Ouster of Montijo’s Is Made Official by Council

Ben Montijo, the embattled executive director of the San Diego Housing Commission, was officially ousted Friday when the City Council voted unanimously not to renew his contract.

Montijo sat in the first row of a mostly empty council chamber as his attorney, Shirlyn P. Daddario, read a prepared statement that, at one point, accused council members of making the Housing Commission too political.

Then he watched as they quickly voted, 6-0, to put him out of a job.

“If it’s a sunny weekend, I’m going to play a lot of tennis. . . . Do any of you play tennis?” Montijo told reporters as he left the meeting flanked by Daddario and commission spokesman Ken Guyer.

In a telephone interview later, Montijo said he felt relief but thought his ouster was “handled kind of shabbily. I think it could have been handled a little more dignified.”

“I just think that if an employer wants to make a change, they ought to approach the employee and handle it in confidence rather than handle it through the media,” he said. “Even way back from the beginning, I would have rather people come to me and say, ‘Hey, we don’t think we want to work for you.’ ”

Mayor Maureen O’Connor, who led the opposition to Montijo, said after the meeting Friday that she was glad the episode was “finally over.”

“It was like a marriage,” O’Connor said. “When the trust and the confidence breaks down, you really can’t put it back together again.”

Friday’s emergency meeting of the council, called by O’Connor 24 hours earlier, ratified a vote taken a day earlier by the San Diego Housing Commission, the majority of whom are council members.

Citing a lack of confidence and a “breach” in communication, the commission voted, 4-3, not to renew Montijo’s contract and to give him 60 days’ notice. The deadline to give Montijo the notice was to be Sunday, after which his contract would have been renewed automatically.

The move came after The Times reported last month that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had initiated an investigation into how Montijo and his staff handled the renovation of a 122-unit apartment complex in Southeast San Diego under a federal program.

Results of the commission’s own internal investigation, released last week, found the agency committed a number of irregularities and gave “extraordinary assistance” to the developers in the project.

At Thursday’s meeting, Montijo waged a desperate battle to save his $79,500-a-year job at the 130-employee agency. The executive director asked to have the matter heard in public, and then offered a sometimes rambling two-hour defense of his policies and accomplishments.

Although he was more low-keyed on Friday--he sat back while his attorney read a much shorter statement--Montijo again emphasized to council members that he could work with HUD officials and be effective. He proposed that council members keep him on for two to six months longer while the HUD investigation winds up.

Montijo also took a slap at the recent move by council members to take over direct control of the commission. In September, O’Connor and her colleagues ousted five members of the old appointed board and had themselves named as successors.

“I believe this commission has repoliticized,” Daddario read from the statement. “But if I should deal with it, not wash my hands and walk away from it. If I walked on water it would not go away. Controversy in some programs will always be with us.”

The six council members voting against renewing Montijo’s contract were O’Connor, Judy McCarty, Celia Ballesteros, Ed Struiksma, Abbe Wolfsheimer and Mike Gotch.

Missing were council members William Jones, Bill Cleator and Gloria McColl. Jones has disqualified himself from Housing Commission votes because of a former conflict of interest involving his ownership of a small apartment complex.

Cleator said Thursday he would miss the vote because he was scheduled to appear on a radio talk show and then “go to the desert” for the weekend. Interviewed on the air, Cleator said he believed Montijo was being tried in the press, but he wouldn’t be at the meeting to vote for the executive director.

McColl, who voted to renew Montijo’s contract on Thursday, skipped the meeting because she had some appointments in her district before heading “to the mountains” for the weekend, an aide said.

Gotch, who was supposed to be in Los Angeles attending a state Coastal Commission meeting, said he returned to San Diego instead to participate in the council vote.

“I have been displeased for quite some time with Ben Montijo’s management style and with the poor morale of his staff,” Gotch said. “I had felt that he gave little attention to critical detail.”

Mac Strobl, a lobbyist who helped hire Montijo in 1979 and who is a former housing commissioner, said Friday he felt it was “unfortunate that it’s come to this.”

“I’m still not sure that the criticisms that have led to this are justified,” he said. “But the other side of the coin is that an executive director in that capacity serves at pleasure of (the) board of control, and if that board believes a change is necessary, I don’t think it is appropriate to attempt to obstruct that change.”