PROFILE / DON PENMAN : Baldwin Park’s New Manager Ready to Tackle Big Challenge

BALDWIN PARK —  Not all of Don Penman’s friends think coming to Baldwin Park is the best move in the young administrator’s career.

The previous city manager resigned under fire last May. In his wake, five other top officials--including the mayor, police chief and interim city manager--have also departed.

Morale has been low. Money is short. And any hope of quick relief was squelched in November when voters overwhelmingly rejected a proposed increase in the city’s utility tax.

“Why would you want to go there?” they asked Penman, 38, husband, father of two, Little League coach and Presbyterian church leader. “It’s so unstable.”

But after seven years as city administrator of San Fernando, where he is credited with turning around a town that suffered many of the same problems nagging Baldwin Park today, Penman is ready to scale new heights.

He is excited by the chance to manage a staff of 195 city employees, nearly double that of San Fernando. There are 63,000 residents, more than triple San Fernando’s population. Yet there will be only $2.3 million in sales tax revenues to work with, not even close to the $3.1 million generated by the tiny community north of Pacoima.

“I would hate to go through life backing away from those challenges,” Penman said the other day in the trailer that has housed his office for the last two months while San Fernando City Hall is being remodeled.

On Wednesday, the four remaining members of the Baldwin Park City Council voted unanimously to give him the chance after a sometimes frustrating seven-month search, during which several interim candidates declined the job. Penman will take over as city manager Jan. 29.

He will earn $86,500 a year, about $10,000 more than his current salary. He will also receive a city-owned car, equipped with a cellular phone, to make the 40-plus-mile commute from his San Fernando Valley home.

“If he’s the type of person who enjoys a challenge,” said Mayor Pro Tem Bette Lowes, “we can certainly provide it.”

If he can do for Baldwin Park anything even close to what he’s credited with having accomplished in San Fernando, he’ll be the town hero.

It’s widely agreed that San Fernando was in a sorry state before Penman was named administrator in 1982. The San Fernando Redevelopment Agency had just lost $700,000 due to sloppy paper work, Penman recalled. And over the previous three years, the city had been forced to use $1 million from its reserves to balance the budget, leaving only $300,000 in emergency cash.

“He had his work cut out for him,” said San Fernando Mayor Daniel Acuna. “There was a total lack of leadership. City Hall was in such a sad state.”

Penman, who graduated from USC in 1975 with a master’s degree in public administration and had served as deputy city manager in Simi Valley, set out to clean house.

He got rid of several part-time department heads and replaced them with permanent staff members. He bought new computers. And he tossed out the antiquated telephones the city had been leasing and bought a modern system.

“A lot of that was just sound management,” Penman said. “It didn’t require a lot of genius.”

Then he launched the most ambitious redevelopment effort in the city’s history. Like Baldwin Park, San Fernando had grown into a predominantly Latino community. Per capita income was falling. And the big stores that had been in town for years started heading west toward more affluent suburbs.

Penman negotiated a deal that brought a Pace Membership warehouse and a Home Depot to the site of the old San Fernando airport. A Jeep dealership came to town. An industrial park opened. Plans for a new Tianguis store, part of the Mexican supermarket chain owned by Vons, are now in the works.

With the sales tax revenues rolling in, a new senior center was built at one of the city parks. A new police station was constructed. City Hall is being renovated. And a new public library is slated to be built on the old police station site.

“He was the first professional city administrator we had,” said Councilman James Hansen, who counts 41 separate projects completed or under way during Penman’s tenure. “If he had chosen the private sector, he would have been the president of a company somewhere.”

In fact, no one in city government seems to have a word to say against Penman, a trim, athletic man with a hint of red in his hair inherited from his Scottish grandparents.

Councilman Jess Margarito, who believes Penman has served the city well, complains only that redevelopment sometimes came at the expense of human services and housing.

“He’s very fair and interacts well with people of all persuasions,” Margarito said. “But he’s been a little slow to respond to quality-of-life-type issues. He should have been a little more proactive in helping to envision answers for some of our deteriorating neighborhoods.”

Yet, as others in the community point out, there was such disarray when Penman came on board that the basic building blocks of the city needed to be put in place before other problems could be handled.

“He had to set the stage first,” said Jose Hernandez, a city planning commissioner and professor of urban studies at Cal State Northridge. “You have to have a strong economic base before you can move into the area of social needs.”

Penman sees parallels between the San Fernando of the early 1980s and the Baldwin Park of today. And for all the turmoil that has rocked his new city, he is confident of being able to bring about some of the same changes.

“Despite all the uncertainty, I think the council really wants to put that behind them and move ahead,” he said. “I have a lot of energy and enthusiasm. If that’s what the council’s looking for, that’s what they’re going to get.”