With one eye on the Burbank city manager's seat and, of course, a
heavy heart, Judie Sarquiz, daughter of former Burbank Mayor Larry
Stamper, departed from the city clerk's office for the final time last
week and carted her belongings to her new office in the Financial
Services Department.
Stumping for the elected office of city clerk in January, Sarquiz
gushed, "I really love what I'm doing. I feel as if I'm giving back, and
in a lot of jobs you can't do that."
Aw, shucks.
Just a few months later, Sarquiz was changing decks in the middle of a
heated poker game when she admitted, "I do love what I do, but I've also
thought for quite some time that my skills, abilities, love for work and
career path would probably be better played out in a city management-type
position, whatever that role might be."
Aha.
And it was just last Friday that she appeared on Charter
Communications Cable Channel 6, sharing her dreams with the city's public
information officer about how one day she would LOVE to be the city
manager of a wonderful city just like Burbank -- or maybe Burbank itself.
Interesting timing, what with the rumored impending retirement of City
Manager Bud Ovrom in the not-too-distant future.
But aside from that, Sarquiz's retreat from an elected office to an
appointed office is a real disservice to the 9,013 registered Burbank
voters who punched her chad last February.
It isn't like the clerk's pay was all that bad. On the contrary, it
was pretty darn good.
Elected in 1997, Sarquiz received two cost-of-living raises totaling
5% in the first two years of service to the community. In December 1999,
she received another raise, this time a 5% increase, after she wrote a
memo pointing out that her position paid 11% less than the same job in
five cities of comparable size. We wonder how many staff hours -- at
taxpayers' expense -- it took for City Hall employees to dig and sift
through oodles of paperwork to find out that factoid.
It was in November 2000 that she received a City Council-approved 5%
pay hike, raising her annual pay from $77,208 to $81,068. Then, in August
2001, she received a 3.61% raise -- up to $7,000 a month -- just to bring
her in line with the Glendale city clerk's salary.
Look, life happens. Sarquiz, who's been at City Hall for the past 10
years since graduating with a bachelor's degree in political science from
Cal State Long Beach, is entitled to move on in her career. And as city
clerk, it's widely accepted that's she's done a pretty good job.
But if she'd planned to move along in city government, it would have
been nice if she'd made that decision six months before running for city
clerk again, instead of six months after. As it stands, the balance of
the clerk's four-year term won't be finished by the person Burbankers
really wanted for the job, someone who was rewarded handsomely during her
tenure.
That isn't a betrayal, exactly, but it sure is a large disappointment.
