A Penny Saved : Gadfly’s Probe of Public Spending Led to Fall of Hawthorne City Clerk

With her gray, coiffed hair and sturdy chin, Frances Stiglich resembles a librarian with a penchant for shushing rowdy schoolchildren.

But give the 73-year-old Hawthorne woman the idea that a penny of her tax dollars has been spent frivolously, and she becomes a tenacious civic activist--a gadfly to some--who pores over city records with the diligence of a detective.

“I don’t care if it’s 10 cents; if they’re taking it from my pocket, they’re stealing it,” Stiglich said.

She says she inherited her stubbornness from her mother, who once hacked up her own floorboards with an ax to force her husband to replace them.

That sort of pluck prompted Stiglich to uncover city phone records that eventually led to the resignation of Hawthorne City Clerk Patrick E. Keller, who had been living in Hawaii for four years, attending to his $600-a-month city clerk duties while selling houses and running a hair salon in Kailua-Kona, a haven for sportfishing on the Big Island’s southwestern coast.

Although the City Council had known that Keller was living in Hawaii, word did not leak out to the public until Stiglich began poking through some city phone records two months ago.

Several city officials said they had quietly asked Keller last year to either resign from the part-time elected post or move back to Hawthorne. But they didn’t press the point until Stiglich demanded to know why the city clerk’s office had accepted $30 worth of collect phone calls from Hawaii during a six-week period last fall.

Stiglich, who remains more piqued over the cost of the phone calls than the revelation that the clerk lived out of state, says she never dreamed that her probing would lead to the toppling of a public official.

In fact, Stiglich says she wasn’t even looking for malfeasance in the city clerk’s office when she filed a request about two months ago for copies of a city phone bill dated Sept. 28-Nov. 6. Instead, she was trying to find out why the Department of Parks and Recreation was spending several hundred dollars a month on telephone expenses.

When she began questioning the collect calls from Hawaii, the council members told her that the charges were reasonable and that there was nothing they could do about Keller’s absence because he maintained a legal residence in the city. When newspaper reports revealed that Keller used a friend’s address to meet the residency requirements, council members resolved to declare the city clerk’s position vacant.

Stiglich said she is glad Keller agreed instead to step down, but she still thinks the City Council was slow off the mark. “Somebody fell down on the job,” she said.

Noted for being something of a rambler who occasionally loses her place in conversations, Stiglich nevertheless exhibits the tenacity of a bulldog in whatever task she sets before herself.

When her two sons were still in nursery school, Stiglich took a job as a “snooper” with the county tax assessor’s office, a name referring to the now-defunct position of household property appraiser. When the county stopped taxing household property in the late 1960s, Stiglich continued to work for the county as a receptionist until she retired in 1978.

A Minnesota native, Stiglich grew up in a family that believed there were two kinds of women: those who followed their husbands and those who spoke their own minds. The women in her household were of the second sort.

And according to Stiglich’s 76-year-old husband, Joe, a retired inspector for Southern Pacific Railroad, the tradition endures: “I’m not interested in politics at all; that’s her affair,” he said.

From her carpenter father, Stiglich inherited a talent for working with wood, and at 67 she went back to school to hone her skills. Two years later, she received an associate degree in construction from El Camino Community College. Today, she has a wood shop in the garage of her home where she makes contemporary-style furniture for her two sons and four grandchildren.

Although Stiglich says she was always interested in civic affairs, she didn’t take on the role of whistle-blower until early 1990, when she became upset to learn that a developer had proposed building a senior housing complex on a vacant lot near her home.

The project was never built, but her interest in city government grew. Stops at City Hall became an integral part of her weekly rounds.

Her style, however, has not always endeared her to city officials.

Mayor Steve Andersen said he has talked to half a dozen employees at City Hall who have described Stiglich as abrasive, especially when she doesn’t get her way.

“She berates the City Council,” Andersen said. But “on balance, I think raising public issues in a public meeting is a good thing to do. . . . I think she raises some good points occasionally.”

City Atty. Michael Adamson was less diplomatic: “She is not very patient or polite. She doesn’t seem to think we have anything to do or have any duties . . . (as if) we’re just waiting for her to come in and can mobilize our resources to cater to her every whim.”

Stiglich admits that she is easily provoked to anger. But she said, “I feel I need these questions asked.”

And recently, she found something else to raise her eyebrows at: a $1.51 collect phone call from El Segundo to the city attorney’s office.

Adamson told her that the call had come from a staff attorney who needed to check on a case on his day off. But the idea of charging taxpayers more than $1 for a phone call that could have cost 25 cents irked her so much she had to look into it further.

“Now I thought, what is that for?” Stiglich told the City Council last month. “So I called over there and it was the golf course, so then that kind of makes me mad. Now why is somebody calling from the golf course to the city?”