Residents Have a Friend in High Place : Thousand Oaks: Ombudsman Maria Prescott helps mediate disputes with City Hall and promotes ‘customer service.’

When Ken Grik got mad at Thousand Oaks City Hall, city officials sent him to see Maria Prescott.

Prescott, a friendly bureaucrat who dwells on “customer service” as if she ran Nordstrom, is the city’s ombudsman. Her job is to guide residents through the conflicting and sometimes confounding red tape at City Hall.

“When you get them they’re very, very angry. When they go away they’re satisfied,” Prescott said.

Grik was very, very angry when he went to the city manager’s office July 17.

A divorce had forced Grik to put his Lynn Oaks Avenue home up for sale. Despite the depressed housing market, he found a couple who wanted to buy it. But days before the $267,000 sale was scheduled to close, a city building inspector intervened.

The inspector, Gary Kahn, wouldn’t certify a $5,500 set of French doors. He said the windows on the doors--60 panes of tinted and beveled glass--didn’t meet building codes because they did not have etched labels identifying them as tempered, or safety, glass. Without the inspector’s approval, the sale couldn’t go through.

To prove that they were tempered, Grik said Kahn suggested that Grik take a hammer to one of the panes. If it didn’t shatter, Kahn told Grik that he would certify the doors.

“I said no, that wasn’t a good idea,” Grik recalled.

Grik tried to find another way of getting his doors approved without smashing a window. And Prescott finally came up with a solution by proposing that a glazier be hired to certify that the glass met safety standards.

The glazier came, saw, and certified. The building inspector approved the windows.

Grik’s case is an example of what Prescott called being “consistent with our principles, but flexible with our people.”

Prescott says she prefers to be called an ombudsman instead of an ombudswoman because that’s how the job description reads.

Her customers vary from large developers such as the Lang Ranch Co. to a woman whose neighbors complained because she parked junked cars on the curb and had people sleeping in her back yard.

A row of green file folders, one for each case, sits on a shelf over her computer. All of her notes and memos go into the folders. And since people often are frantic by the time they come to her, the files include a lot of old pink message slips on which have been scribbled “EXTREMELY URGENT! CALL TODAY!”

“It could be a reroofing. It could be a swimming pool permit. It could be a shopping center,” Prescott said.

Sometimes it isn’t even the city’s problem, like the elderly couple whose untended swimming pool was breeding mosquitoes. In that case, Prescott called the county agency that deals with insect control.

As she spreads her message of customer service, Prescott becomes a Miss Manners for other city employees. She may suggest that a planner use plain language instead of bureaucratese on a letter to a resident, or encourage staffers to pick up another person’s ringing telephone.

But her main job is guiding residents through the intricacies of city planning and building regulations.

“She really went to bat for us,” said Jim Kinville, a Thousand Oaks architect who designed an apartment complex that was rushing to meet a May 1 deadline.

Tenants had already signed leases to move into the moderate-income apartments, but the project ran into some delays.

Without Prescott’s help in speeding along city inspections, Kinville said, the apartments would have opened at least one month late, meaning lost income for the builder and great inconvenience for the tenants.

Kinville, who has been critical of city building regulations, said Prescott typifies an improvement in the outlook of city workers.

“It’s been the people’s attitudes, when they don’t care about my problem, when they only care about their regulations. That’s changing now,” he said.

Complaints like those prompted the Thousand Oaks City Council to create the ombudsman’s position in June, 1991. Prescott, who earns $46,800 a year, said she doesn’t know of any other ombudsmen in Ventura County.

Because she speaks Spanish, Prescott occasionally helps Spanish-speaking immigrants who find City Hall bewildering.

The woman who got into trouble for the junked cars and back yard guests was a Salvadoran who did not understand city health and safety rules, Prescott said. Prescott persuaded the city’s code enforcement office to give the woman time to bring her property into compliance.

Prescott learned Spanish as a teen-ager while living in Havana, Cuba, where her father sold heavy equipment. Her family lived through the 1959 Cuban revolution when Fidel Castro came to power, but was evacuated a year and a half later when the country became too dangerous for Americans. Her family later moved to Mexico.

After working at City Hall for 17 years, Prescott, 47, is well-suited to a job that requires her to bring together officials of several different departments.

Her long tenure had another benefit: She is married to principal City Planner John Prescott, whose cubicle is a few feet away from hers.

She said staffers good-naturedly put up with her pointers and gentle criticisms.

Some greet her with the “ombudsman’s mantra”: They press their hands together as supplicants do and chant, “Ommmmm.”

“I have to keep my sense of humor and not go overboard,” she said about her dealings with city officials.

And overall, she added, she believes that creation of an ombudsman position has helped improve relations between the city and the public.

“There is a general dissatisfaction with public employees,” she said. “We have come a long way.”