Huntington Beach Boss Calls It a Day and a Dream

Charles Thompson woke up one morning earlier this year and decided that being the chief executive officer of Huntington Beach just wasn’t fun anymore.

“I’d made up my mind if I ever got to that point where I got up in the morning and felt, ‘God, I don’t want to go into the office,’ ” said Thompson, Huntington Beach’s city administrator, “I would quit.”

The 60-year-old Thompson is doing just that today. After 6 1/2 years, he’s leaving a job that can have less security than that of a baseball manager.

In doing so, he will end a 34-year career that included several awards for innovative housing for the elderly and fiscal planning in Huntington Beach. He is leaving a $105,000 annual salary plus fringe benefits, the third-highest-paid city manager in the county.

Since he announced his resignation last July--15 minutes after a stinging defeat was handed his Beach Boulevard Redevelopment Plan--Thompson has taken more heat than in all his previous years in Huntington Beach combined.

His plan was to create a redevelopment area on the boulevard from the beach to the San Diego Freeway in order to finance $14 million in traffic and public improvements. Opponents who defeated the plan complained that the city would seize 20% of the property by eminent domain.

“He probably did become the scapegoat on redevelopment in general with the Beach Boulevard Plan, as far as citizens who are against it go,” said Paul Cook, director of public works and Thompson’s interim replacement. An executive search team is recruiting candidates and a new city administrator is expected to be in place, possibly in four to five months.

“He was hired to be a strong leader and put together the downtown redevelopment because he was good at it. But when it became somewhat controversial and being the father (of the plan), so to speak, he also took the heat,” Cook explained.

“That,” Cook said, “is why it’s rare to have a city manager have a long career in one place. Because political change often results in change of a city manager. It’s much like being a coach . . . but he’s survived it.”

Co-workers, council members, developers and community activists who were asked recently to assess Thompson’s tenure described him variously as: “a strong leader,” a “great boss,” “stubborn as hell,” as having “bulldog tenacity” and being “not a very good golfer.”

Thompson replied: “Well, the part about the golf is true.”

But the last few months have not been so light-hearted.

Last month, Thompson’s half-billion-dollar plan to redevelop downtown Huntington Beach was questioned in closed session by the City Council--without Thompson present.

Council members met at the request of the city planning staff, who needed direction and priorities to pursue on several pending projects. The council concluded that several of the projects in the 334-acre redevelopment area that includes the pier and Main Street needed to be reconsidered, those who attended the gathering said.

They pointed to a hotel planned at the inland side of Pacific Coast Highway and Main Street--at the foot of the pier--as a project that may be scrapped altogether.

Some council members and a few city employees called that meeting the most productive since the majority of the council--four members--were elected last November. Thompson’s temporary replacement, Cook, conducted the meeting.

And in August, while he was in Sacramento with Mayor Jack Kelly to discuss a Bolsa Chica wetlands bill with legislators, the seven-member council arbitrarily set his retirement date, under a dismissal clause in the city charter, Thompson said.

In a technical sense, he was fired after he had quit. The action was subsequently rescinded by the council, with some members saying that they only wanted to set an exact date so they could begin a search for his replacement.

The confusion over an issue seemingly as simple as a retirement date underscores one of what some council members have called Thompson’s weakness: communication.

“I think what we are looking for in our next city manager is someone with all of Charles’ strong leadership and redevelopment expertise but with the ability to communicate, and to regroup when the plan isn’t being bought by the council and/or the community,” said Councilwoman Ruth Finley, who was mayor when Thompson was hired.

Finley, who is outspoken in both her criticism and support of Thompson, said he “was unable to retreat from or modify an idea and “the Beach Boulevard fiasco was a classic” case in point.

“I think we can find a happy medium between communicative wimp and strong man,” suggested Councilman Peter Green, a Golden West College professor and Thompson supporter.

“I don’t think Charles is the extreme, though. Some people have said Charles doesn’t communicate well or that he knows the right buttons to push on different council members. But I know his buttons, too,” Green chuckled, “so we have mutual button-pushing sessions.”

Another recent example of a “communication mix-up,” in the words of one city planner, occurred after Thompson had been to Sacramento. During that trip, Thompson also met with state Department of Parks and Recreation officials to discuss scheduling a hearing before 1988 on the city’s application to build a multi-level parking structure and restaurant on the state beach immediately north of the pier.

When Thompson came home, he found several seething controlled-growth activists--and at least one council member who was unaware of the plan--who accused him of steamrolling the idea, a charge Thompson vehemently denies.

At any rate, his admirers point out and most of his critics agree that whatever problems existed under Thompson’s reign, they were mostly a result of personal style and management technique. Many city officials and developers who have worked for years in the city also stress that Thompson was hired in March, 1981, by a council that was looking for a strong director and wanted to be led. Some say the current City Council now appears to want to lead.

“I think we want to take action now, not react, as we have been doing with staff,” said Councilwoman Grace Winchell, elected in November. She has said that Thompson was “intimidating” and that she is “relieved” that he will leaving.

“We had four of seven council members new and we are still trying to find some cohesiveness,” Winchell said. “I think he could have helped us find our way and act as a unit better.”

So what is a man to make of all this--one who is preparing to become what he calls “just another of your average Huntington Beach citizens” with a farewell party tonight at the Seacliffe Country Club?

It’s frustrating, he says, disheartening, too. The rumors that he was asked to quit or that he packed it in after his Beach Boulevard plan was torpedoed are unfounded but go with the political territory, facts that are confirmed by every council member.

But his biggest disappointment, Thompson said, has come from the council’s second thoughts about the latest plans for a downtown renaissance. Various city councils have for two decades attempted unsuccessfully to renovate the scruffy downtown area.

“To reconsider all of this now, when we have spent half a million dollars in consultants and studies and citizen workshops and finally passed the downtown specific plan in 1983; to have all of those reviews done and have the thing right on the brink and start to second-guess, it is in my opinion a dangerous mistake,” Thompson said last week. “That’s the council’s prerogative, of course. But I think if you really change one piece of it, the rest of the puzzle doesn’t fit together.”

He remembers when he was first approached about coming to Huntington Beach, now a city with 185,000 people. He was working as city manager of Downey, which he affectionately refers to as the “rose in the toilet bowl.”

“I saw the downtown area and I saw what a beautiful place it could be,” Thompson recalled.

Thompson, an Oklahoma native who is part Cherokee Indian, lives in Huntington Beach with his wife, Alma, and has three grown children. He said he hopes to work as a management consultant in the future and still have time to root for his beloved University of Oklahoma football team and golf with Kelly, a close friend who brings up what Thompson’s “people did to Gen. Custer” right before tee-off.

“I think he will be remembered for the redevelopment, and I think we’ll have it made in the shade then,” Kelly said. “And I’ll be grateful to Charles Thompson when it gets off the ground.

Thompson said he would like to be remembered for leaving the city with a “top management team, our accomplishments in providing senior citizen housing. And the other is a successful program of redevelopment that I think will have lasting effects for 60, 75 years. It has a lot of meaning as to the kind of city it will become in the future.”

HIGHLIGHTS IN THOMPSON CAREER

- Graduated from University of Oklahoma.

- Worked a year for the governor of Missouri to establish the state office of urban affairs.

- 2 years as city manager, Springfield, Mo.

- 9 1/2 years as city manager, Middletown, Ohio.

- 5 years city manager, Wyoming, Mich. (a city at that time of 65,000 people near Grand Rapids).

- 11 years as city manager, Downey.

- March, 1981, hired by Huntington Beach.