Unusual Unity in Government Divides Oxnard City Council

All the world parts for lovers--especially the Oxnard City Council, which has divided into warring camps over the marriage between the city clerk and Oxnard’s most outspoken councilman.

After less than three years of marriage, Mabi and Michael A. Plisky are beset with charges of favoritism ranging from Mabi’s alleged omission of unfavorable references to her husband in city minutes to Michael’s alleged attempt to garner a raise for his wife.

Although the alleged infractions seem trivial, some council members believe they add up to a discomforting pattern. That, the detractors say, may spell marital bliss for the couple who have been called “the Doles of Oxnard” but has led to holy acrimony at City Hall by further polarizing an already sharply divided City Council.

“As much as I like Mabi, I don’t think it’s possible for her to be objective,” said City Councilman Manuel Lopez. “The whole situation is very unhealthy for everyone.”

The Pliskys, an unlikely couple, appear to be a case for how opposites attract.

With the brown hair and eyes of her Basque heritage, the 34-year-old city clerk carefully chooses her words as she speaks, meticulously closing each sentence so that it almost appears to have been rehearsed. A diligent worker, she spends most council meetings flitting efficiently between a steno pad and a computer, completing minutes for much of each meeting even as it is concluding.

Spouse Blond, Blue-Eyed

Her 46-year-old husband, meanwhile, sports blond hair, blue eyes and a brusque manner that some blame for the recent defection of several of the city’s department heads. Easily distracted by any inconsistencies--some would say perceived inconsistencies--in staff reports, he works himself up into tirades at most council meetings.

And therein lies the problem, detractors say. They fear that the politically astute woman who has worked for over a decade at City Hall provides her husband with fodder for his frequent, sometimes embarrassing attacks on political opponents.

As city clerk, she is a sort of librarian, keeping records and helping city officials and citizens retrieve information. Her husband’s political opponents fear that such requests for information is sometimes funneled to Michael Plisky for what they describe as his “witch hunts.”

“It’s not a conflict of interest because that has to do with money and the conflict is definitely not financial,” said Plisky’s archrival on the council, Dorothy Maron.

“The conflict is the inability of the rest of the council members to use the city clerk’s office and feel like what we’re doing is just between the city clerk and us,” she said. “The feeling is that Mr. Plisky will know right away.”

The Pliskys, meanwhile, dismiss the charges as political hype. She said she would never jeopardize her job and her husband, a former record-company executive in business as a financial planner with his brother, said that he would never ask her to do so.

But some council members do not buy that. While careful to point out how much they like the popular city clerk who said she garnered more votes in the last election than any other elected official in Oxnard’s history, they claim that torn loyalties are inevitable.

“I know if Irma, my wife, was in her position,” said Councilman Manuel Lopez, “and I was in his, we would be sharing information.”

In any event, the issue is likely to resurface later this year when Michael Plisky is expected to announce his candidacy for mayor. Observers predict that the marriage will be a significant issue in the campaign.

By then, the novelty of the Pliskys’ situation will have heightened. Currently, they are one of only two city clerk-councilman couples in the state, but with the retirement in May of Upland’s city clerk, Doreen Carpenter, the dynamic duo will stand alone.

Not that the Pliskys are not used to people gawking at them. Some 500 people--including newspaper, television and radio reporters--turned out for their wedding two and a half years ago at a Catholic church in Oxnard. Even their first Thanksgiving as a married couple did not go unpublicized. As they were sitting down to dinner, a local radio station telephoned to ask what they planned to eat.

They are not oblivious to the concerns that their marriage raises. When Michael Plisky first ran for office in 1984, he contacted City Atty. Duane Lyders to find out whether his budding romance with the city clerk, who was going into her second term, presented a conflict.

Saw No Problem

Even though Lyders saw no problem, Michael Plisky later asked the state Fair Political Practices Commission for a ruling when he ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 1986. It also gave the couple the thumbs-up so long as his wife abstained from handling the election, which she did.

Still the Pliskys were not prepared when the issue came to a head in February with the revelation of plans by City Manager David Mora for a staff retreat to be attended by city department heads. Conspicuously absent among those invited were not only Mabi Plisky but also City Treasurer Geraldine Furr.

Publicly, Mora said that the two women had been excluded because they were elected, not appointed officials and therefore not truly members of the city staff. But later in a private session with council members, he acknowledged that the exclusion was really aimed at Mabi Plisky, whose presence, the city manager argued, would defeat the purpose of a retreat.

“If you have a retreat where people are supposed to bare their souls and the wife of the most critical council member is present, they aren’t going to be likely to open up,” Lopez remembers Mora explaining.

Mora, who has been the target of frequent attacks by Michael Plisky, declined comment on the Pliskys, saying the issue was “a personnel matter.”

Citizens Comment

When the council reconsidered the retreat at a meeting two weeks later, citizens called for the city officials to bridge their differences. In a newspaper man-on-the-street interview that ran at the time, a woman complained that Oxnard’s city officials were “acting like children.”

But if concerns about a possible conflict reached a climax during the February meetings, they had been building for a while.

Just a month earlier, in fact, Michael Plisky and his political ally, Councilwoman Ann Johs, failed in what appeared to be an attempt to hold Mora’s annual bonus hostage to a raise for Mabi Plisky.

At the time, the pair voted against giving the $2,064 bonus to Mora on the grounds that he had not completed evaluations of city department heads, a step that has to be taken before staff members can receive merit raises. But as it turned out, the only heads who had not been evaluated were Furr, who had been in the job for less than a year and was not eligible for evaluation, and Mabi Plisky.

Again, Mora would not publicly elaborate on the rationale for failing to carry out Mabi Plisky’s review but some council members said that he complained privately of being “caught in the middle.”

Dilemma Described

“Mike, in essence, is one of the people who hires David,” explained Lopez. “How can David evaluate Mike’s wife?”

Indeed, some say that problems began shortly after Michael Plisky was elected to the council in November, 1984. He seemed unprepared at one of his first budget sessions, and other council members resented Mabi Plisky for apparently prompting him with notes.

The pattern has continued, Maron and Lopez charge. They complain that minutes kept by Mabi Plisky unfairly favor her husband and point to a recent occasion when Oxnard College President Ed Robings chided Michael Plisky for his role in removing a black man from the city’s Planning Commission. Although the incident is mentioned in minutes for the Feb. 6 meeting, Michael Plisky’s name is not.

Yet on an occasion two years earlier, Mabi Plisky did spell out the role of her husband’s foe Dorothy Maron in a land deal in which the city planned an auto mall. Minutes for the council’s meeting on Feb. 18, 1986 recount a consultant’s “understanding” that land owned by Maron had been sold for four times the rate of a nearby parcel. To Maron and her supporters, the reference implied that she had gained unethically from the project, something that they vehemently deny.

Situation Not Comparable

The discrepancies are not comparable, Mabi Plisky said, because the comments about Maron represent “a statement of fact,” whereas those against her husband constituted “an accusation.”

Her detractors do not agree. “When Mike is treated harshly, then he isn’t even mentioned. But when someone else gets the same treatment, such as Dorothy, it all gets put down,” Lopez said.

The importance of unbiased records of city proceedings cannot be underestimated, he said. “In elections, people cite these.”

In a more recent alleged offense, Lopez complains that Mabi Plisky refused his request to abstain from conducting the election for a controversial ballot measure that would have made the treasurer an appointed position.

While Mabi Plisky did offer to have the assistant city clerk handle paper work submitted by Lopez, the measure’s chief proponent, she did not offer to abstain from handling the paper work of the measure’s opponents, who were led by her husband.

It’s as “if we were playing Little League Baseball and the other kid’s mother was the umpire,” complains Lopez.

As a result, both Maron and Lopez said that they have resorted to seeking information from the county clerk’s office on politically sensitive issues. Confirmed Oxnard Mayor Nao Takasugi: “There’s a reluctance to seek information of a political nature.”

Involved in Debate

And it did not help matters during last November’s discussion of the councilman’s pet peeve--cost overruns at Oxnard’s municipal golf course--that Mabi Plisky carted into council chambers a sarcastic sign that said, “Golf Course at No Cost to Taxpayers?”

Neither is the couple’s image aided by the councilman’s frequent insistence during heated debates that the record reflect the sometimes biased points that he makes.

But Mabi Plisky, who graduated sixth in her class from a local Catholic school and attended business college on scholarship before landing a job in 1976 as stenographer in the city clerk’s office, insists that she is a professional who can be trusted to respect loyalties.

“Every week I attend department-head meetings and I have never revealed any details of those meetings to Mike,” she said.

If nothing else, the Pliskys maintain, their busy professional and social lives keep them honest. The City Council’s weekly meetings often stretch late into Tuesday nights and the Pliskys say that they attend up to four politically related social engagements each week.

“We don’t have a lot of time to plot and plan against the Council,” Michael Plisky said.

Try to Forget Business

Once at home, they try to forget city business. Plisky said he concentrates on his clients’ tax returns during the tax season but later turns his attention to his collection of model trains. Cooking, gardening and housecleaning, meanwhile, takes up his wife’s free time, she said.

City business only comes up, they claim, after Tuesday’s council meetings and at that only in the context of a critique of the councilman’s performance.

“There are times when he doesn’t appear to understand something and later I’ll try to explain what staff’s driving at,” Mabi Plisky explained.

But even if the councilman were taking advantage of his wife’s position, they point out that the city clerk’s office is hardly a repository of top-secret information.

“The records that are kept in our office are strictly historical and public,” Mabi Plisky said. “Anyone can come in and research from the documents that we keep.”

Johs, meanwhile, sees the issue another way.

“I don’t understand what’s so confidential,” the councilwoman said. “Even if she were to go home and talk to Mike, I don’t see what there is that he shouldn’t know.”

Despite appearances, the councilman denies that in opposing Mora’s bonus he and his ally were angling for a raise for his wife.

“I just didn’t feel his performance warranted a bonus,” Plisky said.

Wants Validation

As for Mabi Plisky’s merit increase, she claims to be not so interested in the money, which could be as much as 10% of her $40,000 annual salary, as in a validation of her performance.

“I think most professionals need to know if they’re doing a good job,” she explained. “And it’s important to correct deficiencies if there are any.”

As far as the retreat goes, the Pliskys say that if department heads would feel uncomfortable about the city clerk’s presence, none have expressed such concerns to them. But if such concerns exist, a retreat would be just the forum in which to air them, Mabi Plisky said.

Meanwhile, Carpenter, the Upland city clerk, said that she is routinely invited to both the city’s retreats for staff and elected officials.

“I think it’s very disappointing to deprive Mabi of the benefit of a staff retreat,” she said. “She’s an excellent city clerk.”

The couple also denied using “crib notes,” but Mabi Plisky said she often passes pieces of paper to her husband containing either messages from City Council spectators or information requested during the course of a council session. But, she said, she extends the same courtesies to all council members.

“I’ll pass up whatever notes I’m asked to pass up,” she explained.

Denies Skewing Minutes

As for skewing the minutes, Mabi Plisky maintains that she treats her husband just as she treats other council members.

“I don’t include council members’ names when they are being accused of something,” she said, pointing out that her minutes similarly shielded Lopez from direct criticism over the considerable expense of placing the treasurer’s measure on the ballot. Dealing with “personality issues,” she maintains, is “the role of the media.”

And if council members have complaints about the minutes, she pointed out that they have an opportunity at the beginning of each meeting to correct them.

As for ammunition against his opponents, the councilman said he keeps his own arsenal in three filing cabinets stored in the garage of the couple’s meticulous Vineyard Avenue condominium and in a 10-volume collection of newspaper clippings on council actions kept in their den.

“Starting back here is every agenda or staff report since I started on the council,” he said, pulling open cabinet drawers to reveal folders containing information on the city’s key issues. “I don’t need to go to Mabi.”

They do not think that discord in council chambers is undesirable or, for that matter, unusual.

“Our council is tame compared to some who stand on desks and throw things at each other,” Michael Plisky insists. “I, for one, would like to have my council having healthy debate in public rather than making back-room deals.”

Hope to Avoid Discord

But fellow council members appear ready to do anything to avoid such discord.

After two weeks of stormy deliberations, they finally took the unusual step of tabling the staff retreat, abandoning the project at least for the near future.

As for evaluations, some officials, such as Takasugi, suggest that rather than asking for Mora to carry them out, an outside consultant may be called in to appraise Mabi Plisky’s work.

And her husband’s opponents on the City Council say that they will continue to circumvent the city clerk’s office on politically sensitive issues. They also say they will refrain from quibbling, as Mabi Plisky suggests they do, with the minutes of meetings.

Said Lopez: “We’re not there to fight over piddly matters.”

Meanwhile, Mabi Plisky said she plans to abstain from handling next November’s election, when both she and her husband plan to run again for office.

Fellow council members do not even plan to challenge the fact that the city clerk is in bed with a colleague.

“What can one do?,” asked Takasugi. “You can’t tell them to get divorced. It’s a difficult situation and it’s hard to find a solution.”