Worker Turnover Rises Under Manager Landeros

The fights began in earnest in 1996. So did the exodus from City Hall.

First the City Council picked a fight with Ventura County, threatening to drop out of a regional library system. Then the city chastised the county for making Ventura a dumping ground for homeless people.

The city also fought its own residents, and lost when voters rejected a city-sponsored midtown redevelopment zone. And it fought a bitter shopping mall war with Oxnard through two lawsuits.

Just last month the City Council voted to pull a $572,000 portion of its sales tax out of a regional pool--prompting a furious Board of Supervisors last week to threaten to abolish the tax altogether if the city follows through.

Amid this squabbling, more than one-third of city workers opted out of City Hall, resigning or retiring at a rate 2 1/2 times as high as in 1995. In all, 233 employees--including a host of high-quality managers--have left since mid-1996.

At the same time, the district attorney investigated a Ventura councilman for lobbying on behalf of a city golf course contractor. And this year, two more council members filed for bankruptcy--an image-tarnishing development that also begs the question:

What’s going on at Ventura City Hall--once a comfortable, almost clubby, civic center known for its classic architecture and the smiling faces of workers who stream out at noon for a jog along Surfers Point or a bit of volleyball?

At the center of these storms has been Donna Landeros, a take-no-prisoners city manager who has consolidated her power since arriving in 1995 and may today be the strongest municipal administrator in Ventura County.

Although her job is to implement City Council policies and oversee day-to-day operations at City Hall, Landeros has gained extra power through reforms that funnel nearly all staff information through her to the council.

That has left some council members feeling disengaged and too dependent on Landeros.

Councilman Ray DiGuilio said he privately called Landeros last month after the City Council--following a strong Landeros recommendation--discussed how to spend the $572,000 the city hopes to get back from the county.

“Donna publicly made some statements to unduly influence council members,” DiGuilio said. “I thought she was taking advantage of the situation that basically most of the council members were going to follow her lead. I’m the policymaker, and I don’t want that to be countermanded by an administrator.”

Landeros responded to DiGuilio’s concerns, he said, by promising to be more careful with her comments--to be strictly an advisor, not an advocate.

Veteran Councilman Jim Monahan said Landeros leads the council far more than her predecessor, John Baker.

“We’ve had councils who are in charge, and we’ve had councils that are more or less hands-off,” he said. “This is one of them.”

With Landeros at the helm, the Ventura council has gained a reputation for its combativeness.

Councilman Carl Morehouse, elected last fall, said he counseled against moving so quickly into the latest confrontation with Ventura County.

“I am concerned that the city went into a confrontational mode, instead of a cooperative one,” he said. “And I believe there’s a side to Donna that likes to evoke controversy or engender a vigorous dialogue.”

A No-Nonsense Administrator

Landeros arrived in Ventura on a rainy day in January 1995, after serving as one of only two women top executives at a California county. She became the first permanent woman city manager in Ventura County.

During her tenure in Ventura, this intense 51-year-old executive has reshaped City Hall.

With the council’s agreement, she did away with city committees that had become time-wasting fiefdoms, and she developed rules that limited council access to employees. She drafted a book of protocols for how the council should do business.

She has taken on her own bosses when she thought necessary, testifying against one council member and filing a complaint against another for what she considered threatening behavior. And she faced off against the veteran police chief when she heard he had referred to her as “a psycho” city manager.

“Nobody ever accused me of being shy and retiring on issues,” Landeros said recently. “I don’t do the cocktail circuit really well. But, on issues, I’m willing to go out there.”

This has made the no-nonsense manager the No. 1 target of the city’s largest labor union, an arch-enemy of the cash-strapped county and the focus of a behind-the-scenes campaign to discredit her and force her ouster.

But it has also contributed to efficiency and accountability at City Hall, forcing out poor workers as well as good ones, and arguably providing better service for city residents. In fact, a number of City Hall managers publicly endorsed Landeros’ efforts after a spate of high-profile resignations in 1999.

The results of her battles with the county have often been good for Ventura, if not necessarily for the region overall: They have produced better libraries in the city, more attention to homeless services and the prospect of better maintenance of city roads.

In Landeros’ annual job reviews, council members have always given their top manager high marks, hiking her pay from $105,000 a year in 1995 to $147,000 today. She says she has never felt more secure in her job.

Indeed, all seven council members praise her overall performance, some more enthusiastically than others.

“She was brought in to clean up City Hall and to make it a model for how governments work,” Mayor Sandy Smith said. “I’ve gained a lot of respect for her. She’s not perfect, but she’s a hell of a city manager.”

Even her critics say Landeros has contributed to successes, such as doubling the size of the city’s only shopping mall and the revival of the city’s historic downtown.

She has focused attention on rebuilding the tattered Avenue area of west Ventura and contributed to the rise of neighborhood councils. Under her direction, the city also has supported a fledgling arts community with cash.

For those who insist on black and white, there is Landeros gray: She gets the job done, but sometimes at a human cost; she is an efficient bureaucratic in-fighter, but sometimes the fight may not have been necessary.

“She sets high standards by saying kicking back is not acceptable,” said former Councilman Steve Bennett, who voted to hire her. “But she’s had a problem with morale. There’s a difference between high standards and being autocratic.”

Of particular concern, Bennett said, are the talented managers who have resigned. “You need the finesse to pull your good people on board,” he said.

A special 1999 management and operations review--the so-called Zucker Report--cited low worker morale as one of the most significant issues facing the city. And despite recent reforms to involve workers in management decisions, workers are still leaving City Hall for calmer, more hospitable climes.

“Man, I love working,” said Steve Wantz, who resigned from the city’s treasury division in March to take a job with the county assessor. “I just didn’t want to work there anymore.”

Wantz, one of more than a dozen former City Hall employees now employed at the county Hall of Administration, said his boss at the city was domineering on everything from dress codes to break times.

He finally decided to resign, Wantz said, when his superior refused to let him start his workday at 8:30 a.m., instead of 7:30, so he could be with his epileptic 12-year-old son before school, instead of leaving him alone. His total work hours would have been the same.

“He said, ‘You’re here to serve the city, not yourself and not your family,’ ” Wantz said. “That was the last straw.”

Barry Hammitt, executive director of the city’s largest labor union, said Landeros is a problem as a manager, especially when compared with Baker.

“When Baker made a budget, employees would be one of the first things in the equation, not the last,” Hammitt said. “The real problem is why employees are leaving. It’s the way they’re treated, and it comes from the top.”

Landeros says she treats employees fairly and with respect, but that there is some truth to what Hammitt says.

“To me, the people we serve come first,” she said. “I would not agree that employees [come] last. But we are not here for our own benefit. If you’re unhappy, it’s time to find another job. We have a statement around here: It’s not the employer’s job to make you happy.”

A Change in Management Style

The once-collegial atmosphere at City Hall soured, numerous former employees said, after Landeros arrived. The changes came, in particular, after the new administrator solidified her power in 1997.

Landeros acknowledges that after pushing subordinate managers for two years to crack the whip, she became more aggressive in forcing change. And many employees didn’t want change, she said.

“You’ve heard of the Peter Principle,” Councilman Brian Brennan said. “It was in place in Ventura. It was a laid-back style. And we wanted to run it more as a business.”

Retirements and resignations climbed from just 23 in 1994-95 to 51 two years later and peaked at 70 for the fiscal year that ended June 30.

Over 18 months ending in mid-1999, Landeros acknowledges nearly emptying the city’s planning department by refusing to hire replacements, increasing the workload on those remaining. And all five division heads in the city’s Administrative Services Department--those in charge of the treasury, budget, accounting, purchasing and computers--resigned or retired.

Under Landeros, two budget chiefs, two planning directors and two directors of administrative services also departed. Gone too are a deputy city manager, a director of community development and a police chief.

Landeros said Ventura’s turnover is slightly higher than some other jurisdictions, but that is more of a function of the economy than anything else. Employees were locked into jobs because of the recession but left when a business boom increased opportunities, she said.

“Everything that happens to any employee is laid at my doorstep,” she said. “The sad thing is that two employees died, and I’m sure [someone will say] I had something to do with it.”

She noted that the turnover rate in Simi Valley--a local city with similar municipal duties--is about the same as Ventura’s. The county of Santa Barbara has about the same turnover rate, and the city of Santa Barbara is slightly lower, she said.

In Simi Valley, however, employee turnover has remained roughly the same since the mid-1990s, not tripling as has Ventura’s. And nearby Oxnard reports a turnover rate less than half of Ventura’s, only 5% in 1999.

In interviews, many former employees said they left the city because of harsh management and because they felt overworked and undervalued. Some also said they disliked reductions in employee benefits.

Last year, Landeros changed the status of about 30 mid-level managers so they could be fired more easily, changed schedules so employees no longer got one day off every two weeks in exchange for working nine-hour days and stopped allowing workers to build up “comp” time they could trade in for vacations.

“I was the first to bail,” said Mike Solomon, the former budget manager, who said he took an $800-a-month cut in pay and benefits to leave the city in 1997.

“I’d been there for 12 years and had nothing but great evaluations. We all worked hard and got along great,” said Solomon, 42. “Then, all of a sudden, we were treated like we were stupid and useless people. The word was that if you had been there more than five years, then you were lazy and hadn’t had a good thought in years and should leave.”

Solomon said he decided to resign after his immediate boss came to him one evening when he was working late and gave him another assignment. “She said, ‘Have it on my desk by 8 a.m. or don’t show your face in the morning,’ ” he said. “So I ended up staying until about 4 a.m.”

Solomon, now chief financial officer at the United Conservation Water District in Santa Paula, has hired two former city colleagues. “I’m constantly getting calls from city people saying, ‘Get me out of here.’ ”

Former Community Development Director Everett Millais, 51, a city employee for 26 years before resigning in December, said he struggled with Landeros’ insistence that he make harsh decisions about subordinates.

“Donna Landeros’ style is an us-versus-them kind of approach,” he said, “a frequent adversarial approach to problems with employees and with other jurisdictions.”

Landeros admittedly gutted Millais’ planning staff. And she eventually shelved Millais in late 1998, assigning him as advisor to a committee devising plans for the city’s future.

In the end, Millais, perhaps the city’s most beloved administrator, quit. And this spring he became executive officer of the Local Agency Formation Commission--a local planning agency that oversees city annexations.

Yet, Millais said he sees Landeros as “extremely efficient and capable”--not a bad city manager.

If Millais’ departure was a shock to some colleagues, at least they saw it coming.

The loss of Deputy City Manager Steve Chase was another thing altogether.

Now an aide to county Supervisor Susan Lacey, Chase, 47, was popular in the Ventura community, deftly guiding expansion of the city’s shopping mall and taking over community development when Millais was reassigned.

But after months of 80-hour weeks in 1999, Chase ended an exhausting day and a nine-year city career by sending Landeros an e-mail resignation. He hasn’t spoken to her since, he said.

That final day was typical of what his life had become, Chase said. Because he had hardly any staff, he personally manned the City Hall counter where the public asks basic planning questions. He then sat as advisor to the city architectural design committee. And finally he was called by the City Council to answer questions raised by the Zucker audit.

“I told them we could not keep up with a skeleton crew of planners and consultants,” he said. “Somewhere in the middle of that dialogue I knew I couldn’t do it anymore.”

Of Landeros, he said: “We had a good, healthy relationship when I left. Through her guidance and her patience I grew into the job.”

But Landeros had a different spin on Chase. She said she found out after he left that Chase was misrepresenting her positions to other staff members. “I honestly didn’t know things Steve was telling people,” she said. “I was a victim of that.”

Chase said he was dumbfounded by the accusation. “Those are very hurtful comments that are simply untrue. This clearly changes a relationship I thought we had.”

Organized From the Start

The strong-willed daughter of a self-employed structural engineer and a small-city mayor, Landeros was born in the San Fernando Valley and grew up in Santa Paula.

“She was very well-organized, even as a little kid,” her mother, former Santa Paula Mayor Eleanor Crouch, once said. “She’d start making Christmas presents in the summertime.”

Landeros considered herself “an odd little kid” who never really thought about limits on girls.

“I swam competitively when there were no sports for girls,” she said. “I figured as a junior in high school, that I better stop beating the boys in arm wrestling if I wanted a date for the prom.”

She studied in Spain for a year as a 16-year-old and in Chile for a year while in college.

After graduating from UCLA in 1970, she climbed steadily through the ranks in Los Angeles and Butte counties, and then was hired as chief administrator of Yolo County near Sacramento 11 years ago.

While in Yolo, a county of 150,000 residents, she was widely praised by colleagues and citizens alike. When she left, the local newspaper lamented the community’s loss.

“She’s a very bright and articulate manager,” said Richard Wittenberg, who ran Ventura County government at the same time. “She flourished in a situation where they’d had eight chief executives in eight years. She was strong enough to keep that volatile situation under control.”

But Wittenberg also saw during statewide meetings a side of Landeros’ personality that was less flattering. “She doesn’t seem to have an enormous amount of patience,” he recalled. “I think it’s because she has very high standards and wants things done well.”

In Ventura, the City Council was looking for just that sort of strong presence following Baker’s resignation in 1994. Several council members liked the way Baker encouraged them to directly interact with staff members, and they reveled in their roles as chairs of council committees.

But some looked to Landeros to rein in the unwieldy system. And others were frustrated that their seaside city had languished economically.

After one top applicant rejected the job, the council chose Landeros, although three members--Gary Tuttle, Greg Carson and Tom Buford--had reservations. The vote was 7 to 0.

Different styles and philosophies led to showdowns: Landeros and former mayor Carson, who reveled in working directly with staff members, engaged in fights so furious she filed a complaint with the city attorney, and police patrolled City Hall for security. She clashed with former Councilman Jack Tingstrom, who worked closely with city contractors and local developers and was even paid $70,000 by a contractor as a consultant.

And she had run-ins with former Police Chief Richard Thomas, 52, who retired at least a few months earlier than he intended after a nagging back injury resulted in him being declared incapable of physical police work.

“I thought she did a pretty good job; for the most part she was pretty easy to work with,” Thomas said recently. But at the chief’s retirement dinner in late 1998, a Santa Barbara police official told the audience that Thomas had confided to him that he worked for “a psycho” city manager.

Sitting nearby, Landeros brushed off the quip, but took it seriously--especially after Thomas essentially repeated it this year at a funeral for the Santa Barbara police official. And she said she believes Thomas never would have said such a thing about a male superior.

“The guy tap-danced on my head,” she said. “He and I had already gone head to head about how I thought he was trying to exit the organization to his advantage by making me look bad.

“Rich’s leaving worked out very well for him,” she said. “I [supposedly] drove these people out. Yeah, right. I’m not collecting a tax-free retirement.”

Landeros’ bosses--the City Council--say the one weakness of the Landeros administration has been poor staff morale. But for the last year she has worked through employee committees to solicit workers’ opinions.

“Her ability to relate well to a wide variety of people is getting better,” DiGuilio said. “We’ve asked her to continue to improve. When people don’t see it exactly her way, that doesn’t mean she’s right and they’re wrong.”

As for Landeros, she said that if the worst thing people can say about her is that they don’t like her, she’s doing all right.

“I’m blunt,” she said. “But at some point in this business you have to settle for being respected as opposed to being liked.”

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Leaving City Hall

The city of Ventura’s rate of employee turnover has tripled since 1995. By comparison, the rate in the city of Simi Valley has remained relatively constant.

City of Ventura, Employee Turnover Compared to Work Force

1994-Present

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Resigned/ Total Total Turnover as Fiscal year Retired Fired turnovers work force % of work force 1994-1995 4 19 23 626 3.7% 1995-1996 8 17 25 631 4.0% 1996-1997 17 34 51 632 8.1% 1997-1998 19 31 50 622 8.0% 1998-1999 18 44 62 609 10.2% 1999-2000 23 47 70 618 11.3%

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City of Simi Valley, Employee Turnover Compared to Work Force

1994-Present

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Resigned/ Total Total Turnover as Fiscal year Retired Fired turnovers work force % of work force 1994-1995 2 64 66 553 11.9% 1995-1996 1 50 51 556 9.1% 1996-1997 5 44 49 565 8.7% 1997-1998 7 57 64 573 11.2% 1998-1999 11 50 61 591 10.3% 1999-2000 10 50 60 594 10.1%

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Sources: Cities of Ventura and Simi Valley