For Oxnard’s Tom Holden, ‘Change’ Is Still the Watchword : Politics: Councilman believes that the city should be run like a business. Efficiency, privatization are at the top of his agenda.

Tom Holden was preaching to the converted.

Oxnard’s newest councilman returned last week to the neighborhood of his youth, a middle-class community like many in the city that are fighting hard to loosen the grip of gangs and graffiti.

He told members of the Fremont neighborhood patrol how they have come to represent Oxnard’s future: a group of residents willing to look out for themselves rather than waiting for the city to ride to their rescue.

“We talk a lot about changing the way we do things and, when you talk about change, you leave the comfort zone,” Holden told the patrollers, who nodded and chanted their approval like churchgoers swept up in a religious revival.

“But just because it’s not comfortable doesn’t mean we shouldn’t deal with it,” he added. “The days of saying that the city is going to do it all alone are pretty much gone.”

These, too, are unprecedented days in the life of the 39-year-old eye doctor turned politician.

Holden concluded his first year of City Council service last week. In that time, he has faced a room full of angry firefighters, roused by the council’s consideration of a proposal to merge police and fire services.

He and his fellow council members pulled the plug on a proposal to bring big-time gambling to Oxnard, an issue that split the community and ultimately prompted an investigation into possible laundering of campaign contributions.

He has helped hire a new city manager, voted to put more police officers on the street and supported merging city departments as a way to cut costs without cutting services.

The job has been more work than Holden expected. Yet he has all but committed to running for reelection when his term expires in November.

“It would be very difficult not to run again,” said Holden, who beat out 12 rivals in a special election March 2, 1993, to fill the seat vacated when Manuel Lopez was elected mayor four months earlier.

“This isn’t a question of a system being broken. It is broken,” Holden said in an interview. “But we--the residents, city staff and the council--are changing that, and I’m excited about the prospects for our city.”

But some are less than comfortable about those prospects.

Oxnard remains Ventura County’s most crime-plagued city, and even the recent addition of eight police officers leaves the city short on crime fighters. Most park restrooms, closed years ago because of budget cuts, remain locked.

And some residents fear what Holden might mean when he talks about a city in need of change. Is it wise to merge city departments if the result is that the library is now headed by the recreation director?

Has the city that battles gangs and graffiti forgotten that youngsters also need recreation programs to keep them out of trouble? And will the City Council’s zeal to boost the economic base translate into neglect of its poor and powerless?

“When a council becomes so interested in money, in the almighty dollar, then it’s easy to lose sight of the best interest of the community,” one longtime council observer said. “They don’t understand; they don’t see anything wrong with all this pro-growth. But it can be reckless and, in the end, gain the city nothing.”

Holden said he believes that the city is in its best shape in years, and he doubts that many people would disagree.

“I don’t think you are going to find a whole lot of residents who think that city government is changing too fast to become cost-effective and efficient,” he said. “I think what they will say is that we are 10 years behind.”

Those who know Holden best say it was his longing to return to a day when Oxnard was financially sound and services were plentiful that stoked his desire to seek elected office.

“He remembers Oxnard as being a small town, and I think he was concerned about the direction it was going,” said Lisa Knapp, Holden’s wife of six years and business partner. “He was frustrated in that he thought things could be done a lot better.”

Added his father, longtime Oxnard businessman Pat Holden: “He’s probably one of the few people who still figures that one person can make a difference.”

The Holden philosophy of orchestrating city government is actually quite simple: City Hall should be run like a business.

The third-generation Oxnard businessman campaigned on the idea that the city should strive for maximum efficiency in its attempt to provide the same level of municipal services for fewer dollars. He championed the cause of private-sector competition and, in some cases, advocated private management and operation of public programs.

And he stressed the need to find new approaches to old problems.

It hasn’t been easy. He joined a panel that had been unable to reverse a financial slide that critics attributed to years of fiscal mismanagement, bad business deals, and the failure of past councils to make hard decisions about spending and saving.

And he inherited a stubborn budget shortfall that had whittled down the city’s work force and gutted services over the years.

“We couldn’t continue doing what we were doing and still be OK in the next 10 years,” Holden said. “The knee-jerk reaction is to cut services. It’s much harder to really look at things and find ways to make them better.”

To that end, he joined his fellow council members last summer in reorganizing five departments in city government, in an effort to reduce costs without cutting services.

Late last year, he backed a move to put the city’s economic development program in the hands of a private contractor.

His was the strongest voice in support of allowing private landscapers to compete with city crews to provide gardening services around some public walkways and medians.

When it came time to balance the city’s budget over the summer, Holden and other council members refused to adopt a spending plan calling for more service cuts. Instead, they saved money by reorganizing city departments.

And for the first time in years, they agreed to take $500,000 from reserves to hire eight more police officers. Holden points out with pride that the reserve fund was repaid, with interest, earlier this month with money saved by downsizing city government.

Of course, Holden has not been alone. His election came four months after a hard-fought campaign forged a historic shift of power at Oxnard City Hall.

In that election, residents installed their first elected Latino mayor, first black councilman and only the fourth Latino councilman in Oxnard’s 90-year history. Holden tapped into that formula for success.

He built a diverse coalition, recruiting many of the volunteers who helped organize Councilman Andres Herrera’s successful campaign in November. He told voters that he was unlike previous council members, that he was a candidate willing to make bold changes to pull Oxnard out of its economic funk.

In short, he saw himself as a candidate who could appeal to a large cross-section of the city. Still, he is not without his critics.

Despite the citywide uproar over the card club proposal, critics note that Holden didn’t decide against the project until the eleventh hour, in the face of an investigation by the county’s top prosecutor into possible laundered campaign contributions and in front of a room full of people outraged that city leaders would consider such an idea.

“He and the rest of the council should have never let it get that far,” one observer said. “That issue clearly tore the community apart.”

And affordable-housing advocates note that little has been done in the past year to better the conditions of thousands of Oxnard’s poor, who live in garages and toolsheds or double and triple up with relatives just to scrape up rent money.

The city is still falling miserably short of its goal of building 1,450 low-income units by 1995.

Although Holden recently joined a unanimous decision to back construction of a controversial low-income apartment complex in downtown Oxnard, activists say he missed other opportunities to beef up the city’s low-income housing stock.

“His record hasn’t been great, but he hasn’t been alone in that,” said Eileen McCarthy, a poverty lawyer. “But I hope to see a shift by Holden and the rest of the council during this coming year.”

And some residents cringe at Holden’s willingness to put public services in the hands of private contractors.

Former city employee John Zaragoza, who has already announced that he will seek election to the council in November, said Holden’s approach to privatizing services could prove dangerous in the long run.

“It amounts to passing the buck,” Zaragoza said. “There is no accountability when you put a city service in the hands of a private contractor. Council members must live up to their responsibilities as elected officials.”

Holden argues that he is doing exactly that. He said his responsibility is to ensure that taxpayers get the best value for their dollars, regardless of who provides the services.

“That philosophy has gotten us to where we are now,” Holden said of Zaragoza and others. “That is part of the mentality that has kept us stuck in a mode where we continue to cut services to balance the budget.”

Holden has witnessed that decline firsthand.

He was born and raised in Oxnard. He attended Santa Clara Grammar School and graduated from Santa Clara High in 1972. Afterward, he went to work in his father’s downtown Oxnard liquor store until he was 25.

“Tom was the only one of my kids who didn’t enroll in a four-year college,” Pat Holden said. “He was kind of a late bloomer.”

At 25, he started taking courses at Ventura College. Ten years after graduating from high school, he enrolled in the Southern California College of Optometry, where he met his wife.

Holden and Knapp were married a month after she graduated from optometry school in 1987. They immediately moved to Oxnard and opened a practice together in late 1988.

No one--not his father nor his wife nor his close associates--was surprised when Holden decided to run for office.

“I think he’s got the fire necessary to commit to the challenges he will face,” said Barry Braff, an Oxnard optometrist who introduced Holden to the career during late-night poker parties. “The same thing that allowed him to put on a good bluff in a poker game will give him the strength to get through.”

So Holden will continue to embrace change. Park restrooms are set to open soon under a plan that would put the chore of maintaining them into the hands of a private contractor.

He explained to members of the Fremont neighborhood patrol how he recently learned that it took more than eight months of staff time to put up a couple of basketball hoops and resurface the courts at a city park.

“We can no longer afford to charge 40% more and take 10 times as long to accomplish something,” he said. “The reasons the bathrooms were closed, the reason things have become so difficult, is because of an unwillingness to change.”

In fact, he told the neighborhood patrol group that it was the park restrooms that spurred his interest to run for the council.

“To me, it basically symbolized where we had gotten to,” Holden said. “I just looked at the situation and thought there has to be a better way.”