Fired Official’s Reforms Score Points for City

Eight months after Oxnard City Manager Tom Frutchey was fired amid accusations of a tyrannical management style, his reforms have landed the city in the final round of a prestigious nationwide competition on government innovation.

Before a Harvard University-selected panel in Washington on Tuesday, acting City Manager Prisilla Hernandez outlined a “corporate-style” make-over of Oxnard’s bureaucracy that is credited with cutting crime, holding down trash-collection rates and opening new parks despite a declining budget.

The city has been named one of the nation’s 25 most innovative governments and has been awarded $20,000 from the nonprofit Ford Foundation, which runs the competition in conjunction with Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. The award money is to be used by city officials to travel to other communities and encourage civic leaders to replicate Oxnard’s reforms.

Frutchey’s reorganization plan was centered around empowering rank-and-file employees, giving them more say in how their departments are run.

But the standards for effective and efficient government are apparently much different in Oxnard than in the ivory towers on the East Coast.

Frutchey and the so-called “transformation” of city government were widely denounced during his public firing in February. Many city employees, and three of five council members, said they had been alienated by the top administrator’s autocratic approach and that his reforms created a lack of accountability in City Hall.

Former Oxnard Finance Director Sandra Schmidt, for instance, resigned from her post and went to work for the city of Burbank last year. She said she expected to be the next in a string of employees fired by the city manager.

“Oxnard was not the place to pull this,” Schmidt said. “There were some good things about the transformation, but you couldn’t criticize anything, for fear you’d lose your job.”

Schmidt noted the focus on “pay-for-performance,” another Frutchey policy, had some questionable results, such as several parks department employees awarding themselves bonuses topping $6,000. Schmidt said she would not look forward to a visit to Burbank by her former Oxnard colleagues to promote a similar government overhaul.

“This city’s doing just fine,” Schmidt said.

Oxnard Mayor Manuel Lopez criticized the Harvard committee that evaluated the city’s government, saying it was prone to catchy phrases and had heard a skewed argument from Frutchey supporters.

“I think the whole concept of innovation is based on verbally trying to make things sound good--’efficiency,’ ‘more for less,’ ” Lopez said, adding that the city had already begun streamlining its work force before Frutchey arrived. “A lot of it is smoke and mirrors.”

Frutchey, 47, collected a city severance package worth about $60,000 and was recently hired as an executive at Borla Performance Industries, an Oxnard automobile exhaust system manufacturer.

He recalled filling out an application for the Harvard program last year, and said Oxnard’s success in the competition demonstrates that private sector concepts can be brought to bear in city government.

“It all revolves around focusing on the service that one is providing,” Frutchey said. “It means providing an opportunity for employees to be their best. We develop so many systems in bureaucracies that keep employees from being successful. In hierarchical organizations everywhere, the management says, and the staff, blindly, does. We didn’t believe in that in Oxnard.”

Oxnard is one of 25 finalists in a competition that screened applications from 1,540 municipalities and agencies across the United States. In addition to the $20,000 from the Ford Foundation, the city will get another $80,000 if its government innovations are deemed among the country’s 10 best. The city will learn today if it qualifies for the top 10 ranking.

Other programs cited in “The Million Dollar Competition” are the California Department of Transportation’s Highway 91 Express Lanes and a San Francisco program that lets first-time “johns” in prostitution cases avoid criminal prosecution through counseling.

Oxnard Councilman Tom Holden, a strong backer of Frutchey’s reforms, said the national recognition is bittersweet.

“The frustration is, the person responsible for these reforms has been terminated,” Holden said. “It is a very deep irony.”

Frutchey became Oxnard’s city manager in 1993, and soon initiated wide-reaching changes.

The restructuring reshuffled the chain of command in City Hall. Previously, about 1,000 city employees reported to one of nine department heads, who in turn reported to the city manager and City Council.

That system of management was abandoned in favor of one that Frutchey and reform proponents say empowered rank and file employees. Instead, about 80 workers who managed city programs, from street-sweepers to firefighters, were made program heads. They report directly to the city manager or council, without the traditional department heads as go-betweens.

By removing a level of the bureaucratic hierarchy, reform proponents say Oxnard’s city government was made leaner and more efficient. They cite numerous improvements, such as a steep reduction in the local crime rate and annual profits of about $400,000 generated by the city-owned River Ridge Golf Course after Oxnard workers teamed with a private management company.

But some say the city manager grew too powerful under the new program.

Lopez, for instance, criticized Frutchey for negotiating to bring the minor league Pacific Suns baseball team to Oxnard without informing him.

After a trip to Oxnard this summer, Linda Kaboolian, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, returned to Massachusetts convinced that good things have happened in Ventura County’s largest city.

Kaboolian said she was well-aware that Frutchey had been fired, but after interviewing “all the players” in Oxnard City Hall and traveling through the city, she said she could see positive reforms had taken hold.

Employees at the Oxnard Public Library, she said, had grasped the city manager’s concept of treating residents like customers. They actively reached out to library patrons, asking if they needed any help, she recalled.

“They’re all willing to serve people, as opposed to sitting in their offices and doing paperwork,” she said.

Kaboolian said when she called civic leaders in neighboring cities, she heard nothing but praise for Frutchey.

“I don’t think Tom Frutchey was the most savvy political player,” she said, noting that Mayor Lopez had signed the city’s application for the competition. “But there was no question this was creative and innovative.”

The professor noted that Councilmen Bedford Pinkard and John Zaragoza, who along with Lopez voted to fire Frutchey, are former city employees. Frutchey’s changes were quite a departure from traditional forms of government, she said.

“The bottom line is that a very prestigious, credible organization has looked at what has taken place in Oxnard,” Councilman Holden said. “This should be a very proud moment.”

As Oxnard continues its search for a new city manager--the city recently had to extend the application deadline because so few have applied for the post--Lopez and Zaragoza say some of Frutchey’s changes need to be reversed. Both said, for instance, that a return to the department head system might be a good idea.

But after hearing luminaries such as political commentator David Gergen speak Tuesday, acting City Manager Hernandez told panelists how a break from convention had served her city well. Frutchey was not mentioned in her presentation.

“Tom was the father of the innovations,” she said, “But we focused on the employees and what they had done.”

Frutchey, meanwhile, said he looks forward to his new job in the private sector and plans to live in Oxnard the rest of his life.

But he did not rule out a return to the public sector.

“The nice thing about cities,” he said, “is that you really can make a difference.”

Wilgoren is a Times staff writer, and Chi is a correspondent.