A Front-Seat Advocate of Streamlining : Administration: Frank Benest, Brea’s city manager, was selected to help Vice President Al Gore’s team ‘reinvent’ government and save the taxpayers’ dollars.

Leaning over a plate of fruit and dry toast in his earth-tone sport jacket, tie and button-down shirt, Frank Benest looks like the kind of earnest California businessman who might be trying to push the newest office computer network.

You’d be forgiven the error. Benest is an entrepreneur, of sorts. But he’s not working for a private company. He’s a government man, the city manager of Brea, who believes that public enterprises ought to start behaving a lot more like private businesses.

Benest, 44, spent much of his summer sharing those thoughts with Vice President Al Gore and the team that put together Gore’s report on “reinventing” the federal government. The document, known formally as the National Performance Review, was unveiled last week by Gore and President Clinton.

A Kansas native who grew up in El Monte, Benest was one of a handful of local government officials tapped by the Gore team to participate in the effort. “When I read that the President had created this task force, a lot of the initial information was that they were going to focus on the traditional problems of waste and fraud,” Benest said.

“So I sent a letter, basically saying that from the work I’ve done, the research I’ve done, the issue is not waste and fraud. If they focus on blaming the victim, the (government) employee, they’d be on the wrong tack. What they really had to do was look at the kinds of systems they had.”

Gore and his team took much of the advice from Benest and like-minded officials to heart. Their report outlined a program of personnel cutbacks, agency consolidation and procurement reform that they said could save the federal government--and the taxpayers who support it--$108 billion over the next five years. Skeptics, however, have questioned some of the numbers.

Benest wears glasses, sports a salt-and-pepper mustache and occasionally flashes a gap-toothed grin to rival David Letterman’s. He talked about his experience with the Gore team during a break in a conference he was attending in Virginia. The subject: how local governments can best market their goods and services to earn more revenue.

The question of how government can best serve its citizens--Benest calls them customers--has fascinated the Brea manager for years. He even did a thesis on the subject when he was earning his Ph.D. at Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City. (“I’m the only Arab Jew that’s ever graduated from BYU,” he says with a smile. “That’s a true story.”) He is the author of a recently released book, “Rightsizing Local Governments.”

So when a Gore staffer replied to his letter, Benest began putting his thoughts together. Ultimately he was assigned the task of evaluating the federal field office system that began during the Great Depression, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was President.

After chatting with a host of federal workers and “customers” involved with nearly a dozen federal agencies, Benest concluded that dramatic advances in telecommunications and major demographic shifts have made much of the federal field office structure obsolete. He traveled to Washington at the end of July to make his report in person, and share his thoughts with other analysts on the Gore team.

“The whole rationale (for field offices) is incredibly undercut by the lack of autonomy at the field office level. They don’t have the authority to make anything happen,” Benest says.

“They think that by having 18 different levels of management, and God knows how many levels of review, and all these thick books of regulations, that somehow they’re going to avoid making a mistake,” he says.

A case in point, Benest says, is the widening of Imperial Highway through his own city. The project, expected to be completed next year, was first conceived in 1978. “The system is very, very frustrating. Everyone is a victim,” he says.

If the federal government needs reform, so does city management, Benest believes. And Brea, he says, is taking the lead.

The city of 35,000, which is host to more than 100,000 people during working hours, now earns more than half of its revenue from sources other than traditional property taxes.

Nearly a quarter of Brea’s income comes from selling city services to other jurisdictions, including the police protection it provides to neighboring Yorba Linda and recreation services sold across the Los Angeles County line. At the same time, slightly more than a third of the city’s income comes from its share of the sales taxes collected by city businesses.

“One of the reasons we’ve been able to weather the recession, and all the state rip-offs of property taxes, is because of our entrepreneurial activities,” Benest says. The federal government, he adds, would do well to follow the example.

Profile: Frank Benest

Age: 44.

Family: Wife Pam Grady; no children.

Residence: Brea, since 1989.

Education: Bachelor’s degree in sociology, Yale University; master’s in public administration, Cal State Long Beach; doctor of education, Brigham Young University.

Current position: Brea city manager and redevelopment agency director.

Responsibilities: Oversees $100-million budget, 357 full-time employees and 135 part-timers.

Experience: 1974-1986, Gardena human services director; 1986-1989, Colton city manager and redevelopment agency executive director.

Affiliations: Former president of City-County Communications and Marketing Assn., a national organization helping agencies use private-sector marketing principles to solve public-sector problems. Currently works with the California/ Colorado/Arizona/Nevada Innovation Group as a consultant and trainer in Rightsizing Local Governments project.

Source: City of Brea

Researched by MIMI KO / For The Times