Councilman Comes by Critics Honestly

Blunt and busy in his sparse city office, Councilman Bill Davis takes a rare break.

Between phone calls, appointments, letter-writing and research, Davis pinpoints the urge that drove him to burn up his retirement years attending 15 meetings a month of the City Council, the Ventura County Transportation Commission, the Metrolink board and a dozen other panels.

“I want to be the guy that makes the decisions,” says Davis, a retired auto service manager and radio repairman nearing 70.

“You only can do what the law allows you to do and what the people who put you in office allow you to do,” he says. “But it’s a satisfying thing to me to see something happen.”

Davis proudly paints himself as an activist, someone who has helped shove projects into existence to better the city.

Since his appointment to the council in 1986, Davis has helped launch the Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center and the Metrolink commuter line that cuts through town en route to Moorpark, Camarillo and Oxnard.

He set up a retirement fund for the city’s police dogs and helped hammer out the beginnings of a coherent trash policy for eastern Ventura County to extend the life of the Simi Valley Landfill.

And he has been a tireless crusader for the elderly, setting up a rent-subsidy program for poor senior citizens and pushing through several low-cost housing projects.

But while some praise Bill Davis’ honesty, his industry and his expertise on every issue from trash to transportation, critics call Davis brusque, bristly and too quick on the trigger.

Barry Hammitt, chief of the city workers union, says Davis handles criticism poorly.

“He appears to have his mind made up, and anybody who disagrees with him, he lashes out at them,” says Hammitt, whose Service Employees International Union Local 998 threw heavy financial and manpower support behind Davis’ failed 1990 bid for a seat on the Board of Supervisors. “It’s like he’s almost offended if people question him.”

Even supporters see Davis’ tart tongue as a two-edged sword.

Mayor Greg Stratton praises Davis’ determination, his ability to stand up for Simi Valley’s rights in meetings with large regional entities such as Metrolink.

“[But] he’s been known to have a fairly short fuse. He doesn’t stand for BS of any kind,” Stratton says. “I don’t know if we’ve ever lost anything because of it, but I’ve had places where I’ve had to clean up behind him, or maybe [former City Manager Lin] Koester or [City Manager Mike] Sedell has.”

Stratton adds: “He’s a cannon, and sometimes he shoots where you want him to shoot, and sometimes he doesn’t. You try and figure out if he’s shot in the wrong direction--and can you take care of the wounded--and move on.”

Mayor Pro Tem Barbara Williamson says Davis’ honesty is his greatest strength.

“You may not agree with him. You may not like his answer, but you know where he’s coming from,” says Williamson, who has known Davis for more than 10 years. “Bill is a giver. He gives of his time, because he truly loves Simi Valley. That’s a wonderful gift to give to the community.”

Davis, himself, makes no apologies for his brashness.

“That’s just the way I am. If people take that the wrong way, I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ve been that way all my life. I always believe in the old saying, ‘Honesty is the best policy.’ And if I tell them that, I never have to worry about what I said before.”

Davis’ quick hackles, his doggedness and his up-at-4-a.m. schedule were formed over a lifetime filled with work that began in Dallas, where he was born in August 1927 to hardscrabble folk.

But he apparently inherited his work ethic and his open book of a heart from the grandparents who raised him from age 6 when his parents got divorced.

“My grandfather would always tell me--he’d always call me ‘son’--’Son, no one is going to give you everything. You’re always going to have to earn everything you want in life,’ ” Davis recalls. “He said, ‘You were born to a poor family, but you can make of yourself what you want to be.’ ”

Davis scraped together money for his first bike--$4.50 for a used clunker paid off in 50-cent installments--by delivering groceries, circulars and the Dallas newspapers.

At 12, his mother reclaimed the boy and moved with her new husband to California, but if he had his druthers he would have stayed with his grandparents, Davis says.

At 15, he struck out on his own, doing odd jobs and helping out at gas stations in hopes of learning to be a mechanic.

By 17, he had rented an apartment with a friend in Los Angeles. A garage owner took him in, taught him the trade, started him out at $30 a week and eventually bumped him up to $40 a week for fixing cars.

At 19, Davis married his high school sweetheart, Ginni--the one who hand-painted his name on his toolbox back when they were dating, and the one who plans to celebrate a 50-year wedding anniversary with him in June. The couple have five children and 11 grandchildren.

After the garage was sold, Davis left and took a mechanic’s job with a Culver City Ford dealership. But he soon yearned to earn more to support his wife and first son, and joined the Culver City Police Department. But he quit after seven months.

“Everything you saw was the poorer side of life,” he says now. “The thing that decided it was a little kid had got run over. . . . And I had him lying on my lap, blood all over me.

“I came home to change my clothes, and I said to my wife, ‘I can’t do this for 20 years,’ ” Davis recalls.

So he went back to work in the auto industry until, at 50, his knee collapsed from all the spills he had taken while racing motorcycles in his spare time.

The injury launched four years of surgeries and housebound recuperation that left him with a plastic knee joint, a limp, and plenty of idle time.

Davis took to tinkering with an old hobby, electronics. And after earning himself a second-class radiotelephone operator’s license from the Federal Communications Commission, he opened The Radio Doctor, a Culver City repair shop that he brought to Simi Valley when he relocated in 1980 to be closer to his adult children.

It was in Simi Valley that Davis met Vicky Howard, who would become his neighbor, nemesis and, ultimately, governmental colleague.

Howard sold the Davises a house next door to hers in the upscale Indian Hills subdivision, a stone’s throw from the golf course that fed another of Davis’ passions.

In talks over the backyard fence, Howard and Davis grew friendly, and she eventually nudged him to join the area’s Neighborhood Council--one of several panels that advise the City Council on local issues.

But when Davis quickly grew frustrated with the purely advisory role, he persuaded Howard--by then a council member--to appoint him to the Planning Commission.

“In the first or second meeting on the Planning Commission, I wanted to do something, and Assistant City Atty. Marge Baxter said, ‘No, no. You can’t do that, that’s not our policy.’ ”

A light went on. Davis realized that to have the real power to shape Simi Valley, he would have to get on the City Council.

So for the next year, Davis sat in the front row at nearly every council meeting, speaking often on the issues. The council appointed him in 1986 to replace Councilman Greg Stratton, whose elevation to mayor was triggered by then-Mayor Elton Gallegly’s election to Congress.

Davis has won reelection three times since.

By 1990, Davis’ full-time devotion to politics had pushed him to close the by-then struggling radio-repair shop and make a run for the Board of Supervisors--against Vicky Howard.

The race started out friendly enough, a light rivalry between old neighbors. But it devolved into a bitter campaign of charges and countercharges regarding each candidate’s alleged ties to developers.

At one point, Davis declared to The Times: “It’s a damn war.” And by the time it was over, he had lost and each candidate had spent more than $103,000. It was the costliest campaign in county history.

Howard, who won and served one term, said last week the battle was “blown out of proportion,” adding, “We’re still neighbors, and we still have a very friendly relationship.”

If ever Stratton leaves the mayor’s office and Davis runs to replace him--something Davis has hinted at broadly--Howard said she would support her old campaign rival.

Davis says it took him a while to cool down from the fight.

“But that’s politics,” he says. “You just have to get over it. I said, ‘I’m still on City Council and Vicky’s a supervisor, and I need to work with her and she needs to work with me.’ ”

As it happened, Davis took over several of Howard’s committee posts when she departed the council, and gained several more responsibilities when council members Glen McAdoo and Ann Rock left the panel in 1992.

He now sits on the Civic Center Ad Hoc Committee, the Affordable Housing Subcommittee, the East Ventura County Waste Task Force, the Rancho Simi Open Space Conservation Agency and half a dozen other panels.

Davis’ largest role outside the council is shaping transportation policy as chairman of the Ventura County Transportation Commission and vice chairman of the Metrolink board.

“He’s likable, he’s very straightforward, he has his opinion and states it,” says Richard Stanger, Metrolink’s executive director, who has known Davis since he began working on the commuter rail service in 1990. “He’s very protective of the interests of Ventura County, and yet he’s very willing to work with others to find a way to move ahead.”

Davis’ bluntness and instincts as a political fighter have won him a dual reputation as being a tough crusader and bullheaded--a politically motivated cheerleader whom one anonymous politico called “a nice guy who tests the wind [and] doesn’t stick his neck out very often.”

Critics scoffed when--in a 1991 ceremony in then-Assemblywoman Cathie Wright’s (R-Simi Valley) office that had the air of a born-again baptism--Davis severed his Democratic ties and joined the Republican Party.

Hammitt, the city union chief, saw it as political expediency: “He professed to support a progressive platform. He supported [job] security issues, pay increases for the employees we represent and protecting employee benefits,” he recalls. “Then he became a Republican.”

And in 1995, when the union first began representing Simi Valley workers in negotiations with the city, Councilwoman Williamson agreed to listen to union reps, but Davis spurned them, Hammitt said.

“[He] knows that’s not correct,” Davis says, adding that he was following city policy that forbids anyone but designated negotiators from talking to the union.

Davis says his late-life party conversion was spurred by his work on Wright’s campaign, and by his own realization that he had been voting for Republican candidates and issues 95% of the time anyway.

Besides, he said at the time, if he had been a Republican he would have had a better chance of beating Howard.

Davis is unapologetic about his political instincts, as demonstrated in the way he describes campaigning among Simi Valley’s elderly residents--a move that eventually made him into a strong lobbyist for their needs.

“I felt if I could control the senior voting block, I’d be elected,” he says.

So, he went door to door in senior-housing complexes, gathering stories of older people scraping by.

One elderly woman on a fixed income told him that she did not know what to do because her rent was about go up, and that left Davis near tears, recalls his wife, Ginni.

“People get to him,” she says. “He cares.”

So Davis prodded then-City Manager Lin Koester to produce a report on half a million dollars in HUD money that was sitting idle in city coffers. And he brought the proposal to the council, which quickly approved a program that today subsidizes rent for up to 50 poorer elderly tenants.

“When you go home at night, you think, ‘By George, it’s taken 10 months, but I finally got that working,’ ” Davis says. “I am a pusher. If someone asks me for something, I’ll give it to ‘em.”

After heeding complaints from the arts community and others who were lobbying for Simi Valley to have its own full-sized theater, Davis also helped push the transformation of a rickety old Methodist Church into the city’s glamorous $3-million Cultural Arts Center.

When it was done, Davis remembers thinking to himself:

“Your name is on this building forever. Someday, my grandchildren . . . will say, ‘My grandpa had something to do with that.’ It’s like you left your mark on history.”