COVER STORY : Juggling full-time jobs and City Council seats can create strains at work and home for these . . . : 2-Career Families

At first glance, the job description looks pretty good. As a part-time City Council member you attend one or two night meetings a month, make important decisions for your community and pull in an extra $700 or so each month.

But before you invest in campaign buttons, get ready to put your other career on hold.

The demands of juggling a full-time job and nighttime council meetings can create enormous strains on career and family, many officeholders say.

In Compton, Councilman Ronald J. Green was forced to choose between his new job as an aerospace engineer and council duties when his work hours were changed, overlapping City Council meetings. He chose the council position. Mayor Omar Bradley is often snatched out of the classroom where he teaches literature to attend regional agency meetings or hold press conferences. He returns calls on his cellular phone between--sometimes during--classes.

And former Long Beach City Councilman Warren Harwood frequently raced from his office in Los Angeles County’s Health and Human Services Department to a pay phone across the street to return calls regarding city business. He did this for years, after he was publicly criticized for running up his county phone bill on city-related calls.

“You can’t have a growing business or career and be on (a) council. No one can,” said Luigi Vernola, a two-term Norwalk city councilman who lost his reelection bid last year after an admittedly half-hearted campaign. “The problem is, you don’t want to let down the people who elected you, so you let (council duties) get in the way of family and business.”

Family members and employees were left mostly in charge of Vernola’s auto repair shops during his council years. While they did a good job, he said, business suffered because he wasn’t paying close attention. Since returning to work full time, Vernola said, he has discovered something surprising. “I really don’t miss the council,” he said. “I thought I would.”

But if local politicians are overworked to exhaustion, they also know many of their neighbors would balk at one possible cure: full-time council jobs accompanied by hefty pay raises.

“You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a senior associate at the Center for Politics and Government at Claremont Graduate School. “If you give (politicians) a living wage, you hear criticism that they’re out of touch with normal people. But if you don’t, they complain that they can’t devote time to constituents and the increasingly complex problems they face.”

In this time of term limits, tight budgets and voter disapproval of so-called career politicians, few city councils are willing to risk voter wrath by asking for full-time jobs and pay raises.

Compton is the exception. Voters in the city will decide on April 18 if the city’s mayor and four council positions should receive full-time pay. If the measure is approved, the mayor will be paid $80,000 a year and each council member will receive $60,000. Currently, all five receive $24,000 a year for the part-time positions. As with most elected officials, council members receive other benefits such as car allowances and health insurance.

Mayor Bradley, a literature teacher at Lynwood High School, has championed the full-time issue since the former councilman was elevated to his current post in 1993. He insists that the demands of running this city require that elected public servants be free of other jobs. The mayor is called on almost every day to make decisions or react to a new crisis in Compton, Bradley said.

“I won’t run again unless this is made a full-time job,” he said. “I am not going to kill myself.”

*

In arguing for full-time jobs and salaries, Bradley cites the time-consuming demands of dealing with the city’s high crime rate, poverty, racial tension and an infrastructure that’s 100 years old and crumbling. Finding new ways to repair decay on a limited budget is a constant challenge, he said.

But the council’s most time-consuming duties are in the realm of public relations, Bradley said. When racial tensions increase, police officers are shot or some other crisis surfaces, Bradley’s phones and the two pagers on his belt work overtime.

“This is a city with a negative reputation that’s nationwide,” Bradley added. “And every time something happens, I’m pulled out of my classroom to deal with it.”

Bradley estimates he lost $6,000 last year from his $45,000-a-year teaching salary because of absences from the classroom. Once he has used his allotted paid personal days, Bradley loses pay when called out of the class on city business, he said. Bradley also said that his elected duties have forced him to set aside plans to complete his master’s degree and move into school district administration.

Councilman Green found that he couldn’t keep both his $50,000-a-year job as a systems engineer and his council seat because of conflicting hours. He was appointed to the council in June, 1993, to fill the seat that Bradley had vacated upon becoming mayor. For weeks, Green rushed back and forth between council meetings in Compton and a job-training program in New York. Then he was told he would be working a 3 to 11 p.m. shift at Martin Marietta, which would conflict with the weekly evening council meetings.

He said he talked over the situation with his fiancee and decided to give up the job. He called it “one of the hardest decisions of my life.

“I was sorry I had to resign (from Martin Marietta), but the City Council was a long-term dream of mine and I wanted to do it right.”

*

Last year, Green married his fiancee, an electrical engineer who is the couple’s main source of income.

Green insists, however, that he is neutral on the ballot measure that would create full-time council positions. In fact, only Bradley has said outright that he favors the change.

Compton Councilwoman Yvonne Arceneaux, an elementary school office manager, admits that it is difficult to juggle both duties, particularly when she has to be at work at 7 a.m. the morning after attending a council meeting that has run past midnight.

But she has also remained quiet on the full-time issue. She said she voted to place the proposal on the ballot just to “put the issue to rest.”

She had opposed a previous proposal to create a full-time council, saying the city in which the median household is $24,971 a year cannot afford to pay big salaries to its mayor and council members. Arceneaux also said she never intended to be a full-time career politician, preferring the role of concerned citizen who receives a small compensation for her council service.

In the Southeast area of Los Angeles County, only one mayor, Beverly O’Neill of Long Beach, is paid a full-time salary. She receives $86,364 a year. Voters made the job full time in 1986 after proponents argued that full-time leadership was needed to bring Long Beach recognition as a “world-class city.”

But the nine council members in Long Beach are still considered part time and receive $21,588 a year, about $2,500 less than Compton council members receive.

Long Beach council members have aides who help with research and correspondence, but that doesn’t mean the officials put in part-time hours for their pay.

*

There are community meetings, fund-raising dinners and study sessions to attend, constituent gripes to investigate and businesses to woo. And on most Tuesdays, the weekly City Council meeting consumes the entire day, which can require some major adjustments for those with outside jobs.

One of the traps council members find themselves in is self-inflicted, some readily admit. During campaigns as challengers, many criticize the incumbents for not being accessible to the community and promise to be visible. And so they attend scores of meetings, from neighborhood watch groups to business district associations and traffic-management organizations.

First-term Long Beach Councilman Jerry Shultz said he attended 331 meetings in his first 32 weeks in office. His record is 11 meetings in one day. Shultz is a full-time sheriff’s deputy, managing 16 other deputies in the Court Services Division. He works 10-hour days, four days a week so that he can attend the Tuesday council meetings.

Former Long Beach Councilman Ray Grabinski said the job “is not something I would recommend to the faint of heart. You need to have the fire in your belly for (politics) because you end up going to a lot of things you don’t want to. And, unfortunately, your family suffers and so does your business.

Grabinski said his council duties left him with little time to deal with emergencies at his delicatessen.

Grabinski, who lost to O’Neill in the mayoral runoff election in June, said he has no regrets about his eight years on the council, however. Anyone getting into politics should realize the job is both time-consuming and temporary, he adds.

*

Councilman Alan S. Lowenthal also said he was surprised by the workload. “I didn’t realize it would be this time-consuming,” said Lowenthal, a psychology professor at Cal State Long Beach. “Given normal economic circumstances, this job probably should be full time. But the city just can’t afford it right now.”

Others say a full-time council job also would have disadvantages, particularly in cities with term limits. Harwood, the former Long Beach councilman, said he would have been reluctant to interrupt his county career to assume a full-time council job that offers limited security.

Even in smaller cities that have council meetings only once a month, officeholders find themselves in heavy demand.

Artesia Councilman Timothy J. Kelemen, a chiropractor and father of five, said he is still booked two or three nights a week for community functions. “There are days when I spend four hours on the phone with city business. I hate to admit it, but my income has probably dropped because of it,” Kelemen said.

*

In Montebello, Councilman Edward C. Pizzorno, owner of Stevenson Hardware Co., mostly sees the positive aspects of his 10 years of council service. Among other things, it has certainly helped give his hardware store name recognition, he said.

Of course, some people come to his store to talk city business instead of lumber and nails. And he can spot most of them right away.

“The cheapest item in the store is a 69-cent bag of screws,” Pizzorno said. “People would come in and feel they had to buy something to talk to me, so they would stand there, holding that bag of screws.

“I did sell a lot of those screws,” Pizzorno added, laughing.

Pizzorno has never tallied up the hours he spends on city business. He doesn’t want to know, he said, how many afternoons he has left the hardware store in the hands of his employees in order to attend to city business. He doesn’t want to calculate how much income he has lost, or business he has gained, because of his position.

“Making money,” Pizzorno said, “is not what the (council) job is about.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

City Councils and Members’ Occupations

Artesia

Members: 5

Meetings: Monthly

Salary: $401 per month

Occupation:

Mayor Isidro S. Menezes, real estate agent

Robert J. Jamison, construction supervisor

Timothy J. Kelemen, chiropractor

John Lyon, construction contractor

Ronald H. Oliver, semi-retired restaurant owner

Compton

Members: 5

Meetings: Weekly

Salary: $2,000 per month

Occupation:

Mayor Omar Bradley, high school teacher

Ronald J. Green, unemployed

Marcine Shaw, retired.

Yvonne Arceneaux, elementary school office manager

Jane D. Robbins, retired

*

Downey

Members: 5

Meetings: Twice a month

Salary: Mayor, $430 per month; council, $365

Occupation:

Mayor Barbara J. Riley, teacher

Gary P. McCaughan, physician

Joyce L. Lawrence, marketing and communications consultant

Diane P. Boggs, retired

Robert S. Brazelton, semi-retired attorney

*

*Long Beach

Members: 9

Meetings: Weekly

Salary: $1,799 per month

Occupation:

Douglas S. Drummond, retired.

Jenny Oropeza, unemployed.

Alan S. Lowenthal, college psychology professor.

Thomas J. Clark, retired

Les Robbins, sheriff’s deputy

Doris Topsy-Elvord, retired

Mike Donelon, general contractor

Jeffrey A. Kellogg, commercial real estate broker

Jerry Shultz, sheriff’s deputy

*The mayor is full time and not a City Council member. Mayor Beverly O’Neill’s salary is $86,364 a year.

*

Montebello

Members: 5

Meetings: Twice a month

Salary: $745 per month

Occupation:

Mayor Art Payan, retired

Jesus (Jess) Ramirez, retired

William M. Molinari, electrical contractor

Arnold M. Alvarez-Glasman, attorney

Edward C. Pizzorno, hardware store owner