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Not a Mad Hatter – Unflappable Town Clerk celebrates 20 years of public service |
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Friday, 14 August 2009 |
By Catherine Billey
Mammoth Times Staff Writer
 Mammoth Times Photo/Catherine Billey Mammoth Town Clerk Anita Hatter.
“I really just kind of lucked into being a public servant. I’ve worked with some amazing, wonderful co-workers. It’s great to be in a community where you can see everything. You’re not locked into one little cell,” she said in an interview.
“You know the media, you know pretty much all the politicians in the region, you know the chief of police and the fire chief, and have interaction with them and understand about what they do. For such a little town, you can gain a broad perspective.”
A town clerk’s main duties are set forth in the Government Code of the State of California and the town ordinance. Among her varied responsibilities, Hatter keeps records of meeting minutes, maintains the municipal code, coordinates elections, swears people in and fills vacancies.
Arguably, a foremost responsibility is keeping cool under pressure. “Sometimes the most challenging thing is to keep a neutral face during a council meeting and not react, because I’m there to record, not to judge,” Hatter agreed.
The only time she lost her cool was after a respected mentor, former town manager Glenn Thompson, passed away and was remembered in a public meeting. She said she broke down in tears.
Small town roots
Born and raised in a “bookish family” in Pine Valley near San Diego with her parents, two brothers and a sister, Hatter is no stranger to small-town life.
“I actually attended a one-room school from first grade until the fifth grade,” she said.
By 1974, her father was having a mid-life crisis – “like everyone else’s dad was having at that stage in the mid-70s” – and moved the family to Mammoth for a job at Tamarack Lodge when it was owned by Bob Stanford, a close friend.
Hatter was in the first graduating class of Mammoth High School in 1975. She went on to the University of Redlands to receive a bachelor’s degree in English Literature in 1979. “I love reading and writing,” she said. “Mostly reading.”
Returning to Mammoth in 1980, she worked as a checker at the Safeway, then located where Rite Aid is today.
It was the year of the big earthquake. “It was Memorial Day weekend. People were still skiing. It really shook things up at the Mountain and emptied a lot of shelves at the grocery store.”
The fortunate thing, however, is that it happened on a weekend. At the old elementary school in Long Valley, light fixtures came down and glass was embedded in the kids’ desks. “If it had happened during the week, it would have been a nightmare.”
The town emptied out after that. And in nthe fall, Hatter moved to the Bay Area to study Mandarin Chinese at the U.C. Berkeley Extension with the intention of teaching English as a second language in China. “I was terrible,” she said with characteristic frankness.
By then, the Reagan recession years had kicked in. Hatter spent most of the 1980s working as a bank teller and then as administrative assistant for the architectural firm of Storek & Storek, which specialized in renovating historic buildings like Oakland’s Victorian Row.
Restless for intellectual stimulation and to be of service, she went for a single-subject teaching credential in English through the Bay Area Writing Project at U.C. Berkeley and moved to Crowley Lake in 1989 to teach 12-year-olds at the Home Street Middle School in Bishop.
“It was hell,” she said. “I missed grown-ups. To be a really good teacher, you should like being with 12-year-olds all day long. It’s very isolating.”
The most interesting job
But that year brought a fresh opportunity, when the Town of Mammoth Lakes – which had incorporated five years prior – was hiring for three administrative secretarial positions. Hatter came on board and reported to town manager, Paul Marangella.
“He was a great boss,” she said, recalling that he presided over one of the town’s first controversies when Ron Stevens, Executive Director for Mammoth Lakes Resort Association, was caught embezzling.
“Paul had the unenviable task of bringing the marketing in-house. That’s when we formed the tourism commission and developed the Tourism Department.”
The move was very unpopular with people who had supported the MLRA. “There was actually a threat to recall all five council members over that issue.”
But she credits Marangella with modernizing the town organization. She said his contract was bought out in late 1990 after a Grateful Dead concert debacle reshaped town council.
Hatter was promoted to town clerk the year after that. “It’s the most interesting job I ever have had,” she said.
The town manager by then was Thompson. “He was a great teacher,” she enthused. “Plus, at that age of technology, I typed everything he wrote. As his assistant, I knew what he was thinking. That enabled me to be helpful.”
Then came another challenge for Mammoth: It didn’t snow in January of 1992. “And because there was no snowmaking equipment, no visitors came. There were huge layoffs on the Mountain known as Black Monday.”
Hatter remembers a sign at the Shell Station that said, “Last one out of town, turn out the lights.”
“It’s a hard place to stay if you lose your job. The town’s reserve for economic uncertainty was not as robust at that time as it is now. We took a million-dollar hit, which was a very big deal.”
Since then, snowmaking has helped stabilize the local economy and the town maintains a healthy reserve for economic uncertainty, she said.
Progressive approach to dialogue
As year after year in Mammoth has brought a different flavor of controversy, Hatter has embraced progressive, pro-active ways in which to create dialogue in the community, though she herself cannot take a public stand on issues.
“She’s one of the longest standing employees and has a wealth of knowledge about the history of things and where we’ve evolved – which is super helpful to have,” said her current boss of five years, town manager Rob Clark.
John Eastman, who has served on council continuously since 1994 (and from 1986 to 1990) has known Hatter from the beginning of her career here.
“The word ‘steady’ comes to mind,” he said. “And something that’s important to the public is that Anita consistently answers her phone if she’s in her office, which is unusual in this day and age.”
Clark praised Hatter for organizing numerous community cafes. “I think she’s one of those people who just really cares deeply about the community. For her, it’s not just a job, it’s a passion. It’s great to have people on board who have that kind of passion and initiate things on their own to try and engage the community and make it better place.”
Indeed, Hatter said that doing the cafes, which explore new ways of pursuing community conversation, has been a most rewarding aspect of her job.
“The council meetings aren’t set up very well in terms of having a dialogue. Just the physical arrangement is the council versus the audience, so it winds up being top-down, even though the council isn’t authoritarian; it is democratic.”
So, she hosted a dozen or so around the time of the 2007 General Plan. “You get a chance to talk to a number of different people and listen. It’s cheered me up enormously when I see people – from having observed them in public and I know they don’t like each other and really disagree – in the cafe context, they’re actually able to talk and listen to each other. That makes me so happy.”
From what she’s witnessed in her career, when there’s 95 percent agreement on something, people still fight over the remaining 5 percent, “...and spend a whole evening over something that in the big picture isn’t that important, but it’s really hard for us not to do that.”
That’s because of a desire for perfection, she believes, and a fear that something will be done wrong. “We get stuck a lot as a community. It’s not just any individual. It’s the dynamic. I think it’s true of a lot of organizations.”
Hatter keeps herself current with peers in the field by attending clerks’ conferences and seeking out mentors.
“We’re so isolated here – it’s a treat to see another clerk.”
Open mind, new possibilities
Hatter has never married or had children. “Never really the right man at the right time,” she explained. But she is grateful for her numerous nieces and nephews.
Importantly, books have provided a treasured, lifelong companionship. “I always read. I read a lot of history, a lot of political books,” she said. Currently, she’s reading The Coldest Winter, about the Korean conflict by David Halberstam.
Her favorite novel is T.C. Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain. “It’s the best book about Southern California that I have ever read. He’s just brilliant. He points out the hypocrisies, but he still has empathy for those characters – that you can be living in the same place, but in two different worlds.”
She’s also passionate about theater.
Councilman Eastman fondly recalled a trip he, his wife, two children and Hatter took to New York City in 2004 to see Hugh Jackman in The Boy from Oz, a musical biography of Peter Allen.
“It was very special,” Eastman recalled. They all met Jackman backstage.
Hatter admits she developed “a minor obsession” with The Boy from Oz and saw the musical 13 times over five visits to the Big Apple. A treasaured item in her town office is a framed copy of the musical’s playbill.
“I wouldn’t understand it myself if I hadn’t done it myself,” she laughed. “He is the most charismatic performer.”
Asked whether her boots are set in concrete in Mammoth, she said no.
“I love the area, I love the people. But I have to keep my mind open to other possibilities. You never know what life’s going to bring next.” |
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 22 August 2009 )
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