The District Weekly study guide for the most powerful job in Long Beach!
By Theo Douglas, Steve Lowery, Brandon Miller, Will Swaim and Dave Wielenga

WHY WE FRIGHT
After four years as city manager, Jerry Miller will officially leave City Hall on July 7, and the City Council has hired a search firm to find his replacement. They’re looking for someone who’ll become the most powerful man or woman in Long Beach.

Forget the mayor and council: the city manager is the real power in this city, his role like that of the CEO in a corporation, serving at the pleasure of his board of directors, the City Council.

A few weeks ago, the City Council approved a contract with the executive search firm Alliance Resource Consulting. The contract says Alliance will spend no more than $30,000 to find the new city manager.

We figured we could do better: we’d do the job for nothing.

OUR CONTRACT WITH LONG BEACH
In exchange for no money at all, The District established the criteria for a nationwide search (“the search parameters”) and then did its best to contact the three best candidates (“the candidates”).

CHENEYED
In the spring of 2000, while still Halliburton’s CEO, Dick Cheney conducted presidential candidate George W. Bush’s search for a vice-president. He reportedly considered dozens of candidates. No matter: within weeks, Bush gave Cheney himself the job of vice-president.

Not through any fault of Alliance, Long Beach may get Cheneyed. Following Alliance’s nationwide search, the City Council is likely to consider a number of candidates from around the country before settling on someone closer to home—Jerry Miller’s No. 2, Assistant City Manager Christine Shippey, or Redevelopment Agency Director Patrick West, the former city manager of Paramount.

WHO YOU’RE LIKELY TO GET
Shippey has said she’ll apply for the city manager’s job.

On the one hand, she has worked in Long Beach for nearly a decade, holding positions in almost every city department. She started low and worked her way up, and she deserves praise for that.

On the other hand, this means Shippey is a City Hall insider. Appointing her would be consistent with our city’s history of choosing insiders: For 57 years, with just one exception, every Long Beach city manager has come up through City Hall.

Insiders are bad for Long Beach. Whatever they bring in institutional knowledge we pay for in their loyalty to the old way of doing business. Take for example the response of Jerry Miller’s staff to the City Council’s recent investigation into charges that the Sea Festival has been mismanaged. Good-government activists cheered the council’s energy; Miller’s people reacted by closing ranks, attacking critics, and attempting to doctor the public record. When caught, they denied wrongdoing. At one point, Shippey’s husband Tom, a member of the city’s Parks Department, sent a sarcastic e-mail to other staffers describing Councilmember Rae Gabelich as “play[ing] it pretty dumb” simply because she sought information about the Sea Festival from city staff. That e-mail exemplifies the attitude of the city’s career insiders, who often consider the publicly-elected city council a nuisance.

Meanwhile, West came to Long Beach from Paramount in 2005 after a 25-year rise through the ranks of that city, from the Parks and Rec department to Community Development Director to Assistant Director of the Redevelopment Agency. West is said to be a personal favorite of Mayor Bob Foster, who under the new city charter will have more influence than past mayors in choosing the city manager. But West also worked closely with promoter Chris Pook in an unseemly use of city personnel to pressure businesses to give sponsorships for the Sea Festival.

THE SEARCH PARAMETERS
We began our search for candidates in cities that look something like Long Beach. We focused on port cities with big populations and large public facilities like convention centers and arenas. And because Long Beach is also the most diverse city in the United States, we looked for cities with similar demographics. We gave bonus points to cities redeveloping historic downtowns; and to city managers who broke open the political decision-making process, thus making it easier for citizens to participate in their own governance. Because technical competence may be best judged by city managers, our candidates have already won the approval of their peers in the form of awards.

Finally, we’ve decided it’s important that our next city manager should come from outside Long Beach.

WHY OUR NEXT CITY MANAGER SHOULD COME FROM OUTSIDE LONG BEACH
The waning weeks of Miller’s term provided ample evidence that the city manager’s office has been captured by the people and industries it’s supposed to monitor.

Influenced by City Hall insiders, Miller allowed Grand Prix founder Chris Pook to run the city’s Sea Festival with almost no oversight—no contract, the unsupervised use of city staff, and access to city cash. When the City Council instructed Miller to put Pook under contract, he ignored the order. When they asked him to report on the Sea Festival, he simply failed to show up. And as we’ve said, when councilmembers began asking pointed questions of staff, at least one high-ranking manager accused them of grandstanding. The Sea Fest is now a pig’s breakfast of conflicts of interest, wasted money, and self-aggrandizement.

Captured by developers, Miller green-lighted projects so rapidly that our streets approach gridlock. Miller’s staff okayed the bulldozing of historic buildings, hoping to lure developers. In at least a few cases the developers backed out, leaving vacant lots. While Miller sat in the city manager’s office, City Councilman Gary DeLong formed a closed committee to plan development near the city’s wetlands. Though legal, DeLong’s Wetlands Advisory Committee illustrates City Hall’s contempt for the public.

Democracy isn’t dead in Long Beach, but the city’s top boss is kicking it in the head.

“In the end, whatever’s gone wrong, it’s always the City Council’s fault,” says downtown businessman John Morris. “They’re very consistent, always hiding away from the tough decisions. That’s why, to me, the next city manager has to come from the outside: we’re never going to change the culture at City Hall unless we find someone who’s not beholden to the old-boys network and the unions.”

THE RISE OF THE CITY MANAGER IN AMERICA
Travel back to a time when the railroad train was the high-tech industry of its day, when horses dropped dead in the streets of America’s best cities and were left to rot amidst abandoned carts, human waste, dead domestic animals, food waste, rags (lots of rags, for reasons unclear), and mud—dirt and all that liquid (animal urine, leaking latrines, and the occasional rain) mass-producing waste as if it were the single product of this second Industrial Revolution. Across the country, cities overflowed like backed-up toilets; the swirling, Biblical muck rose up the steps of city halls and into the mayors’ offices. Pigs rooted through garbage outside the White House. Milwaukee’s kids walked to their factory jobs, stepping gingerly around (or trudging right through) fetid pools of human waste. The waste of Chicago’s stockyards rotted in vacant lots, rivers, and streets.

Most mayors reacted to this by relying on patronage: They called the men who backed them in election, men who for a price promised to do something about all that urban waste. Mostly those political friends did little. The public’s money disappeared, and the stench remained.

America stank—remember that when you hear someone say they want to return the nation to is greatness, because what they don’t know (or know but aren’t saying) is that America at the turn of the nineteenth century, from Long Beach to New York City, smelled like a mass grave.

The city manager was supposed to change that. He (always a he) was the city’s CEO, the scientific response to the problem of too much business at City Hall, of top-hatted, striped-pantsed, cigar-chomping fatties paying off the mayor in order to handle city services—sewer systems, street cleaning, water delivery, electricity. And contrary to conservative opinion, the city-manager movement was not necessarily a liberal initiative. Appointed by the elected City Council, the city manager was supposed to be insulated from popular politics—read: immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe; Catholics and Jews and African-Americans—in order to make scientific (“science” was a key word, a talisman in the literature of the day) decisions about city services.

RICK COLE by ALICE RUTHERFORD

THE CANDIDATES: RICK COLE
Rick Cole is city manager of Ventura, the top appointed official in a burg that just cracked the 100,000 mark in population. Before entering public life, Cole, 53, was co-founder of the Pasadena Weekly newspaper; and afterwards, he became the city’s mayor—and after that, city manager of Azusa. He’s polite and politically savvy enough to call you back at 4:59 p.m.—before he even calls back Kevin Clerici of the Ventura County Star, the beat reporter for his region’s daily paper of record.

“I don’t know if he’s ever met a microphone he didn’t like,” says Clerici, whose call-back came on deadline, after 5. “He doesn’t demand the spotlight, but he revels in it. He’s known for his impassioned speeches.”

An impassioned city manager who calls you back? Long Beach needs one of those. And Cole has many qualities that would make him an excellent fit in Long Beach, chief among them the curious fact that, whether by chance or design, Cole has always gone to work for cities which have lost their direction—cities not unlike Long Beach, which has hitched its wagon to one fallen star after another. But more on that in a minute. Cole also knows his way around a city: When the Pasadena native became his city’s mayor in the early 1990s, he helped revitalize the downtown—then centered on a failing mall—and got deadlocked pro- and anti-growth coalitions to work together. Pasadena is nothing if not preservationist, but its reinvented Old Town district is a model for how to redo an arthritic city center.

“The City Council was not the key issue,” he says. “The key issue was bringing the community together.” Imagine if that had happened when the city replaced Long Beach Plaza—we might have gotten something besides a Wal-Mart, a Panda Express, and an H&R Block franchise.

“You have to be realistic about a downtown,” says Cole, who considers a traditional downtown to be a city’s heart. “It can no longer be all things to all people. You have to kind of redefine a downtown. But I have a bias, which is that I don’t think you should define it too narrowly.”

By “narrowly” he means not too many chains, not too much entertainment, etc., but a healthy balance. Long Beach has always strived to find its balance; unfortunately, a lot of the time it comes out jellied-donut-on-a-stick. That was the treat former Long Beach Councilwoman Jackie Kell had seen street vendors selling in Europe, and she mentioned it—soon it will be 10 years ago—as a possible tourist attraction when the city was figuring out what Queensway Bay would look like. Today, Queensway Bay is The Pike at Rainbow Harbor—and it has a fake metal version of the Nu-Pike’s real, wooden roller-coaster, the Cyclone Racer. Which, like Cole, speaks directly to what may be our Long Beach’s biggest problem after its well-publicized shellfish allergy: low self-esteem.

“Most people think in terms of an image. They think, ‘If we had a cool slogan, a great logo, and maybe an imaginative ad campaign, we could put ourselves on the map, sell our town, position ourselves successfully,’” he says. “But I think where image is very important is self-image. You’re unlikely to succeed if you don’t know what success looks like. Figuring out what you want to be when your town grows up is essential to achieving any kind of success.

“In that sense, image is like a steak: you have to know what kind you want. The sizzle will come later.”

T-bone? Rib-eye? Chuck? Steaks have funny names. A man like Cole could help Long Beach pick out a nice cut of civic sirloin—and figure out how to cook it.

FRANK FAIRBANKS by ALICE RUTHERFORD

THE CANDIDATES: FRANK FAIRBANKS
Being politically astute always sounds like a bad, underhanded thing. But politics is often about the art of appearance, and one can inspire and raise up others through appearances. Look at Phoenix City Manager Frank Fairbanks, generally considered one of the best—if not the best—city manager in the country. Phoenix is regularly lauded as one of the best-run cities in country, and the one constant for the last 17 years has been Fairbanks. He has helped guide it through tough financial times and a prickly immigration debate.

Under Fairbanks, a new City Hall was completed on time and under budget. He consolidated municipal departments. The city opened a new solid-waste facility and improved water quality. Community-based policing has been expanded, dilapidated buildings knocked down.

It’s no wonder the City Council keeps giving Fairbanks raises—it bumped his pay up twice in 2004—even when he doesn’t ask for them. In fact, it’s pay that shows Fairbanks’s understanding about the way things work. Consider that in 1993, three years after he was named city manager, Phoenix won the Bertelsmann Prize, making it one of the two best-run cities in the world. Yet, the year before, Fairbanks had actually cut his own pay. Why? The city was caught in a recession-induced budget crisis, and Fairbanks believed the “best way to get through is to lead by example.

“It was done to show employees that the people at the top weren’t going to be treated like fat cats,” Fairbanks explained.

Sure enough, others followed his example. Local unions agreed to no across-the-board raises in fiscal 1992-93. So did then-Mayor Paul Johnson, who asked his staff to forgo a raise.

More recently, in 2005, Fairbanks adeptly handled what could have been a disaster for his office when it was reported that some of his employees had been abusing their travel privileges. At first, Fairbanks displayed the sort of loyalty you’d expect, saying the charges were likely untrue. But less than two weeks later, after conducting his own investigation, he went on the offensive, changing policy, drafting several strongly-worded policy memos and cracking down on those who had abused travel. Fairbanks’s swift, decisive action not only put the City Council at ease, it resonated outside the city.

The Arizona Republic, which originally broke the travel-abuse story, reported that “Phoenix is actually receiving calls from other major cities about its new travel policies. That’s right. Instead of being the butt of jokes, Phoenix is actually being looked at as an example.”

In the same article, the Republic called Fairbanks “perhaps the greatest spin doctor to ever hold the office of Phoenix’s chief executive.”

But it’s not spin if you back it up with action. And it’s possible that Long Beach—a town whose business is often conducted outside of public view—deserves someone who believes that government should be not only accountable but transparent.

REGINA WILLIAMS by ALICE RUTHERFORD

YOUR NEXT CITY MANAGER
If Long Beach had an East Coast sister city, it’d be Norfolk, Virginia. Norfolk’s population is smaller (200,000 versus nearly 500,000), but both cities are seaports, and each has a state university. Both struggle with underfunded city services, to bridge the gap between populations that live in segregated worlds, and both are trying to figure out the balance between historic preservation and the malling of their landscapes.

But Norfolk has something Long Beach doesn’t: a city manager regarded by other city managers as one of the best administrators in the nation.

Meet Regina Williams, our next top boss—if we’re lucky.

Norfolk’s city manager since 1999 (San Jose’s before that), Williams meets the soft requirements of the job: she has a reputation for public openness, for her deft handling of what one local observer called Norfolk’s “truly fucked-up” racial situation, and for bowing to the publicity needs of her bosses on the City Council. She also meets the tough standards of her peers: she’s a fellow at the National Academy of Public Administration, vice-president of the board of the International City/County Management Association, president of the National Forum on Black Public Administrators, and Governing Magazine’s 2003 Public Official of the Year. She’s got one husband, three children, and eight grandchildren. She has trained managers in cities in South Africa and Latin America through the United States Aid to Developing Countries.

Accolades have come for just the kind of work Long Beach needs from its CEO—reaching across boundaries of class, race, ethnicity, and gender. “Williams’ fundamental goal has been to connect city government to neighborhoods and educational institutions, civic organizations and business interests,” says Jonathan Walters of Governing Magazine.

We couldn’t connect with Williams, and not because of her well-known failure to return phone calls but because she’s caring for Drew, her critically-ill husband of 38 years. So we sought the opinions of others, including Harry Minium, a Norfolk Virginian-Pilot reporter. Minium wouldn’t tell us what he thinks of the city manager, says “it wouldn’t be appropriate, because it’s my job to cover her.” Minium did tell us “there’s absolutely zero chance” that Williams would leave Norfolk given her husband’s poor health and her family’s connection to the area.

That put a damper on our executive search.

But other sources throughout Norfolk told a different story. Williams, they agreed, is highly competent—“certainly one of the most intelligent and diplomatic city officials I’ve ever met,” said a man who asked that we call him “an international businessman who works around the world.” Another source wondered if maybe Williams is too big for Norfolk: “For all of its talk of progress, Norfolk is still a Southern town”—by which he meant, he said, not necessarily that the city is run by racists, but certainly that its most powerful people are morphic-averse. Each of these sources wondered if Williams is (as one put it) “boxed in” by a City Council determined to limit change in a city with a highly charged racial and class climate.

“Regina has really, really good credentials, but big stuff is simply not happening,” said Skip Stiles, who, born in Long Beach, now runs Wetlands Watch, an environmental non-profit in Norfolk. “Her resume suggests she’s ready to step up to the next level of city.”

Welcome to Long Beach!

Williams took the Norfolk city manager’s post in 1999, just after the New York Times had lifted the lid on a town that looked corrupt and backward. Stiles says Norfolk changed quickly: the “sleazy little Navy town with pawn shops and tattoo parlors” became “amazingly well-developed,” thanks in part, perhaps, to Williams.

But the transformation stalled. “She’s boxed in by the mayor,” a source told us.

Some locals speculate that the City Council and a group of influential, shadowy backers are trying to dump Williams. Two sources said it’s possible she requested a leave of absence not merely to take care of her ailing husband but to create a plausible rationale for her own subsequent resignation.

“The Shadow Government probably wants to replace her with someone more pliant,” said a source.

“If you’re thinking of recruiting her,” said another, “make sure that she’d have the support to get something done.”

Last week, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that Norfolk is America’s fastest-shrinking city. Local officials denied it. Williams told the Virginian-Pilot that the city’s own numbers suggested that in fact the city is growing.

Whatever the truth, there’s at least one Norfolk resident—and, sure, along with her husband and family—we’d like to see leave Norfolk now.

Call us, Regina.

Tags: bob foster, christine shippey, city manager, Long Beach, pat west