Simi’s Smooth Negotiator : After a Year on the Job, City Manager Earns Praise as a Problem Solver

Just over a year into his tenure, City Manager Mike Sedell has perfected his balancing act.

Where few other public servants perch for long, Sedell strolls confidently along the knife-edge between the interests of unions and management, politicians and constituents, government and the people.

“He’s just one hell of a negotiator,” says Mayor Pro Tem Bill Davis. “He’s always been able to resolve some of these issues you thought would have become a hot potato, and when he got done they didn’t turn out to be more than a lukewarm French fry.”

City Councilman Paul Miller adds: “He has done an excellent job in his first year. . . . Mike will find the solution that seems to work best for everyone, and that’s important.”

Sedell, 45, shrugs modestly and credits the City Council’s sage policy-making or the smooth-running bureaucracy he inherited when former City Manager Lin Koester left last year to be Ventura County’s chief administrator.

But it is Sedell who firmly controls his staff of 540 and the infrastructure of this city of 108,000, whether guiding complex union negotiations, planning the new police station or ordering workers to smooth a bumpy patch of asphalt.

Some criticize him for being too hands-on or relying too much on verbal orders without putting enough of his directions in writing.

But they acknowledge this: While the City Council makes the broad decisions, Sedell is the one who runs Simi Valley.

He has had plenty of practice: Aside from a three-year stint as Congressman Elton Gallegly’s top aide, Sedell has spent his entire career in Simi Valley.

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It began in college.

Sedell says he had an average upbringing in West Los Angeles.

He loved fishing, water-skiing and working on cars. Sam Sedell, his father, recalls a dune buggy with a beer-keg gas tank, and a jacked-up Mustang that teenage Mike “needed a ladder to climb up into.”

Sam Sedell was a hospital administrator who instilled a code of ethics in his son.

“I learned from his frustration with those in his corporate world, who were more concerned with counting the beans than with caring for the people,” Mike Sedell said. “We’ve got to recognize the need for public service as well as making sure that everything’s done in a cost-effective manner.”

While his Vietnam-era college classmates were preaching that change in government came only through noisy protest or violent overthrow, Mike Sedell bucked the hippie ideology.

“They didn’t want to take the time to wait for change,” he said. “But I believed that government, if it’s managed well and open to public access, then it’s going to serve the public better.”

The polarization and name-calling of politics turned him off, so Sedell hunted around instead for an entree to city government.

A civics class at Cal State Northridge introduced him to the city managers from Santa Monica, Glendale and Simi Valley. And the last of these, Bruce Altman, invited him on board.

“I jumped at the chance,” he recalls of the internship that opened the door to Simi Valley.

Sedell graduated quickly from office grunt work one day a week to helping develop departmental budgets three days a week.

By that point, he was juggling school, a department store job to pay for it and his internship, and he begged the city to begin paying him.

So the city hired him full time, putting him in charge of youth services at a time when Simi Valley was a city of young families--with more than 50% of the population under age 18.

He screened and selected candidates for the city’s youth council. He worked as a go-between with kids and police on the city’s juvenile detail. And he helped set up the city’s youth employment service.

Sedell’s bosses liked his work so much they made him an assistant to the city manager.

He worked his way up through the ranks, learning the ropes: intergovernmental affairs, labor negotiations, media relations, transit systems and election coordination.

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By the mid-1980s, he had earned the rank of deputy city manager, and Elton Gallegly had been elected Simi Valley’s mayor.

Gallegly was impressed.

So much so that when he won election to his freshman term in Congress, Gallegly chose Sedell as his top aide.

“I probably learned about as much from Mike Sedell as I have from any other person in life,” Gallegly said.

While Gallegly sought public office because he was generally dissatisfied with the system, he recalls, Sedell showed him specifically how the system could work better.

“He’d have an ability to push my buttons, to get me to think about things,” Gallegly said. “It was healthy because we could get in each other’s face sometimes and know it was never personal.”

As talk heated up and the table-pounding began, Gallegly said, he realized that Sedell was goading him to refine his own argument until it was as strong as possible.

“And he’d say, ‘Now you really understand the argument for why you feel the way you do,’ ” Gallegly recalled. “Mike was a great devil’s advocate. We got into a shouting match once to the point where a plaque fell off the wall in a senator’s office.”

But while Sedell relished the experience of learning how Washington ticked, he missed his wife, Judie, their two children and his parents in California.

Gallegly saw family ties tug at Sedell, who flew home frequently to visit. Eventually, Sedell moved his wife and children to the Beltway.

But after three years in D.C., Sedell was ready to move back to a world where his work would make more of a difference.

“It was a heady experience, but it was not the real world,” he said of his Washington experience.

“Here, you could see something completed--like a plan for county transportation--over a period of time,” Sedell said. “In Congress, you worked on these broad national issues, and you could tweak things here and adjust them there--and it would tweak back four years later.”

Sedell had kept in touch with Koester, who was his boss before he left for Washington. And Koester brought Sedell back into the fold in 1990 on a contractual basis, then hired him as the city’s assistant city manager.

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While working in Simi Valley, Sedell lived in Thousand Oaks on and off for 18 years with his wife, Judie, to be closer to her job in Ventura, where she worked as a probation officer. The couple has an adult daughter and a 15-year-old son.

When he was named city manager, Sedell put his house on the market and tried to move, but was not able to sell it immediately. He finally moved to Simi Valley about eight months ago after the city voted to give him a short-term $85,000 loan--the amount of equity in the Thousand Oaks house--to buy a home in Wood Ranch.

As assistant city manager, Koester said, Sedell distinguished himself on a daily basis and in times of crisis.

When the Northridge earthquake rocked Simi Valley in 1994, Sedell coordinated the flow of money, inspections and other aid between state and federal emergency agencies and Simi Valley, Koester said.

Sedell also mediated complaints from homeowners whose houses were destroyed or badly damaged, helping them pick their way through a maze of new building codes that sometimes hindered the speed of repairs.

“He just did a marvelous job of coordinating all that,” Koester recalled. “A myriad of things had to be melded together, and Mike did that better than anyone I could imagine.”

When Koester left to become chief executive officer of Ventura County, the City Council launched a nationwide search for the best candidate for city manager.

The search led right back to Sedell, whom the council appointed June 9, 1995.

Sedell quickly proved the council’s decision a good one, said Councilman Paul Miller.

When Simi Valley Police Officer Michael Clark was killed last summer in a shootout, “Mike involved himself in a very personal way with the Police Department,” Miller said.

“He got personally involved in working out the details as to how the city could facilitate helping the family, making the funeral arrangements--anything he could do to grease the skids so that the trauma to the family . . . and the department was minimized.”

From his seat on the City Council dais every Monday night, Sedell also takes care of the council’s needs, council members said. He is quick with answers to questions about logistics, funding and past policy--or with promises to research the issues and report back to the council.

If Sedell has any shortcomings, Koester said, he has relied too often on verbal orders without the written direction to back them up.

But Koester is quick to add, “The only thing I’ve heard is positive, and how he’s doing a better job than I did.”

Mayor Pro Tem Davis said Sedell should delegate authority more often to his department heads, as Koester did.

“He likes to know everything that’s going on and have his finger on it,” Davis said. “It’s not all bad. I think he eventually will probably get away from that. . . . I’d like to see him designate some of the load of his work.

“Everybody says he absolutely lives and breathes this stuff, that this is what he likes to be. But I’m always concerned a few years down the line he’s going to burn himself out.”

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Sedell replies, “I wouldn’t say I’m a workaholic, but I spend a lot of time on the job because I enjoy it.”

That--and the time he spends traveling and fishing with his family--are the times dearest to him.

Sedell says he has no ambition to run for office, nor does he envision any job beyond the city manager’s post--although he teaches a master’s degree seminar in intergovernmental relations at Cal State Northridge.

But Sedell said he will continue to search for ways to answer these questions: “What do the laws say about what’s right and equitable and fair, and how do we bring those together?” he said. “How do we make it work for everybody we can?”