Manager’s Long Climb Finally Puts Him on Top

On Monday, Johnny Johnston will pack his belongings and move out of his basement office at the Ventura County Government Center, where he has served for years as head of a low-profile agency responsible for maintenance and parks.

Johnston, 58, will ride the elevator up three flights to his new office and new job as the county’s chief administrator--in charge of overseeing a $1-billion annual budget and a 7,000-member work force.

His ascension to the county’s top job culminates a nearly 30-year career in government service and fulfills a long-simmering ambition. Before his selection last month, Johnston had twice been passed over for the chief administrator’s post, in 1995 and in 1998.

But Johnston knows he will need more than persistence to survive the challenges that lie ahead. He must answer to five supervisors, each with their own constituencies and budgetary priorities. He must negotiate with ever-demanding union leaders. And he must contend with politically powerful department heads, like the sheriff and district attorney.

“I would be less than honest if I didn’t have a certain level of anxiety,” said Johnston. “But I’ve been given a great opportunity to make a difference and I’d like to do that.”

He knows expectations are high.

Johnston has the daunting task of following interim chief Harry Hufford, a retired top administrator from Los Angeles who was brought in 15 months ago to restore financial and political order to an ailing county government. Hufford not only succeeded but also managed to make friends of some of his political foes.

Hufford himself, however, is quick to discourage any comparisons. He said Johnston’s job will be much different.

“This isn’t a to-the-rescue job anymore,” Hufford said. “His role isn’t to be a turn-around guy. It’s to take charge and manage over the long haul. He’s got to set his own style.”

With a 20-year, on-again-off-again relationship with the county, Johnston said he already has a running start. He knows the players, the issues, the politics. He calls himself “an outsider with an insider’s knowledge.”

But does the affable administrator have what it takes to drive the county’s giant bureaucracy, to make the tough budgetary decisions, cut the right deals and sidestep the political minefields in his way?

Yes, says Johnston, with the same self-assurance that helped him once swim across the San Francisco Bay to Alcatraz Island during a marathon. He embraces the challenge.

“In fact, I think I’ll do pretty well,” he said.

*

Johnston grew up surrounded by municipal politics, watching his father, a political consultant from Long Beach, dispense advice and manage campaigns.

It seemed expected then for Johnston, the eldest of six children, to follow in his father’s footsteps. He received a degree in political science from Cal State Long Beach in 1967.

Shortly afterward, he became Compton’s city manager.

It was two years after the Watts riots, and racial tensions were high. Johnston was given the task of integrating the city’s all-white fire department. An ordinance required that new recruits live within city limits, but officials routinely ignored the rule to hire white.

Johnston’s hires honored the ordinance. “It was not a popular idea,” said Johnston, who was bitterly criticized for enforcing a rule that would require white firefighters to eat and sleep next to black firefighters while on call. “But I just did it. It was an idea whose time had come.”

After only a year on the job, Johnston moved to Artesia, where he served as city manager until 1971. Then, Johnston took on what he referred to as the toughest assignment of his career: Ojai city manager.

Small-town politics posed its own challenges, where decisions at times were based more on friendships than anything else, some former city officials said.

It was a place where a wink and a handshake would earn political favors. A man once asked Johnston for a list of favorite liquors for the city’s police officers.

When he was hired in October 1971, Johnston was Ojai’s fourth city manager in less than a year. Johnston would hang in for three years.

In that time, a councilman would face a recall effort for supporting a downtown redevelopment plan Johnston proposed and the town’s police chief, James Alcorn, would retire after a series of disagreements with the city manager. Alcorn would later win a council seat.

“[Johnston’s] a gentleman, and he’s pleasant,” former Ojai Councilman Hal Mitrany said. “But make no mistake, he’s also a fighter. The entire time I worked with him, all I saw was strength.”

“He had to take on a job that had an awful lot of people entrenched in a status quo,” added former Councilman Clifford Hey, the subject of the failed recall effort. “He straightened . . . a lot of things out.”

Johnston eventually won over the townsfolk, which was underscored by their decision to approve the controversial redevelopment plan that the young city manager put together.

But Johnston’s next job laid the groundwork for his newest assignment. Supervisors drafted him to overhaul a tiny county division called the Support Services Agency. At the time, the agency’s offices were scattered throughout the county, and it was Johnston who pulled them under one roof and created the structure today known as the General Services Agency.

The challenge of running a department in charge of repairs and purchases eventually would wear thin, however. Former county administrator Richard Wittenberg, who was Johnston’s boss at the time, said: “It always seemed like Johnston had too much brain power for the job.”

After 11 years, Johnston left the county for the private sector, becoming chief executive for Lochwood Development in Ojai. He returned to public service in 1991, accepting an offer to become deputy executive officer for Los Angeles County Superior Court, overseeing jury services and support staff.

Court Administrator Joseph Padilla worried when Johnston came aboard, knowing his new boss had no court experience. But Johnston put in 16-hour days to catch up and earned the respect of his underlings.

“I remember speaking to him and saying [when he first got here], ‘This guy doesn’t know anything about the courts,’ ” Padilla said. “But by time he left, he knew the system inside and out.”

In the end, he won the respect of his co-workers and was credited for helping mend relations between court clerks and judges after the clerks went on strike in 1996.

*

After seven years in Los Angeles, Johnston, who kept an apartment in the city but maintained his home in Ojai, longed to return to government service in Ventura County. He applied for the chief administrator’s job when Wittenberg retired in 1995. The job went to former Simi Valley City Manager Lin Koester.

Johnston returned to the county in 1998, this time as the No. 2 man of the agency he once ran, General Services. Six months later, his boss retired and Johnston was promoted.

The job would present new challenges for the now-seasoned administrator. From his office in the basement of the government center, Johnston struggled to run the department on one of the slimmest budgets in all of county government.

The biggest hurdle was maintaining 22 parks, trails and golf courses with the agency’s $2.7-million budget.

The parks department was still reeling from a 1996 decision by supervisors to separate the harbor department into a separate agency, depriving parks from generous revenue generated by Channel Island Harbor fees.

Staffing for parks plummeted from 32 to 15, with Johnston himself absorbing many of the tasks left by the unfilled slots.

Still, Johnston has been able to shrink a budget gap for the park’s department from $900,000 to $300,000. He’s also working on a new revenue source for the department with the creation of the Happy Camp Canyon Regional Park and Golf Course. The course should generate $350,000 annually, Johnston said.

And he’s struggling to rebuild the county’s parks, which have been widely criticized for falling into disrepair.

“I know we have much more to do,” Johnston said. “But considering our resources, I think we’ve done pretty well.”

Johnston recently instigated a publicized battle with Carey Jones, the private operator of Camp Comfort in Ojai. Johnston charged that the park had fallen into “deplorable condition” and advised supervisors to terminate a 30-year contract with Jones.

Jones, the son of former Supervisor Ed Jones, threatened legal action.

Johnston refused to back down. Both sides went to supervisors, who sided with Johnston and terminated the contract. Jones has until May 1 to clean up and move out.

His handling of the park issue, Johnston believes, made him a serious candidate for the chief administrator’s job.

“I looked upon this as the issue I was interviewing on,” Johnston said. “They looked at me and said, ‘Resolve this.”’

He may be right. The day supervisors ended the contract with Johnston was the day they named him new county manager.

It was his third try at the top job. He had applied for it a second time in 1998, but was passed over for San Joaquin County’s chief administrator, David Baker.

But Baker quit after only four days on the job, complaining that the county was on “the brink of financial chaos” and that the top administrator’s post was too weak to wrest control of its problems. Hufford was eventually recruited for the job.

In selecting Johnston to replace Hufford, supervisors said he was familiar to them and had built a reputation over the years as a capable and reliable manager. They said these qualities weighed heavily in their choice for a new manager.

“The board was a little sensitive after the David Baker disruption,” Supervisor John K. Flynn said. “We were dealing with a total unknown and he threw a grenade. Johnny is not a grenade thrower. We know him and that familiarity is an asset.”

Johnston’s first day is Monday and his agenda is already full. Contract negotiations with the Sheriff’s Department have become heated. About $15 million in tobacco settlement funds are waiting to be doled out. And budget battles are just three months away.

While budget negotiations are typically a bruising affair for department heads, Johnston may have the most at stake. Supervisors will be watching closely to see how well he handles the county’s delicate fiscal concerns. Earlier this year, Hufford warned of a potential $7.3-million shortfall on the horizon.

“We all recognize the challenge of the budget,” Supervisor Steve Bennett said. “The complexity of the budget is the most important learning curve.”

For now, the man unanimously appointed has strong support from his bosses. “I have no reservations about him,” Flynn said. “He’s gonna be a tough guy.”

Despite the weighty issues before him, Johnston is hoping for a smooth tenure, saying he’d like to “find common ground rather than dig foxholes on a battleground.”

No matter how the first few months go, Johnston promises he’ll stick around as long as supervisors want him.

“Because that’s the toughest thing for all of us, to just keep showing up,” he said. “I put a value on persistence.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Johnny Johnston

* AGE: 58

* EDUCATION: Cal State Long Beach, bachelor’s degree in political science, 1966; USC, master’s degree in public administration, 1979.

* PERSONAL: Married for 35 years to schoolteacher Kitty Johnston. They have two adult children, John and Kirste.

* PARTY: Democrat

* CAREER: city manager, Compton, 1967-68; city manager, Artesia, 1968-71; city manager, Ojai, 1971-74; director of support services, Ventura County, 1974-1985; chief executive, Lochwood Development Inc. in Ojai, 1985-91; deputy executive officer, Los Angeles Superior Court, 1991-98; director of General Services Agency, Ventura County, 1998-2001.

* GOAL: Johnston wants to strengthen the county’s budget and find ways to reduce expenditures. “My concern is we’ve been living on credit cards,” Johnston said. “We spend next year’s raise before we even have it. But trying to convince people to be more conservative financially is not going to be an easy task.”

* PERSONAL STATEMENT: “I believe you can’t write laws or rules to cover every eventuality. That’s why ethically driven leadership is so important. It’s the glue that holds you.”