Public Eye

Michael Beck was introduced to Pasadena as its new city manager an hour ago in a short City Hall meet-and-greet.

Unlike 17 years ago, the last time an outsider -- Phil Hawkey -- was selected to lead the troops here, the City Council and staff did a brilliant job of circling the wagons and keeping the selection process air tight over the last eight months since Cynthia Kurtz retired.

All that is known, and this unofficially, is that there was a second finalist from among the 118 who applied, that she is a woman, perhaps from Arizona, and that there were some issues surrounding the Pasadena council's inability to talk to her current council after she filed a sexual-harrasment suit and they were not best pleased with her.

Beck, currently assistant city manager in Riverside, is a longtime Inland Empirer, taking a bachelor's degree and MBA at UC Riverside and then serving as director of economic development for the university. He lives in Claremont, where the fact that he's got five kids and four are still in school will keep him domiciled -- and facing a lousy commute both ways -- for the foreseeable future.

Claremont -- where Hawkey, now executive vice president of the University of La Verne, lives. Beck says he doesn't know Hawkey, and has only recently -- presumably to suss out whether he should really take this job -- talked to him on the phone.

Affable, cool but not distant, at ease in his first glare of the spotlight here -- those are first impressions from the press conference.

Since questions about his commitment to preservation were some of the only criticisms that have come up since his name was first made known, the fact that the city's leading preserationist, Claire Bogaard, was sitting in the front row for the announcement was of symbolic importance. And Claire told me that she immediately checked with her sources in the city about Beck once she heard his name, and that to a person, including a current staffer with the National Trust, they were very high on Beck.

Councilwoman Margaret McAustin, one of the council's so-called Riverside Caucus -- the three who made site visits to the city -- went even farther, saying that everyone she talked to there who had worked with Beck, in City Hall and in the business community, "loved" the man.

Clearly the council sought to avoid the circus that surrounded the Hawkey selection, when a short list of three finalists was made known. Two of them were African-American men, one a Bay Area city administrator, another a county administrator from North Carolina. When a divided council selected Hawkey, who is white, he was put in an untenable position through no fault of his own.

Though the council's vote was announced publicly as unanimous, it was being said afterward that at least two of the eight preferred initially at least the woman candidate.

But the call has been made. Welcome on Pasadena, Michael Beck. There are many similarities between the cities -- old for California, born in the citrus era when they were standalone meccas but now surrounded by suburbs, ethnically diverse, seats of great centers of learning. And there are many differences -- nowhere in the world will you find a more active -- crabby, even -- public anxious for your ear than in the Crown City. It won't be anything like the wild ride of the Hawkey years. That was a different Pasadena, and a very different council, which couldn't keep its lips sealed about anything at all. But it will certainly be a ride ...