City’s Legal Guardian Has to Stay on Guard

Gail Hutton’s smile is tight, her greeting to a reporter friendly but careful. Chatty deputies breeze in and out of her office as if to say, see, nothing to hide, no clashes here. But the legal guardian of the county’s third-largest city is on edge these days, and everyone around Hutton knows that.

Gracious and feisty in a Nancy Reagan sort of way, the homemaker-turned-teacher-turned-lawyer has survived more than a decade of political turbulence as Huntington Beach’s city attorney, an office historically embroiled in tumult.

Since she was elected to her $78,000-a-year job in 1978--replacing a man who made headlines over allegations of a fistfight with an employee--there has been a yearly battle over her budget and an unsuccessful bid to make her position appointed. There was a scathing 1985 management audit concluding that her office was slow and uncommunicative.

Now Gail Clifford Hutton, 51--the only elected city attorney in the county and one of just 10 in California--finds herself on the defensive again as decisions approach on her budget requests. Recently Hutton found herself having to explain why she did not know that employee Walter F. Burk, her $40,000-a-year analyst, had for six months worked full time at another job.

And although Burk was asked to resign April 1, and police investigating the matter found that he had mostly taken time off without pay, the incident has triggered some old criticisms. The fracas also renewed interest in making Hutton accountable to city management, an idea that has been rejected four times by voters since 1964. A few city officials even talk privately of firing her entire staff--she cannot be fired--and contracting private law firms for all but the civic meetings.

At a time when she is asking the City Council for more money and a larger staff, some Huntington Beach officials have publicly questioned her ability to manage 15 employees and a $1-million yearly office budget.

The result, she said, has been periodic high blood pressure and a realization that politics can be an ugly business.

A consummate politician and proven fund-raiser who has been elected and returned to office twice by healthy margins, Hutton admitted that she resents having to answer some of the criticism, which she largely views as unfair and politically motivated. She is an easy scapegoat, she said.

Described by colleagues as “difficult,” “too much of a social worker,” “spunky,” “bitchy,” “one helluva politician,” “stubborn” and “a fighter,” Hutton agreed with only the last.

And after six hours of questions from a reporter, she conceded freely to just one weakness, softening it with a melancholy chuckle: “I think one of my weaknesses may be birth. I’m a woman in a man’s world.”

The oldest of three children, Hutton was born Gail Clifford in North Dakota and grew up 10 miles from the Canadian border. Her father was a utilities lawyer who later got into oil exploration and development. The family owned 11,680 acres of farmland, 7,680 acres of it a Canadian seed farm. Just before her father died, oil was discovered on that land. Hutton now earns about $2,000 a month from her one-sixteenth share in the family’s 40 wells.

Despite her early interest in becoming an attorney, she said, her father encouraged her to find a profession at which women could excel. Hutton chose teaching. She married Paul Hutton in 1959 and later settled in Hacienda Heights. She worked there full time, raising her three children and working part time as a substitute high school teacher.

When the family moved to Huntington Beach in 1967, she joined the League of Women Voters. She compiled a study of the county’s courts for the league.

As her children grew, she decided to pursue the dream she had abandoned: law school. After passing the bar, she was hired as a deputy city attorney in Santa Ana, where she handled redevelopment, personnel and appellate work.

During a decade when Huntington Beach was growing tremendously, Hutton said, she acquired a taste for politics while working on a tax override to build elementary schools; classes were being taught by the half-day in trailers.

Five years later, she challenged Don P. Bonfa, Huntington Beach’s city attorney, who was then swimming in controversy for his role in a fistfight with a deputy city attorney, John O’Connor. (Each filed assault charges against the other, and both insisted on taking lie-detector tests to establish their innocence. Both passed.)

Hutton, then 41, ran on a platform of change, and she had a wide swath of community support, from her League of Women Voters colleagues and environmentalists like the Amigos de Bolsa Chica to builders, oilmen and developers. The most recent of four efforts to have the city attorney appointed came two months after she was first elected.

She Was Tough and ‘Charming’

“I liked Gail then,” recalled one city official, who asked not to be identified. “She was bright. She was tough. And politically she was an unknown. No bad history. She was charming.

“But when she got into the position, she threw herself into a world politically, and she was in controversy from the first night she took office.”

For instance, Hutton said, she was pressured by city administrators to rehire O’Connor, whom she fired nine months after she took office for insubordination. He unsuccessfully appealed the decision, and police were summoned to help him move out of City Hall.

Not surprisingly, those who like Hutton and her operation speak freely. Most of those who criticize her would do so only anonymously because, as one explained, “I’d never get anything back from that office.”

Most people interviewed said they had no personal problems with Hutton or her staff. In fact, they said, they rather liked most of them.

The two most common complaints were of delays by Hutton’s office in getting contracts completed, which then caused delays in work or city services, and of Hutton’s political concerns shading legal decisions, an allegation she called outrageous and false.

“I really have nothing against Gail,” said Councilman Jack Kelly, who has made no secret of his desire to make the city attorney accountable to the council as well as his ambition to become a county supervisor.

“I have a concern with who is doing the administering of that office and how. I do know we have a hell of a time moving (paper work) through that office. . . . The complaints from department heads and mid-management people who deal with her office are general, and they are constant.”

“We feel that the requests for legal service that go to her office are responded to very slowly,” said Community Services Director Max Bowman, whose department of 150 permanent and 650 part-time employees is responsible for the city’s beach, senior citizen services, libraries, park development and recreation programs.

A Year for Lease Renewal

For instance, Bowman said, a lease renewal with the Boston Co. to clean Huntington Harbour’s waterways took one year to complete, which “is just ridiculous.”

Hutton agreed and said the deputy responsible in that case was disciplined.

But Councilman Wes Bannister, who owns a downtown insurance company, positively raved about Hutton. He said he had tried in several letters to Administrative Services Director Robert Franz to straighten out a critical disparity in the city’s insurance situation.

“I never heard a thing back from Franz,” Bannister said. “I finally sent a letter to Gail about it, and got it taken care of in less than three weeks. . . . From what I’ve experienced . . . I don’t have any problems.”

Several current or former city employees who refused to be identified have said Hutton, at times, has appeared drugged at work, an allegation that she flatly denies. Hutton said she took prescribed blood-pressure medication until 1979 to control what she called stress-related “essential hypertension.”

But since then, she said, she has taken the medication just once--for “about a week” after the Burk episode.

She takes “half a one-milligram tranquilizer” once a month because of the hypertension, a degenerative disc disease and because “I do get emotionally excited occasionally,” Hutton said. The only time “I admit I didn’t sound very cohesive,” Hutton said, was during a 1986 interview at her home for a TV show on Proposition 51, an interview that was not broadcast. She had been given a new prescription painkiller for the bad back and “didn’t like the effect it had on me, so I stayed home.”

The TV crew insisted that the interview could not be delayed, but she said she still regrets going ahead with it: “If people know that you take anything . . . see you take an aspirin . . . and want to diminish your credibility, (they) bring it up. . . . I don’t think it has ever affected my ability to represent the city and do my job.”

Increased Legal Workload

About the delays in her office, she pointed out that accelerated enforcement of earthquake code violations downtown, more land acquisitions, eminent-domain proceedings and progress in the city’s beach area renaissance have increased the legal workload.

“I’m the one who has to say no, and nobody likes that,” Hutton said. “That sometimes means that I get blamed. But a lot of these people ask for things to be done yesterday. . . . The law does not always move at knee-jerk speed . . . nor should it. Besides, I am elected to be independent.”

Independent or just marching to a different political drummer than the City Council, some ask. There has always been concern about having a city attorney accountable only to the citizens and her constituents in such a key position, where decisions of enormous cost are made. Four times since 1964, the voters made it clear in elections they aren’t handing that power away.

“I don’t care how much she claims to be independent and a watchdog,” one council member said. “There is still the fact that she has to get reelected. And that is the essence of the problem. Her office has been an exasperation for years.”

Hutton argued that politics does not taint her legal decisions, which are “subject to microscopic review” by the public.

“My reputation is at stake,” she said.

Nearly three years ago, Hutton’s office was the subject of a management audit ordered by Charles Thompson, then city administrator. While “the city attorney’s office is generally perceived by its clients as producing quality work,” most departments found it “excessively” slow, uncommunicative and not a “team player,” the audit concluded.

Study Aired Before Election

Hutton still bristles about the study. It was not released to the public until two weeks before her November, 1986, reelection bid, and none of the other management studies found their way into the newspapers.

Still, she adopted many of the audit’s suggestions for improvement, she added.

“I think the support of the community validates me,” she said.

In early April, while Hutton was camping in Mexico with her family, news spread through City Hall of Burk’s dual jobs, and she was criticized by colleagues for not better supervising her staff.

“If I was out playing golf three times a week but getting the work done, that’s not mismanagement,” City Administrator Paul Cook said. “If it’s not getting done, then it’s either mismanagement or an understaffing problem. That’s what she says is the problem. But if you have one guy not here but in L.A. and another guy who takes three months of comp time, maybe if you had them on duty you’d get the work done.”

Hutton said it was a new city policy on compensatory time off that forced Deputy City Atty. Robert C. Sangster to take time off or lose it.

And she has opened the budget squabble to the public. In a letter she said she wrote before the Burk revelations, Hutton accused the City Council of holding her budget hostage each year as a “spanking” in the event “I haven’t been a good girl (politically).”

She beseeched the thousand recipients of the salvo to convey their support for her budget requests by calling the City Council. She will meet late this month or early next with a mayor’s panel to discuss whether to farm out more legal work or increase the size of her staff to handle it in house. Next year’s budget--which the council adopts--is expected to be decided by July.

Mention of Supervisor Post

Hutton stressed that campaign declarations are “premature and inappropriate.” But she said she has been approached by longtime friend Richard R. Terzian, a Los Angeles lawyer and contributor to Gov. George Deukmejian’s campaigns, about a possible appointment to a future supervisorial post.

She is interested in a supervisorial job, but she conceded that the noise over the Burk situation “doesn’t look very good, does it?”

Asked how staff members reacted to the publicity, Hutton--who was reluctant to allow them to comment for this article, and most didn’t--sighed. “I suppose all this notoriety hasn’t made them very proud of their jobs,” she said.

For some time, Hutton said, she has also fancied being a judge. Now she is not sure whether public office is in the cards.

“After the last few months, I think I could find something better to do, and better for my health, than being scrutinized and attacked in public. It’s made me stop and think about what I really want to do.”