He Keeps Close Watch on County’s Purse Strings

He is Ventura County’s designated skinflint.

“They say, ‘Norm Hawkes, he’s the tightest, the cheapest,’ ” said a grinning Auditor-Controller Norman R. Hawkes, a small, strong-willed accountant who for 17 years has made life uncomfortable for other county officials.

When former Supervisor Ed Jones wanted a teapot for his office, Hawkes told him to bring his own.

When Supervisor Madge L. Schaefer turned in a $9 claim for an out-of-town breakfast, Hawkes told her only $8 was allowed.

When a former supervisor sought reimbursement for a cocktail with his meal, Hawkes told him that the taxpayers shouldn’t pay for his vices.

In Ventura County government, there is no such thing as an entertainment budget, he says. Generally, Hawkes does not even allow business lunches to be charged to the county. When out of town, it’s $8 for breakfast, $10 for lunch and $20 for dinner. And don’t ask for an exception.

“People keep saying to me, ‘Now Norm, this is a business and it should be run like a business.’ But this is not a business, this is a public trust,” Hawkes says, his voice betraying the seaport town in Massachusetts where he was raised.

Hawkes, 56, is a certified public accountant who holds no college degree, a friendly man drawn by his profession to confrontations, and a man whose biography cites prominently his longstanding membership in the Masons, the Ventura Shrine Club, the Lions Club and the Rotary.

To Hawkes, the world is full of blacks and whites. There aren’t many grays. Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury, perhaps the auditor’s biggest fan in county government, says: “He lives in a world where there’s right and there’s wrong, and, believe me, there’s no give.”

Schaefer, the supervisor with whom Hawkes has had many skirmishes, remembers when she rounded off a tip on a restaurant bill to the closest dollar, and it came back to her like a boomerang.

Tips of 15% are allowed, and she had overcharged the county by 27 cents. A Hawkes assistant sheepishly asked for the money by check; she paid in coin.

“It’s the kind of thing that makes you crazy,” Schaefer recalls, laughing. “But he’s a perfect auditor, a stickler.”

She should know. She unsuccessfully filed a $5 claim last fall for gym privileges at a hotel where she was staying on county business. And not long ago, Schaefer picked up her staff’s paychecks from the auditor’s office an hour early. Hawkes said it wasn’t the first time. “I blew sky-high and sent a memo out saying no checks will be released until 11:30,” he said.

Hawkes’ other highly public dispute goes more to the heart of what he does with 89 employees and a $23-million annual budget.

For years, his staff had conducted not only financial audits but others to determine how well county departments operate. Public Works Director Arthur Goulet declined to cooperate with Hawkes’ operational audit, which Goulet now describes as a “fishing expedition.”

“We were faced with a question of authority as well as a question of capability,” Goulet says. “I’m not sure the auditor-controller has on his staff anyone who has the qualifications to do a workmanlike job of performing an operational audit on any section of the Public Works Agency.”

“I suspect if you surveyed most of the departments,” Hawkes says, “you’d probably get thoughts along the same line as Art’s.”

In the end, Goulet appears to have won. No operational audit of his department has been done, and new language in the county administrative manual indicates that department heads, not Hawkes, have the authority to initiate such audits.

But even his occasional rivals tend to like Hawkes personally.

Several county officials lauded Hawkes for his fiscal conservatism, long-range budget forecasts and his fervor for his job.

“I have tremendous admiration for Hawkes,” Bradbury says. “He’s a good auditor, he’s an honest man, and he doesn’t care who you are. He’s stood toe-to-toe with county supervisors, and he doesn’t blink.”