City Manager’s Role Shrinks as Council Takes Center Stage

Ray Blair ‘almost adopted a philosophy of “Mine is not to reason why, just to do whatever the City Council and the mayor want.” ’

Fred Schnaubelt

Former city councilman

When the San Diego City Council chose Ray Blair as city manager in 1978, the council took about 20 seconds to make its decision. No wonder.

“I want no adversary relationships with you,” Blair told the council shortly after he was appointed. “I want us to attack problems, not each other.”

For Blair and the council that hired him, the close relationship that followed was unique in the city’s recent history. Managers before Blair grew frustrated at the council’s desire for more control over the city’s burgeoning bureaucracy.

Sylvester Murray, the man hired to replace Blair when even his long honeymoon finally ended, was pressured to resign last week in part, it is believed, because the council was offended by the way he sought and bragged about the power he held in city government.

Since 1971, when Pete Wilson, now a U.S. senator, was elected mayor, the City Council and mayor have grown more powerful at the expense of their hired manager. Murray’s downfall may have been his desire to halt that trend.

“This confrontation is only the latest in a long line . . . of conflicts between managers asserting their authority under the City Charter against an increasingly activist, full-time City Council determined to exert more political control over administrative decision-making,” former Mayor Roger Hedgecock, who helped choose Murray and was angered by his ouster, said.

Twenty years ago, such a conflict would have been unheard of. Like it or not, everyone knew that the city manager, not the City Council, ran the city government. When Leon Williams joined the council in 1969, his staff consisted of one half-time secretary. And he couldn’t even hire that secretary himself.

“The City Council was kind of uninvolved,” Williams, now a county supervisor, said in an interview. “They just sat down and looked at the papers somebody had put in front of them and listened to the discussion and then voted. That was about it. They didn’t check anything. They didn’t relate to the community. . . . They just sort of reacted to what was put before them.”

That attitude changed when Wilson, who had served in the state Assembly, and several new council members were elected in 1971.

“Pete Wilson came out of Sacramento, out of a more professional school of politics than had been the order of the day at City Hall,” said Otto Bos, who reported on city government for the San Diego Union before joining Wilson’s staff as spokesman. “That whole group kind of revolutionized the way things were done at City Hall.”

Walter Hahn, the city manager at the time Wilson was elected, left almost immediately. Kimball Moore, who, like Hahn, believed in the supremacy of the city manager, was promoted from within the manager’s office to replace him.

“Moore came from the Walter Hahn school, that he was the boss and the sun and the rest were planets that revolved around him,” Bos said. “The mayor and the council said: ‘Hey, wait a minute, this is not the way I see it.’ The mayor said: ‘I was elected to be the chief policy maker in the city and that’s what I want to be.’ ”

Wilson asked the voters to amend the charter and make the mayor more powerful, giving him the power to propose the city budget each year, veto council actions, and hire and fire certain department heads. The voters turned him down. But Wilson accomplished much of what he wanted anyway.

A combination of Wilson’s assertive style, President Nixon’s “New Federalism,” which alloted funds to be used at the discretion of the mayors, and increased local government coverage from television news reporters, who tended to focus on Wilson as a symbol for the city, helped the mayor build a power base unlike any since the city manager form of government was adopted in 1932.

“We kept the form of it but changed the substance,” said Assemblyman Larry Stirling (R-San Diego), who served on the council from 1977 to 1982. “The substance was changed by the force of will and intellect and energy of Pete Wilson. Pete was down there on nights, on weekends, he was an incredible workaholic, and he had a vision for the city. The city manager form of government did not serve that vision.”

After his first try at amending the charter failed, Wilson won approval for other, more subtle changes. He made the City Council officially a full-time instead of part-time body. He created the council committee system, which allowed the elected officials to play a greater role in forming city policy. And in perhaps the most important move, if not the most prominent, each City Council office was made its own city department.

That change gave the council members the right to hire their own professional staff members, who could help them collect information independent of the city administration. Now, each council member has several aides.

“He who controls the information controls the policy,” Stirling said. “The city manager’s job generally is information manager.”

When Moore retired in 1975, he was replaced by Hugh McKinley, an amiable man who realized that pleasing Wilson was key to survival in the job. But McKinley, who could not be reached for comment on the Murray ouster, apparently was less concerned with pleasing the City Council, and it finally caught up to him after Stirling, Fred Schnaubelt, Bill Mitchell and Bill Lowery were elected in 1977.

“McKinley was totally responsive to Mayor Wilson,” Schnaubelt, now a private investment counselor and real estate broker, said. “He was somewhat less so to the individual members of the council.”

With tax-cutting Proposition 13 about to pass in 1978, Stirling said, a majority of the council believed McKinley was not the right man to handle the approaching crisis.

“We wanted our guy to do our bidding, which was to get ready for Proposition 13 and clear the decks for battle,” Stirling said. “We went to McKinley and said we’ve got to clear the decks, pal. There’s a war coming. Then he issued the fateful words, ‘Gee, we’re as efficient as we can be.’ We just lost confidence in him.”

Mitchell said he and other council members were also irritated by McKinley’s tendency to allow his staff to undermine the desires of the council. A week after the group asked for a meeting with McKinley to clear up their differences, the city manager quit and took a job with the city of Glendale.

And thus began the Ray Blair era.

Blair, a deputy city manager at the time, was appointed after a closed-door session that lasted less than five minutes. Mitchell said the actual discussion took more like 20 seconds. In Blair, the council found a strong administrator who enjoyed working behind the scenes, a man who posed little threat to the council’s desire not only to set broad policy but also to increasingly get into the details of how that policy would be carried out.

“Ray was the consummate bureaucrat and public servant in the best sense of the word,” Schnaubelt said. “He almost adopted a philosophy of ‘Mine is not to reason why, just to do whatever the City Council and the mayor want.’

“The City Council was in the position of setting the policy and it was unquestioningly implemented by the city manager.”

On issues from police services to growth management, from the retirement system to downtown redevelopment, the council grew more active. It pressured Blair, as it had McKinley, to dismiss certain department directors who did not pass muster. Although the City Charter forbids council members from ordering the manager to fire a particular employee, the council found ways around that provision.

“I asked for a list of all city-owned real estate, and Blair talked to his property director and he said it would take him 3 1/2 years to get me the list,” Stirling said. “So I sent my aide across the street to Title Insurance Co. and, in a half hour, they ran out the list of all city-owned property. We called Ray and asked him to bring in the property director and we walked in with the list and said, ‘How long did you say it would take to get this?’ It was not long after that that the property director was out.”

Stirling said the council had no choice but to become more involved in what might seem to be details beyond its role as policy maker.

“When the manager defaults, which he does all the time, even if it’s just the color of the grass at the stadium, you don’t fire him,” Stirling said. “You’re going to say you want the stadium grass greener. And if a month later, the grass still isn’t greener and it’s an embarrassment to the city on national television, you’re not going to fire him, you’re going to say: ‘Why don’t you get so and so and do such and such?’ ”

County Supervisor Susan Golding, who served on the council from 1981 to 1983, said there can be a fine line between policy, which is the purview of the council, and administration, which is the manager’s role.

Golding said: “If the relationship is good, there are conversations that go on--’How’s it going in this department? Do you have any problems in that department? This employee’s a good one. I have a little problem with that one.’ You’re not telling the manager what to do, but if the relationship is good, that information is going to be taken into account.”

When Wilson left for Washington at the end of 1982, Blair naturally assumed a more powerful role. Hedgecock said that, after he was elected mayor, he and Blair agreed that Hedgecock would concentrate on policy and stay out of administration. (Blair did not return several phone calls last week from a Times reporter.)

“My impression was that it was really Pete Wilson’s personality that not only forged a cohesive alliance on the council to give policy direction a more clear focus, but also forged a relationship with the manager which, to put it in neutral terms, gave Pete Wilson a partnership in management decisions which was informal and clearly inconsistent with the charter provisions,” Hedgecock said.

“I wasn’t in any position to do that. Pete didn’t accomplish this until his second term. My first day on the job I wasn’t going to say to Ray, ‘OK, what are the decisions you are about to make? Let me review them.’ ”

But little more than a year later, Hedgecock’s legal problems crippled him as a leader, splitting the council and prompting each of its members to deal more with the staff on individual projects rather than going through the council to set clear policy.

“I wasn’t strong enough to keep the council members from going around me to pound on his desk about this, that or the other detail,” Hedgecock said. “People were constantly contacting department heads, assistant department heads, line supervisors and trying to second guess what they were doing. This was completely out of line in terms of the charter responsibilities.”

Many of those confrontations involved former Councilman Mitchell, who believed that Blair condoned what Mitchell calls the “imperious veto”--the tendency of some staff members to scuttle policies with which they disagree.

Once, Mitchell remembered, he persuaded the council to add five officers to the Police Department’s budget specifically for the burglary detail. But Police Chief Bill Kolender assigned the new officers to another function, and Mitchell complained.

“Ray brought the police chief in, and he (Kolender) said ‘Don’t tell me how to run my department,’ ” Mitchell said. “I said, ‘I’m not. The people of San Diego, through their City Council, are saying they want more investigations done on burglaries. We provided you with the money to do that, and you put them in the arson squad.’ ”

Kolender, and Blair, prevailed.

But there were other battles, and Blair, weakened by illness and by questions about his relationship with Deputy City Manager Sue Williams, grew weary of fighting them. He quit in May, 1985, seven years after taking the job.

Enter Sylvester Murray, a man accustomed to working in a city--Cincinnati--where the members of the City Council believed there was room under the public spotlight for both them and an aggressive, prominent city manager. Upon arriving in San Diego, Murray made no secret of his desire to exercise his powers to the limits of the charter.

Unlike Blair, who had the same desire, Murray never showed the diplomatic skills needed to exercise his own power without showing up the council. The council, still in factions without an elected mayor after Hedgecock’s forced resignation, clashed with Murray over police issues, the housing commission and property management.

“There were incredible divisions, no cohesive policy statements, nothing but jockeying for power among a group of leaderless people,” Hedgecock said. “The council continued to act as if they were cohesive, as if there was leadership, as if there was policy direction, and each member had his own interpretation of what that direction was. They were all hounding Sy like a pack of hounds after the deer.”

Hedgecock said Murray’s successor as city manager may be shackled from the start.

“It seems to me the great danger is that the next city manager, in order to hang on to the job, is going to accept a diminished role, constant interference by council members and a terribly political and weakened administration, completely contrary to the spirit and letter of the charter,” he said.

George Penn, an assistant city manager hired by Murray, said it may be time for San Diego to reconsider whether it wants to keep its city manager form of government, which is found in few cities as large as San Diego. Penn said San Diego is at a crossroads where it may be proper to consider a strong-mayor form of government.

“There (is) some feeling that they (mayors) are more responsive to the public,” Penn said. “They are political beings. Interest groups come up and say, ‘We want this, we want that,’ and they can respond effectively to them. The manager’s response to pressure from interest groups is not whose wheel squeaks the loudest, but what is the most effective and efficient way of doing things. So there are some people who think that they’re not responsive to the public.”

But former councilmen like Stirling and Schnaubelt said there is room for both a strong manager and strong council, as Blair showed in his prime. Without the manager to provide a check and balance, the politicians might run amok, they said.

“We have more to fear from strong and powerful politicians than anything else,” Schnaubelt said.