Decision Time on CEO

She is as feared as she is admired, detested as much as beloved.

Jan Mittermeier, Orange County’s chief executive officer, is a woman who says she dreads politics and public attention, but she finds herself in the midst of a political firestorm.

With her three-year contract nearing its final weeks, Mittermeier must decide whether to remain as the county’s top executive, which could mean accepting a change in duties and title.

As she has made her way up the county’s bureaucratic ladder, starting off as the first female accountant in 1975 and rising to director of John Wayne Airport, Mittermeier has become accustomed to having to prove herself to skeptical observers.

Her steely resolve, bluntness and no-frills style has won praise from business leaders and Wall Street, but those same characteristics have alienated some members of the Board of Supervisors.

A majority of the board now appears ready to change her title and reduce some of the powers it ceded her three years ago in the depths of the county’s historic bankruptcy.

But, she is not one to mince words:

“If they dilute the authority of this position, we are going to go back to the way it was before the bankruptcy, and it won’t take much time at all before we’ll be dysfunctional and in trouble,” she said.

“That is why my condition for taking this job was the authority that went with it, because I knew that was the only way to get this county back in shape and to keep it in good shape,” she said.

For the past two years, tensions have been mounting between the 58-year-old manager and some of her bosses on the board.

Through nearly her entire tenure, she has kept a poker face, unwilling to show any public displays of frustration or speak to the press when board members went after her.

But lately, her frustration with some board members has been more visible as she rubs and rolls her dark blue eyes and taps her pen on the desk whenever they criticize her or her staff at public meetings.

She has not shown, however, the sharp tongue of her predecessor, businessman William Popejoy, who quit after repeatedly clashing publicly with board members.

“Jan’s demeanor is very poised and one of nonconfrontation but one that is strong and handles things diplomatically,” Popejoy said.

Despite disagreements with some board members, Mittermeier has, by all accounts, accomplished the goal she was hired to reach: cleaning up the county’s financial mess.

“She came in at a very crucial point,” said GeDale Horowitz, senior managing director of Solomon Smith Barney, the financial consulting firm that has helped the county restructure its debt.

“The county is running itself like an intelligent business and lot of credit goes to Jan,” he said. “The toughest job is to say no to people, and that is what she has to do.”

Mittermeier’s fiercest critics, such as Supervisor Todd Spitzer, say her aggressive approach might have been needed when the county was mired in a fiscal disaster, but the time has come to restore some of the board’s former power.

“In a crisis, you didn’t have time to build consensus,” he said. “But government is supposed to be responsive to people, not run over people. Those of us who respect democracy are in this because we believe in consensus building and democracy, whether its efficient or not.”

Work, Education Ethic Instilled in Childhood

Janice Womack Mittermeier, the second of three girls born to William and Vergie Womack, has always been driven to achieve. Her father instilled a strong work and educational ethic in his daughters and proudly drove a car with a license plate proclaiming: “The best man for the job is a woman.”

Though she married at 18 after graduating in 1958 from Redondo Union High School in Redondo Beach, her intention was never to remain a housewife and mother.

Once her two children, Kevin, now 37, and Keith, now 33, were in elementary school, Mittermeier went to college. At 35, she graduated summa cum laude from Cal State Fullerton in 1975 with a degree in accounting. But when she looked for work at corporations and accounting firms, she slammed into the sexist wall.

Rather than ask about her credentials and degree, interviewers from top accounting firms asked if her husband would mind if she worked or if she could handle being the only woman in the office or if her children would get in the way of her job performance.

“Women were not considered analytical enough to be accountants,” she said, laughing at the memory. “One of the auditor directors said women didn’t really make as good auditors as men--that they were better bookkeepers because they had smaller hands.”

Though she was offered a job by one of the firms, Mittermeier opted instead for the public sector. Federally mandated affirmative action programs were forcing the county to recruit more women at the time. She was hired as an accountant and never looked back.

She quickly made her way up to chief of the county’s internal audit division, while returning to school to earn her master’s degree in business administration in 1983.

Meantime, problems were developing in the operation of John Wayne Airport, and her supervisors sent her there in 1987 as assistant manager. Three years later, she moved up to become the airport’s director and oversaw its construction and expansion.

In 1995, she was given the reins of county government as chief executive officer. It was the ultimate career opportunity under normal circumstances, but one she wasn’t sure she wanted to take with the county in bankruptcy.

“My heart just sank when [former supervisor] Marian Bergeson called to tell me I had been selected to be the CEO,” she recalled. “I knew exactly what I was walking into and that it was going to be a nightmare and a no-win situation. But I took it--reluctantly.”

The county was in a tailspin. After collapsing into bankruptcy in December 1994, the situation became so dire the following year that the state threatened to name a trustee to steer the county back into shape.

Working together with county staff and the supervisors, Mittermeier cut department funding, streamlined the bureaucracy and borrowed some money from Wall Street. Those efforts filled a $160-million budget gap left by former Treasurer Robert Citron’s risky investments.

She established a five-year budget plan that showed Wall Street investors how the county would become fiscally sound. A year later, the county was out of bankruptcy and it is soon likely to get its A-rating back--something that amazes even Wall Street experts like Horowitz.

“She instilled an immediate high degree of confidence in the business and financial communities,” said Gary Hunt, senior vice president of the Irvine Co. “Her style, her personality and very matter-of-fact way of doing things has been very helpful for the county in dealing with getting out of this bankruptcy.”

For her efforts, Mittermeier was given an “outstanding” job evaluation by four of the five supervisors in December. In June, however, Supervisors Jim Silva and Spitzer voted against giving her a $20,000 raise. She currently earns $148,000 a year.

Clash Over Issues With Supervisors

Increasingly, though, Mittermeier has clashed with Supervisors Spitzer and Tom Wilson. Spitzer, who was elected in 1996, has called her arrogant and lashed out at her on several issues, including the hiring of consultants and approval of contracts without board knowledge.

Spitzer and Silva are most incensed about the board’s loss of authority over the hiring of department heads, a power the board ceded in creating the chief executive position during the bankruptcy.

“I’ll be damned if I’m going to be making policy in this county and have no say in who will be hired to carry out that policy,” Spitzer said. “This board is derelict in its duties.”

For Wilson, the back-breaker issue has become the controversial plan to build a commercial airport at El Toro when the Marine Corps turns over its air base to the county next year.

Wilson, who represents a mainly anti-airport district, exploded in November when Mittermeier told him outright in a memo that she “would not provide” him with a travel schedule for lobbying trips to Washington on El Toro-related matters.

But the final straw came last month when Wilson was informed of changes to the county’s airport plan by a reporter--not by county staff.

“I am a big advocate of communication, and she has violated my communication principles on two major occasions,” Wilson said. “Those actions weigh heavily on how I view the duties of the chief executive.”

Even her backers admit that Mittermeier has run afoul of one of the basic principles of management: keeping all of her bosses informed.

She has, in essence, taken sides and, worst of all, with the slimmest of majorities keeping her in her job.

“She believes in centralized control, and that is the bottom line,” said Keith Concannon, an Orange County Retirement Board public member. “The Board [of Supervisors] needs to run county government, but it would appear that she is taking some of their duties.”

But Mittermeier defends her position, saying that she’s walking a tightrope in dealing with a divided board on such a high-profile and emotional issue as El Toro.

“I am supposed to be an advocate for the board,” she said. “Just because I have two board members out there who don’t agree with the majority doesn’t mean the majority doesn’t rule. It’s a very difficult situation.”

Some observers such as Hunt and Horowitz warn that a return to the old system of the board approving of department heads could be a harbinger, regardless of whether Mittermeier remains.

“In my opinion, it would be a tremendous mistake and imprudent and nonconducive to the image of Orange County if any steps are taken to change the responsibility of the chief executive officer,” Hunt said.

Horowitz said: “If the terms of the [chief executive] job change, then the jury from Wall Street goes and sits in the jury room again. It is still a critical juncture for the county.”

She also has the steady support of Supervisors William G. Steiner and Charles V. Smith. Steiner said she has done a “terrific” job at putting the county back on its feet.

Whether she decides to accept changes in her title and role, Mittermeier said she has no intention of retiring or slowing down.

A decision on her contract could come in early October.

“I’m really dedicated to this job and doing as good a job as I can,” she said. “But if the board decided that tomorrow they wanted someone else, I’m not going to take that personally.

“When I look back now, I’m very glad that I decided to [take the job] because I think the county is in better condition now than it was even before the bankruptcy,” she said.