Managers Warily Studying City Hall’s New Landscape : Politics: Top bureaucrats take stock after voters heed Mayor Riordan’s plea to end Civil Service protections.

They are the City Hall bosses--the top managers who have long enjoyed near-total job security in six-figure positions overseeing everything in the Los Angeles bureaucracy from street lighting to libraries.

On Wednesday morning, though, they came to work to find everything had changed.

The city’s voters, reversing a longstanding pattern, approved a measure Tuesday giving the mayor and City Council expanded power to fire them.

Dismantled overnight was a decades-old system of Civil Service protections for 26 general managers that Mayor Richard Riordan, the entrepreneur-turned-politician, said has hindered his efforts to bring corporate efficiencies and practices to City Hall.

The vote--and the Riordan-led campaign leading up to it--caused a certain amount of consternation in the upper reaches of the City Hall bureaucracy. “Rumors . . . have been going around that the mayor wants (to install) his own general managers,” said Randall Bacon, head of the city’s General Services Department and a defender of the status quo.

But Riordan, sounding conciliatory at a news conference Wednesday, denied that any purge is in the offing.

Rather, the mayor predicted that mere passage of Charter Amendment 2 would suffice to shake up the city’s top executives. “I expect there’ll be greater accountability,” the mayor said. “When they know they can lose their jobs, they’ll do a better job.”

Riordan also said he could not cite any examples of top managers thwarting him by hiding behind the city’s shield of baffling and complex Civil Service rules and procedures: “When I’ve been involved, they’ve been very cooperative.”

Altogether, eight charter amendments--including measures to hire an inspector general in the LAPD and to overhaul the city’s antiquated purchasing system--were approved by voters.

Tuesday’s balloting also set the stage for runoff elections in two hotly contested City Council races.

In the 5th District, which includes Westwood, Bel-Air and Sherman Oaks, attorney Michael Feuer and activist Barbara Yaroslavsky will face each other in a June 6 election after neither was able to secure the 50% plus one vote needed to win outright in the primary. Feuer received 39.8% to Yaroslavsky’s 26.6%.

There also will be a runoff between Councilman Nate Holden and attorney Stan Sanders, candidates for the 10th District seat that stretches from Koreatown to Crenshaw. Holden won 46.2% of the vote, while Sanders received 42.5%.

Still, it was Charter Amendment 2 that produced Tuesday’s most dramatic impact, passing 61.7% to 38.3% and instantly altering City Hall’s institutional landscape. Its passage was particularly noteworthy because voters have rejected near-identical measures four times in the last 15 years.

Riordan, the measure’s chief spokesman and fund-raiser, chose to interpret the measure’s passage this time as a sign of voters’ heightened sense of respect for city government. The vote demonstrated that residents have “confidence that we can turn L.A. around,” Riordan said.

The most vocal opposition to the measure had come from Holden, who said it would turn general managers into political puppets and could be used to discriminate against minorities.

Exempt from the measure are Police Chief Willie L. Williams, Chief Administrative Officer Keith Comrie, Ethics Commission Executive Director Ben Bycel and Chief Legislative Analyst Ron Deaton, whose tenures are governed by other rules. It also has little impact on the heads of the Airports, Harbor, and Water and Power departments, who are already exempt from Civil Service provisions. However, the measure shifts authority for their hiring and firing from citizen commissions to the mayor.

The prime targets of the measure are the 26 department heads running pension systems, the Convention Center, garbage collection, city planning, services for the elderly, recreation programs--much of the business of municipal Los Angeles. Eighteen of them earn more than $100,000 a year; overall, their salaries range from a high of $171,153 (Fire Chief Donald Manning) to $76,588 (Robert Burns, head of the Social Service Department).

The general managers now have to decide their next step. George Eslinger, head of the Bureau of Street Lighting and one of those affected by Charter Amendment 2, said he wanted to see how the mayor uses his newfound authority before taking definite action.

“I’m in kind of a wait-and-see mode,” said Eslinger, who makes $107,803 a year at the job he’s held since 1984. “Let’s get a little experience.”

One of the options for the top bureaucrats is a lawsuit, said Bacon, who is the head of the city’s General Managers Assn.

Bacon, who has headed one of the city’s largest departments since 1988 and makes $131,273 a year, maintains that it is illegal for the measure to be applied to current general managers.

They accepted their positions with the understanding that the job security of Civil Service protection was part of their benefits package, Bacon said. “I might not have taken this job if it didn’t have such protections,” Bacon said in a telephone interview from Tampa, Fla., where he was attending a conference of the National Forum for Black Public Administrators.

“We feel confident that Civil Service status under these circumstances is a property right and 50 years of court cases uphold that view,” he said. In fact, when city officials previously put similar measures on the ballot, they sought to extend the new rules only to new executives, exempting existing managers.

Bacon, who did not campaign against the measure, said Civil Service keeps the city’s top bureaucrats from becoming political pawns.

Still, several general managers interviewed Wednesday said they do not feel threatened by Charter Amendment 2. “I already feel I’m doing a good job,” said Eslinger, Bacon’s predecessor as head of the General Managers Assn.

“Personally, I’ve got no problem with it,” said Burns of the Social Services Department. “I don’t see a patronage system emerging because under the amendment the mayor’s decision would still require council approval.”

Will he be more on his toes now, as Riordan suggested? “I have no comment,” Burns said. “After all, the mayor is my immediate superior.”

But others spoke warily about the dismantlement of a hallmark of City Hall’s culture.

City Clerk Lee Martinez said he believed Civil Service had helped protect him from dismissal. Under that system, Martinez was entitled to a series of hearings after then-Mayor Tom Bradley sought to remove the clerk on charges that he had sexually harassed some of his female employees. Martinez vigorously denied any wrongdoing, claiming Bradley’s ulterior motive was to punish him for refusing to back the mayor on a controversial decision.

The Civil Service Commission finally voted 5 to 0 in 1993 to reinstate Martinez, with two of its members claiming the clerk had been “railroaded.” Such a commission hearing will not be available to accused department heads under Charter Amendment 2.

* BATTLE FOR THE 5TH: Feuer’s strong showing may be trouble for Yaroslavsky. B1.

* OTHER COVERAGE: B1, B3.