July 14, 2004

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Palo Alto Online

The most trusted person in City Hall

by Bill D'Agostino

The two sides can't see eye-to-eye. One side wants to turn 19 acres of the current city dump into a recycling center when the landfill closes in 2011; the other side wants it to become a pastoral park. The two eco-friendly rivals have such dissonance, they don't even agree on the financial numbers framing the discussion.

Enter City Auditor Sharon Erickson. City officials have asked Erickson and her small staff to sort through the numbers, double-checking Public Works employees' data to allow the thorny policy debate, and not the quibbled-over facts, be center stage.

"I took it as a high compliment that people thought that we could go in and be objective and fair, and at least sort through some of the details," said Erickson, a Palo Alto native. "It's not like we can make any tough decisions for them, but we can do some of the grunt work."

The compliment was intended, city leaders said. During her three years as city auditor, Erickson "has earned a tremendous amount of respect, both among the staff and the council member and the public at large," Vice Mayor Jim Burch said.

Much of that good will emanates from Erickson's October 2003 report that was highly critical of the city's planning department. The report found that the process for approving remodeling construction projects was widely seen as "redundant, uncoordinated and wasteful." The audit suggested 34 ideas for improving the long-reviled procedures. Both inside and outside of the City Hall, local leaders raved about the report as much as they had panned the previous planning process. In May, Erickson won a Knighton Award for "best performance audit report" from the National Association of Local Government Auditors for the work.

The aim of the city's auditor is to help residents and policy-makers avoid "groupthink," Erickson said, intentionally mirroring the term the Senate Intelligence Committee recently used to describe the run up to the Iraqi war.

Visiting Erickson's seventh-floor office in City Hall, with a fabulous panoramic view of the city, it might be hard to believe that the charming and diplomatic mother of two has gotten a reputation as a tough-nosed watchdog. But it's precisely that affable and low-key nature -- paired with her searing intelligence -- that makes her such a good auditor, according to her former boss, San Jose's auditor Jerry Silva.

"She's not someone who's going to scare you. You know she's going to be fair about it and she's going to give you a very objective assessment," Silva said. "That's difficult because no one likes to be audited."

A Stanford University graduate with a degree in political science, Erickson decided to become an auditor after careers running a day care center and an advertisement agency fizzled. While unemployed, she learned about government auditing from a neighbor and thought it would be a good fit for her. In the late 1980s, she went to a monthly meeting of internal auditors specifically to schmooze with Silva and ask him for a job.

"I just sat myself down next to him and I said, 'You need to hire me. I would be really good at this. I'm a detailed-oriented kind of a person,'" Erickson recalled. "He gave me an entry level job and I worked my way up from there."

"She set me up and stalked me and I had no idea," Silva remembered with a laugh.

When Erickson began working in San Jose, she had zero experience as an auditor. But she quickly learned his process for going in and analyzing a city service to find the flaws and fixes.

After 12 years in San Jose, Erickson was hired by the Palo Alto City Council in June 2001. She now reports directly to the nine council members, not to City Manager Frank Benest. That independence from the majority of City Hall employees is necessary for her to do her job, she said.

"If people are stonewalling me for information, I can play the card that I'm just going to go to City Council," Erickson said. "So that's helpful, as much fun as it is to report to all those bosses."

It's also occasionally frustrating since she can only recommend changes, not make them herself. But overall, Erickson said she loves what she does because it's both fun and she believes that she is bettering the lives of Palo Altans.

"I just feel really strongly about the importance of local government," Erickson said. "I think local government is what makes this country different. We have streets that are paved, for the most part. We have clean water. We have sewer systems. We have relative safety in a lot of our neighborhoods. We have electricity that works. Those are the things that set this country apart and make a lot of other things possible that other countries don't have. The kind of work that we do on the local level is just extraordinarily important to people's lives."

Along with her husband, she lives in the Palo Alto home she grew up in (she graduated from Gunn High School in 1967), which they purchased after her parents died.

"I never got very far away. The farthest east I ever lived was Pleasanton; the farthest west was Palo Alto," she said. "I found the right climate and I stuck with it. That's my story."

Staff writer Bill D'Agostino can be e-mailed at bdagostino@paweekly.com

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