Plan Would Give Mayor a Vote and Cut 1 Council Seat : Government: Advocates say the proposal has cost-savings advantage over simply giving the city chief a vote, and would eliminate the possibility of a deadlock. Measure could appear on the April ballot.

Searching for a way to eliminate one of the oddities of Long Beach government, the City Council has decided to consider a ballot measure to give the mayor a vote on the council.

The council voted 5 to 3 at a special session Wednesday to direct City Atty. John Calhoun to draft a charter amendment that would also reduce the number of council seats from nine to eight.

The two items--a voting mayor and a reduced council--were linked because of the need to avoid deadlocks by creating a council with an even number of votes, said Councilman Thomas J. Clark, who proposed the charter amendment.

If the mayor were given a vote under the current setup, some issues could be tied at 5 to 5. With eight voting council members and a voting mayor, that contingency would be eliminated, Clark said.

The city has operated under the current system since 1988, when voters approved a charter amendment giving the city a mayor elected at-large. Long Beach is one of only a few California cities whose mayors cannot vote.

Mayor Ernie Kell has served two terms as a non-voting mayor--a two-year term and a four-year term--and he is up for reelection this year. A full-time elected official earning $84,221 a year, Kell chairs council meetings and sometimes seeks to influence council members.

In some instances, the mayor can exercise a veto, which can be overridden by a majority of the council. But without a vote, the mayor lacks mayoral authority, Clark said.

“I think the situation has been ludicrous all along,” said Clark, a former mayor who has pressed for more than 10 years to have a voting mayor elected in a citywide vote. “It makes no sense to have someone sitting in the meeting like that and not having a vote.”

Opposing the charter amendment were Councilmen Ray Grabinski, Alan S. Lowenthal and Warren Harwood.

Grabinski said he is concerned about the speed with which the council is moving on the measure. “I think there were six people in the audience (on Wednesday),” Grabinski said. “There ought to be heavy involvement from the community before they try to do something like this.”

Lowenthal called the measure “a rush to judgment,” which could deprive neighborhood groups of influence in city government. “Reducing the number of council members from nine to eight is not the best way to empower neighborhoods,” Lowenthal said.

As envisioned by Clark, the ninth seat would be eliminated by attrition, either by the retirement of a council member or by the two-term limit on council members enacted in 1992. Thus, the earliest that the system could be modified is 1996, he said.

Calhoun will report back to the council Jan. 11. If the council approves the charter amendment on that day, it could go on the April 12 municipal ballot, City Clerk Shelba Powell said. Otherwise, it could go on the June 7 ballot, provided the council takes action by Feb. 15, Powell said.

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In a related issue, council members considered whether to raise their salaries as part of the same charter amendment. Part-time council members are paid $21,055 a year, and some of them want to increase that amount to half of the mayor’s salary.

“The idea was that, by decreasing the size of the council, we’d be increasing the size of the districts,” Clark said. “We’d be increasing the workloads of each district by roughly 5,000 people.”

Eliminating a council district, including staff and expenses, would represent an annual savings of more than $200,000, which could offset a salary increase for the remaining council members, Clark said.

But after members of the audience suggested that doubling council members’ salaries was not in the public interest, the council majority proposed a salary review commission. Calhoun was directed to include such a commission in the charter amendment.

Long Beach voters turned down proposed charter amendments in 1990 and 1992 that would have given the mayor a stronger veto--with six votes required to override.

Recently, a group called Citizens Task Force for Effective City Government proposed that the mayor be given a weighted vote so that, in case of a 5-5 deadlock, the mayor’s vote would break the tie.

But the current proposal has the virtue of including a budget savings, Clark said. “It reduces costs and it’s easier to sell.”