Furniture Bill Sparks Furor in Anaheim : City Hall: Councilman criticizes spending $8,000 to outfit two offices as poor leadership in lean times. Mayor says purchases were necessary.

A $4,000 bill for new furniture in the mayor’s City Hall office has been blasted by a councilman as an unnecessary expense but defended by the mayor who said his chairs were literally crumbling.

Councilman Fred Hunter criticized Mayor Tom Daly for spending $4,193 for four new chairs, a sofa, a table and a file cabinet while the city was contemplating cuts to the Police and Fire departments and extending a controversial utility tax. Hunter also criticized the purchase of $4,067 worth of furniture for new Assistant City Manager David Morgan’s office.

“The furniture in the mayor’s office was good enough for (former mayors) Don Roth, Ben Bay and Fred Hunter. But I guess it wasn’t good enough for Tom Daly,” said Hunter, who was mayor from 1988 until last December. Daly defeated him in the mayor’s race last fall by a margin of 57% to 43%, after a heated and sometimes nasty campaign.

Daly called Hunter’s charges a “cheap shot” and said the mayor’s office furniture was 13 years old and some pieces needed replacing.

“I was a little embarrassed when a chair collapsed underneath a visitor,” Daly said. Half of the furniture in his office was not replaced, he said.

Morgan, who was promoted by the council in January after five years as the city’s human resources director, said the assistant city manager’s office had no furniture when he moved in.

“It’s nothing extravagant--some chairs and a desk,” Morgan said of the purchase. “I needed a place to work.”

But Hunter wouldn’t accept the explanations. He said that Daly’s chairs should have been fixed and that Morgan should have been told to select pieces from the surplus furniture the city has in storage.

“I wonder what some low-level employee, who might get laid off, will think about this,” Hunter said. “This is supposed to be a time of austerity, and the leaders of this city need to lead by example.”

Daly countered by saying Hunter rarely conducted city business in the mayor’s office, preferring his law office, which is across the street from City Hall. Daly works for the Building Industry Assn., which is in Irvine. He said that makes it an impractical location to greet city visitors and conduct city business.

“I have a steady stream of business people and dignitaries” visiting the City Hall office, Daly said, which means that he must have respectable furniture.

Morgan and City Manager James D. Ruth said that before Morgan took office, the furniture of the former assistant city manager, who stood more than six feet tall, had been moved to the budget department where an extremely large man had been hired to replace an extremely small man. A decision was then made to allow Morgan, an average-size man, to buy new furniture, Ruth said.

In an effort to balance the city’s $135-million budget, the council has been contemplating a $2.4-million cut in the Police Department budget, a $500,000 cut in the Fire Department budget, laying off up to 10 employees and extending beyond its scheduled Sept. 30 expiration a 2% utility tax that raises $8 million annually for the city.

The council voted Tuesday to kill the tax and tentatively agreed not to cut the Police or Fire department budgets or to lay off employees for at least one year. To do that, it will probably be necessary for the city to dip into its $15-million savings account.