This Top Administrator Uses Songs, Noisemakers, and a Lifelong Passion for Politics to Deal With the County’s Thorniest Problems
BY LEA ASCHKENAS
When it comes to talking about his profession, SLO County administrator David Edge can be downright irreverent.
Giving a brief tour of the Board of Supervisors chambers, he spreads his arms and inhales deeply.
"Welcome," he says, "to the bowels of bureaucracy."
A female employee sitting beneath Edge’s arm span gives him a quizzical, slightly irritated look but refrains from saying anything.
"OK, so if these are the bowels, what does that make you? No, I know. Don’t answer," Edge says in a tone that could be mistaken for apologetic if it wasn’t followed by a poorly stifled snicker.
This is the man in charge of a $250-million, 2,400-employee government complex?
Continuing down the hall toward his office, Edge holds up a newspaper clipping that he’s been carrying.
"Someone sent me this," he says. "It’s about a former colleague from Kings County who’s now a CAO [county administrative officer] in Del Norte County and he’s being charged with embezzlement. He’s accused of trying to deposit a county check into a private bank account he set up for a bogus company."
Edge shakes his head in disbelief.
"Great reputation I have to live up to, no?" he asks, settling his tall, thin body into a slump in his chair.
But then, the next minute, he’s sitting upright, sliding forward on his chair. Hardly the bland, faceless bureaucrat, Edge speaks animatedly, almost gushingly of his job and the dedication of his co-workers, who he says often come in to do extra work on the weekends.
Despite his seeming disdain for the political scene, Edge transitions easily from sarcasm to something resembling earnestness when he looks back, on the verge of his one-year anniversary here, at the tribulations and triumphs of the bureaucratic life.
Edge talks about his job in terms most people reserve for discussions of food or sex. He says he accepted his position last spring after a discussion with supervisors Harry Ovitt and Mike Ryan got him "salivating" about the possibilities to make organizational changes in county government. And, he says, when he was facilitating the Hospital Review Committee, he gave the members noisemakers to "diffuse the run of passion" that political debate can bring on.
"It also helps cut down on the floccinaucinihilipilification," he says. When asked what he’s talking about, he smiles and responds that none of his committee members understood either when he told them to use the noisemakers as "flocci flags" to redirect conversation.
"Floccinaucinihilipilification" is a noun that means "the act of estimating as worthless." Edge spells it without pause, as if he’s simply reciting the alphabet or retelling a childhood tongue twister.
"It was the first word I learned as a child in England," says Edge, with more than a trace of a Cockney accent. "Once you know that, everything else seems easy."
And, according to Paul Roller, general manager of the SLO County Employees Association (read: "union"), it’s this wry English humor that makes Edge so approachable.
"I think he’s a very impressive CAO," says Roller, who served on the Hospital Review Committee. "He’s very personable and has a good sense of humor and is intelligent. I don’t know whether it’s the English accent or what."
Edge is the third county administrator Roller has worked with in SLO.
"The previous CAO [Robert Hendrix] was here for nine years," says Roller. "But I’ve had more meaningful conversations with Edge in his nine months here than I had [with Hendrix] in the previous nine years."
"When we first met for the Hospital Review Committee and he pulled out the noisemakers and used this big word that none of us understood, I think we all thought, ‘Oh, God. Is this gonna work?’" says Roller. "But he set the right tone, and that’s difficult to do, especially when you’ve got 16 people in a room who’ve all got very strong positions."
Roller predicts that he and Edge will butt heads in the future, given the sometimes opposing goals of their two positions.
"As a CAO, his job is often to advocate for things we [the union] are not in favor of. But I feel confident that with his gentlemanly aura and his people skills, we can agree to disagree and move on."
Roller says that at a recent Board of Supervisors meeting, Edge wove bits of philosophy from Aristotle and Plato into a discussion of the benefits and disadvantages of civil service protection for county department heads.
"I went up to him afterward," says Roller. "And I said, ‘David, I’ve never seen a CAO invoke Plato or Aristotle.’"
In addition to philosophy minilessons and noisemaker sessions, Edge has implemented the Song Rule to enliven and streamline political discussions.
"You try to break things up so it’s not so intense," he says. "So I decided that if you’re late coming back from a break at a staff meeting, you have to sing a song."
Of course, it was Edge himself who was the first to be late. He sang an old rugby song from his 26 years of playing the game.
"You do whatever’s needed to move the process along," he says of his unconventional meeting agendas.
For nearly 30 of his 46 years, Edge has been working to refine the political process, either through his studies at the university or his work in various government offices in England and California. And as a child in Blackpool, England, Edge ran numbers from the polls to the house of his grandfather, who was one of the co-founders of the country’s Labor Party.
"My earliest memories are all political," says Edge. "I never really considered doing anything else. Well, I contemplated being an academic when I was getting my Ph.D., but I think that happens to anyone who stays in academia too long."
Edge first considered studying and possibly practicing politics in the United States during the Kennedy era.
"I remember I was 8 when Kennedy got elected," he says. "It was the early ’60s and the whole concept of an election being televised was still so new. Kennedy was so telegenic and it was a big difference from Britain where the presidents were all so stuffy and aloof. Everything that’s now clichéd about Kennedy rang inspirational at the time. There was the whole Camelot image and the idea that, for the first time, politicians were not separate from everyone else."
So, while working on his doctorate at the University of Kent in Canterbury, Edge applied for a grant to study for a year in the United States. He attended UC Davis for a year, researching the relationship between the federal and state governments. He met his future wife here, and she went back to England with him afterwards.
In 1980 the two returned to the United States, and Edge worked for the city of Fresno and Kings and San Benito counties before coming to SLO last May.
He says his main goals are to improve communication and accountability within the county government. When he discusses his approaches to doing this, he waves his hands above his head in a flurry, invisibly diagramming the structure of politics, borrowing quotes from Machiavelli and turn-of-the-century German sociologist Max Weber, who coined the term "bureaucracy" as an effective way to run an organization.
Edge laughs at how the word has since taken on such a pejorative connotation.
"It’s almost like the bureaucracy has become too competent," he says. "All the rules people put in place cancel each other out."
Although Edge believes the middle ground, especially on SLO County issues like land use, can only be found through political debate, he cautions that too much debate resolves certain problems while turning a deaf ear to others that are developing simultaneously.
"We shouldn’t be nibbling at the edges [of change]," he says. "We need to focus on changing the mindset of government. We have to allow government employees the freedom to fail. We need to encourage adventure and risk taking, and if we want to do this, we can’t spend time in public meetings crucifying our employees for making mistakes. We need to understand that it is possible to fail for the right reasons."
Edge also believes it’s important to question the status quo, although he has not always been rewarded for his efforts to do so.
In his previous job as a county administrator with San Benito County, Edge tried to save money on the building of a county jail. It’s a story he tells often to people looking for insight into him and the nature of government.
"We were a poor county and we were building the jail with bond money and the state was going to match [the amount of] the local money," he says. "We knew we needed a constitutionally viable jail so we looked into everything–how many toilets were needed, the size of cells, but we questioned, ‘Why do we have to use this type of pipe?’ We hired a construction management company which was something that wasn’t usually done."
The price of a jail is measured in cost per bed, and the county came up with a bid of $44,000, which was nearly half of the Board of Corrections’ estimate.
"I thought they’d be thrilled," says Edge.
But to his dismay, the Board of Corrections set about trying to find any minuscule fault they could with the county’s bid.
"We’d messed with their presentation, this little podunk county, and we made them look bad," he says. "They went through with a fine-tooth comb, looking for miscalculations. They said there wasn’t enough staffing. We said, ‘You’d be right if we staffed on eight-hour shifts, but we do 12-hour ones."
Here in SLO County, Edge has cut out waste or, as he likes to say, "looked for efficiencies" by bringing a critical eye to the workings of the county.
"Right now I’m looking into [former County Health Agency director] Susan Zepeda’s position," he says. "Within the Health Agency we have directors for the drug and alcohol program, the mental health program, and the public health program. Do we really need an agency head in addition to these three program managers? Would it be better to redirect that money to provide more services in a clinic?"
That type of questioning, which goes against the traditional grain, is what made Supervisor Mike Ryan interested in Edge during an interview last year.
"I was impressed by his forwardness and the way he took on answers directly," says Ryan. "He didn’t necessarily scope out where he thought the appropriate answer would be."
Today, much of Edge’s job as a county administrator involves giving answers to people who are confused about the way a program or government office works.
Edge says he receives calls all the time from people who have a question regarding a city in SLO County and don’t know what government agency to turn to.
With the Board of Supervisors, Edge says his advising begins when new supervisors first take office and are disappointed to discover how little power they have in allocating the budget.
"They think they’ll get to make all these [financial] decisions," he says. "But the reality is, of the $250-million budget, they get to decide what to do with about $50 million, and the rest is mandated by the state and federal government."
With the portion that the county is able to make decisions about, Edge would like to see more public interaction, more of a chance to redeem his profession by working with the community.
"A lot of people don’t trust the government. This Monica thing was just the icing on the cake, but there’s so much else–Vietnam, Watergate, so much idealism that’s gone."
The solution to regaining public trust? Edge believes it lies in an accountability spurred by communication.
"I think the people in San Benito trusted me," he says. "I would tell them the truth about county government–warts and all. I would say, ‘I’ll show you waste in places you don’t even know we have places.’"
And, of course, it can’t hurt to blow the noisemaker on those indulging in floccinaucinihilipilification.
Staff writer Lea Aschkenas is never late for a staff meeting.