Руководитель округа Санта-Барбара уходит в отставку после 12 лет работы на посту

For the last 12 years, Mona Miyasato has been the county executive officer for Santa Barbara County in Southern California. Prior to that she built a career in local government in her home state, serving as deputy city manager in Santa Monica and chief assistant administrator in Marin County. Her time in Santa Barbara has overlapped with a concentration of disasters and emergencies, including wildfires, mudslides, mass shootings and pandemics. As county executive officer, she advises, and answers to, a five-member elected board of supervisors. Miyasato is retiring from the position this month. She says she’s planning to work as a professional coach to public-sector executives. She recently spoke with Governing about her time in office. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Governing: We talk to a lot of people who get into government through electoral politics. That’s not your path. Can you tell me how you got into government administration? Mona Miyasato: I actually thought I was going to be a journalist, maybe sitting in your seat. I went to the Harvard Kennedy School because one of the things I was attracted to was a program in press and politics. I thought I could learn how to cover government better and be a better reporter. But when I was there, something really changed. I learned more about policymaking, policy analysis, how public decisions actually get made, and I realized, hey, I want to not just report on these issues, but I want to be part of government and actually make government better. That was my start. After graduating I became an environmental planner for a little bit, and then I moved on to working in city government and then county government. My first city job was in redevelopment, affordable housing and economic development, for a small city east of L.A., West Covina. I worked for 10 years in the city of Santa Monica. In that position I started out also in affordable housing, redevelopment, and then got plucked into the city manager’s office and I left there as the deputy city manager. What are the roles of city manager and county executive officer, and how do they differ from an elected mayor or something like that? The difference in our position from an elected official is that, for one, I report to five elected members of the board. They have different constituencies. They have different political philosophies. And my job is to give them the best recommendations, the best information, to tell them the consequences, and then once they decide on their direction, to implement it. I’m not elected by the people. That’s what the most significant difference is. But also, unlike a corporate CEO in the private sector, a county CEO doesn’t control the whole organization. In my county and in many counties across the country, not only do I have elected board members, I have elected department heads. They have their own constitutional or statutory authority. A great deal of my job is using my influence, rather than my direct legislative authority, to get things done. What kinds of things do you consider yourself responsible for getting done? What are the factors you consider when you’re making recommendations to elected officials? For example, we had a very contentious and controversial issue in Santa Barbara about whether we wanted to build more jail beds. The difficult position was that a lot of community members didn’t want us to spend more money on building more jail beds. But we were really trying to replace an old jail. The policy questions are, what’s the cost? What’s the long-term impact? What’s the community impact? And what helped my board understand the tradeoffs was that if we build new jail beds, that means we’ll be able to tear down this very old, inadequate jail and perhaps use the land for something else in the future. So it’s giving recommendations like that with the best information you have at the time to help inform their own votes on any issue. You don’t stand for election, but I assume you do absorb some of the potential political blowback from those decisions too? Oh of course. I get emails. Since they’re the elected officials they get more of it. But my staff and myself, we hear from the community members, and we hear from community members in the board chambers during hearings. My job is always to try to ensure that the office has legitimacy through competence, trust and impartiality. My job is not to pick sides. It’s not to have preference for one political situation over another. The job is really at the intersection of good government, administration and politics. How did you end up in Santa Barbara specifically? And what are the things that define the challenges there versus other counties in California? Santa Barbara County was just fascinating to me because it’s so diverse. It’s almost like a microcosm of California or even of the United States. We have extraordinary wealth. Everyone knows Oprah Winfrey lives in Santa Barbara County as well as Meghan and Harry. But we also have significant levels of poverty. We have agriculture, which is huge in the north part of the county, and we also have a lot of tourism on the beaches. The county historically has had oil production and we’re also supposedly the birthplace of the environmental movement. We have urban communities and rural ones. There’s a geographic and political divide between the north part of the county and the south part of the county. We have all this diversity of thought and diversity of industry going on, and also just the basic issues that many jurisdictions face, especially here in California, like housing affordability, the impact of climate change, wildfires, water issues, immigration, behavioral health issues. All that. I was attracted to Santa Barbara because it had this really unique mix of all these things, and we’re not that large. We’re 450,000 people. And that was just really intriguing to me. How does this all come together? It’s a very beautiful place, but it’s not the easiest place to govern. What have been the biggest challenges of governing it? We’ve had to deal with a lot of disasters and emergencies. It’s increasingly so throughout the United States, but since I’ve been here, since 2013, we’ve activated our emergency operations center or proclaimed emergencies over 40 times. I think we did it maybe two or three times in all my previous organizations. When I first got here, there was a mass shooting in Isla Vista near our university. In 2018 we had the Thomas Fire in neighboring Ventura County that came to Santa Barbara. Right after that we had the Jan. 9 debris flows, which was devastating. It tragically killed 23 people in our community. Ever since then we’ve had wildfires, COVID-19, and fiscal challenges. All that challenge, all those emergencies, have really changed how I think about government. One of the things we adopted was a new motto, One County, One Future. It really was from this belief or understanding that when you’re in a crisis or an emergency or a disaster, residents don’t care about who has jurisdiction — what county department, what city department, what agency is supposed to take care of all that. They expect government to work as one organization. That’s been our motto and our theme. So how do you handle all these big hairy issues like you mentioned, housing costs and wildfires and things like that? There’s so many parts of the system, and it’s trying to have everyone understand their part to make the whole system work. Like homelessness: Our public defender is involved because there are lots of unhoused public defender clients and they have a whole-program holistic defense. We have behavioral health and mental health specialists. We have a community services department that runs homelessness programs. We have a nonprofit provider, a probation department. All these different departments, 23 departments in the county, working together to make sure that we’re looking at the same problem and trying to move forward in how you address it. What kinds of results have you seen from that approach? How has that helped? We’ve seen changes in how we approach, for example, the intersection of criminal justice and mental health. We’ve seen a reduction in our jail population, and that has to do with a lot of factors. It has to do with greater diversion, it has to do with the courts changing their practices, it has to do with trying to get people through the judicial system quicker, and all the different partners talking together. That has real implications, because a reduced jail population means reduced costs as well, and also trying to get people who are in jail diverted and into the right services they need. Can you give me an example or two of a choice you had to make about recommendations to the board that was particularly controversial or difficult, and how you thought through it? I’ll talk about the jail because that was most recent. My thought process was a couple of things. You look at what’s immediately before you. What are the finances? What’s the community input? What are the desires of the board based on your goals and objectives for your organization? But you also have to look ahead and you have to evaluate what’s going to happen, especially in large capital projects that are going to be here for 50, 60, 70 years. What do you think the long-term implications are? In that particular issue, some of the folks who wanted a bigger jail said, “Well, you have to build more jail beds because the population is going to grow, and because the population is going to grow, you’re going to have to house more people in jails.” The people on the opposite side of it said, “No, that’s not necessarily true. If you continue to do all your diversionary efforts, you won’t need as many jail cells or as many beds.” Myself and my staff, we have to take all those competing interests and try to figure out, is there one version of the truth that everyone can see and agree on? You can’t predict the future but you can prepare for it. We do need enough beds to satisfy what we think is going to happen, at least in the near term. We will continue diversion and make it part of the culture and part of the institution so that you’re not unnecessarily putting people in jail. And like I said you look to see what are the opportunities if we build more replacement beds and get rid of the old jail? That opens up a whole opportunity for more housing. It’s looking at all those factors, fiscal, legal, operational, what’s the best for the community, and what’s the best for the organization, aligned with some of the priorities and values of the board of supervisors who represent the community. Are the skills in county or city administration largely transferable from place to place? There are some county executive officers that have been in the private sector. It’s just using good judgment. It’s judgment and problem-solving at the core of what we do. There are a lot of transferable skills in that. Our currency is trust. It’s making sure that the public trusts us, because we’re receiving their votes, we’re receiving their tax dollars, we are receiving their approval. That’s more difficult to measure sometimes, but it’s true: Our currency is trust. Why have you stuck it out in Santa Barbara for this long and why are you moving on now? I’m moving on now because I think it’s time. I’ve lost something that I don’t have anymore. I don’t have new eyes to look at the organization, to be objective enough and also to look for opportunities. I do a new employee orientation every month or so, and I always tell the new employees, “You have something I no longer have. You have a fresh perspective.” I have become part of the organization. I’ve built the organization. So now I can’t honestly critique it because I’m going to be defending it. That’s one issue. When you start saying, “Oh, we’ve already tried that. We’ve already done that. That won’t work,” it’s a signal to yourself that maybe you need to let someone else come in. In all of our jobs, government is never finished. With all these big hairy issues, these public problems, our jobs are really to do the best we can with what we have at the time, and leave it for the next person with a stronger foundation. President Barack Obama once said I think that in government, you’re really part of a relay race. You run the best leg that you can and you hand the baton over to someone else. A lot of people left after COVID-19, in a lot of different organizations, and it was the same for us. I stayed because I looked at our forecast and I said, we’re going to have some tough budget years, and I wanted the county to get through those tough budget years. I stayed to get through the budget that we adopted in June. Why was the budget tricky? The budget was difficult this year because we had to do layoffs, which we hadn’t had to do in a long time. Resources are constrained. Inflation is hitting our costs. We also were having to adjust to changes because of H.R.1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and changes in how Medicaid funding affects the state, and how the state changes in response and how that’s going to affect our services. We had to make reductions. We worked with the board and the public back in November, seeing that these might occur, talking about the issues with the departments involved, talking to the public. We have about 4,400 positions right now. And we had over 200 positions reduced. But out the door, we only ended up with 36 people actually without jobs. That’s because some people decided to retire, and other departments hired some people. Even in my department, we prevented a layoff by hiring someone into a position here. We have always tried to ensure that there really is a feeling of a county family, that people can find jobs. And we’re still at it, trying to place people. What are you going to do after you finish your last day on the job? I am right now getting a certificate to be an executive leadership coach. In my next phase, I still want to contribute and focus on coaching executives in the public sector. I see a lot of No. 2s, No. 3s who don’t want to take the top jobs. They see the uncertainty, they see the chaos, they see the stress. And yet we need really good people to continue to serve in these capacities. And I want my contribution in the next phase to help people to develop into that — to take the leap and help them adjust to that, to know how to have confidence to move in an uncertain environment. I always say you have to walk straight along a crooked path. The path is becoming more crooked and probably uphill. What else do you want to say? One thing I always say to my staff is that we can do anything but we can’t do everything. Choosing what matters the most is probably the hardest part of governing.