For Baker, It Was a Tale of Two Counties

STOCKTON — The heart of government for San Joaquin County beats in a seven-story building on a gritty street in downtown Stockton.

All around is a big-city version of urban blight: deserted storefronts, homelessness and high crime.

Now, this is again home for David Baker, Ventura County’s recently departed chief administrative officer who resigned last month after only one week on the job.

This is where, for the past five years, Baker served as top administrative officer, enjoying a virtually unquestioned level of authority.

“Around here, he was ‘the word,’ ” said Steve Wilensky, staff director for the local chapter of the Service Employees International Union. “He was like a good sheep dog nipping at the heels of strays to keep them on a course that was, to a great extent, determined by him.”

Now that he is unemployed, there are serious rumblings among the San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors that Baker will be asked to resume the job he left behind to go to Ventura County.

From his seventh-floor office, board Chairman Robert Cabral leaned back in a worn brown leather chair and grinned beneath a bushy salt and pepper mustache to make his prediction.

“If I had to make a guess right now,” said Cabral, pausing a moment to consider his words, “I think the board will be talking to him soon to see what it would take to bring him back--to see if he is willing to come back.”

The kind of clout Baker would have had in Ventura County would have been nothing like what he carried in San Joaquin County.

Ventura County’s chief administrative officer has a fraction of the authority given to his counterpart up north.

“It’s too weak to be effective,” said Baker, speaking from his home in Lodi last week. “I think [Ventura County] was an organization that wanted to continue to do business as usual. I felt the way things are set up in Ventura, there was little I could have done that would have made a difference.”

For Baker, making a difference meant helping the county reduce an estimated $5-million budget deficit this fiscal year and helping to shape future budget policy.

But by his fourth day on the job, Baker had become convinced that the county was “near financial chaos” and its problems so overwhelming that he could not muster the support needed to make the necessary changes. He decided to resign.

His sudden departure stunned county leaders, some of whom attacked Baker for bolting from his new job without first consulting them. But Baker defended his actions, saying he had talked extensively with top county managers as well as rank-and-file employees before making his decision.

“There seems to be this theory that I was some guy who walked in there, worked 24 hours and walked out,” Baker said. “Baloney. It was the most painful, scary, profound decision I’ve ever made in my career. It required more courage and conviction than what I ever thought I had.”

In Stockton, those who worked with Baker agreed he is not an impulsive man. Though a registered Democrat, he is described as very conservative, a devout Catholic and family man, who works hard to stay out of the limelight.

“This is not someone who shoots from the hip or lives for controversy,” Wilensky said. “He is not prone to spontaneous eruptions. So I figure just without knowing Ventura County that either his alter ego is talking or there must have been one hellacious set of circumstances that greeted him down there.”

Baker was described as a man not likely to turn and run. Making hard decisions in a financially strapped county is what he is used to doing, co-workers said. They know, because they have seen him do it in San Joaquin County.

Big but With a Small-Town Feel

Baker became the chief administrative officer for San Joaquin County in April 1994 after working as an assistant administrative officer for several years. He had previously served as manager of Tuolumne County.

In his new job, Baker held tight control over the $725-million annual San Joaquin County budget and oversaw a 6,500-member work force.

Though there is a small-town feel to the decidedly rural county, it ranks as the 15th most populated county in the state, with more than 579,000 residents, according to the Census Bureau.

It was here that Baker showed himself to be a star, where his skills as a keen budget analyst made him stand out and quickly garnered him the respect and authority he needed to make his own decisions.

Despite a deep political divide on the board, with three staunch Republicans and two dedicated Democrats, all five came to rely heavily on Baker’s direction. Maybe even too much, some said.

“Sometimes you have to think maybe it was easier for them to go with his recommendations than go against him because most just thought he understood the issues better than anybody else,” said one Baker associate who asked not to be identified.

During bitter union negotiations last month, for example, hundreds of county employees carrying lighted candles surrounded the county’s government building one night waiting for the clock to strike midnight--the time they decided a strike would go into effect if an agreement had not been reached.

Baker was in Ventura County at the time working out his new contract.

“We were ticking toward midnight, a strike just minutes away, and they were scrambling on the phone trying to find this guy to get his approval from Ventura,” Wilensky said.

Baker readily acknowledges the level of influence he held in the county, noting that he often made recommendations that garnered the backing of the full board.

“One year they didn’t make one change to the budget--which kind of spooked everybody,” Baker said.

Baker established his level of board support early in his career as San Joaquin County’s top manager.

In 1990, when California shifted property tax revenues away from cities and funneled them to schools, San Joaquin took the eighth-largest hit in the state, said Trish Huart-Pechan, assistant county administrator.

By the 1994-’95 fiscal year, Baker’s first year as top manager, the county had lost nearly $50 million in revenue.

Among Baker’s first orders of business was recommending a series of layoffs to keep the county afloat.

One hundred seventy-two employees were demoted or let go, including 40 sheriff’s deputies. Service hours for many offices were slashed. Department heads were asked to give up their raises.

“We had to go to our unions with this news, and David led the charge,” Cabral said. “So, this is a man with a strong backbone.”

Earlier this year, when the sheriff and the district attorney each demanded a 15% pay hike after learning they were far below the salaries of their counterparts across the state, Baker instead opted for a 6% raise. The law enforcement leaders took their frustrations to the board, but in the end, it sided with Baker.

“That has been my career,” Baker said. “My career has been a career of tough decision making.”

It’s the same kind of tough decision making, Baker said, that he wanted to bring to Ventura County.

Baker’s High Hopes Quickly Faded

Baker said he came to the county with high hopes. But it immediately became clear, he said, that he would never have the power he believed necessary to do the job.

He and his wife were coming to a place that boasted one of the lowest crime rates in the nation--a dramatic change from the San Joaquin Valley where violent crime affects 751 people for every 100,000 residents, according to FBI statistics. That is more than double the rate for Ventura County.

The poverty level in Ventura County, at 9.8%, is also just about half that of San Joaquin County, where it is over 18.7%, according to the Census Bureau.

On Thanksgiving day, Baker said, he took a four-hour break from the grueling work schedule he had set for himself the first week on the job. He picked up his wife and they went for a stroll on the beach. Despite growing concerns, thoughts of resigning had not yet entered his mind, he said.

“[My wife and I] walked along the harbor, we thought about the beauty of this area,” Baker said. “We had just put $10,000 down on a house here. We were there period--emotionally, physically, psychologically. We were there.”

But when he returned to his desk Friday morning, he sat down and made lists of everything that bothered him about his new position and problems facing Ventura County.

“By Friday morning, I really started questioning,” Baker said. “I said, OK, there’s this problem here and I know what to do about this. And I know about this problem there, and this is how they want to work things. Then, once I realized this was not going to be successful, I said ‘David, you can’t continue to collect a paycheck.’ ”

In his resignation letter, Baker listed 23 areas of concern. Among his recommendations was a need to “redefine and refocus” the auditor’s role. Currently, Baker said, there is too much reliance on the auditor for fiscal forecasting and debt financing.

He also encouraged officials to revamp a county ordinance that funnels all money from Proposition 172’s public safety tax to the Sheriff’s Department, district attorney and public defender’s offices, and corrections services. The ordinance had been approved by a 3-2 vote of the Board of Supervisors.

In addition to the monetary guarantee--the half-cent sales tax provided $40 million this fiscal year for those four departments--the county’s ordinance requires officials to dip into the general fund to pay for inflationary costs for equipment and supplies in those departments as well as all salary and benefit increases.

The ordinance can be amended or repealed by a simple majority vote of the board. But county officials have steered clear of tapping that money, maintaining a solid show of support for public safety programs.

Baker believed the ordinance unnecessarily limited the county’s budget options and therefore created a dramatic and ongoing “financial imbalance” between public safety agencies and all other county departments, he wrote in his resignation letter.

“Over time, while it guarantees rich resources for public safety, it does so at the expense of other community programs and nonpublic safety employees. The community politics in affecting change are acknowledged as treacherous.”

In a prepared statement released Monday, the day Baker’s resignation letter was received, Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury said the county manager’s comments “were made without a full understanding of Ventura County’s history in the public safety arena.”

“Regrettably, Mr. Baker’s comments are most likely a reflection of his experience as the chief administrative officer of a county with a much poorer record of public safety,” Bradbury wrote.

The district attorney said he was saddened to learn of Baker’s decision to resign. “I wish Mr. Baker every success in future endeavors,” Bradbury wrote.