Running the Show in Long Beach

Sitting behind the desk in his 13th-floor office, City Manager James C. Hankla has a sweeping view of Long Beach’s waterfront. It is a view he is proud of, one that bears his personal stamp.

As he gazes out the window, the man many consider to be the most powerful person in Long Beach can see the gleaming steel-and-glass Convention Center, the end result of a $100-million gamble that many considered folly but which now is paying big dividends.

Close by is the Long Beach Arena, the new home of the International Hockey League Ice Dogs, a team Hankla helped lure from Los Angeles in characteristic slap shot fashion, getting the owner’s signature on a contract one day and running it through the City Council the next.

To the west is the partially built $150-million Aquarium of the Pacific, another high-risk venture that Hankla nailed down with such dazzling speed that critics are still wondering what happened.

But lest Hankla’s reverie go on too long, all he has to do is look directly below his picture window onto Ocean Boulevard, Long Beach’s street of broken dreams.

The broad avenue, flanked on both sides by high-rises, is an ever-present reminder of the city’s deeply troubled past and still-uncertain future.

Many of the gorgeous hotels and office buildings that line the boulevard are only partially completed or have high vacancy rates. They are monuments to the freewheeling 1980s--buildings that have eaten fortunes and resulted in bankruptcies, foreclosures and musical-chairs management.

And dominating the view to the west is the Queen Mary, the city’s troubled icon. The ship has taken much of the city’s wealth--more than $50 million in tidelands oil revenues--and needs as much as $40 million for repairs and restoration. The city doesn’t have the money and is now considering a plan to hire it out to Tokyo investors for up to five years in return for the money to fix it.

Whether the issue is a development that will help shape Long Beach’s future or the burden of past mistakes, the responsibility for dealing with them lands squarely on Hankla’s desk.

Ten years ago, when Hankla, 57, became city manager, the big issues were cleaning up graffiti and crime, housing density in the city’s residential neighborhoods and airport noise. These days, putting together megamillion-dollar deals, or a string of them, is what keeps the pot boiling in City Hall.

At a time when complaints abound in government about the difficulty of getting things done, Hankla is that rarity: a government official given what essentially is a free hand by a mayor with limited powers and a part-time City Council to do what he needs to do to help rebuild California’s fifth-largest city with a population of 437,800. Even though his deals are not universally popular, evoking opposition from citizens’ groups and even demands that he be fired, Hankla continues to draw enough strong support from city leaders and business groups to remain firmly in charge.

“Jim is running the show,” said downtown business leader John Morris, the owner of the upscale Mum’s restaurant on Pine Avenue, who has battled openly with Hankla over downtown redevelopment. Even so, Morris gives the city manager grudging respect: “He has a vision of what he wants to see for his city and he is going to make that happen.”

A Possible Prototype

In many respects, Hankla is typical of hundreds of other city managers, the men and women who run the day-to-day affairs of California’s cities. Occasionally thrust into the limelight, city managers are for the most part gray operatives, relegated to the status of staff by elected officials. Except when things go wrong.

“You take the heat when things go wrong and you learn to pass off the credit when things go right,” said Debra Accosta, city manager of Pleasanton and president of the city managers’ arm of the California League of Cities. “If it’s good news, it’s the mayor’s signature; if it’s bad news, it’s always the city manager’s signature.”

Exactly, said Hankla in an interview. “That’s what being a city manager is all about. If you can’t get comfortable with that, then you are in the wrong business,” Hankla said. “The challenge, then, is to always be right.”

With constituent appetites still strong for services, city managers have had to be more resourceful than ever to keep police on the street and libraries open. The recent recession took a major toll on city economies. A succession of taxpayer initiatives, beginning with Proposition 13 in 1978 and continuing through Proposition 218 last year, have curbed officials’ ability to raise taxes. City managers have also had to deal with the rapacious appetite of the state Legislature for local tax dollars.

Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Economic Development Corp. of Los Angeles County, said the challenge of cities today is to “grow their own economies.”

“City managers have to deal with developers, find financing, work with institutional investors on Wall Street,” Kyser said.

These wheeling-dealing city managers often are referred to as government entrepreneurs. Hankla, who has won national recognition in the field, just may be the prototype: forced to become a self-starting deal maker, someone far removed from the cliched image of a bureaucrat wearing a green eye shade and making safe, by-the-book decisions.

“ ‘Bureaucrat’ is not a nasty word, but I don’t happen to think I am one,” Hankla said.

Indeed, Hankla once held one of local government’s most powerful jobs--chief administrative officer of Los Angeles County--but left in 1987 because he said he felt hamstrung by Civil Service rules.

He faces no such problems in Long Beach. If he has been given a difficult mandate, he has also been given broad powers to accomplish it.

While Los Angeles agonizes over whether to give a new contract to Police Chief Willie L. Williams, Long Beach is spared such hand wringing. Hankla has the power to hire, and fire, the police chief, as well as other top city managers--and he has judiciously exercised those powers.

Hankla has veto power over megamillion-dollar real estate deals, which he freely exercises, and enough clout to give his word in negotiations with corporate chieftains without too much fear of being overruled by the City Council.

“Time is money for business,” Hankla said. “If they can’t get a reliable yes, the next best thing is a reliable no.”

Explaining the differences between the way he operates and the way a traditional government executive might, Hankla said:

“A bureaucrat tends to take a problem and fit it into a process and down the process pipe it goes. They wait to see what comes out at the other end, and if the wrong result comes out, they can say, ‘Well, I followed the process.’ I tend to take a look at a problem and then at the pipe and say, ‘This is not going to fit,’ and create a process that fits the problem.”

That kind of thinking, while it has enabled the city manager to cut through red tape and expedite projects like the aquarium, has also created problems.

At community meetings, angry residents often demand that Hankla be fired, accusing him of neglecting Long Beach’s considerable urban problems while focusing on downtown economic development. A common complaint is that he runs roughshod over opponents. The word “process,” kind of an all-encompassing word for the series of steps a government agency takes as an idea evolves into law or action, comes up often.

“We have a city government run by the city manager, not by the people,” said Traci L. Wilson-Kleekamp, president of the Second District Neighborhood Assn. and one of those who would like to see the city manager fired. “The public is often left out of the decision-making process.”

Hankla’s projects rarely come easy. It seems like every major project draws opposition. People in Long Beach, as in other cities, love to fight City Hall. They back up their words at both the courthouse and the ballot box.

A group of small manufacturers on the city’s industrial westside has filed a suit that so far has succeeded in blocking a $23-million borrowing for redevelopment projects that Hankla said the city needs. In last November’s elections, opponents succeeded in defeating his financing plan to pay for an overhaul of the city’s antiquated 911 emergency communications system. After appearing to have overcome opposition to a naval station reuse plan, a new lawsuit has been filed to block it. A suit challenging the financing of the aquarium was also filed, but the city won that one.

The suit filed by the westside manufacturers, essentially reflecting a fight that began more than 20 years ago, offers a revealing glimpse into the tenacity of Hankla and his opponents.

Hankla started working for the city of Long Beach as an intern in the budget office in 1961, when he was a senior at Cal State Long Beach studying political science.

His first big job came in 1974 when a small band of city leaders named him to be the first director of the now-defunct Long Beach Economic Development Corp.

The charge of the corporation was to revitalize downtown. Among other things, Hankla helped get the Hyatt Hotel built and laid the groundwork for what many consider his biggest failure--the ill-fated downtown Long Beach Plaza Mall, a concrete monolith in deep financial trouble. The corporation also decided to clean up the city’s then-blighted westside, home to hundreds of small manufacturers located on the west side of the Los Angeles River.

The only problem was that not all the westsiders wanted to be cleaned up. They feared the city and its power of eminent domain would wipe them out. They filed a lawsuit, eventually winning a favorable settlement. But anger and suspicion of the city remained strong.

The fight led to the disbanding of the corporation.

On to Future Battles

Hankla’s career, meanwhile, was launched. He went on to become head of the city’s Redevelopment Agency and director of its community development department. In 1980, he left for a job as director of the Virginia Peninsula Economic Development Corp., which among other things played a role in financing the first Mercedes-Benz production plant in North America. Returning to Los Angeles County in 1982, he was director of the county’s Community Development Commission until 1985, when he was named county chief administrative officer of the county’s massive bureaucracy. He served two years, when frustrations led him back to Long Beach.

During the early 1990s, the city was hit with a succession of devastating blows. The collapse of the residential and commercial real estate market left many buildings in bankruptcy and homeowners demanding tax rebates because of sharp declines in the value of their homes. The Navy decided to close down its naval station and shipyard. McDonnell Douglas Corp. began downsizing, eliminating roughly half its work force. In all, more than 50,000 jobs were lost during the 1990s. In the midst of all that, Disney dropped its shoreline development plan and gave the city back the keys to the chronically money-losing Queen Mary.

With Long Beach reeling, Hankla and his staff looked to redevelopment projects to pump new life into the city.

The problem was this: The city needed major loans to keep its redevelopment projects moving, but the only place where revenues were growing was in the westside redevelopment area, which includes the port.

Several months ago, the Redevelopment Agency came up with a plan to borrow $23 million, based on westside tax revenues, but a lawsuit was immediately filed to prevent a bond sale. Many of the principals in the suit were the same ones who fought Hankla in the mid-1970s.

“Jim Hankla was our nemesis from day one and still is,” said Reinhold Grassl, who owns Ultron, a small manufacturing business.

Hankla views the suit as a temporary setback, but he expects the city to eventually win.

Hankla’s drive to excel, he acknowledges, probably began with his efforts to compensate for a childhood bout with polio. His parents, both of whom were government workers, left their home in Louisville, Ky., in 1944 and moved to Los Angeles County after their son, then 5, was stricken.

The disease left him self-conscious about his built-up orthotic shoes and a noticeable limp, which eventually went away.

His effort to overcompensate, he said, “is more a reflection on me than other people. I probably was a little bit socially maladroit because I expected people to treat me in a certain way and I reacted as though they were going to.”

He compensated in athletics and outdoor activities, as well as the classroom.

Raised in Wilmington, then as now a tough blue-collar community, he went to Banning High School, playing on the football B-team and the varsity swim team. Active in Boy Scouts, he attained Scouting’s highest rank, Eagle Scout, at 15. At Long Beach State, he was on the wrestling team.

These days, Hankla remains active, though the limp has returned because of post-polio syndrome--a sometimes debilitating degeneration of nerve cells that often afflicts those who had contracted and overcome the disease.

When he is not in City Hall, Hankla might well be found tramping around the wilds of Wyoming, Colorado or Alaska. Everywhere he goes, except Alaska, is reachable by cellular phone. “My staff can usually count on hearing from me twice a day,” he said.

Hankla lives with Jorene, his wife of 35 years, in a comfortable home off a golf course fairway in Bixby Knolls, a planned community in Long Beach.

‘I Love My Job’

But his real domain is City Hall, a 14-story office building in downtown Long Beach. As he moves from city office to city office, takes up his familiar seat in a special staff box during weekly City Council meetings or engages in quiet hallway conversations, Hankla seems to have his hand in everything, from parks and police budgets to trash hauling and parking fines.

He does it all while trying not to get too far ahead of the city’s elected leaders--Mayor Beverly O’Neill and the nine members of the City Council who must officially approve everything he does and who can fire him at any given moment.

Just how much longer Hankla stays with Long Beach remains a matter of conjecture. He has sought other jobs, including the post of chief executive of the massive county Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Sources close to the board vote say he came within one vote of beating out the man who got the job, Franklin White.

Last year, when the City Council raised his salary to $174,000, Hankla pledged to stay through 1998 budget deliberations.

O’Neill called Hankla an “outstanding administrator” who had “provided stability” to the city government. She said she hopes he remains on the job into at least the near future because “we have so many irons in the fire.”

Although he said he hasn’t made any decisions to leave, he quickly added: “I do think that there is a time when you can stay too long. There is an old saying in the city manager profession that friends may come and go but enemies accumulate.”

If he leaves, Hankla said, he would not retire. He might start his own consulting business, he said.

In the meantime, he will stay put. “I love my job,” Hankla said. “It is the least boring job in the world.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Profile: James C. Hankla

Long Beach city manager since 1987.

* Age: 57

* Residence: Long Beach

* Education: BA, political science, Cal State Long Beach, 1961; MA, public administration, Cal State L.A., 1967.

* Career Highlights: 1974, chief of staff, Long Beach Economic Development Corp.; 1980, executive director, Virginia Peninsula Economic Development Corp.; January 1982, general manager, housing division, Campeau Corp.; June 1982, chief, Los Angeles County Community Development Commission; 1985, chief administrative officer, Los Angeles County; 1987 to present, city manager, Long Beach.

* Big Deals: In the 1970s, construction of Hyatt Hotel, downtown redevelopment, Long Beach Plaza Mall; 1980s, in Virginia, helped bring first Mercedes-Benz production plant to North America, gained $100 million in financing for coal terminals; 1990s, $100 million expansion of Long Beach Convention Center, downtown/Pine Avenue redevelopment, major face-lifts in outlying shopping malls, $150-million-plus Aquarium of the Pacific; currently negotiating $100-million-plus public-private partnership for Queensway Bay waterfront development next to the aquarium.

* Interests: Hunting, taking several trips a year to Wyoming, Colorado or Alaska.

* Family: Married; two sons and four grandchildren.

* Quote: “I decided I wanted to become city manager of Long Beach when I was a senior in college.”