Stripping Away Excessive Job Protection : Charter reform would rightly lift Civil Service safeguards for 38 top L.A. city posts

Four times in the last 14 years the Los Angeles City Council has put before the voters a charter reform proposal to give the mayor greater freedom to fire top city officials. Each time, Angelenos have voted no, persuaded by arguments that the change would pave the way for a patronage system staffed by mayoral cronies.

In April, Los Angeles voters will have a fifth opportunity to decide on this proposed change. In addition, six related charter reforms will be on the ballot.

We hope that events of recent years--most notably the long and bitter battle to force a change at the top of the Los Angeles Police Department--will provide convincing evidence of the need for charter change.

Two years ago voters passed Charter Amendment F, which among other things made the chief of police more accountable to the mayor and the City Council. The change now proposed would give the mayor and council the authority to discipline or fire most other city department heads.

Last week, the City Council agreed to put the seven charter reform measures on the April ballot. All are needed. One would create a watchdog for citizen complaints of police misconduct; another would reform the city’s antiquated purchasing system. Others are more technical and less far-reaching.

The most controversial of the seven would exempt all 38 city department heads or general managers, who earn $76,000 to $171,000, from Civil Service protections. That means that protections against firing or discipline, first extended in the 1930s, would be dropped. Other city employees would remain under the Civil Service umbrella.

Why is this change imperative? Because the city has wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars in lengthy, acrimonious legal battles to dismiss several department heads whose actions raised serious questions about their competency.

In the 1980s, for example, then-Mayor Tom Bradley moved to fire Sylvia Cunliffe, head of the General Services Department, on the grounds she had misused her position and had made false accusations against a whistle-blower who disclosed management problems in her office. Cunliffe eventually resigned, still under the threat of dismissal, in 1988.

Civil Service was designed to protect the “little guys,” those at the bottom of the government bureaucracy, against tyranny by their bosses. It was not intended to protect entrenched politicians or ineffective bureaucrats. But that’s what it has done in Los Angeles, for much too long. We think voters can distinguish between employees who need that protection and those who don’t. City department heads should not, in effect, have a lifetime lock on their jobs.