Driscoll Hits Turbulence in Switch to Airport Post : Leadership: Selection of city personnel chief to head department is criticized by Councilwoman Galanter. But his backing at City Hall is strong.

As the city of Los Angeles’ longtime personnel director, Jack Driscoll has been involved in plenty of City Hall flaps--including scrapping physical standards for most job applicants.

“When I came here in 1978,” he recalled, “if you had too many cavities, we wouldn’t let you be hired.”

Yet through the years--even when he directed such politically explosive matters as finding a successor to Police Chief Daryl F. Gates--the quiet, cautious career bureaucrat managed to stay above the fray.

Until now.

Driscoll finds himself at the center of controversy over his appointment as manager of the airport department--a giant operation that includes Los Angeles International Airport, the nation’s third-busiest air transportation hub.

Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, claiming a back-room selection process, will ask the City Council today to launch a review of Driscoll’s appointment by the Airport Commission last week.

“I’m trying to find out why it is they passed over three people with airport experience to pick somebody with none,” said Galanter, who represents the neighborhoods surrounding the airport.

She added, however, that she respects Driscoll and is not trying to overturn his appointment.

Driscoll seemed to take the controversy in characteristic stride.

“I don’t have airport experience,” said the 50-year-old appointed successor to Clifton A. Moore, the city’s highest-paid employee and airport manager since 1968.

But, Driscoll added, “one person isn’t going to be out flagging in the aircraft and, in the meantime, running over and parking trucks. You’ve got a general manager whose job is to manage the resources . . . to use (staff members) in their technical areas to accomplish your goal.”

A former mayoral aide and personnel director in Seattle, Driscoll has run Los Angeles’ Personnel Department for 14 years, directing a staff of 450 and overseeing a $245-million annual budget that provides personnel services to departments employing 50,000.

Driscoll, who holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in business administration from Seattle University, has kept a low profile while handling the hiring or firing of a number of controversial department heads.

On the selection of a new police chief, Driscoll met with community groups to find out what they were seeking in the next chief.

“I went out of my way to meet with all kinds of different groups,” he said. “I’ll bet we met with 200 or 300 people.”

In addition to shepherding the selection of a new chief, Deputy Mayor Mark Fabiani said, Driscoll was “personally responsible for helping to integrate the city’s work force.”

In the process, Fabiani said, Driscoll helped bring more women and minorities to management jobs as well as fashion consent decrees that increased the numbers of both groups in the Police and Fire departments.

Driscoll describes as one of his proudest accomplishments his advocacy of a 1983 voter-approved measure that gave city managers more flexibility in employee hiring. Supporters of the measure say it increased job opportunities for women and minorities.

Although not well known outside City Hall, Driscoll is well liked by Mayor Tom Bradley and most council members--something airport commissioners say was a major factor in their decision.

The airport, which is owned by the city but until recently has often operated independently of City Hall, is seeking to establish a better relationship with the council in the wake of voter-approved measures giving the council greater authority over airport matters.

Councilwoman Joy Picus, who chairs the council’s Personnel Committee, called Driscoll a skilled negotiator who is not reluctant to speak his mind. “I know personally that he has told the mayor things that the mayor hasn’t wanted to hear,” Picus said, refusing to elaborate.

In his new job, Driscoll will run LAX--the city’s largest asset with $2 billion in property and an annual operating budget of $187 million--as well as city-owned airports in Ontario, Palmdale and Van Nuys. He will take the $147,000-a-year job in late January.

One of his priorities, he said, will be examining how the airport can help create jobs.

“We’ve got to look to the airport as an asset of the public,” he said. “It’s my job to ensure that the public’s interests are served and enhanced, from a financial standpoint, from an environmental standpoint, from relations standpoints with the airlines, the city family, as well as the community.”

One of his concerns, he said, will be to study ways to improve traffic flow in and out of the airport. Noting that the proposed Metro Green Line, due to open in 1994, is now slated to end outside of the airport, Driscoll said: “We need to look at why that isn’t closer or in the airport.”

Driscoll--his desk piled with reports on airport issues--has begun preparing for his new job.

He has formed an opinion on a proposal to sell or lease the airport to a private operator. He favors the city maintaining control of the facility, citing a report that Los Angeles could make more money--an estimated $3.4 billion over 30 years--by implementing Proposition K than by leasing or selling the facility. Proposition K, approved by voters in November, allows the city to tap airport revenues to help pay for strapped municipal services, but federal restrictions must be removed.

Driscoll described his management style as “politically sensitive, but . . . not political.”

Even before his appointment as airport manager he visited Galanter, who had questioned the Airport Commission’s decision to limit the search for a new manager to city employees. He also called Council President John Ferraro.

Ferraro said Driscoll only called to say he could work with the council--an assurance apparently prompted by Airport Commission questions about his relationship with the council.

Galanter said she was impressed by Driscoll’s visit. “He had done a lot of homework on the airport,” she said.

Still, Galanter has voiced concern about persistent rumors that whoever wins the airport job will hire longtime Bradley aide Phil Depoian as an assistant in a “package deal.”

Driscoll scoffs at that notion. “I don’t believe anybody had that in mind when they appointed me,” he said, adding that Depoian’s name never came up in his discussions about the job. He said that he has made no decision about whether to appoint Depoian.

Moreover, Deputy Mayor Fabiani insisted that Bradley did not allow his high regard for Driscoll to influence the commission’s appointment.

“He did not direct the commission to appoint anyone,” Fabiani said. “He was asked by two commissioners what he thought about the various candidates and he offered his opinion regarding their qualifications. But that’s as far as it went.”

Others took a different view. “The word was out weeks ago that the mayor wanted Driscoll,” said one longtime airport official who asked not to be named.

Robert Chick, president of the Airport Commission, said that in the view of the council’s increased authority over airport matters, the commission wanted an airport manager who has a “strong relationship with the policy-makers of this city.”

Driscoll seems poised to assume his duties when Moore leaves.

Although his selection could be overturned if the next mayor appoints new airport commissioners in the new year, Driscoll points out that the same personnel regulations he has studied for 14 years give him no need for concern:

The City Charter allows him to return to his job in personnel if he loses his airport post.