While department sentiment is strong for the City Council to choose a hometowner – Capt. Hank Davies is the people¹s choice by a mile – Ms. Gross said she will not grant local candidates an edge.
"I will not walk into (the round of interviews) with any preconceived notions," she said.
Ms. Gross refused to confirm persistent reports that, in an attempt to shape the future, Mr. Montanio heavily recommended Capt. Cerres Black to the City Council as his successor.
Change Is Coming
Regardless of who the winning candidate is, it will be virtually impossible for the next police chief to be as close, personally and professionally, to any member of the City Council as Mr. Montanio was to Mayor Albert Vera. They were so close, spoke so often, that friends did not even note the great frequency with which they were together.
Covering thirty years, the last two police chiefs in Culver City have been hometown boys. Venice-born Ted Cooke, who served more than twenty-seven years, came over from the LAPD. Mr. Montanio, a Valley native, spent his entire career in Culver City
Around the Police Dept. and City Hall, where the hiring is done, there appears to be a consensus that Mr. Montanio¹s term was both disappointingly and predictably abbreviated.
Some of his officers told The Front P{age they believed all along that he never intended to stay on once he had maxed out his pension benefits last March. Other officers, nodding in agreement that they knew Mr. Montanio was destined to be a short-termer, say that her intended to leave on the one-year anniversary of his appointment. But he did not retire then, they said, because he did not want to give his growing chorus of critics the satisfaction of being right.
Challenging Montanio
One of Mr. Montanio¹s key deputies was even more precise, and perhaps harsher (see below) in a biting assessment of why her boss left when he did.
Unlike the melodrama that infused the last search for a police chief two years ago, the departure of the latest chief was not a signal for publicly expressed regrets from the Police Dept. and elsewhere. In Mr. Montanio¹s final days before his official Dec. 10 departure, two contrasting scenes played out.
Friends say that to Mr. Montanio¹s credit, he refused, out of modesty, to sanction a farewell affair. Still others, including the aforementioned deputy, said that it was "self-serving," the way that he chose to slip into technical retirement at the age of fifty-four.
They said Mr. Montanio¹s objective in blurring – "or inflating?" – his future course was to encourage speculation and discourage talk about his controversy-wracked term in office.
Privately, within the walls of the Police Dept., there were (mostly) discreet sighs of non-regret floating across the department when Mr. Montanio announced he was going to cash in his retirement chips. He has made an approximate two-year commitment to a secretive Homeland Security-type of assignment in an exotic "but dangerous" foreign location. Much of his job description was shrouded in vagueness.
Not only were no tears spent as Mr. Montanio’s abbreviated twenty-one-month tenure ended with shrug, one key deputy suggested her old boss was not entirely candid in his farewell.
The doubts that her boss¹s exit-story explanation is as glamourous and mysterious as he portrayed it.
"What¹s to hide about what he is going to do?" she asked with a shrug in an interview this week with thefrontpageonline.com. "He will be working for the federal government, a Homeland Security kind of assignment in Southeast Asia. He has been doing that for the last three years. Why does it have to be eerie-sounding, so mysterious? I believe he wanted to build it up so it would seem more prestigious than it is.
"He said he could not identify the country where he will be working. He said that almost no one will know how to find him. Come on. That is too much like James Bond for me.
"Montanio¹s work is not the big national security assignment he makes it out to be," the deputy said flatly.
Refusing to be identified for reasons that she said "should be obvious," the deputy ventured that "Montanio¹s departure was calculated not accidental.
"In his defense, because of all of the controversies that sprouted up certain arrests, and then not informing the City Council about the Vera events, the criticism and his health all of that weighed on him. Some say that he was lucky to be in the chief¹s position for as long as he was. The glamour went away quickly for him. He may have felt overwhelmed.
"Worst of all, he was supposed to be following a legend – which already is pressure – by being a reformer, a clean-up guy. He didn¹t clean up anything. That was disappointing, but not really surprising to many of us."
Most Grateful?
Going into the New Year, Interim Police Chief Bill Burck, not a candidate, at least yet, may be the member of the department who has the
most to be thankful for. When he was bumped up from Assistant Chief to Interim Chief, his annual salary was raised from $143, 208 to $156, 229.
