Councilmen Accuse Mayor of Power Play

An attempt by Azusa Mayor Eugene Moses to force Lloyd Wood, who serves as city administrator and police chief, to give up one of the jobs has been rebuffed by city councilmen, who say the mayor is pulling a power play at City Hall.

Councilmen Bruce Latta, James Cook and Lucio Cruz walked out on last week’s council meeting after a heated argument with the mayor over his effort to change Wood’s job.

The dispute began in closed session and continued into the public meeting that followed. When Moses tried to make a statement, the three council members tried to adjourn the meeting. They maintained that it is improper and illegal to discuss personnel matters in public.

Councilmen Walk Out

Moses refused to call for a vote on the adjournment motion. The three council members would not let him speak and the meeting ended in disarray when they walked out.

The fourth council member, Jenny Avila, who was elected in April, did not enter into the argument or walk out and after the meeting had no comment on the political conflict.

But the three other council members said that Moses, who was elected by voters this year to his third two-year term as mayor, is trying to run the city by himself.

They asserted that he has meddled in the operations of the city, rearranged staff priorities and spread misinformation.

In interviews last week, Latta said the mayor is “running amok” and Cook said, “Basically, the man thinks he runs the city without having to answer to anyone.”

Latta said he is drawing up a list of actions he will ask the council to take to restrict the mayor’s activities.

Curtail Privileges

He said he will ask the council to make the mayor’s City Hall office available to all council members and to curtail the mayor’s use of city staff to prepare speeches, proclamations, letters and plaques.

Moses said he endured verbal abuse from council members at last week’s meeting.

‘They Called Me Khomeni’

“They called me Khomeini. They called me Kadafi,” he said. “They said I’m a dictator, that they don’t know what I’m doing.”

Ironically, the mayor’s proposal to split the job of city administrator and police chief was advocated by Latta and Cruz earlier this year.

But Cruz said he thinks that now is a bad time for an administrative change because the city is in the middle of extensive redevelopment efforts.

And Latta said the mayor just wants to get Wood out of the way. “He’s looking for a yes man so he can run the city,” Latta said.

Wood has been police chief for five years and became city administrator three years ago. He took the top administrative position on an interim basis but then was given a five-year contract that has more than two years remaining. He earns $85,000 a year.

Wood said he is “taking the position of no comment” in the current dispute, adding that anything he could say would displease one side or the other.

But, he said, he has always told the council that if he is asked to choose one job, he will elect to return full-time to the Police Department because of the pension benefits, Civil Service protection and his belief that the job of city administrator is too insecure.

Moses said he does not care which job Wood handles but that he should not try to do both. He said the city is growing and needs both a full-time police chief and a full-time administrator.

Administrative Skills

Moses said Wood has done well and his skills as an administrator helped straighten out the city three years ago.

He described Wood as “a militant,” meaning, he said, that Wood “goes strictly by the book 100%, taking orders to the point where there is no bending and flexibility.”

The mayor and Wood clashed recently over the mayor’s desire to promote librarian Miguel Alaniz to department head status, instead of having him report to the finance director. Moses said that Azusa is 55% Latino and should have a Latino on its top staff and that Alaniz, by all reports, has done an outstanding job with the library.

Alaniz said he never talked to the mayor about the issue, never sought a promotion and merely wrote a recommendation to his superiors suggesting that the library become a separate department.

Streamlining Effort

He said the library was placed under the finance director in 1984 as part of an effort to create “super” departments to streamline management, but he thought the arrangement merely added a layer of bureaucracy between the library and the city administrator.

He said he was only making a suggestion and considers the issue “a tempest in a teapot.”

Moses said the most recent council meeting ended in a shouting match because he was about to expose the fact that Latta and Cruz had flip-flopped on the issue of whether the job of police chief and administrator should be combined.

Cruz, Latta and Cook said that Wood is caught in a power play by the mayor, who they said is trying to usurp authority.

‘Ceremonial Figurehead’

“The mayor’s duties are no more than our own,” Cruz said. His only extra responsibilities, Latta said, are to be “a ceremonial figurehead and chair the meetings.”

But, Cook said, the mayor spends every day meddling in city business, harassing the city staff and promising favors to people.

“He’s out there doing favors and glad-handing” because he is not employed, Cook said.

As mayor, Moses, 53, receives $350 and a $330 car allowance each month, plus $30 for each redevelopment agency meeting he attends. Councilmen receive nearly the same compensation, but only $220 a month in car allowances.

Full-Time Involvement

The mayor’s and council positions are supposed to be part-time, but Moses said he puts in 60 hours a week. He said he has other income that enables him to devote full-time to city business without holding another job.

He has an office next to Wood’s at City Hall and said a lot of residents call him for help on city business. He said he trys to assist where possible, going through the chain of command.

“I get a lot of calls because people know I can get things done,” he said. When action is warranted, he said, “I have the chief (Wood) look into it. I don’t go around telling department heads what to do.”

He said he keeps close tabs on Wood. “I want to know what he is doing every minute. I want to know if City Hall is producing.”

‘Tearing Me Up’

Moses said he doesn’t understand why council members are “stabbing me in the back” when the city has made so much progress under his leadership.

“Why can’t they get along with me instead of tearing me up?” he asked.

Cook said the city would be better off if Moses would spend less time on city business.

For example, he said, Moses will get a complaint about a street light being out and will order its immediate replacement, taking a city employee from a more important task and disrupting the work schedule.

Cook Versus Moses

Cook, who has announced that he will run against Moses for mayor in 1988, said Moses makes himself popular by ordering a quick response to citizen requests, but “that’s not an efficient use of city funds.”

Moses said Cook’s remarks are politically motivated. Moses, who was first elected mayor in 1982, said he has defeated Cruz and Latta in past mayoral elections and “now Cook wants to take a shot at me and has joined forces with the losers.”

Moses said he has worked tirelessly to make Azusa a better city.

“Don’t punish me because I’m working my holy head off,” he said.