SPECIAL REPORT * A wave of retirements of people in key positions is bringing both challenges and an opportunity to . . . Change the Way the County Does Business

Thirty-six years ago, a young lawyer with deep roots in the old Los Angeles signed up for a stint in the legal department of Los Angeles County.

De Witt W. Clinton bore the same name as a locomotive used to settle the American West, and he came to Los Angeles County government at a time when the region was churning with growth, hurtling forward like a steam engine whistling through the desert.

In those days, developers, politicians and the lawyers who represented them were bound together in a tight circle of power, which was generally wielded out of sight. If the county was sued--over a flawed development deal, say, or an allegation of malpractice at a public hospital--the strategy was to dig in for the fight: batten down the hatches, shove off outside inquiries, and, if absolutely necessary, settle quietly.

“I never talk to the press,” Clinton, who shouldered his legendary golf clubs and retired last month, was fond of telling colleagues after he rose to become county counsel, Los Angeles County’s top lawyer, in 1983. “I never got in trouble by saying, ‘No comment.’ ”

This approach, in varying degrees and forms, was repeated throughout the dozens of departments that today make up the largest county government in the United States.

“If the department heads wanted to shut things down, they could,” said county Supervisor Don Knabe, who prior to his election worked as an aide to former Supervisor Deane Dana. “They had total protection. They had total power.”

Now, however, the county’s old-style leaders are retiring. And with their passing, the $14-billion county government--responsible for public health, regional planning, welfare and countless other functions of municipal government--is at a crossroads.

Who will replace the old guard? And will these new people--well-paid, suit-wearing, press-savvy department heads--be willing or able to wrench the county’s bureaucracy in a new direction?

There isn’t much time to find an answer.

Clinton was the gigantic local government’s fifth department head to retire in as many months. Gone also are the chiefs of mental health internal services, as well as the treasurer/tax collector and the agricultural commissioner. The longtime head of probation retired last year.

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All told, 23 of the county’s 34 appointed department heads--about 67%--have retired in the past five years, said human resources director Mike Henry. Another half-dozen will reach retirement age in the next five years.

Their departures give the five members of the county Board of Supervisors an unprecedented opportunity to change the way the county does business, which they insist they want to do.

In the old days, managers were so secretive and hierarchical that in many departments no one but the chief was allowed to speak to a board member, said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. To this day, many county employees are so afraid to deal personally with their elected bosses that they will not step on an elevator if a supervisor enters, Yaroslavsky said. Some will not pass through a doorway before a board member--even if the supervisor is attempting to hold the door open as a courtesy.

With the abolition of Civil Service protections for department heads in 1976, the system became even more closed around some bureaucrats, who, while taking particular care not to offend a majority of the supervisors, quietly continued to run their departments their own way.

“Most of our general managers are very competent,” said Yaroslavsky. “But the culture here is very corporate. There is so much deference to the board that it’s hard for some of the general managers to give their best professional opinion. . . . Far too often, we get, ‘I think this is what Zev wants to hear, so this is what I’m going to tell him.’ ”

It is no accident, therefore, that the secretive Clinton will be replaced by one of the most gregarious and open lawyers in the department, the only one who ever talks to the press.

Lloyd W. “Bill” Pellman, who was a teacher and a public relations man before becoming a lawyer, is so popular that several hundred county employees--from clerks to political aides and even one supervisor--crowded his swearing-in ceremony Aug. 5.

Normally, the rank and file wouldn’t even be invited to such an event, but Pellman insisted that they be allowed to attend. And they greeted his ascension with the hoots and cheers of true believers.

The new county, the supervisors and others say, needs to be led by people like Pellman: broadly educated public servants who, while not intimidated by power, do not hoard it either.

They must not simply be specialists in a single field, but able to coordinate several departments, lobby in Washington and Sacramento, manage a vast number of subordinates and interact comfortably with the supervisors.

Finding such people is terribly difficult. Empowering them to change the culture of a massive entity like Los Angeles County will be even harder.

When the county’s budget went to pieces a few years ago, one of the first programs to be cut was a nationally recognized training system for young executives.

To date, with the current wave of retirements pressing the question and the next wave waiting to break, there’s still no formal recruitment and promotion plan for department heads.

“We’ve got some voids,” said Sandra Davis, the county’s assistant chief administrative officer. “We need to do some succession planning.”

So far, the hirings have been piecemeal, with a new search begun every time a top manager decides to leave. Theoretically, at least, a succession plan would provide the county with a proactive way to recruit and train department heads far enough in advance that several could be in the pipeline at any one time.

A good program could help the county avoid the situation it found itself in when one of the most excruciatingly public and difficult jobs in the entire bureaucracy--running the Department of Health Services--came open two years ago.

Robert Gates, who retired 2 1/2 years ago as head of that department, felt more than most managers the clash of the old county culture with the supervisors’ growing demands for greater agility and openness.

At one point during a very public examination of the county’s overburdened health care system during the fiscal crisis of the mid-1990s, he physically collapsed under questioning from Supervisor Gloria Molina during a meeting of the board.

It took much cajoling--and a $50,000-a-year increase over Gates’ salary--to entice the current health chief, Mark Finucane, to sign on after that.

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A succession plan could also avoid lengthy vacancies like the one created when the county’s well-regarded head of mental health services, Areta Crowell, retired in March.

Crowell’s departure surprised the supervisors, and her replacement, Marvin K. Southard, was not hired until July. He has not yet started work. A replacement for retiring agricultural commissioner E. Leon Spaugy, whose last day was Aug. 6, has also not been chosen; nor has a new head of Internal Services.

Henry, the human resources director, said he is attempting to develop training programs for the county’s middle managers that would help them vault to top positions as they come open.

Beyond whether new department heads will be chosen quickly, though, is the spongier question of whether they will really be more responsive to the public and the supervisors, or whether the culture of hierarchy and protectivism will remain in place.

“The new management coming in will develop and set its own culture,” Henry said. “The challenge for us is to make sure that the new culture that evolves is the one that we want.”

The county’s goal, said Henry and others, is to hire managers who are willing to be keep the board and the public apprised of their activities--while still feeling confident that they will not suffer retaliation for proposing an idea that their political bosses might not like.

“We want a more open culture and environment,” Henry said. “One that supports risk-taking and supports the development of ideas.”

The county’s success at creating such an atmosphere will depend in large part on the supervisors themselves, who frequently blame department heads when something goes wrong and at times humiliate them publicly.

In a more benevolent culture, punishment for a failed idea would not be so swift and so public, allowing managers to try new routes.

“That is a tough culture to institute in a government operation,” Henry said. “We are under a microscope. You make a mistake and you can find yourself in a newspaper.”

The hirings of Pellman as county counsel and Southard as head of mental health show that, for now at least, the board is serious about choosing a different sort of manager.

Both men are good with subordinates and with the press, and both have navigated highly political waters with some ease. At the same time, neither has simply sat around being a boss: Both have significant track records of developing innovative programs and carrying them out.

Southard is a trained therapist who earned his administrative and political stripes as vice president for mental health programs at El Centro Human Services in East Los Angeles before signing on to run Kern County’s mental health department.

He is already planning a series of community meetings throughout the county to discuss ways to target individual parts of the region with appropriate mental health services.

He is also preparing a series of initiatives on substance abuse, foster care and other issues that have traditionally been considered the turf of other county departments.

“The kinds of problems we face can’t be solved by any one department,” Southard said in an interview in his Bakersfield office. “The only real important outcome is how ordinary people are living their lives together.”

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The product of a family with dual ethnicity--his mother is of Mexican descent and he describes his father as Anglo--Southard is used to living in two worlds.

Shifting all his life from one to the other, he said, has enabled him not only to understand and move in Southern California’s polyglot cultures, but also to talk politics and power to the politicians while at the same time ministering to a fleet of counselors.

“This job will bring together threads of my life that have been developing for 20 or 25 years,” said Southard, who assumes his post Aug. 24.

Henry and others argue that it may not be realistic or desirable to wrench the county in too different a direction in too short a time.

Spaugy, the savvy agricultural commissioner, recounted his baptism by fire in Los Angeles County. He became chief of agriculture and weights and measures just a few months before the worst Mediterranean fruit fly infestation in Southern California’s history struck the region.

Without the protection of state regulations and the insulation provided by a county culture that kept department heads an arm’s length away from the highly politicized supervisors, Spaugy’s program for dealing with the pest might have been seriously jeopardized.

Spaugy, who reluctantly agreed to use malathion during the 1988 crisis after the state’s supply of sterile medflies ran out, still keeps a photograph of the agriculture commissioner’s offices with its windows boarded up after anti-malathion protesters broke them during a rowdy demonstration.

If the same issue had arisen today, Spaugy might have been ordered to drop the program once the issue became too hot. And opponents of malathion spraying would argue that such a change would be a good thing, that it would make department heads accountable to the public through their elected representatives.

But even with what the supervisors insist is a new approach, any real shifts in the way the county does business will be years in the making, if they come at all.

“The culture here . . . is not likely to change,” said Yaroslavsky. “It’s too entrenched. But if you bring new people in . . . maybe you don’t turn the battleship around, but you might move it a few degrees.”

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Retirement Wave

About two-thirds of the county’s department heads have retired in the past five years. Among the more recent departures:

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Administrator: De Witt W. Clinton, County Counsel

Age: 62

Retired: July

Salary: $164,457

Former duties: Responsible for handling the county’s legal affairs and managing a staff of 120 attorneys. Also responsible for 80 attorneys who represent children in dependency court.

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Administrator: E. Leon Spaugy

Age: 62

Retired: August

Salary: $117,109

Former duties: Responsible for regulating pesticide use, working with agricultural interests. Led the county’s fight against the Mediterranean fruit fly.

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Administrator: Larry J. Monteilh

Age: 54

Retired: March

Salary: $139,555

Former duties: Responsible for collecting property taxes and running the county treasury.

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Administrator: Areta Crowell

Age: 62

Retired: March

Salary: $139,569

Former duties: Responsible for all mental heath services offered by the county, for a range of people including the chronically ill poor, disturbed children, mentally ill foster children and jail inmates.

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Administrator: William Stewart

Age: 61

Retired: March

Salary: $144,499

Former duties: Ran the operations and procurement arm of county government, supplying everything from copy machine paper to gasoline for county vehicles.

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Administrator: Barry Nidorf

Age: 57

Retired: March ’97

Salary: $133,181

Former duties: Head of the nation’s largest probation department, supervising 80,000 adult and 16,000 juvenile offenders. Opened the nation’s first juvenile boot camps.