Thousand Oaks Officials Trapped in City Council’s Cross-Fire : Government: Bureaucrats tread carefully between factions split on development issues. Elections make it even trickier.

Some Tuesday nights, City Manager Grant Brimhall leaves the Thousand Oaks council meeting half expecting to find his nose crumpled by an errant punch or his double-breasted blazer spattered with mud.

From his high-backed seat in the center of the council dais, Brimhall sees a fair share of nasty politicking. And increasingly, he and other top city officials say they feel shoved into an ever more bruising fray.

“Staff members are sometimes put in the boxing arena, and when that happens, staff members have their hands tied behind them,” Brimhall said.

Brimhall’s top aide, Assistant City Manager MaryJane Lazz, agreed. “It’s not a fun analogy,” she said. “But it’s a very relevant analogy.”

With Thousand Oaks council members intractably split on major development and planning issues, top city bureaucrats must tread between two highly partisan camps.

On the one hand, they must heed votes by the majority--council members Alex Fiore, Judy Lazar and Frank Schillo. At the same time, they must respect the concerns of the minority--Mayor Elois Zeanah and Councilwoman Jaime Zukowski.

Staff tightrope walking has become even trickier because the upcoming election, with three seats open, could potentially swing power to the Zeanah-Zukowski faction. Whoever controls the council controls the hiring and firing of city staff. If purely in the interest of job security, bureaucrats must please both sides.

“The key thing is to try with all your heart to maintain an objective, professional perspective and to be honest and forthright,” said Brimhall, who has been city manager for 16 years. “You can’t play games.”

But the ever-warring council members don’t make it easy.

Factional disputes among the politicians have lately grown so intense that the anger has spilled over into council-staff relationships. That tension crops up more and more frequently during televised Tuesday night council meetings.

Voice icy beneath her trademark smile, Zeanah may grill the city manager on his decision to schedule a controversial issue early on the agenda, before most residents return from work.

Veteran politician Fiore may fire loaded questions at the city attorney about council protocol, his tone and words suggesting that his rivals have broken the rules.

More calm, but still severe, Zukowski may complain to the city clerk that the typed summary of council actions does not reflect her views.

The confrontations all happen in public, and they are captured live and in re-runs on the government cable station. And that makes some city staffers uncomfortable.

“My main concern is that council members don’t call us and talk about (such issues) before the meeting,” said Nancy Dillon, who has served as city clerk for a dozen years. “That’s one reason we produce an agenda on Thursday, to give them an opportunity to call us if something isn’t clear.”

Top city employees are reluctant to talk on the record about tensions with individual politicians.

“I’m afraid I can’t comment--I’m right in the middle of this thing,” City Atty. Mark Sellers said recently.

Despite his reserve, however, Sellers did express frustration with council-staff relations, which he described as “a little more sensitive now.”

“The other day the mayor yelled at the city manager for having a long agenda,” Sellers said. “Well, what are we supposed to do? If we knock items off the agenda, people will yell at the council and say, ‘Why wasn’t my item heard?’ ”

For their part, several council members admit that bureaucrats occasionally become surrogate punching bags. Nearly unanimously, they express distaste for such public bickering. Yet they cannot agree on the reason for the tension--or the best way to ease it.

About the only solution they concur on, in fact, is for everyone to hang on until November.

“An election always clears things up,” Schillo said wryly.

For now, however, council members must deal with the many issues facing the city, from zone changes to development proposals to overcrowding laws. And, reluctantly, they concede they will probably continue drawing city staff into their debates.

“My style is to do as much as I can behind the scenes,” Zeanah said. “However, if I have to take something public, I will.”

As mayor, Zeanah said she considers it her job to monitor the bureaucrats who carry out council policies. She expects a professional, objective staff. And her constituents, she says, have the right to know if she’s disappointed.

But Schillo views the monitoring as meddling.

“We should not get involved with the daily business of staff,” Schillo said. “It’s a paranoia, trying to interject (the council) into every aspect of government.” Pointedly targeting Zeanah, a rival in the upcoming council election, Lazar added: “Nobody else criticizes city staff like she does. Nobody. There’s only one person who really drags city staff into the fray. I think that’s inappropriate.”

The most dramatic example came during a recent debate about the Civic Arts Plaza, when Zeanah accused the city attorney of concealing key information from her.

In dropping-a-bombshell tones, Zeanah announced during a public meeting that the city attorney had refused to show her an appraisal of the former civic center at 401 W. Hillcrest Drive. The city has long planned to sell that property for at least $11 million to pay for the new government headquarters being constructed in the Civic Arts Plaza.

Only when she made a fuss, Zeanah said, did Sellers let her see the appraisal--and even then, he would not allow her to copy it.

At least one citizen in the audience that night reacted with outrage, scribbling letters to local newspaper editors denouncing city staff for withholding information from the mayor.

But Sellers, at the public meeting and later in a an interview, insisted: “I’ve never kept any information from the mayor. In fact, I spent a half-hour with her, going over the appraisal page by page.”

Sellers acknowledged that at first, he asked Zeanah not to copy the appraisal, which is supposed to be a confidential city document. But when he discovered that copies had been circulated to a citizens’ committee, he changed his mind.

Zeanah, however, stuck with her interpretation.

Her foes, she said, did not want her to see the appraisal because it assumed that the property would be subdivided into three separate lots for condominiums, a restaurant and other commercial uses. With such zoning, the appraiser estimated the property would be worth about $13.5 million.

But Zeanah considers such intense development unlikely, and therefore concluded that the property is worth far less than city staff indicated. Convinced that the appraisal--and her difficulty obtaining it--were noteworthy, she aired the issue during a televised meeting.

“As council members, we have an obligation to serve as watchdogs over the bureaucracy, and I take that obligation very seriously,” Zeanah said. “If the government is not being responsive to a critical need, I’ll take it public.”

To that, Lazar responded: “You don’t resolve the problems by airing them publicly.”

Despite that philosophy, however, Lazar could not resist jumping into another recent bout between Zeanah and city officials, this time the city clerk.

Following up on a concern voiced first by her ally Zukowski, the mayor directed the city clerk to include dissenting views in the minutes that summarize council action.

Lazar swiftly intervened, telling Zeanah that the minutes have for years recorded only votes, without detailing each council member’s reasons for supporting or rejecting the proposal.

“Could we ask the city clerk about this?” Lazar suggested.

But in the ensuing debate, no one found time to question City Clerk Dillon.

If they had, they would have learned that some recent minutes have included a synopsis of the debate while others have dryly recorded the vote. Dillon later attributed the disparity to the fact that she’s been training a new recording secretary. Yet her explanation was lost in the shuffle.

City Atty. Sellers has found himself in similar situations, ostensibly asked questions by both sides, but never given an opportunity to answer.

“It’s like when you get into a quarrel at home,” Lazar said. “You keep saying, ‘Is that true? Yes, of course it’s true.’ And you don’t give the other person a chance to respond.” Sellers says he doesn’t mind being cut out of debate--even debate that concerns parliamentary procedure or legal issues.

“I respect that they are elected representatives of the people,” he said. “If that’s how the community decides to run the local government, that’s a community decision and I respect that.”