A Legacy of Improvements

Lin Koester’s final week as Ventura County’s chief administrative officer was a lot like his four-year tenure in that hot-seat job: low-key, no-nonsense and buffeted by contradictory signals from his five bosses.

His success in steering the county on the course dictated by the Board of Supervisors was overshadowed at the end by a squall he had warned it to avoid. Board members Susan Lacey, Kathy Long and John Flynn ignored his counsel not to reorganize the county’s mental health care system without fully exploring all the consequences; the penalties of that decision have already topped $15 million and are likely to rise further--and that’s just the monetary cost.

But Koester’s contributions should not be eclipsed by this mistake by the supervisors, even though much of his final year as CAO was devoted to trying to limit the damage from it.

In his four years as CAO, Koester improved the efficiency and responsiveness of the 7,200-employee county government by ending a four-day work week. He balanced the budget in part by downsizing his own office staff and instituted procedures to make sure the budget was completed on time.

From his previous post--16 years as city manager of Simi Valley--he brought a keen sense of the friction between the county and its 10 cities. He worked to smooth those relationships by attending monthly meetings of city managers. Among the results was creation of the countywide library commission and better library services at the city level.

But that kind of diplomacy wasn’t enough to bring either the Board of Supervisors or the bureaucrats into agreement about the best way to provide services to the mentally ill.

After the board voted to merge its mental health and social service agencies, the local outcry was joined by a number of state and federal investigations. It fell to Koester to respond to the regulators while attempting to carry out the wishes of the deeply divided board. Even after the board scrapped the merger, the ugly controversy continued. Warring camps still blame each other for the mess and disagree over how to fix it.

Koester’s contributions to Ventura County government were not glamorous ones but they have made the county a better place to live. And they have helped to give it the sort of financial stability that will enable it to recover from the mental health fiasco.

Now, as Koester settles into a retirement of fly-fishing in Oregon, the board is still pondering who will take his place. Whomever they select, we hope the supervisors have learned to listen the next time their helmsman warns them that they are charting a perilous course.