Board of Dry Cleaning Votes to Fire Director : La Habra Assemblyman Says Current ‘Chaos’ Will Help His Drive to Abolish State Agency

The Board of Dry Cleaning and Fabric Care, an obscure state agency threatened with extinction, fired its controversial executive director Michael Siegel and replaced him with his chief assistant on Monday.

The board elevated Judith Husted, the agency’s second-in-command for the past four years, to handle the top duties for the next three months.

The state agency has been under fire for more than a year by Assemblyman Ross Johnson (R-La Habra), who has authored a bill to abolish the $900,000-a-year agency which regulates about 6,500 dry-cleaning shops and plants in the state.

The Assembly easily passed the measure last year, and now the bill is pending in the Senate Business and Professions Committee. Johnson has twice postponed votes to keep the measure from being defeated in the committee.

Meeting at a hotel near Los Angeles International Airport, the board voted 4 to 0 to fire Siegel. Board President Ardith Lee Bigelow said Husted’s promotion is temporary, a move necessitated by the board’s tenuous situation.

“I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t know if the board is going to stay or if the board is going to go,” Bigelow said.

Siegel, 38, who has run the agency for the past 20 months, was criticized for being too “enforcement-minded.” During the past two years, several dry-cleaning merchants--including an Anaheim shop owner--have been jailed for noncompliance of state law.

He also had been involved in a dispute over whether surety bonds, which are required for licensing of dry-cleaning establishments, could be replaced by personal guarantee bonds. Earlier this month Siegel sent letters to dry-cleaning license applicants telling them the personal guarantee bonds were illegal, a decision he said was based on state law.

Bigelow said the letter Siegel mailed to the applicants had been sent without the board’s knowledge. “We were working on the situation, but we had no idea that letter was going out,” Bigelow said.

Siegel’s termination, the board president said, was due to Siegel’s having “overstepped his authority as an employee. He was not working on behalf of the board.”

Robert Frederick, who earlier this month resigned from the board which he previously headed, had supported Siegel, saying the firing was “strictly a railroad job.”

Johnson said that turmoil within the agency could help him in his drive to abolish the panel. “It’s chaos,” the assemblyman said from his Sacramento office.

Johnson said he was not convinced that Siegel had been a competent director of the state agency.

“I think he was running around trying to create the impression he was doing something. He was a classic case of a bureaucrat trying to justify his position and justify his agency, when any unbiased observer would say they are serving no useful function.”

The board interviewed two other candidates to succeed Siegel but decided to elevate Husted on an interim basis until the board knows whether it will survive. Bigelow said the new executive director’s position would be reviewed again in three months.

Times staff writer Kenneth F. Bunting in Sacramento contributed to this story.