ELECTIONS / THOUSAND OAKS CITY COUNCIL : Engineer Wants to Redesign Government--and Buildings

John Ellis keeps the innards of his car hanging out: a jumble of wires, boxes and strange mechanical parts dangling below the dashboard.

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The Thousand Oaks City Council candidate, who spent most of his professional career as an engineer, does this for a reason: easy access. Ellis wants to be able to get in there at a moment’s notice to replace anything that isn’t working quite right. He is a tinkerer.

In much the same way, he would like to turn City Hall inside out, cutting some staff members, retraining others and making sure everything is in good working order.

And even though he knows it is completely unrealistic, he wouldn’t mind tearing down the entire $64-million Civic Arts Plaza. In a perfect Ellis world, he would have an opportunity to rebuild the new facility, but this time to his own ideals of easy disabled access.

Ellis, at 63 the oldest of the five candidates running for the council, is hoping residents will vote for him when they go to the polls Tuesday.

But he knows his constant haranguing about what he calls the city’s lax enforcement of the Americans With Disabilities Act has given him a tough reputation to overcome--that of a single-issue candidate.

He rivals Ekbal (Nick) Quidwai in appearances at City Hall during council meetings. But where Quidwai digresses, Ellis obsesses, focusing on the issue of disabled access with a ferocious intensity.

He admits he may be giving the public a bad impression, but says he doesn’t really mind, as long as he fulfills his role as a self-appointed watchdog.

“This isn’t just about some idiot with nothing better to do than yell at the City Council,” said Ellis, whose wife is disabled. “There is a reason the idiot yells at the City Council.”

On a tour of the Rancho Conejo Industrial Park in Newbury Park, Ellis tries to explain some of his reasons. The 24-building complex was renovated by the city last year to comply with the disability act’s requirements, using a $230,000 federal block grant.

Ellis thinks the city made a mess of the renovations.

“I can understand that they were trying to fix something that was bad, but they did it all wrong,” he said.

Taking a wheelchair out of his car, Ellis demonstrates one problem he sees: a disabled parking spot at the top of a steep, sloping driveway.

“A disabled person, they are not all supermen,” Ellis said, unfolding the chair and trying to hold it steady. “What will happen is they will get into the chair and start to move away from the car.”

The chair slipped out of his hands and went careening down the hill.

“Just like that,” Ellis said, retrieving it. “These people simply do not understand accessibility.”

He said he learned about accessibility the hard way. His wife, Phyllis, who had polio as a child, has used a wheelchair for nine years. Before that she used canes. The couple often travel, and Ellis said they get frustrated trying to get her wheelchair in and out of restaurants and hotels.

“I sometimes spend all afternoon trying to get my wife inside a room,” he said.

Ellis has problems with almost every aspect of the Newbury Park renovation. But what gets him most riled are the lifts installed at entrances of eight of the buildings. He says most don’t work, and the ones that do are locked and the keys are not readily available.

Furthermore, he thinks the open shafts of the elevator-like lifts--which cost about $10,000--are dangerous. A child could get caught underneath and crushed if the mechanism is turned on, he said.

The likelihood of such an accident happening is small, he concedes.

“But Murphy’s Law tells you that someone will get caught in one of these things someday,” he says.

Ellis took council members Andy Fox, Jaime Zukowski and Elois Zeanah on tours of the complex last winter, pointing out what he thinks are deficiencies in disabled access. He also invited Councilwoman Judy Lazar, but she went separately, he said.

“Judy said her blood pressure couldn’t stand being in the same car with me,” Ellis said in his Southern accent, still thick despite 40 years away from his native Virginia. “So she came over by herself.”

Fox said he made careful notes during the tour, bringing questions back to city staff about points Ellis raised.

“The things that John says are in violation are not actually in violation,” Fox said.

But Fox did say he felt that too many lifts were installed where they did not need to be. He also said he has asked staff to find a better way to deal with the missing keys.

“John does make a lot of good points in that there was wasteful spending there,” Fox said. “But the bottom line is, for an industrial park, you aren’t going to find many that have that degree of accessibility.

“These individuals [disabled people] have a hard enough time,” Fox added. “They don’t need to be challenged getting in and out of businesses. John is a very good advocate for that special interest, but I don’t always agree with every point he makes.”

Michael Gibbens, a consultant hired by the city to design and oversee the changes at the industrial park, said Ellis is dead wrong.

“I can absolutely guarantee, 100% without any shadow of doubt, that complex is 100% in compliance with both state and federal laws,” Gibbens said.

Gibbens has written several books on disabled access, including most recently “The CalDAG,” a 600-page disabled accessibility guidebook. He said there have been complaints from building owners about the lifts in the past but that every time he has gone over to see what the problem is, he discovered an emergency stop switch had been inadvertently pushed. The remedy? Pushing it again.

Having had any number of run-ins with Ellis in the last two years, Gibbens is clearly frustrated with dealing with him. He said he thinks Ellis started out with good intentions but that he has become a “terrorist” about accessibility. Ellis gives a good cause a bad name, Gibbens said.

“When somebody comes in and causes these kinds of problems, you have to think, do I want to put up with this kind of grief when I’m trying to do something right in the first place?” Gibbens said.

Barry Branagan, the city’s Department of Building and Safety director, said Ellis has often been correct in pointing out access problems around the city. One year, Ellis filed more than 300 complaints about trouble spots. In most cases, Branagan said, Ellis was right. He also said Ellis was instrumental in persuading the city to follow federal regulations rather than state regulations when putting in curb cuts. The federal rules are better, Branagan said.

However, when Ellis stands up at council meetings and starts bashing the Civic Arts Plaza for supposed noncompliance, Branagan takes it with a grain of salt.

“Listen to him,” Branagan said. “He talks a lot in generalizations and a lot of what he is talking about is opinion. We follow the law here.”

“I just nod my head when he says things,” Branagan added. “And if I pick up something that I agree with, I write it down.”

Despite his passion for the topic, Ellis said he is much more than a one-issue candidate. The most important thing he would do as a council member is shake up the way city government works, he said.

Cutting the size of the staff would be a priority, he said. And he believes that too much city business is done in the back corridors of City Hall instead of in the council chambers.

He scoffs at his opponents in the council race for making campaign issues of public safety and the environment, saying that Thousand Oaks does not have problems in either area.

At forums throughout the election, Ellis has stayed away from the access issue. Instead he throws out metaphors about running the city like a farm, delivering homilies about hogs and cows and bees and birds.

He and his wife have three children and have lived in Thousand Oaks since 1963.

Ellis graduated from Villanova University’s School of Engineering and has taken classes at many other schools, including Ventura and Moorpark colleges. He worked for Hughes Aircraft for most of his career. At 39, he decided he was “burned-out” and retired. He works now as a consultant and a real estate broker.

But if he ever has the urge to return to engineering, there is always his car to tinker with.