The Credo of Sylvester Murray: When in Command, Command

Growing up in the ghetto of Miami before the civil rights movement had ripened, young Sylvester Murray knew exactly what to do when a police car was spotted cruising the neighborhood: Run the other way.

So 30 years later, Murray puts aside his businesslike mien to relish the private irony of why he chose a career in public service, a career that culminated last year in his appointment as San Diego’s city manager.

“When I was told that a city manager could be the boss of the police, I knew that’s what I wanted,” Murray said. “I get an orgasm just being a boss of police.”

Prince of police. Sultan of sewers. Guru of garbage. Pooh-bah of parks. Since he took office Sept. 9, the 44-year-old Murray has been all those things as city government’s highest-ranking, highest-paid administrator.

The job atop the San Diego municipal bureaucracy has yielded some surprising and interesting insights into his newly adopted home. And in two recent, wide-ranging interviews with The Times, the thoughtful, articulate Murray shared his impressions of San Diego, its government and its people.

For instance, he expressed surprise that local blacks had not expressed more outrage over revelations about police brutality emerging from the Sagon Penn murder trial. Penn, a Southeast San Diego youth, is being tried for murder in the slaying of a police officer and the wounding of a second officer and a civilian who was accompanying them.

And he said he was “very concerned” that more minorities have not been appointed to the upper level of management at City Hall. An outspoken believer in aggressive affirmative action programs, Murray vowed to change that with his own managerial selections.

Murray, who as city manager of Cincinnati was accustomed to being the undisputed spokesman for city government, also made it clear that he intends to fully exercise his powers in San Diego, where, beginning with Mayor Pete Wilson’s reign in the early ‘70s, mayors have competed for the limelight.

“The law in this city has not changed. Pete Wilson did not get the people to change the law . . . and he was able to influence based on his personality,” he said. But Murray emphasized that his powers now “are equal to . . . the city manager’s powers in Cincinnati.”

“I will be powerful,” Murray declared. “I will be no more powerful than the law allows, but I will assume all the powers of this office.”

At the top of Murray’s agenda: transforming downtown into a sort of social crossroads, improving the image of police, and expanding the amount of public open space, especially along the city’s northern boundary.

Under San Diego’s council-manager form of government, Murray is the chief executive officer of City Hall. He serves at the pleasure of the City Council, whose members theoretically act as a board of directors.

Murray’s powers include the appointment of department heads--such as police chief--and he is ultimately responsible for the far-flung daily activities of 7,500 employees who build and maintain parks, supply drinking water, dispose of sewage, extinguish fires, arrest criminals, clean up streets, inspect buildings and operate libraries.

Recently, he drafted his first city budget; it totaled more than $616 million. And his position, which carries an annual salary of $102,344, puts him in charge of a staff that controls one of the most important commodities around City Hall--information. Council members needing help for constituents or explanations of city issues must route their requests through Murray’s office, which issues a fistful of reports each week.

Because of these powers, a city manager is both blessed and cursed by elected officials. While he can dismantle an administrative logjam with a telephone call, he can also create one. Council members sometimes have complained privately about some “hidden agenda” they think the manager’s office is pushing counter to their wishes.

Such talk may be premature for Murray, who confesses that he is still learning the ropes at City Hall.

While his predecessor, Ray T. Blair, was a low-key local boy who knew many of the city’s prominent citizens because he attended San Diego State University with them and had worked at General Dynamics, Murray has no history here. He cut his administrative teeth by being city manager in Ann Arbor, Mich.; Inkster, Mich., and Cincinnati before moving to California.

To make up for that, he is touring the local landscape like a politician on the hustings.

His weekly appointment calendar includes an average of four speaking engagements or meetings with groups like the Del Mar Rotary Club, black graduates at San Diego State and the San Ysidro Chamber of Commerce, said Donna Legrande, the city manager secretary for nine years.

“I think people were absolutely shocked that he accepted” their invitations, said Legrande, who added that such invitations were not tendered to Blair.

Speaking to small groups, Murray easily shows off his personal powers, as well. Ask a question about city business and he will deliver an answer that is diplomatic, yet hardly wishy-washy. Try to trap him and he parries with his wry wit.

Mr. Murray, just how do you assess the intelligence of the San Diego City Council?

“I have been in this business for 20 years and I have yet to meet that incompetent incumbent city council person,” he replies.

Such a facile style will do him well in the soap opera known as San Diego City Hall. So far, Murray admits he has had things relatively easy because of the vacancy in the mayor’s office--a void that will be filled with this week’s election.

“It’s probably been an advantage from the point of view of less competition and less fear of competition and second-guessing,” he said.

“All that is predicated on the assumption that with a mayor, the city has a leader, a visionary person who every morning gets up and says, ‘This is what we are going to do today, city . . . ‘

“That is what has not been happening, so I have been in a position to take the initiative that I wanted to take or to respond to issues the way I wanted to respond to them based on me and my staff’s opinion.”

From his vantage point, Murray has glimpsed what he says are sometimes perplexing truths about the character of San Diego.

Unlike Cincinnati, where a city manager with an ambitious project would approach the chairman of the board of Procter & Gamble, Murray says he has been unable to find a sugar daddy counterpart here. There does not appear to be any Establishment calling the shots behind the scenes.

“I don’t have a sense of such a group existing,” he said.

San Diego according to Sy Murray is a place where city government is so efficient that hardly anybody complains about a missed garbage pickup. Yet he’s puzzled that it takes a year of planning and paper work before the city can put a trash receptacle on the street.

It is a place where the government pays $5 million to $6 million a year to resurface the streets--a luxury service in other cities--but takes up to a year and a half to install a traffic light at a busy intersection.

Here, even conservatives--made crazy by the growth of the federal government--don’t get exercised when their own city government swells.

“Here, the attitude is: It is a growing city. Government is supposed to grow, too,” Murray said.

“The people here who you would consider conservatives are the people who are saying, ‘Yes, we ought to have a landscape ordinance,’ and ‘Yes, you ought to have a one-stop (building) permit counter . . . ,’ knowing that it’s going to add to the bureaucracy and add to the costs. It’s confusing.

“But at the same time, when you come to a point of saying you have to have a better affirmative action program in building a convention center, there’s not a big push. . . . The idea is if we can get it in passing as we get the low bid, OK. But that’s not a priority.”

He also noted San Diego’s lack of any government housing exclusively for poor people, opting instead to subsidize rents for the indigent in apartments built by private developers. Even at that, he said, city policy dictates that only 20% of the units are eligible for the rent subsidy program, ensuring that the entire building is not inhabited by the poor.

Murray also said he has been “very surprised” that there has been so little outrage in the black community over allegations that have surfaced in the Penn trial. Witnesses in the trial have testified that Penn shot the two police officers and a civilian ride-along only after he was stopped without a cause and then beaten by the officers.

“The reaction has been basically . . . blah,” Murray said. “Except, I think, for a while there, there were some pickets around the courtroom. It has not generated publicly the issues of police brutality or non-police brutality, blacks, racial strife, that I just know it would have generated in Cincinnati or every other place.

“Blacks in San Diego are just as conservative as whites,” he concluded. “Blacks in San Diego are just as concerned about not rocking the boat as whites do not want the boat to be rocked.”

As the city’s first black city manager, Murray says he has felt welcomed. He is “very concerned,” however, that more minorities have not been appointed to top-level city posts.

When Murray, barely one month in office, had his first chance to make a managerial appointment Nov. 1, he said he “consciously” chose a black fire chief. And he promised that a Latino will be his choice for the director of the new Department of Bi-National Affairs, recently established to work with Mexican authorities on common problems.

Murray has informed city department heads that he is keeping a tally of how many blacks, Latinos and women they pick as deputies. If a choice isn’t from one of those groups, he said, they “have to justify why, what happened?” Recently, city officials selected a minority-owned firm to help underwrite the sale of $30 million in open space bonds after Murray made it known that he wanted minority firms considered.

Yet Murray says he will not use his powers as city manager to invoke radical changes in the Police Department in the wake of the Penn trial. He said he is “personally pleased” with the performance of Police Chief Bill Kolender, who answers to Murray.

Instead, he promised to work to implement the recommendations of a special citizens’ panel that has been established to advise police on community relations.

“I can then be the semi-politician,” he said, “and simply buck any kind of position that could be out there . . . ‘Here comes Murray from Cincinnati, black guy, who’s going to change all of our Police Department that we’ve loved for the last 25 years.’ Instead, ‘the citizens of San Diego through this advisory committee have made certain recommendations and Murray the good city manager is going to assure that these citizens’ time is not wasted.’ That’s the attitude I’m going to take.”

If Murray is worried that his handling of the Police Department might offend some sensibilities, his longer-range plans are sure to please.

First off, Murray said he wants to concentrate on making downtown--he defines it as all the land south of Interstate 5 to the bay--a “meeting place” that can be the crossroads for a city that is otherwise a collection of well-defined neighborhoods.

Ingredients for success would include more hotels, which will generate night life, and housing for people in the upper middle class, who will frequent expensive restaurants on weeknights.

“I don’t expect, even in the long run, that the people in Clairemont will go to Southeast to shop and go to the movies. I don’t expect even in the long run that people in La Jolla will necessarily go to Tierrasanta to shop and go to the movies. So they will not meet. They have their own identities.

“I would look for downtown to be the melting pot (so) everybody, in every community, can say, ‘This is me, too.’ So when they think of San Diego, they think of two places--La Jolla and downtown. Scripps Ranch and downtown.”

Second on Murray’s agenda is police safety, which he said is “geared more towards perception and philosophy than to having 6,000 cops on the street.”

“So we should have a police force that, generally, is assumed to be educated, sensitive and service-oriented, as opposed to just the bad boys with guns and night sticks. . . . My agenda will always be making certain that you have somebody in charge like a Kolender that gives the impression to the community of community input, that ‘I’m part of the community,’ that ‘I’m sensitive,’ that ‘I understand.’ ”

Next on the Murray agenda is buying more canyon land, as well as creating a greenbelt at the city limits.

Murray said he would like to someday point to a map that shows it is possible “to walk this entire city through publicly open canyon lands from one side to the other.

“And the second part of that greenery is we need to keep our identity physically by having a greenbelt around the city.

“That which separates us from Los Angeles is (Camp) Pendleton. But there should also be something that separates . . . Carlsbad and some of the other communities from San Diego. I think you should spend the money, buy the open space and greenery, and leave it.”

Future visions, however, are not what makes city managers important, as Murray well knows. His powers lie, in great part, in the immediate satisfaction of the citizens.

“When I said powerful,” he said, referring to comments about his intentions to be active, “I mean that I can influence and intend to influence the conduct of the bureaucracy.

“For most people, their quality of life is probably impacted more by what a civil servant does on a daily basis than what we can project 10 years out.

“Most people live in the present. So a street light at the right location, a sidewalk that has been repaired, an alley that is paved, dogs picked up, drug addicts arrested, all have a higher impact on the quality of life on a daily basis than does ‘Where should the expressway be 10 years from now?’ ”

To prove his point, Murray tells a story about when he was city manager in Inkster, just outside Detroit. Walking around City Hall, he encountered an “old black lady with her head down and she was on her way out.”

He asked if he could lend assistance but, not knowing who Murray was, the woman took one look at him and insisted there was no way he could help her. Until she stepped into his office.

“She went into the office. It was the city manager’s office, the best office in City Hall. She looked at that office, she looked around and she looked up at me and she said, ‘Who is you?’ And I said, ‘I’m the city manager,’ ” Murray recalled, a sly satisfaction creeping into his voice.

The startled citizen then told Murray that, for years, she had tried to get the city to cut down a tree in front of her house because every time it would bloom, it would trigger an allergy and send her into convulsions. For years, the city had refused because of its policy against cutting down live trees.

“I was able to pick up the telephone. I said, ‘Cut down the tree. Plant a new one. And I’ll send you a note for your files.’

“You can’t have that kind of power other than the city manager. Nobody else could have done that. And I like that. I helped that woman. . . . Those are the kinds of rewards you get as a city manager.”

After nine months in San Diego, can Sy Murray tell a similar story about his new hometown?

“Not yet. Not of the same magnitude.

“But I’m certain that I will.”