Manager Trades City Helm for Private Realm : Ventura: John Baker is remembered as tenacious, trustworthy and sometimes brusque as he leaves to start his own consulting company.

At some point, managing Ventura just stopped being fun.

John Baker, the outgoing city manager, can’t pin down the exact moment, although he tries at times during the waning days of his tenure in a spacious office overlooking downtown and the Ventura Pier.

“What bugs me most about government is when there’s not enough money to just throw it at a problem, the pressure groups start their lobbying,” said Baker, 50, who leaves office Friday to start a consulting company. “There’s more and more pressure on government with less and less ability to (get results).”

Twelve years ago, Baker left his job as assistant city manager of Oakland, wearied of the constant jockeying between local interest groups over an increasingly limited pot of cash.

He found haven in Ventura, a pleasant coastal town that boasted sound finances and stable government. “Here, there were issues that were resolvable,” he said.

But the budget problems in Oakland in the early 1980s followed Baker even into prosperous Ventura a decade later, as state and federal moneys grew scarcer and cities had to fight for every dollar.

For a city manager who prides himself on the morale of his staff, last year’s budget cuts and layoffs at City Hall were particularly painful for Baker, who still cannot speak of the difficult period without wincing.

“There’s people who like laying other people off, but I’m sure not one of them,” he said.

And as the funds became sparser, factions similar to the ones he fled in Oakland began to emerge in Ventura, each fighting for its share of the limited dollars.

Baker says those factions are reflected in the present City Council, which is among the most fragmented in years. Its seven members espouse opinions and agendas that clash almost as often as they coincide.

Councilman Gregory L. Carson has adopted tourism and municipal redevelopment as his twin crusades.

Councilman Steve Bennett, a newcomer, touts himself as the council’s purest environmentalist.

Veteran Councilman Jim Monahan persistently would follow the path of least regulation, whether the issue is closing Poli Street at Ventura High School or the fettering of businesses across the city.

And Councilwoman Rosa Lee Measures, a former banker, takes as her mantra Ventura’s need for increased economic vitality.

“I think there’s more of a special-interest bent to this council than there was when I came here,” Baker said. “But those folks aren’t different than most folks out there.

“We used to worry about what’s in the best interest of the total community,” he said. “But . . . there’s less of that happening.”

This is John Baker’s dream for his post-Ventura future: As a consultant to government organizations, he will swoop in, prescribe a solution to the dilemma at hand, and move on before the dissections and battles commence in the political arena.

“I’m going to make it so they can make it better--and then I walk away,” he explained, grinning.

Although he will dole out many opinions in the months to come, Baker, who plans to remain in Ventura, holds off on issuing parting wisdoms for the city or its council members.

“I’m very hesitant to offer advice,” he said, “because my job is to do.”

Such a comment is typical of Baker, who sits poker-faced at weekly council meetings, occasionally whispering asides to the mayor seated beside him, but otherwise only speaking up when specifically addressed.

In part because Baker does not play to the public stage, counting the council and his top staff as his primary obligation, council members say they place a high degree of trust in him and his judgment.

“John has a lot of integrity,” Councilman Gary Tuttle said.

Baker’s top staffers at City Hall hold their hard-driving boss in high regard.

“You need to be focused when you go in there to talk to him,” said Terry Adelman, city director of management resources. “One thing about John, he’s always prepared. He always has a list and he’s very organized. You need to be as well organized as he is.”

Baker, city department heads agree, does not like to waste time, and he will not suffer rambling explanations.

“He’s a bottom-line person,” said Everett Millais, director of community services. “It’s like, ‘OK, don’t spend an hour telling me the background and every bit of history, tell me the bottom line.’ ”

Baker admits that he is not a paragon of graciousness.

“I’m not Jay Leno or what’s-his-name, the guy on the other channel at the same time,” he said, ever in motion even as he sits, rubbing his hands together and crossing and recrossing his legs. “My personality’s one that tends to want to get through the issue and move on. Sometimes I even have to remind myself . . . to listen.”

His impatience, even abruptness, has led to some of the strongest criticism of Baker over the past dozen years.

Three years ago, frustrated with his often flip responses to public inquiries at council meetings, the City Council told Baker that he needed to work on improving his image. Then-Mayor Richard Francis even went so far as to suggest that Baker consider hiring a public relations firm.

“John is such a technician that the soul of the city isn’t being revealed,” Francis said at the time. “He knows that he needs to work at being more human.”

Baker’s brusqueness often frustrates those who already feel at odds with city policies.

“My complaint was always that he felt he was above the business community,” said Mike Crocker, a commercial real estate broker and frequent critic of Baker. “(The city) taxes us to death and yet, when you go up to talk to him, he says we’re a bunch of whiners.”

Crocker adds that in the last year or so, Baker has contributed to a “dramatic turn-around” in the city’s attitude toward businesses and business owners.

“But, God, it took them 10 years to get there,” he said.

Some local business boosters--while careful to praise Baker for his accomplishments--speak eagerly of what they hope to gain in his successor.

“I would be looking for someone who has more of a public relations-marketing aspect behind them,” said Bob Alviani, president of the Greater Ventura Chamber of Commerce.

All but Baker’s toughest critics, however, agree that there has been much to praise in his performance as the city’s top administrator.

Council members describe a city manager who was always thorough, always prepared, always ready with a detailed answer to every question.

“He’s done a super job for this city,” Monahan said in an interview shortly after Baker announced his resignation. “I think he takes the time to sit down and go through every situation, and has the alternatives already worked out in his head.”

City staff applaud his ability to see beyond the daily struggles and interdepartmental conflicts at City Hall, and plan for the larger problems looming ahead.

“He’s always looking ahead, anticipating,” Adelman said. “That’s the big word with him--anticipation. He’s always focused on the city as a whole.”

City Hall observers say the evidence of that is in the city’s solid fiscal condition.

“I think when we look back at John’s time with the city, one of the things we’ll look at . . . is how the city’s maintained a strong financial position, when other cities are struggling,” Alviani said.

Staff members say Baker--whose annual salary at the time of his resignation was $108,120, plus $23,957 in benefits--played a key role last year in forcing the city to make painful budget cuts and stay financially healthy.

“It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, the city can use its reserves,’ ” Millais said. “Believe me, he had demands from me and other department heads on how to spend that money. But John’s been a kind of fiscal conscience out there.”

Baker says his biggest accomplishment was constructing a cohesive team out of the myriad departments and divisions that make up city government.

In 1989, when the city was working on updating its comprehensive General Plan, Baker realized that to chart the city’s future, employees needed to know what was happening in the present.

“I told them, ‘You are going to pick two people you don’t know, and you are going to visit them in their jobs and they are going to visit you in yours,’ ” Baker said. “And it’s working to this day, keeping people thinking about the impacts of their jobs on others.

“To me, it was worth a lot.”

Beginning Friday, however, John Baker will have to prove himself all over again--this time, for the first time, in the private sector.

Baker’s entire adult life has been spent working for government. Before his 12 years in Ventura and 10 years in Oakland, he volunteered for a U. S. Navy tour in Vietnam because, he said, he would have been drafted anyway. He spent his entire time on board a ship cruising three miles off the coast of Vietnam.

“I was on a great big ship that had airplanes on it, and you just sailed back and forth, back and forth,” he said.

Often, he and his shipmates got offers to fly with the pilots as they dropped bombs over the coast of Vietnam.

“Yeah, (some went on the planes), but not John,” he said. “I said no thank you. Why should I fly over there and get shot down?”

Before Vietnam, Baker, a native of Montpelier, Ida., earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Idaho and a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Washington.

After his years as a civil servant come to a close, Baker plans to head for Idaho, where he will spend a week with his parents in Boise, as he does every year. Baker’s only other annual trip is a weeklong skiing jaunt he takes with friends each winter at varying Western resorts.

As soon as he returns, Baker will head for San Diego, where he will advise that city’s water and utilities department on how best to restructure its operations.

Baker has a partner in his venture--Jerry Newfarmer, a former city manager of Cincinnati and an old colleague from Oakland days. The two have a name for their enterprise--Management Partners--and a green-and-black, boomerang-shaped logo designed by Baker’s wife, Catherine, a graphic artist.

Already, he’s getting excited about his new job, spending hours after work learning how to use a word processor and plotting the four weeks of vacation he plans to take every year.

Never mind, of course, that he could have taken four weeks vacation a year while at Ventura, but didn’t seem to find the time.

Baker is already breaking with tradition. Only moments after insisting that it is not his place on the eve of his departure to give city leaders advice, Baker pours forth with a passionate tirade against--again--”pressure politics.”