VanderKolk Fills Calendar to Shed Naivete

Maria VanderKolk identifies with the naive, idealistic scoutmaster-turned-senator in the classic movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

“I remind myself very much of Jefferson Smith,” said VanderKolk, 26, as she completed preparation last week to be the youngest supervisor in the 117-year history of Ventura County.

VanderKolk, who upset incumbent Madge L. Schaefer in June, sees herself in the Smith character especially in a scene where newspaper reporters depict him as a bumpkin doing birdcalls upon his arrival in Washington.

“He goes to a bar and smacks one of them in the nose. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ he asks them. They tell him, ‘You don’t know anything about being a senator.’ He realizes they are right.”

Seven months ago, VanderKolk admits, she also knew very little about government and was ill-prepared to help run Ventura County, a public business with 7,000 employees and a $686-million annual budget.

She didn’t know, for example, the sources of the county’s drinking water or that Ventura had a harbor and a pier.

At first she would stare sleepless at her bedroom ceiling, awed by the task ahead. The job was to educate herself as quickly as possible. But how to start?

Shortly after her election by just 79 votes, VanderKolk’s team of advisers drafted a list of things she should do before taking office this month.

“I remember looking at it and thinking, ‘What is this? I don’t know what these people are talking about.’ I told them, ‘I need to start at ground zero. I need to know how the county works, how the board works.’ I didn’t know this stuff.”

VanderKolk had reason to be ignorant. She had moved to Ventura County less than two years before her election and had little connection with her adopted county. Both she and her husband, Mike, commuted to work in Los Angeles County.

She was recruited at the last minute by an environmental group desperate for an opponent to beat Schaefer. She had never met most of the volunteers who campaigned for her.

And she had never worked in government.

She was smart, having graduated with honors in 1986 from the University of Colorado, where she earned degrees in political science, with a concentration on international affairs, and in business, with an emphasis on public relations.

Yet her principal professional experience was as a manager at a firm in Woodland Hills that matches trademarked logos, such as the California Raisins, with products, such as T-shirts and coffee cups.

“It was just so overwhelming, all the different issues to learn,” she said.

Since then, however, she has studied government as if she were a student preparing for final exams, training to hold an office she says she never dreamed of winning.

She has met with dozens of county, state and federal officials, initially knowing so little that she could not even think of questions to ask them.

“They’d say, ‘Now, what questions do you have of me?’ and I’d say, ‘I don’t know, because I don’t know who you are or what you do.’ After about three months I started to know what questions to ask.”

When she met Public Defender Kenneth Clayman, she asked him if he worked for the district attorney. When she met Sheriff John Gillespie a second time, she didn’t know him. She recognized Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury only because she’d seen him in a television ad for Gov.-elect Pete Wilson and the image had stuck.

“There are so many people and names and faces to try to remember,” she said. “People get kind of offended when you don’t remember them sometimes and it really blows my mind. How am I supposed to remember a thousand different people I’ve met once or twice over the last six months?”

Slowly, painfully, VanderKolk built her base of information.

On June 25, she had what she describes as her most important meeting, a lengthy session with the county’s veteran chief administrative officer, Richard Wittenberg. He helped her organize her time by forwarding board agendas and background papers to her and generally acting as her mentor over the months to come.

VanderKolk filled large gaps of knowledge through tours, meetings, dinners and seminars over five months. She attended more than 125, according to her calendar.

Planning officials spent a day showing her the county from their perspective; she toured the Oxnard Harbor District; she visited the county hospital and mental health facilities and the Triunfo Sanitation District sewage plant; and she was shown the County Jail and inmate honor farms. She also went to La Colonia in Oxnard, the county’s largest barrio and probably its poorest community, for the first time.

Supervisors Maggie Erickson, John K. Flynn and Susan K. Lacey, and another supervisor-elect, Vicky Howard, lent advice. So did council members and administrators from Port Hueneme, Camarillo, Ojai and particularly Thousand Oaks, where soured relations hurt incumbent Schaefer.

She met twice with state Sen. Gary K. Hart (D-Santa Barbara), played on a softball team with Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks), attended one fund-raiser for state Sen. Ed Davis (R-Santa Clarita) and another for Gov.-elect Pete Wilson. She lunched with judges, union leaders and school board members.

Slender and 5 feet, 11 inches tall, she was a model at the Business and Professional Women’s fashion show. She was a “celebrity waiter” at a charity event at the Oxnard Tower Club.

She spoke at Rotary clubs and community groups from Thousand Oaks to Ventura.

Along the way, she sometimes said things she regretted and learned lessons about how to deal with the news media.

“Women supply the creative force to men’s logical force,” she was quoted as telling a class of Thousand Oaks high school students, repeating a stereotype.

“You don’t mean to say dumb things,” she said recently, “but you do. That’s been the hardest lesson I’ve had to learn--that everything I say is open for public consumption. . . . Having a marketing background helps, but I’ve never had to market myself.”

And she has had to rethink how she sees herself.

“When I first started out, it floored me that Mike Bradbury would excuse himself from a meeting to see me. . . . I had to come to terms with the fact that they need stuff from me too.”

“I’ve had to come to respect myself, the fact that I am doing this job,” she added. “And that’s been a long time coming.”

VanderKolk has kept a journal during this free-fall into local government. Excerpts from lessons learned at meetings of the Board of Supervisors are revealing.

In October, after the supervisors heard testimony from county nurses about pay raises, VanderKolk wrote: “I wondered today how many opportunities a board member has to make decisions that make them feel completely good, and how often the only options still represent compromise and frustration.”

Two weeks later, she wrote: “If a board member does not fully understand an item on which they are voting, they have the option of additional study. I need to remember this.”

On Nov. 13, after the supervisors invited her to sit near them on the board’s hearing-chamber dais, she wrote: “It’s a different perspective, up there on that dark oak platform. No wonder I, as a citizen, always felt rather small on the other side. There I sat on my plush leather chair, looking down and out over everyone. I quickly made a mental note that this feeling should always be awkward for me.”

While VanderKolk attended a four-day statewide convention for county supervisors in late November, she wrote: “I must say, I do feel young. Several people have approached me to ask how old I am. . . . At one luncheon I sat with a gentleman from Plumas County. . . who stated I looked as though I should be in high school.”

The convention provided VanderKolk with tips she says she is determined to follow. The most important is to write down her campaign promises and what she hopes to accomplish over the next four years, place the document on her desk and to read it daily.

Other tips included: “learn to understand how you personally can influence the budget; don’t be swayed by the vocal minority!; don’t expect to change the world in the first six months; don’t tread on another supervisor’s turf. (For example, John Flynn is the water expert. Don’t try to take that away.)”

On a more personal level, VanderKolk’s journal notes the toll the stress of preparing for public office can take. When Simi Valley first proposed to annex Jordan Ranch, a move that might eventually allow construction of hundreds of residences, VanderKolk’s reaction was “a constant pain in my neck and shoulders.”

Two weeks ago, she noted that the pain had receded and was “a dull throb that reminds me that my world is a much more stressful place than it used to be, but a pain that I can live with.”

After this seven-month period of trial and error, VanderKolk says she is now confident she can do her job when she takes office this week.

“I know that I can be a contributing member of the board,” VanderKolk said.

Others who have watched her work through the last months tend to agree.

Ken Bauer, who worked on VanderKolk’s campaign and in her transition, said that the supervisor-elect has worked tirelessly and without pay to prepare. “And she is really getting a grasp of other issues, not just land use.”

Wittenberg, the county’s chief administrator, said: “Maria’s quite a distance along. She wants to come on board knowing virtually everything, which is impossible, but she has done a lot of preparation.”

VanderKolk said she is thankful for her apprenticeship but knows that she can anticipate life under a microscope from now on.

“I still know,” she said, “that a lot of people are just waiting for me to fail.”

Yet, like Jefferson Smith whose dogged idealism finally vanquished the cynical Washington Establishment, VanderKolk said, “I have no intentions of failing.”