People / Spotlight on achievers : City Clerk’s Longevity Is One for the Books

“Rocky” was chosen best picture and Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976, the year Verna L. Rollinger was sworn in as Laguna Beach’s city clerk.

Celebrating her 20th anniversary this month, Rollinger has held the office longer than any elected city clerk now serving in Orange County. “I have children older than I was when I came to work here,” said Rollinger, 50.

A tenure of two decades is rare, said Maureen Cavin, manager of communications for the League of California Cities’ Orange County division, because elected city clerks are at the mercy of shifting political winds. “It’s a very long time to be a city clerk,” she said.

Rollinger, a longtime member of the political action committee Village Laguna, won reelection by large margins until 1992, when she got 5,889 votes to her opponent’s 5,286.

“That’s the closest anyone has ever come,” she said, to ousting her from the job, which pays $5,400 a month. Salary was an issue in the campaign. The Laguna Beach Taxpayers Assn. backed Rollinger’s opponent, who vowed to take a lower salary.

Robert R. Mosier, vice president of the group, said he thinks Rollinger has endured because Village Laguna has a long record of getting its candidates elected.

Others say that Rollinger has survived because she knows the city inside out. “I’m a real supporter of Verna’s,” said Alice Graves, chairwoman of the city’s Housing and Human Affairs Committee.

Rollinger is up for reelection this fall. Will she run? “Absolutely,” she said.