Moorpark Settling Down After Wild Times : Government: The city looks back on its colorful beginnings nearly 10 years ago from a vantage point of relative calm. But have the controversies really faded, or just all the noise?

First came the scandal when Moorpark Councilman Danny Woolard was convicted of embezzling $5,500 from the downtown post office, where he worked as a window clerk, to feed a cocaine habit.

Then there was the “Wednesday Night Massacre,” when the City Council fired all five members of its Parks and Recreation Commission after a dispute over the design of a new park.

There have been some other wild political times in the brief history of Moorpark, the youngest of Ventura County’s 10 cities. The recall of Councilman Thomas C. (Bud) Ferguson, for instance. And the night Moorpark had three mayors.

Now this city of 26,000 is preparing to celebrate its 10-year anniversary, looking back on an undeniably colorful beginning from what some view as a present-day vantage point of relative political calm and efficiency.

“I think it’s a question of maturity,” said Mayor Paul Lawrason, who has served on the council since 1988 and was recently elected to a second two-year term as mayor. “The city is coming of age as much as anything else. We have got a really outstanding future ahead of us.”

But whether Moorpark has gone mature or simply mute is a point of some contention.

“I would not necessarily agree with the characterization that it’s grown up,” said Clint Harper, one of the city’s first councilmen and now a school board member. “It’s grown quiet, but I don’t know if it’s grown up.”

Concerned by the prospect of continued county control over their community, residents of the area that would become Moorpark voted 1,127 to 1,047 to incorporate on March 8, 1983. The vote became official with the seating of the city’s first council on July 1 and politics went local.

“You’re actually faced with starting a city from a vacuum,” Harper said. “There were five of us with no formal governmental experience. We didn’t have a letterhead, we didn’t have a city seal, didn’t have telephones. The council helped staff a lot. I remember typing memos, moving furniture.”

Bob Braitman, then the executive director of Ventura County’s Local Agency Formation Commission, served as Moorpark’s first city manager while on loan from the county and gave the council members a series of intensive training sessions between the incorporation vote and their ascension to the dais.

“It was a fascinating time,” Braitman said. “I was on the road between Moorpark and Ventura, where I lived, at about 1 or 2 a.m. a lot of the time, because there was some very intense education taking place.”

The council was so taken with Braitman’s schooling that it asked him to quit his job with the county and stay on as city manager, even offering him a car.

“They said, ‘What do you want, a Mercedes? A Porsche?’ ” Braitman said. “And with all the controversies over perks now, I’m glad I didn’t do it.”

Other members of that first council look back with fond memories on the process of starting a city from scratch.

Leta Yancy-Sutton served from 1983 to 1986 and was the city’s first mayor, appointed by the rest of the council in a process that continued until Lawrason became the first person elected to the post in 1990.

“When we first started out, it was great and it was fun and we were putting a new city together,” Yancy-Sutton said. “Then, of course, after I left, there were games being played. It was very obvious.”

Some say the games, at least the serious ones, began with Woolard, who had finished sixth in the incorporation vote but won election the following year at the age of 37.

Rumors that the postal clerk-turned-councilman was involved in drugs had been circulating through the city, and had even hit the front pages of local papers, months before a federal grand jury indicted Woolard in November, 1986, on a single count of stealing postal funds.

The councilman admitted the theft, which he attributed to cocaine addiction, pleaded guilty and served 4 1/2 months of a six-month prison sentence. Before pleading guilty in January, 1987, Woolard gave City Manager Steve Kueny a letter resigning his council seat.

“If I hadn’t screwed up and kept my nose clean, so to speak, I’d still be on the council today,” said Woolard, now living in Northern California. “All the negative (stuff) was because of drugs. If it hadn’t been for the drugs, and you just wipe that away for a minute, I think I was a good councilman.”

But he didn’t go down alone.

After his indictment, the councilman accused then-Mayor Ferguson of trying to influence him through a series of loans. Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury probed the allegations, finding that Ferguson had made loans, lied under oath and used questionable conduct. But he decided that no criminal behavior could be proved.

“That’s what got Bud out of politics real quick,” said Woolard, who still stands behind his claims. “The D.A. wouldn’t do (anything) to him, but the public did.”

Connie Lawrason, Paul’s wife, still remembers that day in 1987 when she sat in the Cactus Patch restaurant on High Street waiting to serve Ferguson, one of its regular patrons, with a petition seeking his recall from office.

“He came in and we were sitting there having a cup of tea,” she said. “I walked up to him and said, ‘Bud, this Bud’s for you.’ And I walked out and he was served.”

“That is true,” said Ferguson, now living in Texas. “I was sitting there having coffee with some of the fellas. I was very nice to her. I said, ‘Thank you, Connie,’ and I took the papers. Didn’t know what it was.”

Ferguson probably should have had an inkling. Already under fire for the Woolard accusations--which he still denies--he went on to allegedly make racially disparaging comments that were printed in a local newspaper.

In the ensuing firestorm, Ferguson lost his mayor’s seat to Harper in a March, 1987, council reorganization, still holding on to his spot on the council, barely.

And in the months leading to his recall vote, Ferguson participated in some of the more controversial 3-2 council votes in the city’s history.

On June 17, 1987, Ferguson and council members Eloise Brown and John Galloway formed a 3-2 majority that summarily dismissed the Parks and Recreation Commission, which had recently tangled with the council over plans for the development of Peach Hill Park. Harper and John Lane, who had won office in a special election to fill Woolard’s seat, provided the minority.

After initial reluctance by the council to approve the park the commission had planned, complete with lighted playing fields and other amenities, commissioners had taken their case to the people in the form of a petition drive and political pressure.

The pay-back came months later in the pink slips handed down from the dais.

“I was there; I was dumbfounded,” said Tom Baldwin, who chaired the commission and is now president of the Moorpark school board. “I never expected that they would turn around and fire the lot of us. I never thought that would happen.”

Brown still defends the move.

“The big problem with them, and with Mr. Baldwin in particular, was the recognition that their role was to make a recommendation, not a decision,” she said. “And they always felt particularly enraged when their final recommendation was not the decision.”

“They weren’t doing a good job; I’ll tell you they weren’t,” Ferguson said. “They were doing some things that the city just couldn’t afford.”

Looking back, Baldwin said the affair he found personally disturbing probably had little impact on most residents.

“I don’t think the average John Q. Citizen really gave a flip,” he said. “It wasn’t high on their list of things to get excited about. It was just one more item on a long list. It was just more of the same from this bunch.”

Ferguson was recalled on Nov. 3, 1987, by a vote of 1,823 to 666, and a special election to fill his seat was set for February of the following year.

Suddenly, the once-colorful and popular figure who had lived in the area for more than 25 years was destined to go down in history as the Richard Nixon of Moorpark, a man driven from public office.

“That’s about right,” Ferguson said. “I was a Ross Perot there for a while and I damn sure left like Richard Nixon. . . . (But) I wasn’t a crook and I can live with myself. I can look at myself in the mirror when I get up in the morning.”

In his last council meeting, Ferguson was part of another 3-2 majority with Brown and Galloway, who collectively became known as The Troika because of their perceived tendency to vote as a bloc, which all three deny.

The three voted on Nov. 9, 1987, to install Galloway as mayor, unseating a disgruntled Harper, who passed the gavel and, according to city minutes, “brought attention to how the reorganization of the council was accomplished just after council member Ferguson was recalled from his office by a 3-1 vote of the people.”

The ouster of Harper set the stage for possibly the most celebrated council meeting in the city’s history, March 2, 1988, the night Moorpark had three mayors.

Bernardo Perez had been sworn in the night before, having won the election to fill Ferguson’s council seat, and Harper had said that once he had the support, he was going to unseat Galloway, whom he felt was too immature for the post.

“We had one argument one night when I was still mayor,” Harper said. “We had agreed to reorder the agenda at 11 o’clock and I looked down at my watch, saw it was 11 and said, ‘It’s time to reorganize the agenda.’ And he started screaming at me and pointed at the wall clock and said, ‘We have to use the official Moorpark time.’ There was, like, four minutes difference and there was this big debate on what was the official Moorpark time.”

Realizing that he was about to be unseated, Galloway made the first move and quit.

“He had threatened publicly, months before, that when he got his ‘third vote,’ he was going to make this move and I had no reason to think this wasn’t going to occur,” Galloway said.

“They went in trying to remove me, but in fact having me step aside wasn’t sufficient. They were really there to put someone else in.”

Which is what happened. After Galloway resigned, Brown, mayor pro tempore at the time, took over the meeting for about 20 minutes before John Lane was appointed to the post on 4-1 vote. Galloway, who had tried to install Brown, dissented.

“It was frightfully amusing,” Brown said of the infamous evening. “I was not surprised. In fact, I was a little bit entertained.”

Others recall the night with less enthusiasm.

“That was just a circus, and the public has to be affected by it,” Lawrason said. “You become the laughingstock of the area. People comment on it and it’s embarrassing.”

“It made us the laughingstock of Southern California and maybe the nation for a while because I understand it got national publicity, some news wire picked it up,” Baldwin said. “Petty politics to the extreme, small-town politics at its worst, that was the example that was flashed across the nation.”

“The small-town politics at its worst had actually occurred prior to that evening,” Perez said. “It was an attempt to correct or to redress some political maneuvering that had occurred. It was unpleasant and it wasn’t easy, but I think it was a message that had to be delivered.”

By comparison, the city’s politics has become relatively quiet as Moorpark approaches its 10th birthday. Contested votes are, by and large, rarer than unanimous ones, and council meetings end at 11 p.m. or midnight instead of 2 or 3 a.m.

Some say age has brought stability and experience to city government. This past November, Perez and Councilman Scott Montgomery became the first in the city to be reelected after serving a full, four-year council term. Lawrason is entering his fifth year of service.

“I think the council had developed a real sensitivity and responsiveness to the community,” Perez said. “There’s been a real effort to make city government an inclusive experience.”

“They’ve grown up a lot,” Baldwin said. “I don’t think that there were people who moved to Moorpark or moved away because of the City Council. But I do think it makes a difference in the way people feel about their local government.”

Still, there are some who say Moorpark politicians shouldn’t get too worked up congratulating each other.

“I never advocate going back to the nonsense that went on back then,” Harper said. “But, on the other hand, I don’t trust government when there’s too much agreement among the council. If there’s no controversy, then my assumption is that things are being worked out behind the scenes.”

“It’s much less interesting,” Brown said. “I think a little passion in city government is well worthwhile because it takes a little passion to get life into things.”

Lawrason disagrees.

“I feel like we’re making progress and we’re doing the things we should be doing,” he said. “If we don’t do it in a flamboyant, passionate manner, that’s unfortunate for the viewers, I guess. I guess we could hire some entertainers to come in and perform during breaks or something.”