Ousted Escondido City Manager Is Hired by Oxnard

Ousted Oxnard City Manager David Mora will be replaced by Vernon G. Hazen, a former city manager in Escondido who also was forced to resign his post last year, the City Council announced Thursday.

Hazen, 54, who was unanimously chosen by the council during closed-door meetings this week, will begin his new job Aug. 13. Mora, who was forced to resigned after a 3-2 council vote in December, ends his five-year tenure in Oxnard today.

Assistant City Manager John Tooker will act as city manager in the interim.

“He’s a real people person,” Councilwoman Ann Johs said of Hazen. “I think we need a people person in Oxnard.”

Councilman Manuel Lopez said the council interviewed five candidates for the job but chose Hazen because he had the most experience as a city manager. Hazen’s salary has not been negotiated, council members said. Mora earns $95,705 a year.

The California native had been the top administrator of Escondido in north San Diego County since 1982 and earned $95,000 a year. He formerly was city manager in the Northern California towns of Mill Valley for seven years and Mountain View for 12 years.

Hazen resigned his post in Escondido in January, just hours before the council was scheduled to meet in closed-door session to consider firing him.

Hazen lost the support of a majority of the council soon after two slow-growth council candidates--Carla DeDominicis and Kris Murphy--were elected, joining veteran Councilman Jerry Harmon to form the city’s first slow-growth majority on the five-member council.

He said Thursday that he resigned because the new council majority felt he could not carry out a slow-growth development policy after overseeing a very pro-growth policy under the previous council.

Hazen said Escondido grew from a population of about 65,000 to about 104,000 during his tenure. Despite the unceremonious circumstances of his departure, Hazen said he left Escondido on “amiable” terms.

Escondido Councilman Ernie Cowan, who voted to keep Hazen, said the former city manager was forced to resign for purely political reasons. He said Hazen was “just tainted by the fact that he was the man, so to speak, of the previous council.”

Cowan called Hazen an innovator and said he “brought Escondido into the 20th Century.”

For the last year and a half, Hazen has worked as a private consultant, developing a general plan for a 23,000-acre planned community near Chula Vista. However, he said he sought the post in Oxnard because he missed working as a city manager. “I think it’s a blood-related disease,” he said.

Hazen has inherited a city plagued for the last three years with financial woes. The council this week avoided a $2.8-million deficit in the 1990-91 fiscal year by cutting 18 1/2 staff positions and injecting the budget with $1.2 million in onetime windfall revenues.

Hazen said he needs to further study the city’s budgetary policies before making any suggestions on the budget. However, he said he would have supported a 5% utility tax increase, which city officials had hoped would solve the city’s financial problems by generating $5 million annually. Voters rejected the tax measure June 5 by a 3-to-1 margin.

Mora’s ouster was supported by Johs and Councilwomen Dorothy Maron and Geraldine (Gerry) Furr, who blamed him for the city’s financial woes. Maron also has questioned the concessions made to developers by Mora’s staff to lure development to the city.

After Mora’s resignation, a group of Oxnard residents, including members of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and the Assn. of Mexican American Educators, accused the councilwomen of racial discrimination for forcing out the Latino city manager. More than 50% of Oxnard residents are Latino.

The group called Community Concern launched a recall petition against Maron, saying she is unresponsive to their request to review the decision to fire Mora. The group has until July 13 to gather 9,300 signatures to qualify the recall measure for the November ballot. It has collected about 8,000, said Community Concern spokesman Ray Tafoya.

Hazen said he does not speak fluent Spanish but has dealt with many issues in Mountain View concerning Latinos and Asians.

“Ethnic diversity adds to the richness of the community,” he said.