Turnover High Among Aides to Gallegly

If Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) were running a football team, fans might be bracing for the worst. His veteran quarterback is leaving. His chief blocker is gone. The season opener is just weeks away, and half the team has quit.

From his first term in the House, Gallegly has experienced considerable staff turnover--and the trend is continuing as the 105th Congress prepares to open Jan. 7. Gallegly’s top assistant, Michael Wootton, will leave at year’s end to become a Washington lobbyist. His press secretary, Jim Maiella, has moved to a New York City public relations firm. Legislative assistant Amy Adams joined a law firm shortly after the election and receptionist Kyla Nelson is heading for Costa Rica to polish her Spanish.

Staff turnover is common on Capitol Hill, where the hours are long, the pressure high and the pay relatively low. And the days following the election are the typical time for career moves in Congress, just as a president’s cabinet secretaries typically jump ship at the launch of a second term.

Still, Gallegly appears to churn out staffers more than most. He has eight aides working in his Washington office, half of whom are leaving. Another six staffers work in his Oxnard office, which is a far more stable place.

Although some past staffers have suggested that he is a difficult boss, Gallegly insists that nothing is amiss in his operation and puts a positive spin on the turnover.

“You look at my office and I probably have one of the lowest turnovers of almost any office in Washington,” he said. “People do leave and go different places. I know that. I never hire anybody to come to work with me that I don’t think is capable of doing better things. I always try to find the most qualified person, and I recognize that means some of them are going to leave.”

But a survey of the Capitol Hill work force suggests that turnover in Gallegly’s office runs higher than average.

With Wootton leaving the post after two years, Gallegly will be forced to bring on his sixth chief of staff since he first went to Congress in 1986. The average chief of staff stays on the job four years, according to a study by the nonprofit Congressional Management Foundation.

Press secretaries typically last 2.3 years, according to the study. That is just about the amount of time that Maiella, a former correspondent for The Times’ Ventura County Edition, filled the job. Now a public relations official at Rubenstein Associates Inc., Maiella called his time in Gallegly’s office a “tremendous learning experience.”

The latest departures mean that only two of Gallegly’s Washington aides, Caroline Hall, office manager, and Don Gilchrest, a legislative assistant, will have more than two years’ tenure in his office. Gallegly is bringing on replacements, however, who know their way around Capitol Hill.

Dennis A. Parobek, who will replace Wootton as Gallegly’s chief of staff, currently fills a similar position for retiring Rep. Barbara Vucanovich (R-Nev.). Before that, he had worked for the Federal Aviation Administration and for former Sen. Chic Hecht (R-Nev).

The new press secretary will be Nora Bomar, who is now deputy communications director for Rep. Ron Packard (R-Oceanside) and had previously worked as a White House spokeswoman based in Los Angeles after the 1992 riots.

The staffing exodus comes after an especially intense legislative session in which Gallegly played an active role in passage of the immigration legislation. Besides chairing a special task force on the issue set up by Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, Gallegly was active in defending the legislation on the House floor--even after he was hospitalized for exhaustion on the eve of debate.

Wootton brought two decades of government experience to the office. Before signing on with Gallegly, he had been a top aide to former Congressmen Michael Huffington and Robert J. Lagomarsino and former Sens. John Seymour and Pete Wilson.

“There’s always turnover in these jobs,” Wootton said. “Longevity is the exception.”

Wootton will become the director of federal government relations for Sunkist Growers, a marketing cooperative representing 6,800 fruit growers. He will open a Washington office for the organization and lobby on the growers’ behalf. One congressional office he will have to stay away from for the next year under House ethics rules is Gallegly’s.

Although there are many staffers who spend their careers working as congressional aides, the positions tend to fall to recent college graduates who learn on the job and then take their skills elsewhere. Salaries for entry-level jobs can start as low as $18,000, although pay for some career staffers can approach their bosses’ salary of $133,000 annually.

“They’re burnout positions,” said Rick Shapiro, who studies congressional staffing as executive director of the Congressional Management Foundation.

“You’re talking about people with virtually no job security. There is no predictable schedule. If the speaker decides at 7 o’clock at night to go to midnight, you work to midnight. . . . Because of all these factors, you get people who are interested in an exciting, challenging and demanding job that takes over their lives--for a while.”