Dana Point City Manager Resigns Post : Politics: David Elbaum, who has been with city a year, cites communication problems with council as main reason for leaving.

Under pressure from the City Council, City Manager David Elbaum resigned Monday after just one year on the job.

Elbaum cited communications problems with the council as the main reason for his departure. The one-time chief executive of Santa Barbara gave 90 days’ notice to the city.

“In my profession, you can see when you’re not working well” with a city council, Elbaum said. “There was no one particular thing that led me to resign. Sometimes you have to decide when is the right time to leave.”

One council member, who asked that his identity not be revealed, said the council had discussed terminating Elbaum almost a week before he tendered his resignation.

At a closed-door performance evaluation of Elbaum last Tuesday, all five council members were prepared to terminate him, but decided to wait until City Atty. Jerry Patterson returned from vacation, the council member said.

“This was a trial for him as well as for us,” said Councilwoman Karen Lloreda. “Communication is probably one of the most difficult aspects of a city manager’s job.”

The council will decide whether to accept Elbaum’s 90-day notice or terminate him immediately at a meeting tonight, Lloreda said.

Other council members were not available for comment.

Last week’s closed-door performance review also proved to be the turning point for Elbaum, who concluded that it was time for him to leave the city. Elbaum said his presentation outlining goals for the city elicited no response or reaction from the council.

“It was a pretty substantial shock for me,” he said. “I was expecting some kind of feedback. It made me realize we weren’t having the kind of dialogue that needs to exist between a city manager and a council.”

Elbaum was hired last July after working for Santa Barbara County for seven years, where he had risen to become the county’s chief administrative officer. As the top county official, Elbaum, 41, had presided over a bureaucracy with approximately 3,200 employees and a $220-million annual budget.

He left the Santa Barbara job in 1988 after becoming embroiled in a grand jury investigation that resulted from disclosures that county workers there had been overcharged more than $800,000 for their health insurance.

Elbaum and others were cleared of any wrongdoing, but he left his position anyway and took a consultant job in the Irvine office of the accounting firm Ernst & Young.

He was hired as Dana Point’s city manager by a 3-2 council vote.

Since he joined the city last year, his tenure has been marked with controversy over development of the Dana Point Headlands, a prime 121-acre site overlooking the ocean. He also directed efforts to recover from the massive landslide that has kept a short stretch of Pacific Coast Highway closed since heavy rainstorms in February.

Elbaum was criticized for his handling of the termination of two high-ranking city employees who had worked for Dana Point since it became a city three years ago.

Assistant City Manager John Donlevy Jr. and Administrative Coordinator Barbara Healy were laid off in April for budgetary reasons. Both reportedly learned that they would be losing their jobs during a staff meeting attended by their fellow city officials.