Ex-Pasadena Mayor Takes On Challenge in Azusa

Rick Cole and his new employer, the city of Azusa, have one thing in common: an image problem.

Cole, who will start work as Azusa’s city manager in July, is a former Pasadena mayor known for his razor-sharp mind and switchblade tongue.

Azusa is an often overlooked town with a name derived from the Shoshone word for skunk. Landmarks include a landfill and a quarry, and its commercial core is so bleak that an AM/PM convenience store ranks among the city’s top sales tax generators.

“It’s really a desperate hour. We’ve become the caboose of the foothill communities,” said Cristina Madrid, mayor of the eastern San Gabriel Valley city of 45,000.

Madrid said the council needs to look beyond conventional solutions and people to turn the town around. She assesses Azusa’s condition with the raw honesty and resolve she says is needed, and many say Rick Cole exemplifies. “As the caboose, we want a jump-start, not incremental progress,” Madrid said.

In Cole, the council has picked an activist and politician who was a leader in turning Pasadena’s blighted downtown into one of Southern California’s most popular shopping and entertainment districts. They also are handing over the city’s management to someone who has never worked as a city administrator. But in the process they are saving money, paying Cole $30,000 less than the $130,000 his predecessor made.

It is a choice the council made with its eyes wide open, picking Cole from an applicant pool otherwise composed of career bureaucrats. “We went way out of the box,” Madrid said.

Cole’s lack of administrative experience has some wondering how he will handle the intricacies of managing a city staff of 265 while also answering to a City Council.

“It is a hard adjustment from assistant city manager or department head to city manager, it will be even harder for a guy with no experience,” said Alhambra City Manager Julio Fuentes, who was Azusa’s city manager in the late 1980s.

Before entering politics, Cole was involved in civil rights and anti-Vietnam war activities, and had been a journalist. While city managers tend to be quiet and careful not to offend their council bosses, Cole has always been blunt about his beliefs.

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As Pasadena’s vice mayor, he criticized the Tournament of Roses for appointing a direct descendant of Christopher Columbus as grand marshal of the 1992 Rose Parade. Citing the injustices of the 16th century Spanish conquest, Cole blasted the choice as one made by “an organization totally controlled by aging white men.”

But Cole has proven that he can compromise as well as provoke. A year after his swipe at the tournament, Cole lauded the group for including minorities and women in its executive committee.

Even in praising Azusa for selecting him, Cole reveals his distaste for the status quo. “I’m always amazed at how cautious and dull big institutions tend to be. When in doubt, they tend to promote mediocrity,” he said, contrasting Azusa’s boldness with what might be expected in most cities.

Since leaving the Pasadena council in 1995, Cole has been the regional director of the Local Government Commission, a nonprofit urban policy research group. As city manager, he will have a chance to practice the kind of community-building policies that he has been preaching. “It’s a chance to walk the walk,” Cole said.

Pasadena City Councilman and former Mayor William Paparian, who served on the council with Cole, said it will be a tough, if not impossible, move. Paparian doubted that he himself could make the switch to administration. “I could probably bluff my way through it for a while, but that’s about it.”

Paparian, who calls himself an “ex-friend” of Cole’s, nevertheless said Cole has helped to transform Pasadena and his vision could benefit Azusa. Paparian said that as an activist, Cole was a leader in bringing about district-based City Council elections, which enabled minorities to win council seats. “He brought social consciousness to the city that had been the conservative bastion of Southern California,” he said.

Born in Royal Oak, Mich., in 1953, Cole has lived in Pasadena since his childhood, and has captured public attention since his teens. At Blair High School he wrote for an underground newspaper called Iskra, named for a paper edited by Lenin, and was active in civil rights and antiwar protests.

He worked on the 1972 presidential campaign of antiwar Republican Rep. Paul N. (Pete) McCloskey and the unsuccessful congressional campaign of Brooklyn antiwar activist Allard K. Lowenstein.

Cole resigned from a job as a student liaison for the Pasadena Unified School District after conservative board members accused him of using his position to organize demonstrations, an allegation that he denies.

At 21, Cole entered American University in Washington, D.C. A year later, he transferred to Occidental College in Eagle Rock.

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As a student journalist, Cole and classmate John Hinrichs won a Los Angeles Press Club award for an investigative story on the denial of a promotion to the college’s only black professor. Cole and Hinrichs made headlines when the college accused them of stealing documents from the administration building. The students were eventually cleared.

After college, Cole earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and founded the Pasadena Weekly before winning election to the council in 1983.

Despite his seemingly radical past, Cole defies ideological categories. He has written columns expressing admiration for figures as disparate as Jonathan Jackson, his Blair classmate slain in a famous 1971 gun battle at a San Rafael courthouse in which a judge also lost his life, and the late Robert Finch, a Republican lieutenant governor and Nixon Cabinet member.

“I was raised in a Republican home, and my father always said ‘It’s not important what you think, but that you think,’ ” Cole said.

Cole sees his outspokenness and his background as a politician who had to rally public support as strengths that Azusa needs. “You have to tell people straight what the problems are, and include them in the solutions. That’s the Rick Cole approach,” he said.

Speaking of Azusa, Cole might well be addressing his own challenges in his new job. “There are real problems and image problems. The image problems are the tougher ones,” he said.

Azusa’s real problems are a $1-million-a-year deficit, a decaying downtown and lagging community involvement, Cole said.

Like several cities in the east San Gabriel Valley, Azusa’s population has soared in the last 20 years, growing 50% since 1980. Cole hopes to get more of the newer residents involved in civic affairs through such efforts as seeking neighborhood participation in developing a new general plan.

Cole has been a critic of depending on large retail stores for tax revenue, and wants to try other approaches.

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Instead of commercial real estate development, Cole wants to focus on improving Azusa’s downtown. He hopes to turn Azusa Avenue, the main thoroughfare, into a two-way street to provide easier access to the stores lining it.

The city also should find marketing niches for commercial development, he said. One such niche would be the city’s location abutting the Angeles National Forest. Cole wants to secure funding to reopen California 39 through the forest, which has been closed since the 1960s. Cole said that reopening the road would bring more people through the city and could fuel businesses such as ski and camping shops.

Cole may have a ready solution for some of the city’s woes. Rosedale, an 1,800-unit housing development, has already been proposed and is working its way through the approval process.

Azusa’s leaders hope that Cole also will be an ace in the hole. “He’s a high-risk, high-gain guy,” Paparian said. “Azusa’s gambling that with him they’ll come down on the gain side.”