City Manager Seeks Vote of Confidence

It’s Tuesday morning, and beleaguered Mission Viejo City Manager Dan Joseph still has a job.

Almost every two weeks since January, Joseph has faced the unsettling situation of finding his job performance listed on the Monday night City Council agenda. After seven months, Joseph says he has grown weary of having his head on the chopping block, and he’s urging the town’s elected leaders to give him a vote of confidence or let him go.

“It’s a roller coaster for me,” Joseph said Monday, hours before the council discussed his fate in closed session yet again. “The frustrating part is nobody has said one word to me since this first surfaced. Nobody has told me formally what’s going on and why they are doing this.”

Joseph, who has spent 13 1/2 years as city manager, has held a tenuous grip on his job since a City Council shakeup last fall. Weeks after newcomers Trish Kelley and Lance MacLean easily toppled longtime incumbents Susan Withrow and Sherri Butterfield, the City Council began closed-door discussions of Joseph’s employment.

Mission Viejo Mayor John Paul Ledesma, who in December placed the first item on the council agenda to dismiss the city manager, has declined to comment.

Joseph learned about his shaky job status from a November newsletter of the Mission Viejo-based Committee for Integrity in Government, many of whose members supported Kelley, MacLean and Ledesma in the election.

The newsletter called for the ouster of several city employees, including Joseph. The veteran city executive was aligned with a previous council majority that had been criticized for, among other things, overspending.

A formal review of the city manager’s performance was commissioned by the council in February. Councilman William S. Craycraft estimated that the city had already paid a law firm at least $40,000 to conduct the evaluation.

As the review dragged on into the summer, Joseph said, the environment around City Hall has changed.

“It has caused a significant amount of poor morale within the organization,” Joseph said. “These people don’t know if they chop the head off if the rest of the body will follow. Because some of them were also on that [CIG] hit list. There’s that fear of uncertainty and unknown that’s filtering through, and I think the work product is suffering. People don’t like that uncertainty.”

Rick Howard, the city’s deputy city manager for six years, said he was constantly being asked for updates on Joseph’s employment status.

“The employees respect Dan’s leadership very much as their boss, and they feel he has proven himself to be a good leader for us,” Howard said. “But I’d be lying if I said people weren’t concerned. It’s hard to do your job when you’ve got this cloud of uncertainty.”

Howard hopes the skies clear soon.

“When you look around the city and see the beauty of the parks and the streets, then you look at the town’s financial standing, all this didn’t happen overnight,” he said. “A talented staff that’s been around for a long time had a lot to do with it.”

Joseph, whose $152,000 annual contract expires in June, said he simply wants to know where he stands.

After Monday night’s meeting, the council doesn’t meet again until Aug. 18, and Joseph doesn’t return from a golfing vacation in Scotland until early September.

“It’s past time,” he said. “I need to get on with the business of this organization without that cloud hanging over me. It’s not fair to this organization.”