Yolo Official Candidate for City Manager : Ventura: Donna Landeros is considered by some to be the top contender. The administrator’s colleagues praise her performance.

The leading candidate for the job of Ventura city manager is a Santa Paula native who manages an agricultural county near Sacramento, City Hall sources said Wednesday.

If selected for the job, Donna Landeros, 46, would be the first permanent woman city manager in Ventura County history. The City Council is scheduled to resume hiring discussions when it meets in closed session on Monday.

Supervisors in Yolo County, where Landeros is chief administrator, praise her as one of the best administrators they have ever encountered.

“I have a tremendous amount of faith in her,” said Mike McGowan, chairman of the Yolo County Board of Supervisors. “She’ll be very difficult to replace.”

“She’s top-notch,” said Yolo County Supervisor George DeMars. “She’s strictly professional in everything she does.”

In Yolo County, Landeros makes $86,292 a year, plus $8,950 in benefits, according to county records there. Ventura’s former city manager, John Baker, who left the city in July to start his own consulting business, made $108,120 a year plus $23,957 in benefits at the time of his departure.

On Wednesday, city officials announced that Ventura Police Chief Richard Thomas will serve as interim city manager beginning Dec. 1, while the city waits for Landeros or another candidate to fill the job on a permanent basis. Thomas will replace another interim city manager of the same name--Richard Thomas, the retired top administrator of Santa Barbara--whose contract ends on Nov. 30.

The current interim city manager started his position on July 1, when then-manager Baker resigned.

Landeros declined to be interviewed, but through her secretary said that she grew up in Santa Paula, leaving after her high school graduation in 1966. Her parents, Bill and Eleanor Crouch, still live in town. Eleanor Crouch served as mayor of Santa Paula from 1977 to 1979.

Also through her secretary, Landeros said her husband is a migrant education teacher, and the couple has a 13-year-old son who is in the eighth grade. Yolo County Supervisor Helen Thomas, who said she is a personal friend of Landeros, said Landeros attended UCLA and worked after college for Los Angeles’ parks and recreation department.

Landeros moved to Yolo County five years ago, in the midst of one of the worst budget crises the county had ever faced, county officials there said. Yolo County has 150,000 residents and a strong agricultural base, in addition to businesses in the oil and food processing industries, county officials said.

UC Davis and the city of Davis, with a population of about 50,000, are located in Yolo County, as are three smaller cities--West Sacramento, with 30,000 people; Winters, with fewer than 5,000 people, and Woodland, the county seat, with a population of 40,000.

Yolo County is one of the state’s original counties, with a history that dates back more than 140 years. With funds in extremely short supply in recent years, Yolo County’s supervisors have made drastic budget cuts, including shutting down the county’s only public hospital and consolidating all the county’s courts in Woodland. The county now saves money by paying local private hospitals, clinics and doctors to provide medical care to the poor.

Supervisors said Landeros’ negotiating and leadership skills were key to making the budget-cutting go smoothly.

“(The county hospital) was an albatross,” DeMars said. “It was her decision that it had to go. It was her plans and negotiations that made it happen.”

One example of Landeros’ talents that her bosses mentioned repeatedly was her ability to broker a deal between the county’s long-feuding environmentalists and gravel miners.

For about 15 years, McGowan said, environmental advocates have butted heads with the miners, insisting that they cease taking gravel out of local riverbeds because it endangered the area’s plants and wildlife. But gravel mining is a big industry in Yolo County, and the miners say the community cannot afford to lose the jobs its industry creates, McGowan said.

About six months ago, the supervisors decided they were at the end of their patience with the quarrel, he said. So they asked Landeros to take a stab at settling it.

Landeros brought both sides together together in a room and made them talk to each other, he said. Today, the two factions are working out the final details of an agreement that the supervisors say has won approval from all but the most extreme environmentalists.

“There are other people who contributed to the success of the process,” McGowan said, “But it was Donna who really made it happen by her personal intervention.”

Landeros has been the only woman on a list of seven candidates the council has considered for the job. Ventura’s search for a new city manager has lasted for months and council members have said their closed-session bickering over the decision has reached a new level of animosity.

But they say the search should end soon. Councilman James Monahan said he hopes to have a new, permanent city manager on board by mid-January. Thomas, the police chief and soon-to-be interim manager, said he was told he will be able to return to law enforcement within about a month.

If his replacement is Donna Landeros, the city will be extremely fortunate, said Penny Bohannon, Ventura County’s lobbyist and legislative analyst, who has known Landeros professionally for a dozen years.

Her advice to the council, Bohannon said, is “don’t let her get away.”

“She deals very well with people, is tremendously hard-working and dedicated,” Bohannon said. “She’s very direct and she doesn’t mince words. She would be a tremendous asset in any city.”