Embattled Head of Convention Center Resigns

A year after it was disclosed that he was moonlighting for a competing agency in Hawaii, the longtime director of the struggling Los Angeles Convention Center resigned Thursday.

Dick Walsh’s resignation ends a lengthy bureaucratic odyssey in which Mayor Richard Riordan attempted to exercise his power to hire and fire city department heads, only to encounter a cumbersome process involving lengthy hearings and City Council review. Walsh is the 10th of 27 city department heads to leave in recent months.

After The Times reported last summer that Walsh had earned more than $80,000 counseling Hawaiian officials on building a convention facility, spending more than 1,000 hours over two years--the equivalent of 120 workdays--on the project, Riordan immediately ordered him to cease, and launched a special review of his job performance.

Sources who spoke on condition of anonymity said a three-member panel evaluating Walsh’s leadership at the Convention Center--which in recent years has required a subsidy of as much as $20 million from the city’s general fund--submitted a scathing written report and urged the director to resign rather than challenge his inevitable firing.

“This is an appropriate step for a man with a lot of years of service and a vastly changed set of responsibilities for the department,” said Robin Kramer, Riordan’s chief of staff. “When taxpayer money, [millions of dollars] of it a year, is being used to subsidize the Convention Center--instead of being used for police or cleaner streets or trimmer trees--you have to look at the performance of the center and think hard about its stewardship and its future.”

Walsh, who has run the Convention Center for nearly 24 years, will leave city government in January, but remain available as a consultant for two months and receive a fee of $25,000. Having resigned with a salary of $134,238, his annual pension benefits will be about $70,000.

“We do not believe he has the vision to run the Convention Center in the way we’d like it to be done. He basically does the job he’s set himself up to do,” said City Councilman Mike Hernandez, who headed the evaluation committee.

Hernandez’s committee was stymied in its effort to approve Walsh’s written goals for the Convention Center and measure his performance when Walsh hired an attorney last fall and threatened a lawsuit. The panel had several lengthy closed-door sessions, then submitted a report to the mayor several months ago.

Walsh’s attorney, Peter Kelly, and the mayor’s office refused to provide copies of the report.

But sources said that it was highly critical of his leadership at the Convention Center and said Walsh lacked the vision and business savvy to lead the agency into the future. If Walsh had refused to resign, the sources said, the mayor’s office and the evaluation committee were likely to recommend his ouster; at that point, the report would have been disclosed to the full City Council.

Before Walsh agreed to quit, Hernandez warned, “It’s going to get ugly.”

Walsh declined to be interviewed Thursday. Kelly also declined to comment on the circumstances surrounding the resignation.

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Last summer, Walsh told The Times he had cleared his moonlighting with the mayor’s office as required by the city’s Ethics Commission. The mayor’s top staffers said they had been unclear about the scope of Walsh’s involvement in Hawaii.

Riordan ordered an Ethics Commission investigation, which found that Walsh had not violated any city laws.

In a three-paragraph resignation letter to Riordan, Walsh said it had been his “privilege--and challenge” to oversee the $500-million expansion of the center to its present size of 866,000 square feet.

“But as successful as we have been, I am confident that the best is yet to come, and that under your leadership, the city and the Convention Center will reach greater heights in the years ahead,” Walsh wrote.

Riordan responded with an equally short, and similarly cordial letter, describing Walsh’s oft-criticized tenure as “distinguished.”

“Your in-depth knowledge of the convention industry is an important part of the Convention Center’s track record of success,” the mayor wrote. “Most recently, with your valuable assistance, our city is well on the way to creating an even better Convention Center complex with the addition of the sports and entertainment arena.”

Riordan had criticized Walsh last summer for sending letters to Convention Center clients warning them of potential inconveniences that could be created by arena construction.

Kramer and Deputy Mayor Kelly Martin said the lengthy, repeatedly delayed process of reviewing Walsh highlighted problems with the city’s system of evaluating the performance of top administrators. Although the mayor is supposed to have the power to fire these employees at will, the City Charter requires that the City Council first set goals for the manager and evaluate his or her performance against those goals--a process that is years behind schedule.

“The whole general manager merit pay process, which is the mechanism to review performance, isn’t working as well as we would hope,” Martin said. “We need to go in and tweak the process to make it speedier and more timely.”

Kramer said Riordan will probably appoint a new commission to study the Convention Center and consider implementing a different management structure before hiring someone to replace Walsh.