Thousand Oaks’ City Hall Aims to Trim the Fat

City Manager Grant Brimhall can see it now: the much-maligned Thousand Oaks bureaucracy transformed into a lean, mean, service machine.

Fat will be trimmed. Belts will be tightened. And productivity will soar.

All because the new City Hall, now under construction at the Civic Arts Plaza, will include a $17,500 gym.

In a novel approach to downsizing, Thousand Oaks will offer its employees an in-house exercise room--only 500 square feet in area, but filled with modern, fat-busting equipment.

Stressed-out workers will be able to sweat away their lunch hours in the mini-gym, or slip in for some mind-clearing exercise before or after their shifts. The workout room will offer a treadmill, rowing machine, two stair climbers, three exercise bikes and some sit-up benches.

Officials also plan to install a weight machine, so those who routinely heft the City Council’s phone-book-sized agendas can build up a little muscle.

“I’m so jazzed about it,” said the city’s ombudsman, Maria Prescott, an avid treadmill walker. “I think it’ll really catch on.”

The new City Hall’s layout, however, could foil even the best intentions.

To get to the gym, employees will have to pass a concession booth loaded with hot dogs, croissants, cookies and other high-calorie snacks. They’ll also have to walk straight by a lounge filled with comfy sofas.

“That might be a little bit tempting,” administrative clerk Susan Kane acknowledged.

No other city in Ventura County keeps exercise equipment on hand for municipal employees. But Thousand Oaks officials figure their gym will be well worth the expense.

They expect to save on health care premiums, which slide up or down depending on how many employees have needed medical treatment during the previous year.

Spokesmen for Blue Cross, Kaiser Permanente and Metropolitan Life said their health-care divisions have not produced any studies about the benefits of in-house gyms. And they did not know whether insurance rates would fall just because a company installed a few treadmills.

But Thousand Oaks officials remained confident that heavy use of the gym could swell the city’s coffers even as it shrinks employees’ waistlines.

“You’re going to have to pay for preventive medicine, or you’re going to have to pay for remedial medicine, and preventive medicine is a whole lot cheaper,” City Manager Grant Brimhall said.

Ruefully patting his slight paunch, he added with a grin: “Some of us really need it.”

Aside from the potential insurance savings, Thousand Oaks supervisors said they expect productivity to rise when workers begin to take advantage of the gym.

As a prime example, Deputy Planning Director Mike Sangster pointed to his own remarkable history. Sangster has accumulated more than 2,000 hours of sick leave--that’s 50 full weeks worth--during his quarter-century in Thousand Oaks. He attributes his impregnable immune system to regular workouts.

“Exercise really does improve your alertness,” Sangster said.

His boss, Phil Gatch, who bikes nearly every morning at a local gym, agreed: “If you have a job that has any kind of pressure associated with it,” he said, “it’s a real stress reliever.”

Even gym rats like Sangster and Gatch said they eagerly await the City Hall workout room. If it’s not too crowded, they said, they would prefer to work out at least a few times a week in City Hall, rather than trek over to the gym and waste precious exercise time.

That’s exactly what Brimhall wants to hear.

“We really need a place where people can work out,” he said, “so we can make sure our employees’ physical abilities are enhanced . . . so they can take the rigorous mental duties we require of them.”