Court Official Has Taken 34 Trips Since ’91 : Expenses: Sheila Gonzalez has been criticized by some on her staff. But others say her travels benefit the county.

Sheila Gonzalez, who recently received a $12,400 pay raise as Ventura County courts administrator, has spent nearly five months of workdays out of the office on business trips since mid-1991, public records show.

In that time, Gonzalez has taken 34 trips out of town, including 15 outside the state, according to the records. On most of the out-of-state trips, she conducted business for organizations not directly affiliated with the county.

Altogether, the 34 trips kept the 50-year-old Gonzalez out of town for 123 days.

Gonzalez’s frequent absences have not gone unnoticed by some of her staff, especially in light of the controversial pay hike that raised her base salary to $109,000.

“You hear criticism from employees that they can’t get money for basic things, and yet Sheila is always gone,” said Barry L. Hammitt, executive director of the Service Employees International Union Local 998.

But Gonzalez and her supporters defend her travels as being beneficial for Ventura County.

They also say that nearly half the funds for the trips out of state came from two private, nonprofit national courts groups of which Gonzalez is a board director.

They also credit the trips for helping boost the county’s image as a national leader in court efficiency and technology. Gonzalez supporters argue that without the trips--and without her staying on top of new court technology--the Ventura County system would lose its label as a national model.

“I think it’s important to note that the courts in Ventura County are not an island unto ourselves,” said Municipal Judge Bruce A. Clark, a presiding judge the past two years who authorized many of Gonzalez’s trips.

But one judge, who did not want to be named, called the court administrator’s travels “outrageous.”

Many of the trips by Gonzalez were to San Francisco or Sacramento to lobby legislators and judicial authorities on behalf of the county. But 15 trips were taken outside the state.

As well as her Ventura County duties, Gonzalez is a board member for the National Center for State Courts and the National Assn. for Court Management.

Most of her out-of-town trips were to take care of business for one of those groups--either to speak at a conference or to attend board meetings.

In her capacity as a county administrator, she took several out-of-state trips either to arrange equipment buys or attend educational seminars.

Gonzalez’s busiest stretch for out-of-state travel came during a five-month period in late 1991, when she visited Miami, Philadelphia, Chicago and Dallas.

“Very few court administrators nationwide get appointed to the board of the National Center for State Courts,” Clark said. “That’s a real plum. And it’s through these contacts that she has made on a national basis that enable Ventura County to remain on the cutting edge.”

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Gonzalez said she maintains regular contact with her office and with the judges while she is away.

“I’m away but I’m not away. I’m always running the office,” Gonzalez said. “If I have to baby-sit this office, then I haven’t done a good job of training or selecting management.”

She said that the travel is often a headache for her, causing her to rise early from bed and often return at odd hours. She also argued that most of the travel does not interfere with her work schedule.

“When you look at most of it, it is on the weekends,” Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez had $11,710 in bills on her 15 trips outside the state. The county paid a little over half of that total--$6,099.

Most of the travel did not occur on weekends, however.

The travel records--including requests for cash advances, reimbursement reports and airline itineraries for the past 31 months--show that only 28 of the 123 days Gonzalez spent on the road were Saturdays or Sundays.

Gonzalez, who was hired seven years ago as Municipal Court executive officer, said the judges realize the value of her travel. “I think it has brought not just money, but ideas here,” she said. “We don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

But many other local officials rarely take more than one or two trips out of state a year. For example, during the time Gonzalez made the 15 out-of-state trips, Chief Administrative Officer Richard Wittenberg made four, records show.

In April, 1989, the Ventura County courts became the first in the state to combine their Municipal and Superior administrations. Gonzalez was appointed to head the combined operations as clerk, executive officer and jury commissioner.

It is unclear how extensively she traveled before July, 1991, the latest period for which records are available.

That July, however, Gonzalez attended the 10-day annual conference of the National Assn. for Court Management in Philadelphia. It was the first of six out-of-town trips she would take over the next four months.

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In August, she spent two days at a conference in Dallas. A month later, she attended a four-day conference on fine collections in San Francisco. A week after that, in October, she traveled to a municipal-clerks convention in Lake Tahoe.

She returned to Ventura for a week, then attended a four-day conference on sentencing alternatives in Chicago. She ended the travel during that period with a four-day committee meeting in Miami for the courts-management group of which she’s a member.

But her busiest travel year was 1992, when 14 trips kept Gonzalez on the road for 52 days, records show.

That year, she visited seven out-of-state locations: Chicago; New York, Austin, Tex., Kissimmee, Fla.; Dallas and New Orleans (twice).

Gonzalez said she believes most of her staff understands what her travel missions are all about.

“I am open with the staff, and they know that I have a lot of commitments away from the courts,” she said. “I don’t do these things for me. It’s not like someone is paying me an honorarium.”