LOS ANGELES : Council Adopts New Policy for Evaluating Managers

The Los Angeles City Council has adopted a new process for evaluating department general managers, a change intended to make them more accountable.

In the future, the performance criteria will be drafted by a “planning group” made up of the agency chief, the agency’s commission president, the mayor and the chair of the agency’s council oversight committee.

Previously, general managers drafted the criteria themselves and presented them for the review of the mayor and the department’s commission.

“This is a dramatic departure in how we’ve done things,” Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, the Personnel Committee chairwoman, said Tuesday.

Councilwoman Ruth Galanter said that in the past she had been frustrated in conducting evaluations because they sometimes did not include guidelines that she thought should be considered.

“To have an opportunity for more people to participate in not only setting the goals for each individual department, but in making sure that where we have citywide goals that they become goals for each general manager, I think is going to improve the process immeasurably,” she said.

Randall Bacon, head of the General Services Department, spoke on behalf of the city’s general managers and said that they agree with the change in the evaluation process.