Latest Actions Underscore Flynn’s Style

The flu caught up with Supervisor John Flynn last week. But it didn’t slow down Ventura County’s most unpredictable policymaker or keep him away from the center of controversy.

First, from his sickbed, Flynn hurled his colleagues on the Board of Supervisors a disorienting curve--breaking board unity by going his own way in a search for a new chief administrator.

Then, still ailing, he unilaterally upped the ante in a new debate over how to spend the county’s rich pot of Proposition 172 law enforcement dollars.

Finally, late Friday, Flynn got a surprise of his own, when a Latino leader in Oxnard filed to run against him, the first serious challenge for the six-term supervisor since 1980.

“I think it’s time for a Latino representation in county government,” said Oxnard schools trustee Francisco Dominguez. Just as important, he said, is Flynn’s role in the failed merger of the county’s mental health and social services agencies. “Certainly Mr. Flynn has been part of some of those decisions that haven’t fared out too well.”

For Flynn, 66, who usually seems to thrive on controversy, this was not just business as usual. He’d expected a Latino challenge one day, since 54% of voting-age residents in his 5th District are Latino. “But not so soon,” he said.

At the same time, Flynn was taking heat from his colleagues on the board. They’d all agreed to speak with a single voice to show they were not the pack of political animals chief administrator David Baker made them out to be in a scathing resignation letter two weeks ago.

Shortly after Baker’s stunning resignation, they voted unanimously to recruit a strong interim administrator from outside the county to make quick and painful budget cuts.

That was a Tuesday. Three days later, Flynn changed his mind; an inside candidate really makes more sense, he said. And by the following Tuesday, the bedridden Flynn was leading a charge for the appointment of controversial health care chief Pierre Durand--a move critics said would add turmoil to chaos at the county government center.

Most disturbing about Flynn’s flip-flop, said colleagues and veteran government-watchers, was that the 23-year supervisor--an outspoken maverick--would not act as a team player even in a time of crisis. While that reversal was true to form, it roiled to the surface anger and resentment that had been building against Flynn for a long time.

“It just puts a bad face on it for the public,” Supervisor Judy Mikels said. “Here’s the board making statements about how we’re all going to move forward to solve these problems. Then he bolts--and all of the sudden one of the cats has escaped.

“I think it’s time,” Mikels said, “for myself and the rest of the board to stand up to John and say, ‘You are not going to destroy our process and our county. It’s time for you to straighten up.’ ”

Mikels said she made those comments knowing that Flynn is “a bully” who will make her public life “hell.”

“But that’s all right,” she said the day after Flynn floated his trial balloon in support of Durand. “I’m tired of it.”

Mikels is far from the first Flynn colleague to accuse him of grandstanding and unnecessary confrontation. Similar charges have been leveled by members of at least the last three boards.

Indeed, controversy has followed Flynn, first as the odd man out on numerous 4-1 votes, and in recent years as the swing vote on a series of key decisions by a divided board. In 1995, he cast the decisive vote in hiring fiscally conservative Simi Valley City Manager Lin Koester as chief executive. Then Flynn, a Democrat, again joined Republican conservatives Mikels and Frank Schillo in approving an ordinance guaranteeing local law enforcement agencies all of the money produced by a new half-cent sales tax.

Flynn was also the swing vote in April 1998, when he joined Democratic supervisors Susan Lacey and Kathy Long in approving the ill-advised mental health and social services merger. But despite his history of conflict with other supervisors, Flynn denies he is a wild card or unpredictable maverick of the board. Nor is he a bully, he says, although he acknowledges a temper that he sometimes loses, then apologizes about later.

“I think I’m the only politician that’s had to apologize to every politician in Ventura County at one time or another,” he said recently.

But he was making no apologies to Mikels. “Judy Mikels has a tremendous temper, and it sounds like she just exploded,” Flynn said. “She comes from a particular wing of the political spectrum where differences of opinion don’t go over very well. She has to remember, I’m not the right-wing Republican that she is.”

Flynn insists he is a leader who is not afraid to chart his own course and who thinks creatively about problems. He does not follow the pack, he says, unless the pack makes sense. Given time to think about how best to replace Baker, Flynn said he decided it was ridiculous to go outside county government when a candidate like Durand, a strong boss and fiscal expert, was already here and ready to serve.

“I thought we had been stampeded and we weren’t thinking very clearly, so I changed my mind. Is there anything wrong with that?” Flynn said. “I’m trying to get the board to move in concert, but in the right direction. And if unanimous votes are so good, how come [hiring] Baker didn’t work out?”

All anyone has to do to understand his role in county government is to look at his record, Flynn said. “I can’t think of very many wild card votes.”

But then he cited several votes where he said he was ahead of the board pack, where he said his leadership changed Ventura County for the better, or should have.

Counting on Record

He made the motion in the 1970s to build a new county government center outside of downtown in east Ventura; he led a successful effort in the 1980s to stop seawater intrusion into drinking water basins; and he alone opposed building a new county jail and only Proposition 172 kept it from sitting empty and unused, by providing money to staff it, he said. He led a citizens committee to save the county’s two large Navy bases in 1994, and he was the supervisor who first supported tearing down the obsolete Matilija Dam even though it was in two other supervisors’ districts. “I unilaterally went after that to the dismay of Kathy Long and Susan Lacey,” he said.

Flynn could have added that he was the supervisor most responsible for construction of the Las Posadas housing complex for the mentally ill, that he helped create the federal Sespe Wilderness Area and is now leading efforts to fight beach erosion and revive business at county-owned Channel Islands Harbor. Indeed, no one disputes Flynn’s work ethic, expertise in areas such as water issues and welfare reform, his leadership in farmland preservation and the value that his long service brings to discussions.

And he is among the best shoe-leather campaigners in the county, winning every election since 1980 in a walk.

His Oxnard-area 5th District is tailor-made for a Latino challenger, but Flynn has been backed by an array of Latino leaders who were biding their time until his planned retirement in five years. “John Flynn really, truly represents the best in our elected officials,” Oxnard Mayor Manuel Lopez said when Flynn announced his run for a seventh term in June.

That was before Dominguez split the Latino leadership on Friday with his surprise announcement.

Flynn says the attributes that have carried him through past campaigns will win this one, too. He’s knocked on 6,000 doors already, and will knock on 6,000 more, he said.

And just as Flynn thinks he will win next year by doing what he has always done, he sees no reason to change his style on the board--whether fellow supervisors like it or not.

Flynn has always seemed more popular with the voters than with his colleagues. For years he warred publicly with another smart, strong-willed official, former Supervisor Madge Schaefer. And he stormed at county Chief Administrative Officer Richard Wittenberg.

‘Always the Maverick’

In a remarkable series of meetings in 1991, Flynn accused four female board members--Maggie Kildee, Vicky Howard, Maria VanderKolk and Susan Lacey--of being manipulated by top male county officials, including Wittenberg. He railed at them for backing a Latino voting rights coalition’s plan to make Flynn’s district more heavily Latino than he proposed. The next week, he apologized, asking Wittenberg to “please forgive me” and shaking supervisors’ hands.

But a month later he accused Kildee, Howard and VanderKolk of meeting illegally in deciding to redraw 5th District boundaries to put Flynn rival Nao Takasugi, the Oxnard mayor, back into Flynn’s district. He said Kildee and Howard were conspiring to defeat him.

Of his run-ins, Flynn said later, “All of that is good for people--that kind of challenge. It’s like giving your whole system an enema. It needs to be done from time to time. I really kind of enjoyed the apologizing. It’s something like going to confession.”

Today Kildee, retired since 1996 and a sculptor, says she thinks the true Flynn has been spotlighted by his quick flip-flop and individual approach to selecting an interim top administrator. “This showcases John very nicely,” Kildee said. “He believes that he alone can see the right direction. John’s a loner, and that makes it very difficult for the team to function properly. Right now people in this county need to be assured that the Board of Supervisors can work together. But there they go, splintered again.”

Overall, Kildee said, Flynn is a good supervisor because he represents his district well, but a bad one because he doesn’t work well with the rest of the board.

VanderKolk, now assistant city manager in Arvada, a medium-sized Colorado city, was also struck by the two sides of Flynn. She got along with him better than most of their colleagues and generally liked him. Yet he would not speak to her during much of her final year on the board, she said. VanderKolk said she couldn’t remember what their problem was. “If an elected official’s job is to do what they think is right for their district, John was an outstanding supervisor,” she said. “But I tend to believe that if you work together cooperatively, you can get more accomplished. “John was always the maverick,” VanderKolk said. “But a lot of people think we need more mavericks, because those who compromise sometimes compromise their integrity too. And John Flynn is as ethical a person in politics as I ever knew. He lives a very modest life and hasn’t sought anything for himself other than publicity.”

Most of Flynn’s colleagues today also say they admire his best qualities--his humor, his district representation and his hard work, especially on his own projects.

Supervisor Frank Schillo said he and Flynn--after getting off to a rocky start in 1995--get along fine and have worked well together on a series of issues.

“I’ve been pretty surprised,” Schillo said. “We have diametrically different outlooks on many things, but we have voted together on a lot of things. He does his homework.”

After years of being odd man out, Flynn moved into the unfamiliar role of swing vote in 1995, when Schillo and Mikels joined the board. With them, he hired Koester and approved the Proposition 172 ordinance. Then he joined Lacey and Long in the mental health merger. Schillo and Mikels registered their vehement objections. And when the merger failed, Flynn voted to reverse that decision. He has since worked hard to lessen the size and impact of nearly $20 million in levies and fees to settle a federal lawsuit against the county.

“As soon as he realized what had happened, he started to try to rectify it,” Schillo said. “I give him credit for that.”

But Mikels and Long say they have had problems with Flynn. They want him to work better with them and to be less confrontational when they disagree.

Long said she usually gets along well with Flynn but sees his reversal on the chief administrator selection as a problem.

“I think it is disruptive to--less than a week later--publicly change your position and put the rest of the board in an awkward position,” Long said. “John and I have had our disagreements, and I expect we will continue to. I have not appreciated at times the manner in which he tries to persuade me to change my position.”

Lacey, a liberal Democrat, said Flynn, a one-time history teacher who worked in the county presidential campaign for Robert Kennedy, is predictable on social issues. He takes “good humanitarian positions,” she said. Lacey said she doesn’t remember Flynn’s scolding during the redistricting debate in 1991. “Things like that happen in the heat of passion. But that’s forgotten because you have to work together.”

Mikels takes a less sanguine view of what she sees as Flynn’s volatile personality. “He’s a bully,” she said. “He’s certainly not a peacemaker or a consensus builder. I know he views himself as a leader, but if we don’t go in the direction he’s leading, then we end up with his snippy little remarks. I never know when he’s going to be happy or just vitriolic.

“I was raised to be careful about what you say because you can never fully take it back,” Mikels said. “John will yell at someone or hurt their feelings and malign them, then say he’s sorry. But after a while that doesn’t work anymore. What’s frustrating is that people say, ‘Well, it’s just John.’ But if I did that stuff I’d be pilloried.”

Flynn said he was surprised by Mikels’ comments, mostly because the supervisor is in a tough primary race for higher office. “She’s running for state Senate, and Oxnard is in that district,” he said. “This shows the heights of her ignorance. She’s not very politically savvy. So maybe she should get out of the race.”