Outspoken Health Chief Not Immune to Criticism : County: Some say Dr. Gary Feldman personifies their idea of a surgeon general.

When wildfires turned the Ventura County skies orange and black, Gary Feldman was on the phone to the sheriff’s emergency operations center.

When the Northridge earthquake shook Southern California, Feldman responded, walking the streets of quake-damaged Fillmore and Simi Valley.

And when helicopters buzzed over Camarillo, spraying a syrupy pesticide mix as part of a state-run effort to eradicate a Mediterranean fruit fly infestation, agriculture officials saved Feldman a seat in the aircraft.

Not a firefighter or a disaster coordinator, Feldman has been the county’s public health officer since October, 1993. A pediatrician by training, Feldman has been speaking out, during crises and between, with warnings and advice on the health risks of wildfire-related smoke inhalation, valley fever, malathion, measles and flesh-eating bacteria.

His job is, in part, to be the surgeon general of Ventura County. Indeed, those who work with Feldman are quick to point out similarities between his local role and the national one played by the country’s top doctor.

“He looks like a surgeon general,” County Supervisor Frank Schillo said. “I think he has the political skills.”

He has the bushy white beard of former President Reagan’s surgeon general, Dr. C. Everett Koop. Like former President Bush’s surgeon general, Antonia Novello, he speaks fluent Spanish. And, like ousted Clinton Administration Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, his views on sex education have drawn the ire of some social issues conservatives.

The beard, Feldman said, has graced his face since he was 19. He shaved it for his wedding day in December, 1963, but has worn it since.

The Spanish, he said, was learned during a year’s sabbatical in Spain, and honed on yearly trips to Central and South America, where Feldman volunteers with teams that offer reconstructive plastic surgery to impoverished people.

As for the sex education issue, Feldman has so far been more diplomatic than Elders was. At a Ventura County Board of Education meeting last month, Feldman patiently sat in the audience, awaiting his turn on a speakers list until 11 p.m. before calmly reading a prepared statement. He stopped before finishing when his time expired.

The board eventually voted to ban two AIDS education groups from sex education workshops for teachers, despite Feldman’s opposition. But it allowed county public health workers to continue to appear in classrooms.

“I don’t see that as a victory,” said Feldman, 52. “This is just a skirmish in a very, very long process.”

He said he understands why some parents are angry.

“Look what’s happened in society. We’ve had huge changes,” he said. “I think that the AIDS thing is very scary. We know why (parents) are so upset and why these are such troubling times.”

Still, Feldman’s empathetic words are not enough to satisfy critics such as Claire Connelly, who served with Feldman on the AIDS Advisory Committee to the County Board of Supervisors.

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“He’s extremely liberal,” said Connelly, president of the Gay and Lesbian Resource Center in Camarillo.

Connelly said she disagrees with the county Public Health Services’ practice of giving grants to other agencies to conduct AIDS education in the schools instead of the department teaching a more balanced program. “Students get a pro-condom, pro-sex approach,” she said.

Feldman’s detractors do not limit their criticism to his views on sex education.

“I’m very disappointed in his response and his attitude,” said Terri Gaishin, chairwoman of the Group Against Spraying People, which opposes the aerial spraying of malathion. She said that Feldman has not done enough of his own research into the effects of the pesticide on humans, and that the doctor has been late responding to invitations to the group’s events.

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Feldman has voiced support for the aerial malathion spraying program. Although state officials maintain that there is no health risk from the pesticide, Feldman acknowledges: “There’s no such thing as zero risk.”

Feldman also drew flak for his opposition to November’s Proposition 187, which aimed to deny public services, including non-emergency medical care, to illegal immigrants.

“He’s trying to push a bureaucratic agenda,” said Steve Frank, who coordinated the Ventura County campaign for Proposition 187. Frank contended that Feldman favors treating illegal immigrants as a way to keep his public health empire large. “It’s just the attitude that bigger is better, more is better.”

Feldman, for his part, accepts the criticism as part of the job, a natural consequence of being outspoken in the defense of the public’s health.

“I get angry calls for all kinds of reasons,” he said. “If you duck every issue, you’re useless to people.”

Taking sides has won Feldman some fans, as well.

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“I think he’s been honest and he’s showed a lot of courage,” said Rex Laird, executive director of the Ventura County Farm Bureau, which supports the pesticide spraying.

And even Gaishin acknowledges that “he’s not been difficult to deal with.”

Born in Pittsburgh, Pa., the son of an anatomy teacher and a struggling inventor, Feldman studied math at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then earned a master’s degree in computer science at Stanford University.

At Stanford in the late 1960s, he worked on a federally funded artificial intelligence project that he thought would help guide a Mars probe. Instead, the technology was used to build smart bombs.

Disillusioned, Feldman applied to graduate schools to study psychology. But not a single one admitted him, he said. So he went to Stanford Medical School instead, graduating in 1972.

Even though he could not get into a graduate psychology program, no one denies that Feldman is very smart.

“Super-intelligent,” said Bernie Schaeffer, director of training and information at the Tri-Counties Regional Center, which treats people with developmental disabilities. Feldman worked there for 17 years before joining Public Health Services. “There were times working with Gary when I thought he was brighter or smarter than the whole bunch of us put together.”

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When Feldman arrived in Ventura County in 1976, it was on a bicycle.

“I remember hearing that he had been hired, and it took weeks before we ever saw the guy,” Schaeffer said. The delay was the time it took to bicycle down from San Francisco. “It was an early suggestion of the guy’s varied skills and interests,” Schaeffer said.

When Feldman took over the public health job in October, 1993, he arrived without any formal training in the field.

“I didn’t really know a lot about public health,” he said.

But the slew of disasters quickly brought him up to speed. Feldman said experience has been the best teacher.

Kay Maloney, director of public health nursing, said it took the public health staff some time to adjust to Feldman, as well.

There were some complaints at the start about the number of days that Feldman spends traveling outside Ventura County. Maloney said that the gripes have subsided, however, and that Feldman keeps in touch by beeper and cellular telephone.

Feldman said he spends two or three days a month in Sacramento on county business. He said he goes there to keep abreast of legislation that affects public health and to seek out grant money to support Ventura County’s programs. He also serves as head of the Data Committee of the California Conference of Local Health Services.

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For the most part, however, Feldman draws praise from his colleagues. “Political talent” is the phrase that comes up again and again.

That talent will be put to the test as the County Board of Supervisors embarks on a review of the Health Services Agency, which oversees the division where Feldman works as well as the county hospital. Phillipp K. Wessels, who was head of the Health Services Agency, recently died.

Feldman said he is “very interested” in participating in the review, which could result in budget cuts or an administrative reorganization.

Ask Feldman about his goals for the future, however, and he does not talk about budgets or bureaucratic survival struggles.

He talks about child immunization.

Forty percent of Ventura County children younger than 2 do not have all the shots they should, he said.

To remedy that situation, Feldman, the computer science whiz, hopes that a computerized registry of births and child immunization records will help the county’s Public Health Services keep better track.

Feldman, the political animal, works the state Legislature, hoping that it will approve a bill to allow such record-keeping. And Feldman, the county’s top doctor, sat recently atop an examining room table in the trailers that serve as Ventura’s public health clinic, thinking of all the work to be done between disasters.

“We’re still far from perfect,” he said.

Times correspondent Catherine Saillant contributed to this story.