Lawyer Masry Gets New Role as Mayor

He called the city attorney a “deaf mute” and tried to fire him. He painted colleagues as incompetents and flunkies for developers and shouted down ordinary citizens when they disagreed with him.

And now he is mayor.

In his first year as a Thousand Oaks councilman, Ed Masry--a crusading environmental attorney portrayed in the film “Erin Brockovich”--has been criticized as the most disruptive force on the panel, prompting some calls for his resignation.

But on Tuesday night, the gruff millionaire with shaggy white hair was on his best behavior as he was appointed mayor, a mostly ceremonial post whose duties include maintaining order in the council chamber.

“I think you’ve done an outstanding job,” Masry told Councilman Dan Del Campo, the outgoing mayor and Masry’s sometime foe. Despite some misgivings, the council voted 5 to 0 for Masry as mayor.

In his acceptance speech, Masry presented himself as an accessible leader of the white-collar city of 120,000, not a one-issue politician supported by a cadre of radical environmentalists, as some critics have charged.

“I am a lawyer, a businessman, a family man,” Masry said, pledging to support small business and city police and firefighters.

Though he praised biotech giant Amgen and Baxter BioScience, Masry promised to continue fighting developers’ attempts to skirt guidelines on where and how they build, and to champion affordable housing construction for seniors and others.

Masry also called on his council colleagues to adopt an official stance against the Ahmanson Ranch development, a 3,050-home project planned near the county line. He later said he would volunteer attorneys from his firm to assist opponents of the project.

Despite his best efforts at diplomacy, Masry couldn’t resist one or two characteristic jabs.

“This year was the year of the snake in the Chinese calendar,” he said. “I want my year as mayor to be the year of the truth.”

While his critics were mostly silent Tuesday, Masry’s mayoral appointment had been so controversial that no one was quite sure what would happen until the votes were cast. Councilwoman Linda Parks has consistently supported Masry, but members Del Campo, Andy Fox and Dennis Gillette have often bristled at his positions and style.

Before the vote, a handful of supporters threatened a backlash if Masry was denied the title.

“If any tomfoolery goes on tonight to unseat Ed Masry, to anybody who even suggests this, I would say, ‘You will not be reelected,’ ” said supporter Suzanne Duckett.

Only hours before the meeting, Del Campo still had not decided whether to support Masry, who had been mayor pro tem. By tradition, Masry was next in line for the top post. But he had edged his way into the pro tem spot last year by arguing in public that he had garnered more of the popular vote than Fox, who had expected the post. Del Campo also worried that Masry had not shown himself to be a consensus builder and didn’t know when to keep quiet.

“Not every person, in my opinion, is best suited to serve the purposes of the community,” Del Campo had said. “There’s no built-in right to anything.”

When it came time to choose a successor, however, Del Campo nominated Masry.

“You’ve added an element of celebrity,” he told Masry, then addressed the crowd: “I think Mr. Masry will certainly add a new element and character. I certainly appreciate his ability as a communicator.”

Fox said after Tuesday’s vote that he had always planned to support Masry’s mayoral bid.

Land-use attorney Chuck Cohen, a Masry critic and former mayor, said that if the council had blocked Masry’s ascension, it might have made him a martyr and divided the city. Besides, he said, Masry might change.

“You know what happens in grade school,” Cohen said. “Sometimes you appoint the incorrigible to be the window monitor and you get better behavior from them.”

Masry, at 69, still shows signs of wiliness, however. He said before the meeting that he would be furious if anyone argued that his dialysis treatment meant he was too ill to be mayor.

But in his first remarks as mayor, Masry told the council his condition would make it impossible for him to attend many functions and that he planned to dispatch council members in his place: “There are going to be many times when they’re going to have to carry my baton.”

After the meeting, Masry approached another of his critics, Rick Lemmo, incoming chairman of the local Chamber of Commerce, and invited him to join a celebration at Cisco’s, a nearby restaurant.

“I’m going to pop over to Cisco’s for a couple minutes,” Lemmo said. “I think it’s the right thing to do.”