San Diego City Manager Quits Under Pressure

San Diego City Manager Sylvester Murray, unable to close an expanding political chasm between himself and the City Council, announced his resignation Wednesday after 13 months on the job.

Murray’s resignation came one day after the City Council, meeting in closed session, lodged a 7-to-1 vote of no confidence against him.

His forced resignation from the city’s highest appointive post was the latest in a series of controversial events that have swept through City Hall.

A week ago, Councilman Uvaldo Martinez pleaded guilty in Superior Court to two felony counts of misusing his city credit card by charging personal dinners and drinks. As a result, Martinez will resign.

One year ago today, Mayor Roger Hedgecock was found guilty by a Superior Court jury of violating campaign reporting laws. The conviction led to Hedgecock’s resignation.

Malfeasance, however, had nothing to do with Murray’s ouster from the $102,344-a-year position. Instead, Murray, 45, who attained the highest post of any black ever to hold appointive office in San Diego, was the loser in a clash of styles with the City Council.

Outspoken. Assertive. Take-charge. Those were Murray’s traits.

But the City Council, itself strongly independent, became increasingly uncomfortable with Murray’s aggressiveness.

“It was a culmination of things . . . that aggressiveness and management style were a little too strong for what they (City Council) were looking at in their role as policy makers,” said a City Hall source with knowledge of the ouster, who asked not to be identified.

Mayor Maureen O’Connor and council members were reluctant to discuss in detail their reasons for turning against Murray.

Events of the last four months, however, during which the council reprimanded Murray for his outspokenness and demanded that he tone down his management style, were at the heart of the council’s uneasiness and the eventual no-confidence vote.

“We agreed that the differences in management style and organizational leadership are the main reasons for this resignation,” said O’Connor, who, according to sources, was the leader of the movement to remove Murray.

The mayor refused to be more specific, saying: “I don’t think anybody is pointing blame at any one individual. . . . It was a difficult and tough decision for everybody and no one is happy about making it. But on the other hand, we all agreed this was the time to do it and this is the fashion we wanted to do it in.”

“I think Mr. Murray will tell you he came from a city with a part-time council. This is a full-time City Council and it is a little bit different,” O’Connor said.

A subdued Murray also declined to elaborate on specific reasons for his resignation, saying it was not because of any single incident.

“I don’t know if I can pinpoint any specific time or to say that something happened on this day or that day that caused things to go wrong. I just cannot pinpoint any specific item,” he said.

When Murray--who previously was city manager in Cincinnati--took over the job in San Diego on Sept. 9, 1985, he did so with the knowledge that he wasn’t the City Council’s first choice to replace Ray Blair, who had resigned.

Murray’s short tenure was marked by recurring problems with the City Council. He made it a point to seek out citizens and business groups, which alienated some council members who felt Murray was stepping into their political arena and meddling.

Other council members felt that he didn’t share enough information with them and privately criticized his organizational style.

Murray angered several council members when, in a June interview with The Times, he said that blacks in San Diego are as conservative as whites and that he was surprised that blacks weren’t outraged over allegations of police brutality made at the trial of a young San Diego black man accused of killing a policeman, severely wounding another and wounding a civilian observer who was riding with police.

In that interview, Murray described some of his experiences while growing up in a ghetto in Miami. He found it ironic, he said, that he was now the boss of police.

“I get an orgasm just being the boss of police,” he said in the interview. The comments enraged some City Council members, leading some to call for his immediate removal. It was a rupture of confidence from which Murray never fully recovered.

The City Council convened a four-hour executive session to deal with the matter, during which not only his comments in The Times but his leadership abilities were also questioned.

He was reprimanded and his relations with the council, particularly Councilmen Ed Struiksma and Bill Cleator, were to remain tenuous.

In the aftermath, Murray kept a relatively low profile, although other incidents continued to haunt him. One concerned the Housing Authority, which Murray recommended leaving intact, only to be overruled by the City Council, which voted to take over the agency.

O’Connor said that, since she took office in early July, “everyone has really worked at trying to work (out) the differences. It has been on-going . . . trying to find a solution. I just think that everybody agreed in the final analysis that in the best interests (of San Diego) we would respectfully part ways and move forward.”

When O’Connor took office, she “planned to give him the benefit of the doubt. She was certainly aware and concerned about the situation, but she wanted to give him a fair shake,” according to a City Hall source familiar with what was happening behind the scenes.

The source said “lots of little things” continued to occur and erode Murray’s standing, such as Murray not fully divulging plans for a land swap between the Navy and the city in the Miramar area, and the lack of information involving a request by developer Roque de la Fuente to include his Otay Mesa industrial property in a proposed foreign trade zone.

“The mayor finally decided it was time for a change,” according to the source. She was supported by Cleator and Struiksma, who had been ready to dump Murray since the time of his “orgasm” comment.

In fact, it is Cleator and O’Connor who are negotiating with Murray over his severance pay. And it was O’Connor, Cleator and Murray who met at the mayor’s Point Loma home Wednesday morning to discuss what the city manager and the mayor would say publicly about the resignation.

The end for Murray as city manager began two weeks ago when the council met once again in private session to evaluate Murray’s performance, according to sources. At that time, the City Council lodged a preliminary 8-to-1 vote against Murray.

Then on Tuesday, the council, again meeting in executive session, recorded a 7-to-1 vote of no confidence. Only Councilman William Jones voted for Murray on both occasions. (Councilwoman Gloria McColl was out of town Tuesday, though she participated in the earlier vote.)

Jones was so angered by the vote against Murray that he left his office Tuesday afternoon and has not returned, telling his office staff to cancel all his appointments for the rest of October.

While it’s unclear exactly when Murray became aware of the council’s votes to oust him, he said he didn’t know about Tuesday’s tally until Wednesday when a story about the closed-session vote appeared in the San Diego Union.

The City Council had wanted to keep its no-confidence vote secret, to give Murray time to find another job, according to O’Connor, council members and sources.

“If we had our way . . . we’d (have given) Mr. Murray sufficient time to be city manager and resign in a timely fashion,” O’Connor said at a press conference she held in conjunction with Murray.

“Let me say this about Mr. Murray,” O’Connor said. “He’s a man of high integrity. He has a lot of dignity, and . . . (while) the council and Mr. Murray were going through this difficult process, he always said, ‘I will resign if I feel it is in the best interest and the City Council feels it’s in the best interest of the city, and I’ll do it with dignity.’

“I want to say right here and now that Mr. Murray has handled himself in a thoroughly professional manner.”

In the next few days, Murray will go on a 90-day administrative leave, during which time he will hunt for a new job. Filling in as city manager in the interim will be Assistant City Manager John Lockwood.

Murray said he intends to stay in San Diego while he looks for a new job.

“I think the mayor and the council have been very honorable with me in trying to make this a smooth transition,” he said, “and I’m a part of that and will cooperate.”