When Jan Mittermeier was expecting to be fired last month as the county executive officer of the Orange County government, she took the memorabilia off the walls of her office and packed her belongings.
In a surprise 3-2 vote, the Board of Supervisors didn’t fire her, but Mittermeier still hasn’t put the memorabilia back on her wall.
“It took me two days to pack up and I’m going to be light on my feet,” she quipped.
Mittermeier said she has gotten feelers from private sector companies, who she didn’t identify.
“There have been some people who have called me. I’m not looking to leave and I’m not looking to stay. I’m just looking to be flexible,” said Mittermeier.
Mittermeier deflected a question of whether she would accept a private-sector job, calling it “hypothetical” and saying it depended on whether she felt she could continue to accomplish her goals with the county.
During a 35-minute interview with the Orange County Business Journal, the strong-willed but soft-voiced and usually media-shy Mittermeier talked about why she’s remained as the OC government’s CEO up to this point and what else she wants to accomplish in the job.
Mittermeier, who has often said she is simply following the will of voters in carrying out the planning for an El Toro airport, sounded much like a concerned general. She said the business sector and North County politicians had better become more assertive if they truly want an airport.
“We need the business community to step up publicly and say, ‘We need this airport for business opportuni-ties,'” she said. “I think there are a lot of people out there who feel this way, but they just assume that the Board of Supervisors will be the only ones out front. That’s difficult. They need help.
“You can’t just have three supervisors and maybe one businessman who are seen as driving the issue,” she said, in an obvious reference to George Argyros.
Mittermeier, a youngish 60, is an accounting and MBA graduate of Cal State Long Beach. She came to work as an OC employee in 1974, eventually directing the county internal audit division and the claims and disbursement division. In 1990, she was named director of the John Wayne airport in the final stages of a $300 million expansion.
After the county government declared bankruptcy in 1994, the board named as its first chief executive William Popejoy, a financial fix-it man who remained only for a stormy workout period of a few months. Mittermeier followed in July of 1995. She is the top administrator and the highest-ranking non-elected official in a county government of 16,000 workers and with a budget of approximately $4 billion.
Except for an annual debt payment of $78 million (scheduled to increase to $91 million next year), the OC government has by almost any measure totally recovered from the bankruptcy. This owes mostly, of course, to a good economy, which has increased the county’s revenue. Mittermeier is credited with implementing the necessary short-term budget cuts and restoring a sense of order to the government. She’s proud of installing a decision-making system for managers and reaching an agreement with employee groups to implement a pay-for-performance plan.
Just five years after the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, the county’s bonds have been restored to investment grade. It was this accomplishment that was seen as helping Mittermeier maintain her job in the recent debate over whether to fire her.
But in that debate, one of her biggest supporters, Board Chairman Chuck Smith, joined long-time critic Todd Spitzer; accusing her of misleading them. One supervisor who voted to retain her, Tom Wilson, agreed that Mittermeier had helped the county recover from bankruptcy, but said she was so incompetent on the El Toro airport that keeping her in the position would make sure the airport isn’t built.
During the debate, supervisors discussed whether they should reduce the CEO’s power by having certain department chiefs report directly to them.
“Obviously this is not productive,” said Mittermeier of those discussions. “It’s not productive to have our elected body up there questioning whether we should go back to the way things were pre-bankruptcy. That was part of the action that the employees got very upset with. They don’t want to go back to that way. Those kinds of things make me wonder about the time that I’ve been putting in here.”
Mittermeier said she maintains 12-hour days and longer, from being awakened with 6 a.m. phone calls to answering emails late in the evening. With the grueling schedule and lack of support from the board, and the assumption among many observers that she could get a higher-paying job in the private sector, why is Mittermeier staying?
“People don’t go into government for the compensation. You go into government because your public service genes are much stronger than your logic. You really feel a need to make a difference. This job has given me a lot of satisfaction. I think I have made a lot of difference. Every day I talk to employees who tell me that. That offsets a lot of the aggravation. Obviously, there are days when I think the aggravation offsets the satisfaction, but we all have those days.”
Her legacy will clearly be helping the county government recuperate from the bankruptcy. But she said she wants to accomplish other tasks, such as making the county government run like an efficient corporation and changing a culture where workers are preoccupied with not making mistakes instead of accomplishing tasks.
“It still takes a while to change the culture of an organization. We’ve only been at it a little over four years.
“As long as I can make progress and ultimately take the county where we need to go, I feel needed here and feel satisfied with what I’m trying to accomplish.”
She continued: “We’ve tried to change that culture so people feel comfortable stepping out and trying new things. We tried to change the culture so that people remember who they are working for. It isn’t just a job. What we’re trying to do is work for the people. They pay our salary. We want to make sure that the services we’re giving are the ones that they want and that we’re giving them as efficiently as possible.”
Of course, if Mittermeier walks away now, she won’t have completed the biggest project in the county’s history , the proposed airport at El Toro, which has been projected to cost $1 billion to become operational by the year 2005 and another $1.7 billion in improvements over the following 15 years.
In many corners the airport project has already been declared dead, and even some supporters are ready to throw in the towel.
Asked if the airport is dead, Mittermeier answered, “I don’t know that it’s dead. I don’t know that they (the supervisors) feel it’s dead.”
Mittermeier noted three members of the board are still on record as favoring the airport. But her tone lacks the confidence of earlier times, when she put the chances for an El Toro at 99%.
When asked to state a new probability, she said, “I’m reassessing.”
Pro-airport Supervisors Cynthia Coad and Jim Silva have suggested a non-binding vote in November to once and for all decide the debate on the airport. Mittermeier sounded receptive to the idea.
“Is it (the airport) something with a lot of support or is Measure F telling us that it doesn’t have that support? If it doesn’t, then I think the Board of Supervisors should move on.”
Measure F, which mandates two-thirds approval of county voters before the county builds an airport, a toxic waste site or a jail, was approved by 67% of the voters in March. Some have called it a repudiation of the county government and a death knell for the airport. Mittermeier said it was partially an anti-airport vote, but also a statement by voters that they want to vote on big projects.
She also said the vote wouldn’t have been as lopsided had the pro-airport side matched the “$10 million-plus” spent by the airport opponents. She acknowledged that many airport proponents urged the county government to counter with its own large-scale information campaign. But Mittermeier sided with county lawyers who argued such a course could be seen as illegal campaigning. South County cities didn’t take that tack, arguing that their expenditures aimed at stopping an airport were for legal informational purposes.
Besides, she said, “There are huge issues that the Board of Supervisors face here , healthcare, watershed, flood control, county islands For the Board of Supervisors to take $10 million and spend it on a couple of information campaigns for just one project, it’s very hard for them to do that.”
Mittermeier’s approach toward the campaign is one example cited by some El Toro airport proponents who criticize her for not advocating for the project more strongly.
“The pro-airport side doesn’t think we’ve moved aggressively enough,” she said. “That’s because some of the things that they would like the board to do, the county counsel has advised them that they shouldn’t do it and I had to recommend that they shouldn’t do it. They felt that it should have moved faster.”
One contention of airport proponents is that Mittermeier failed to pull all stops to get a few cargo flights into El Toro immediately upon the Marines’ departure. By not doing so, the status quo at the base shifted from flights to no flights, a disadvantage for the airport side, they say.
But Mittermeier said there was no way the military was going to budge: “It wasn’t us that was stopping cargo. The military wasn’t willing to do anything so controversial. They simply won’t do it. We really worked on cargo but came up against a stone wall.”
The supervisors have privately discussed taking the El Toro process away from Mittermeier by establishing a sort of airport czar. Mittermeier ruled it out: “Under my contract, they can’t.
“That’s why the CEO contract was put in place to start with,” she said. “Under the old structure, the CAO (county administrative officer) had no authority over any actions the department heads took, yet the board held the CAO responsible if anything went wrong That’s why I would have a problem with that.”
On the other hand, Mittermeier said she would be amenable to the establishment of a joint-powers authority, similar to the Orange County Transportation Authority, to oversee an El Toro airport. She also indicated a willingness to let the supervisors set up their own public relations structure to deal with the El Toro process if they so choose. “That’s their prerogative,” she said.
Mittermeier tried to put the El Toro issue in a historical context:
“I don’t think anything went wrong with El Toro as an airport Look at any airport, it’s an extremely emotional issue
“Other big projects also have difficulties. It took 10 years to get the toll roads in. Any big infrastructure project has typical major opposition and airports tend to generate a lot of opposition. If you look at Los Angeles, they have major opposition. They’ve had to downsize their whole project several times. When we expanded the terminal at John Wayne, that took 10 years from an idea to when we broke ground.
“These projects are long term, very difficult and there has to be a lot of people committed to them.”
