City Manager Quits Escondido Position Before Talks on Firing

Escondido City Manager Vern Hazen resigned Wednesday, just hours before council members were scheduled to meet in closed-door session to consider his firing.

Hazen, 52, has been Escondido’s top administrator since 1982 and earns $95,000 a year. He formerly was city manager in the Northern California towns of Mill Valley for 7 years and Mountain View for 12 years.

Had Planned to Quit

He said that he decided “several weeks ago” to leave his Escondido post and that the time of his departure will be up to the City Council. His employment contract with the city runs until Aug. 30.

Hazen was rumored to have applied for an administrative position with San Diego County, but he denied it Wednesday, saying he has not decided on his next career move.

Two top county posts currently vacant are a slot as an assistant chief administrative officer, a post previously held by Randall Bacon, and the position of director of the Department of Planning and Land Use, formerly held by Ray Silver.

Political observers have predicted Hazen’s ouster since the June elections, when two slow-growth council candidates--Carla DeDominicis and Kris Murphy--were elected, joining veteran Councilman Jerry Harmon to form, for the first time, a slow-growth majority on the five-member council.

In August, in a rare public statement, Hazen aligned himself with Escondido Chamber of Commerce officials in backing a major expansion of the city’s industrially zoned land for “campus industrial parks,” similar to those in the Mountain View-Silicon Valley area, to create new high-paying employment opportunities locally.

The council troika, which has been trying to set the brakes on the city’s runaway population growth, has had little success. Some of the blame has fallen on Hazen, who was instrumental in forging developer agreements approved by previous councils for major housing developments. It is those very development agreements that the new slow-growth alliance is now attempting to unravel, a task it has found frustrating.

Firing Tied to Frustration

Former Escondido Mayor Jim Rady speculated recently that the new troika’s frustration over lack of progress in attempting to control growth and achieving other campaign promises may have been the cause for Hazen’s problems. Other observers commented that Hazen, a taciturn man, had failed to win the confidence of the new council members or to mend fences with Harmon, who was long the lone “no” vote on pro-growth council decisions until the June election.

Mayor Doris Thurston defended Hazen, calling him “one of the best city managers in the state,” and questioned the manner in which the slow-growth members had gone about the matter of removing Hazen, discussing it among themselves in possible violation of the Ralph M. Brown Act, she said.

“We’ll be lucky to find anyone as qualified as he is,” Thurston added.

After its regular meeting, the council accepted Hazen’s resignation in a closed-door session.

He will remain until an interim manager is chosen and then be hired as a consultant for six months.

Councilman Ernie Cowan was bitter about the abrupt quitting.

“If you believe he resigned, you believe in the tooth fairy,” he said, adding that, because of the dissension surrounding the situation, the city is a “ship dead in the water, perhaps even sinking.”

Murphy, who was the deciding vote on Hazen’s rumored firing, declined to say how he would have voted on the issue. “It’s irrelevant now,” he said.

Murphy conceded that he had been at odds with Hazen on a number of issues while attending council meetings for several years before winning a council seat, but he said he had been “generally satisfied” with Hazen’s performance, “although, at times, he could have been stronger in his recommendations” to the former pro-growth council.