Where Are They Now?

We were wondering what became of Oliver Chi, Claremont's former Assistant to the City Manager (photo, left). You may recall that when last we heard, Chi had just resigned as City Manager of Rosemead. That was back in April, 2009.

Well, Chi was back in the news last week. The story, as told by Rebecca Kimitch in Pasadena Star-News, is a little convoluted. It begins with a former Rosemead councilmember, John Nunez, who lost his re-election campaign in March, 2009. Soon after that election, Nunez filed for unemployment benefits for losing his City Council seat.

After Rosemead officials learned that Nunez was claiming the benefits, they filed an appeal with the state's Employment Development Department (EDD). The EDD, however, sided with Nunez, and he has collected a total of $11,000 so far. All that money came from the Rosemead coffers because the EDD bills Rosemead directly for its workers' unemployment claims. This all prompted several outraged state officials to threaten to change the state's laws governing such claims. The Star-News article explained:

Since Nunez's claim became public, two state lawmakers have challenged its validity and threatened to change state law. State Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, and Assemblyman Curt Hagman, R-Chino Hills, are helping the city appeal Nunez's claim for a third time.

This time, they are citing a section of state code that seems to explicitly prohibit elected officials from receiving unemployment.

"We have written a very clear letter to the EDD, indicating how they have misapplied the law. But we have yet to hear a response," [current Rosemead City Manager Jeffrey] Allred said.

The Nunez matter caused someone to take a closer look at what Rosemead was paying out and to whom. Turns out that, after he resigned last year, Oliver Chi also filed for and was granted unemployment benefits. According to the Star-News piece, Chi collected around $10,000, which was apparently a surprise to the city of Rosemead. City officials there seem to have thought they were done with Chi when they paid him $350,000 under the settlement agreement he and the Rosemead council reached prior to Chi's resignation.

Chi, unlike Nunez, had the good graces to return the $10,000 he received for his unemployment claim. In the article, Chi defended himself:

Chi said he had every right to collect unemployment after he left his post in April 2009 since he resigned "under the threat of termination." He agreed to return the payments in order to maintain a good relationship with city staff and officials.

What's $10,000 between friends?

This really ought to show folks who think that every high level managers in the public sector can be every bit as greedy as the people who brought you the tech stock and real estate bubbles and the Wall Street investment banking firms that were responsible for the financial meltdown of 2008. The scale may be smaller, but a fellow can dream.

If the rank-and-file public employees who do the actual work and the voters who foot the bills paid any attention to the money lavished on some of these guys and gals in salaries, benefits, and severance packages, the outrage would be every bit as great as what you're seeing right now with with bank bonuses.

In fact, it may already be reaching that point. In our next "Where Are They Now?" installment, we'll look back to Claremont and points south.

Oliver Chi for Claremont City Council?

From the Mailbag...
We received an email last week from a reader wondering whether Oliver Chi, ousted Rosemead City Manager and former Claremont Assistant City Manager, would run for Claremont City Council next time around, in March of 2011.

This was a scary thought, but as we reflected on it, an obvious one. Despite one obvious difference between Bridget Healy and Oliver Chi, there are already some parallels: Both are proteges of Glenn Southard; both left the city of Claremont; both are acceptably malleable in their veracities; neither had notable success here in town; both merely labored in the vineyard and did the bidding of the overseer; both have their nest lined with hundreds of thousands of dollars of money from their cities--Bridget in her six-figure pension payment for time spent (honest graft), Oliver in his extraordinary $300,000+ severance payment for services not rendered with a little extra to get him out within 90 days of the Rosemead municipal election (dishonest graft).

The email:

so when does...
Wednesday, April 15, 2009 4:45 PM
From:
To: claremontbuzz@yahoo.com

...Oliver Chi run for a seat on the Claremont City Council

We can already imagine the signs placed by the Powers That Be on the Porkchop Park at Indian Hill and Harrison as shown above, but are not sure we are ready to see Oliver Chi every day:

Oliver, We Hardly Knew Ye

The karma trolley just rolled into the station. Earlier this week, former Claremont Assistant to the City Manager Oliver Chi agreed to resign as Rosemead's city manager, the Pasadena Star News reports.

You might recall that Chi, who seemed to hitch his wagon (apologies for all the conveyance metaphors) to the falling Glenn Southard star, left our humble town not too long after Southard fled to the Indio. Chi went to Rosemead as an assistant city manager and was given the top job there in August, 2007 at the tender age of 27.

Chi, who was the youngest city manager in the area, always struck us as the Eddie Haskell type, oozing a saccharine eagerness to please. He may not have intended it, but it often came off as insincerity. Is he kidding me? one would think, as Chi cozied up to whichever local power brokers graced an event.

The Pasadena Star article said that Chi may have agreed to resign after his ally on the Rosemead council, former Mayor John Tran, lost his re-election bid. Don't weep too much for Chi, however. He was earning $196,000 a year, including benefits, and Rosemead gave him $350,000 severance package, quite enough to tide the young man over until he lands another city management gig.

Boy, at that rate, you could live pretty well. Kind of like a fireman: on a couple years, off a couple, just working long enough to earn a healthy severance, then getting yourself dismissed. Of course, that assumes cities would continue to hire you. But, heck, there are an awful lot of towns in California and the U.S. who'd love to throw cash around once the economy picks up. Or even before - thanks, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act!

Part of Chi's resignation agreement includes a no-sniping clause, which precludes the parties from speaking disparagingly of each other. The article did note that one of the possible complaints about Chi was his expansion of Rosemead's city staff (hmmm, why are we not surprised?). You might recall that Matt Hawkesworth, Claremont's former director of finance, left town to join Chi in Rosemead, a move that in hindsight may not look so smart.

Fortunately for Hawkesworth and the rest of Rosemead's staff, Chi's resignation agreement also included a 90-day moratorium on staff layoffs, with exceptions for thing like dismissals due to Rosemead's financial condition or the elimination of positions, the Star article said.

The Star also reported that the Rosemead council has hired former El Segundo city manager Jeffrey Stewart as interim city manager.

The Latest Oliver "Twist"

It is common knowledge at Claremont City Hall, and may even have been announced--as City Manager Jeff Parker apparently announced the General Fund appropriation of $1,200,000 last June for Johnson's Pasture--by a posting in some obscure place on the City website, that city finance man Matt Hawkesworth is leaving Claremont for greener pastures in Rosemead.

At Council meeting last Tuesday, we hear, Sam Pedroza tried to recognize Hawkesworth's impending resignation when Hawkesworth finished his report on City finances. Unfortunately for Pedroza, and Hawkesworth, the Hallelujah Chorus of the city council was having none of this maudlin exercise, and no one joined in the usually-obligatory statements of regret and wishes of good luck.

What is the Oliver "twist"? Former Claremont colleague Oliver Chi, now city manager in Rosemead, has lured Hawkesworth away with the title--and we presume more cash than his 2006 compensation in Claremont of $116,000 and $40,000 in benefits--of Assistant City Manager. We look forward to Oliver's statement welcoming Matt; it could be a little stronger than his statement about Rosemead temporary employee Steve Brisco: "If there was any malfeasance, Steve would have been the one indicted..." (We know this sounds terrible; please go read the full quote.)

We don't know if the other recent Claremont hire-away by Oliver Chi, Aileen Flores, formerly public information officer in the Fifth Best City has adopted the haircut (or if Chi any longer sports one), but it appears that Rosemead perhaps is becoming the City Governed by Spiky-Haired Administrators.

Southardism, Rosemead Style

Oliver Chi, Claremont's former Assistant to the City Manager, has been picked to be Rosemead's new city manager, as an article in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune reported this past week.

Chi, who is 27, was approved to fill Rosemead's vacant top city staff spot on a 3-2 vote by the Rosemead City Council.

While in Claremont, Chi, whose obsequious personality resembled the Eddie Haskell character on the old "Leave It to Beaver" show, attached himself to former Claremont City Manager Glenn Southard and cozied up to the Claremont 400, leaving a number of lingering problems in his wake when he left.

The largest of these problems with the appraisal for Johnson's Pasture which set the price of that open space land at $12 million, overvaluing the land by about $500,000, according to the state of California. This imperiled the city's chances of qualifying for a $1 million grant from the state because the granting agency wouldn't allow the grant for the city's appraised value.

Chi was the staff member we see as most responsible for the faulty appraisal, and he was the staff member who steered the city, at the behest of the Claremont 400, towards the failed first attempt at buying the land through the 2006 Parks and Pastures Assessment District, which failed 44% to 56% when voted on by Claremont property owners.

Chi worked on the Parks and Pastures campaign, which was filled with such Claremont 400 luminaries as Diann Ring, Judy Wright, Al Leiga, and a host others. In the debate over whether Claremont should go with an assessment district or a bond to fun the purchase of Johnson's Pasture, many people warned that an assessment would never get the 51% it needed to pass and that a bond, even though it needed 67 percent win, had a better chance because of the lower total cost. One suspects that to Chi it mechanism didn't matter and that the only important thing was that the 400 was pushing the assessment.

Events proved the 400 and Chi wrong and the people who favored the bond right - a few months after the assessment lost, Claremont voters passed the Measure S bond with over 71% of the vote.

Chi's biggest fault as a city staffer was his constant need to size up the political landscape and then joining in with the people he felt most powerful, in this case, the 400. In doing so, he failed to recognize the sentiments of the greater community, so it's no wonder he was so remarkably out of step with and disconnected from the needs and wishes of the majority of town.

Some might attribute Chi's miscalculations to his age and immaturity, but we think his behavior in Claremont betrayed a fundamental character flaw: a willingness to place his ambitions over the good of the community. Chi struck us as the prototypical Southard senior staffer, intelligent on the one hand, but weak and manipulative on the other.

If there is any doubt that Chi isn't plugged into the Southardian network, check out the California City Management Foundation website. That's the organization that Southard helped get started. Chi is now listed as a member of the foundation's Board of Trustees along with Southard and a number of municipal counsultants, including Bill Mathis, the city manager headhunter who helped Southard land that $300,000 a year job in Indio.

We suspect Chi's flaws have caused him problems in the past, and we guess that at some point in the future, they will catch up with him again. Claremont's gain is Rosemead's loss.

Where Are They Now?

A reader wrote in to say that another refugee from the administration of former Claremont City Manager Glenn Southard is in the news. Oliver Chi, former Assistant to the City Manager in Claremont was last week tabbed as the city of Rosemead's acting City Manager. This move came after Rosemead's manager, Andy Lazzaretto, was placed on administrative leave for undisclosed reasons, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune reported.

Chi, you may recall, was one of the Claremont city staffers responsible for the failed 2006 Parks and Pasture Assessment District, which was supposed to pay for the purchase of Johnson's Pasture. The Parks and Pasture measure, which was pushed by the Claremont 400 and the local League of Women Voters, lost 56% to 44% in a vote by Claremont property owners.

The assessment lost primarily because the city tried to use the assessment to pay for city park maintenance on top of the open space purchase. It also lost because many commercial and residential property owners are still mad over the city's other assessment, the Landscaping and Lighting District, which was enacted in the early 1990's as a stopgap measure to help the city balance its then-large budget deficit. That "stopgap" is still in force after all these years (more on that tomorrow).

The city and the Claremont 400 pursued the parks assessment even though they were warned that the property owners would not support it, and Oliver Chi was in many ways the 400's pointman on the issue. Like many of Southard administration's actions (the $675,000 paid to Village West developers this year and the $17.5 million Palmer Canyon Fire lawsuit settlement), Chi's work on the assessment left some lasting impacts.

In gearing up to buy Johnson's Pasture, the city commissioned an appraisal for the property that set its value at $12 million. After the assessment loss, a coalition of groups that had worked on the assessment campaign came together with people who had opposed the assessment and successfully passed Measure S, a bond measure dedicated strictly to the Johnson's Pasture purchase. Measure S passed in November, 2006, with 72 percent of the vote.

Unfortunately, the city is stuck was stuck with the old appraisal, done while Oliver Chi was working on the issue. The state of California, whose grant money the city needs for the purchase of other open space, audited the appraisal and determined it overvalued the land by $500,000. The state was going to withhold additional money the city is counting on to use for the Johnson's Pasture purchase if the city used the old apprasial. The state's rationale is that they can participate in the purchase only if it is for a fair market value.

Consequently, the purchase is being held up in limbo because the original agreement with the landowners was for $12 million, and now the city is using the state's lower figure of $11.5 million for the Johnson's Pasture land. The owners have refused to budge from the original, erroneous appraisal. The city, on the other hand, is obligated to use the lower figure in order to qualify for state grants, not only for this purchase, but for any future open space purchases.

As we've said before, Southard, and we suppose now Chi, are gifts that keep on giving.