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 Posted: Mon Jan 03, 2005 7:20 pm Post subject: Walter Monsour - Baton Rouge Chief Administrative Officer |
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What do you think of the appointment of Walter Monsour to the Chief Admin position?
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Advocate staff photo by Richard Alan Hannon
Mayor-elect Kip Holden is briefed by his new chief administrative officer, Walter Monsour. 'Down the line we may disagree sometimes, but I think those instances will be rare,' said Holden of his right-hand man.
Monsour looks forward to 'being a part of history'
By J.D. VENTURA
Advocate staff writer
Snowboarding? Yes, Walter Monsour, the mayor-elect's 61-year-old choice for the chief administrative officer position, would give the sport a whirl. If it weren't for that bad knee.
And perhaps his upcoming career change that will presumably leave him with a lot less time to hit the slopes.
For the time being, however, his schedule still allows for Sunday dinner with his family. One of his four adult sons, Jordan, an avid boarder, just laughed over beef tenderloin and twice-baked potato at the thought of his father on a snowboard, then, a few minutes later, said of himself, "I like just doing the blue diamond slopes, although I'll still do the 'blacks' (the most difficult) -- just to say I can do it."
It's an esprit de corps that seems genetically installed into the bloodline, although his father certainly has a lot less to prove.
Monsour has met with success in both politics and business. Not long after graduating from LSU's law school in 1969, he became the chief aid in district attorney Ossie Brown's office. Six years later he was briefly the parish attorney until accepting former mayor Pat Screen's offer to do the exact same job Kip Holden is asking him to do today.
He has been involved in several business ventures, most notably the founding of the first Coors Beer distributorship in the state, which he sold in 1986.
Quite accustomed to money and power, it seems Walter Monsour's decision to re-enter the often thankless world of public service has far less to do with personal achievement than it does with a simple belief that the new mayoral administration is poised to do great things for the city.
Some political observers say the first great thing Kip Holden did for Baton Rouge as mayor-elect was tap Monsour to be his right-hand man, someone who walks in the door with strong ties to a business establishment that didn't wholeheartedly support Holden's run. The mayor-elect admits that he was so confident in his choice, he simply hadn't considered anyone else for the job. "I never thought about him not accepting, because I am an eternal optimist," said Holden. Monsour, who friends say can be notoriously analytical, didn't exactly jump at the chance.
The offer was "out of the blue," according to Monsour, who wrestled with the decision for two weeks. He said his wife, Mary Ann (his "best friend and biggest confidant"), gave him an enthusiastic "you gotta do it."
(She said she let him reach his own conclusion first. "But had I said 'no' he wouldn't have done it," she added.)
"He told me after he made his decision he had really prayed about it," said Monsour's priest, Miles Walsh, the pastor of Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church. "Someone said to him 'Well, maybe it's a call from God and that really resonated with him.'"
Whether a return to the municipal building was a divine invitation or a black diamond trail Monsour needed to ride, he took the job, despite the assured raising of eyebrows over the fact that he's a Republican (he voted for Bush) and a former Simpson supporter. Partisan politics aside, he said the idea of joining Holden's team left him with a "sense of being a part of history."
"I was assured by Kip that he wanted to give me a lot of authority and leeway and that he wanted to make significant changes, and not change for the sake of change," said Monsour from the den of his 7,000-square-foot home, from which he and his wife have run their respective businesses for the last 10 years. "He was not interested in the status quo."
Neither is Monsour. As a man who has an uncanny way of getting to the bottom line, both figuratively and on the spreadsheets he has a reputation for scrutinizing; he bristles at bureaucrats who offer established process as a reason for not enacting reform. And financial turnaround seems to be his specialty. He was a human tourniquet for a Screen administration that found itself hemorrhaging money with a ballooning budget deficit. Monsour said he reduced the size of city government by "1/4." He's proud of that.
"It was radical surgery, it wasn't cosmetic," recalled the new chief administrative officer, whose scalpel-wielding resulted in the privatization of the city's garbage pick-up and the headline-making layoff of several teamsters.
Monsour looks back on the garbage controversy as an event that got "blown out of proportion" -- it resulted in death threats and a security detail assigned to guard him --and points to his years as a Democrat when making the case for his understanding of labor. His swift dismantling of what he then contended was an inefficient waste management operation fits with a belief he still holds about Baton Rouge government today. "I don't think taxpayers in this parish over the last 40 to 45 years have gotten their money's worth," said Monsour. "And so, that includes Dumas, that includes Screen, that includes McHugh, that includes Simpson, and I hope it doesn't include Holden."
Getting the most out of the least taxpayer dollars is never easy, especially when you understand that you cannot run the government like a business. Monsour knows this. The "profit motive" that drives business must be, in some sense, replaced by a constant deference to "public concern." He acknowledges that there is also a difference between running the city and running city hall. Incidentally he intends on doing both, while preventing Holden from getting bogged down in the details.
"Kip is not a micromanager," said Monsour. "I don't expect him to be, and if he were, then I don't think he would need me." It's too soon to tell if Monsour will micromanage city hall. He does, however, speak of "redirecting" staff and "reshaping work habits."
"Walter is not a soft touch," said longtime friend and another former chief administrative officer under the Screen administration, Mary Olive Pierson. "When people come in and they want money in this budget for this and that budget for that, he will always have his eye on the big picture. He knows where all the component parts are and how they fit together."
Keep it simple, stupid
Monsour is fond of the acronym K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple, stupid). A quest for simplicity is apparent in a managerial style that allows for digression, but is quick to pull everyone's focus back to the business at hand. It's as if a mental hourglass is turned upside down and the sand is running its course. He is a man who seems acutely aware that time is indeed money.
In a transition meeting with the casually dressed outgoing mayor, Bobby Simpson, Monsour, clad in a red power tie, barely sipped his coffee while engaging in preliminary chit-chat before announcing, "We have a lot of fish to fry."
Appropriate because he was referring to the myriad of issues the departing and arriving administrations had to discuss before the changeover can be completed. Easily misinterpreted in the sense that on the immediate agenda Simpson and Monsour were to discuss personnel, many of whom were vulnerable appointees.
The conversation was civil, diplomatic. There was a compliment about Simpson being "too young" to retire and then, a comment about a staffer that was less than receptive upon meeting the transition team. "It's not a good sign when she doesn't say 'hi' to the mayor-elect or me," Monsour said, his voice even-toned, the statement somehow more fact than warning. When the outgoing mayor suggested Monsour may "butt heads" with another staffer, Monsour smiled confidently, "Only once."
When asked if Monsour was a diplomat, longtime friend Jim Bailey, the CEO of Premier Company, hesitated. He met the new chief administrative officer 40 years ago when they were both frat brothers at LSU, where Monsour was also head cheerleader before entering law school. "Well, I think that he is (diplomatic), but I also think Walter is a pretty tough guy," said Bailey.
A meeting between Atlanta's first female mayor, Shirley Franklin, and Holden later in the day seemed to somehow spin around Monsour's stalwartness. Franklin was seated across from Monsour, not Holden, who sat instead by her side. When Franklin asked everyone to guess how many potholes she had filled in the first six months of her term, Holden said "500." Monsour offered, "5,000." Franklin was impressed -- with Monsour's guess (correct answer: 6,000).
Whether Monsour extracted the information from his new Blackberry, which he checked several times during the meeting, was not clear. Far clearer was how unnecessary Simpson's parting advice was to Monsour earlier that day, when he told him to "get a good filing system." By all accounts, Monsour is fanatically well-organized and never needs reminding. When Holden told Franklin he was asked to be Santa Claus at a fund-raiser that Friday, it was Monsour who gently reminded him that the meeting he had already scheduled with newly elected U.S. Sen. David Vitter may pose a conflict.
Dick Cheney?
Is Monsour the Dick Cheney of the Holden administration?
"That's exactly right," said Jim Greely, the CEO of Regions Bank, who has known Monsour since 1994. "That's exactly as I view him, more of a statesman than a politician."
Neither Holden nor Monsour like the comparison. If running the city were a football game, Monsour said Holden is undoubtedly the coach and he, the quarterback.
"Well I take his position very seriously for the fact that he has been in that position before," said Holden, who feels Monsour's resume of fiscal responsibility will come in handy, given that Baton Rouge has only "a very small surplus." "But, at the end of the day, he and I have a mutual understanding that it's my call."
"He is not the Dick Cheney of this administration," said Pierson. "But I will tell you something -- Kip Holden made a very wise decision."
At that Sunday dinner at home, Monsour was at the head of the table, unquestionably the coach of his clan. Or seated on the kitchen countertop, his sons standing around him talking about cell phones and law and golf. And then in the back yard, gazing at the fountain there, rocking on his porch swing as he smoked on an Arturo Fuente cigar (the "Robusto" grade, not the best of that brand, but a smart choice for the money).
Spotting the silver-haired Monsour in his silver BMW 740 or on his Harley Davidson Fat Boy is far more likely than catching him cruising the trails of Aspen on a snowboard. He still wants to try it, though. He likes h
ow it's less cumbersome than skiing, no poles to carry, no skis to take on and off. Snowboarding just seems more...
"Efficient?" a guest suggested.
"Yes," said Monsour with a hearty laugh, a reward to his visitor for being on the same page. "It just seems easier. There's not as many moving parts."
Click here to return to story:
http://www.2theadvocate.com/specialprojects/brmayor/stories/p ol_monsour002.shtml |
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