L.A. County’s Chief Manager to Retire

David E. Janssen, Los Angeles County’s influential chief administrative officer who over the last decade guided the nation’s largest county back from the brink of bankruptcy, plans to retire at the beginning of next year.

The 61-year-old career civil servant rarely sought the leading role in making policy, leaving the five elected supervisors to wrestle -- sometimes unsuccessfully -- with the county’s struggling healthcare system, jails and other social services.

He also didn’t grab headlines, and he generally avoided the public battles with supervisors that drove his predecessors from the job.

With political savvy and tight-fisted financial management, Janssen managed to work with the fractious Board of Supervisors to bring fiscal discipline to a county whose nearly $20-billion annual budget dwarfs those of many states.

“Quite simply, he is the dean of the business,” said Steve Keil, legislative director of the California State Assn. of Counties, who has worked with Janssen for 16 years.

Janssen said that after 10 1/2 years as chief operating officer, he simply wanted to retire. “I have very mixed emotions, ... but I just think it’s time,” he said, noting that progress has been made in stabilizing the budget and tackling the county’s historically inefficient bureaucracy.

When Janssen took the helm in 1996, Los Angeles County had just been rescued from potential bankruptcy by the federal government, which agreed in 1995 to a massive bailout for the public health system.

County finances, sapped by years of what one study at the time called wasteful and irresponsible spending and always subject to the whims of policymakers in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., remained shaky.

And with two of Janssen’s predecessors pushed out amid tensions with the notoriously prickly Board of Supervisors, there was some question whether anyone could tackle what former top executive Sally Reed once called the “greatest challenge in local government.”

Though sometimes called the “sixth supervisor,” Janssen, the county’s top non-elected official, long occupied an odd and somewhat precarious position.

Nearly all authority in Los Angeles County government is vested with the five supervisors, who hire and fire heads of departments, approve the budget and are by definition the county’s executives.

But the unwieldy nature of the five-member board has tempted some past chief administrative officers to try to grab more authority, sometimes at their own peril. Reed left in 1996 after a frustrating 2 1/2 -year campaign to force the supervisors to become more fiscally disciplined.

Janssen was different.

A careful man with a dry wit and a discreet manner who came to Los Angeles County with two decades of experience in state and county government, the Oakdale, Calif., native proved a master of the diplomatic dance that civil servants do with elected officials.

Although he came to Los Angeles County from San Diego County, where the chief administrative officer has authority over county departments, he adroitly adapted to a diminished role in Los Angeles County.

Janssen, who still believes that San Diego County has a better system, took pains to defer to the elected supervisors in public, offering them options rather than ultimatums and almost always eschewing the spotlight.

“I don’t know too many people who could do the job he did with the Board of Supervisors,” said former Los Angeles County health director Dr. Thomas Garthwaite, who left the county last year after nearly four years of clashes with the supervisors, as well as budget woes and scandals at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center.

“He never confused the fact that the supervisors were elected,” Garthwaite said. “So he didn’t try to make decisions for them.”

Janssen instead focused on keeping the county’s financial house in order, an arrangement that has delivered substantial dividends.

Ten years ago, some Los Angeles County bonds were rated at the lowest investment grade, one notch above junk bonds.

One study of county budgeting faulted leaders for spending themselves into a fiscal crisis with a bloated bureaucracy and overly generous pay raises.

But nearly a decade after that report, Fitch Ratings concluded the county’s finances had “improved dramatically,” noting that the county has reduced its debt and run surpluses every year since 1997, helped in part recently by booming real estate values.

When he unveiled his proposed 2007 budget in April, Janssen typically took care to credit his bosses.

“It makes my job very easy when you have a board of elected officials who know how to say no,” Janssen told reporters.

The five supervisors in turn have placed immense trust in Janssen, even as they often foundered in the face of problems with the public hospitals, jails and other county institutions.

“I’m not sure where we will find someone with that level of understanding and sensitivity,” Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke said. “He will be really, really hard to replace.”