Oxnard to Name Assistant Manager to City’s Top Post

The Oxnard city manager’s second-in-command has agreed to take over as the city’s top executive if the City Council approves a three-year contract, council members said Thursday.

Thomas Frutchey, who was hired as Oxnard’s assistant city manager just 19 months ago, would take over the top office Wednesday--one day after a scheduled council vote.

The decision to offer Frutchey the position was made without considering other candidates, council members said.

“The consensus of the council was that there was an element of cost--$20,000 or $30,000--to hire a search firm,” Mayor Manuel Lopez said.

“But since we had somebody on board that already knew the system and was involved in the city’s downsizing operations, we thought it would be best to go with him rather than bring in someone new,” Lopez said.

Frutchey, 43, replaces Vern Hazen, Oxnard’s city manager for nearly four years, who announced this summer that he would retire at the end of this year. Hazen will stay on the city payroll as a project consultant through December.

Councilman Thomas Holden said Frutchey “brings a lot of great qualities to the position. He has great respect among employees, department heads and council members and that makes for a very workable management style.”

Frutchey agreed to terms of the contract after closed-session discussions with council members on Tuesday, officials said.

The deal will pay him $104,500 a year--the same amount Hazen is paid.

But it also stipulates that Frutchey must agree to hold the job for at least three years, although he could be fired by the City Council before the three years are up.

The Oxnard city manager’s job is Frutchey’s sixth position in five years. But that doesn’t worry some city officials.

“You want to grow and you want to get a higher position, but to do that at one city you might have to wait 25 years,” the mayor said.

“The only way (city managers) get broad experience and get promotions is to move,” Lopez said. “And every time he’s moved, he’s gone to a larger city or a higher position.”

Councilman Michael Plisky said an employee’s length of service is not as important as it once was. “More important these days is what he was hired to do and did he get it done,” Plisky said.

Frutchey, a native of Rochester, N.Y., earned an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College in 1971 and a master’s degree in public policy from UC Berkeley two years later.

He worked in administrative positions in the cities of Los Altos Hills, Mountain View and Campbell--all in the San Francisco Bay Area--before becoming Oxnard’s assistant city manager in March, 1992.

In an interview Thursday, Frutchey said his first task will be “to get the whole organization thinking the same way, and moving the same direction. Then we have to come up with more innovative methods (of government).

“If we’re going to compete, we’re going to have to get better,” he added.

The city of Oxnard already has begun to streamline government bureaucracy. Plans call for the city to whittle the number of departments from 18 to nine, and to cut management-level staff by one-third, Hazen said.

“We’re going through some extremely massive changes and reorganization in the city and (Frutchey’s) been involved with it for a year and a half,” Plisky said. “He’s on top of it.”