A Man of Trust : County Housing Chief Praised All Around

Dhongchai Pusavat remembers being lonely and scared when he was ordered to sit motionless overnight in a steamy mountain jungle in his native Thailand. He was in a remote cemetery and he could smell the smoke from a cremation smoldering on a wooden platform.

When night came, it was so black that it made no difference when he closed his eyes. Concentrate on your breathing, he was told--in and out, in and out. Do not respond to mosquito bites or to the fear of spirits from the graves, or to tigers and snakes in the jungle.

Pusavat was 17 years old then, and that was the first day of his training as a Buddhist monk. It also was a turning point in his life, he says.

He grew up the son of a Thai business tycoon. But suddenly, money had lost its significance.

“I tried to impress my monk teacher who I was, my father was this and this,” Pusavat said recently. “He looked at me like . . . so what, like you look at a worm.”

Today, Dhongchai (Bob) Pusavat, 43, is head of the Orange County Housing and Community Development office.

He has a master’s degree in urban planning and is a former senior planner for the city of San Francisco. But rather than work on lucrative Orange County development projects, Pusavat said he joined the county housing office because that is where he can help needy people.

Those who have gotten to know him in his 13 years with the county say that he truly has a big heart. Their descriptions of affection and respect sound more like feelings for a family member than a county bureaucrat.

“The communities feel that he is that one person in a million who comes along in your lifetime,” said Ann Quintana, a 70-year-old vocal community activist in El Modena, an unincorporated county island surrounded by the City of Orange. “All of the people love Bob . . . his principles and his morals are beyond reproach.”

“I’m his biggest fan,” added Pusavat’s boss, Ernie Schneider, director of the county Environmental Management Agency. “He gives in excess of 100%. He works weekends, he works nights, he’ll get out there and shovel chicken manure, as he has in the past, in an effort to show the people he has their best interest in mind.”

Pusavat is the kind of bureaucrat who has given his home phone number to the skeptical among community members. He also hosts an annual cookout for community groups to encourage better relations. And he has gone to the homes of people needing help from the government.

As head of the housing office, his job is to distribute federal, state and local funds to the low-income or deteriorating neighborhoods of unincorporated Orange County. He and his staff of 13 go to the neighborhood centers and homes, make lists of community needs, such as new sewer lines, pavement, sidewalks or housing--and then handle the red tape needed to finance the improvements.

Pusavat now is pursuing one of the most ambitious projects since he came to the county. To replace the shrinking federal budget available for repairing public facilities and housing in low-income neighborhoods, Pusavat wants the county to designate 14 unincorporated urban areas as redevelopment sites.

Redevelopment is a financing tool used to put property taxes back into the communities for physical improvements rather than sending the money to the county’s general fund.

But just the word redevelopment has upset community groups in Huntington Beach, Anaheim and Santa Ana--so much so that some of the cities have had to abandon their redevelopment plans. The residents have said they fear that the city governments would seize their property by eminent domain or that their taxes would be raised.

Pusavat’s version of redevelopment, however, prohibits either.

The county’s redevelopment proposal is still in its early stages and is scheduled for final adoption by the Board of Supervisors next summer. So far, there have been few complaints from the community, although it is still an issue that is mostly known only to neighborhood activists.

Much of that cooperation is due to Pusavat, county and community leaders say.

“No question,” Schneider said. “It would have been a much tougher public hearing if it were not for the fact that Pusavat has the confidence of the people living in those target areas.”

Quintana, head of a coalition made up of representatives from the 14 communities, said: “I would not honestly have as much confidence in the program if it were being done by anyone else.”

Quintana and Pusavat today have a respectful working relationship. But it is a union that did not come easily and one that was hammered out in the trenches.

They met more than 10 years ago when Pusavat came to a crowded community meeting in an old church hall to hear complaints about the lack of sidewalks and adequate drainage in the Modena neighborhood.

For years, the county had made promises to the community about improving the conditions, but they were never kept, Quintana said. So when Pusavat stepped onto the stage, he got both barrels.

“I really roasted him,” she said. “I pinned him up against the wall with questions.”

Pusavat also remembers the meeting well. “They were about to lynch me,” he said.

But he persevered. He made another promise to help, although nobody believed him. And he asked what the community wanted him to do.

As a sign of good will, he also gave the raucous crowd his home telephone number. A few months later, during a huge rainstorm, they used it. Pusavat was called out of bed about 5 a.m. to see water backing up into homes waist-deep.

“They said get your tail down here,” he remembers. “I went down there and my car got stuck in the water.”

It took about four years, but Pusavat got the federal money to build new sidewalks and install new drain pipes in El Modena.

In another case, the home of an elderly couple in Placentia had deteriorated to the point that they could not get fire insurance. One day, the house burned down.

Pusavat and his staff came out and set up a trailer on the couple’s property. They hooked up electricity and plumbing. And then Pusavat started thinking about how to help the couple find a new home.

A new house was built with a deferred-payment loan, meaning that when the couple dies or moves away, the government will be repaid for the construction.

“They were so happy,” Pusavat said, grinning with pride. In their backyard, the couple started a cactus garden and named the different plants after Pusavat and his staff.

Pusavat is a rotund man with wispy black hair and rolls of skin at the back of his neck. At about 5 1/2 feet tall, he weighs in at 200 or so pounds. He speaks five dialects of Chinese and three dialects of Thai.

He also has a fourth-degree black belt in martial arts and, at one point, taught self-defense to local police officers.

Pusavat left his job in San Francisco in 1974 to become a planner in south Orange County. His wife, Yoko, was a Japanese language professor at Cal State Long Beach, and the two were growing tired of their long-distance relationship.

But he came at a difficult time for the county housing office. The federal government was so upset with the county’s slow pace in spending its federal money on low-income areas that it threatened to cut off the grants, according to George Osborne, then head of the county’s EMA.

So when Pusavat was made head of the county housing office in 1977, he faced a generally hostile community.

But Schneider, who at the time was assistant director of EMA, recalled that “in less than a year, there was a 360-degree turnaround. HUD (the federal Housing and Urban Development agency officials were) not only complimenting us, they were using us as a model to other counties around the country.”

Today, however, the federal money is disappearing. In just the last three years, the county’s HUD grant has dropped from about $10 million a year to about $4.6 million.

In response, Pusavat cautiously suggested the redevelopment project.