Mayor Loses Battles on Bureaucracy

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan is in retreat on key elements of his efforts to whip the city’s famously plodding bureaucracy into more responsive shape.

“I think it’s fair to characterize it as a retreat,” said Deputy Mayor Kelly Martin.

Martin was referring to the mayor’s dashed hopes of more than doubling the number of middle and upper managers and technical experts who could be hired to work in city government without the Civil Service protections that the mayor believes encourage unresponsiveness.

The mayor’s hope to increase the city’s use of exempt employees was embodied in Charter Amendment J, which voters passed last fall at his urging.

At the time, he touted it as “an important tool to help make city government efficient and responsive.”

But rather than increase the number of city employees exempt from Civil Service protections, it reduced them.

It also made it more difficult to hire them by requiring a two-thirds majority vote by the City Council rather than the old simple majority.

Why did the mayor’s office support an amendment that harmed its goals?

Expediency and inattention appear to figure in the answer.

“This was a horrible, botched thing,” said William McCarley, Riordan’s former chief of staff. “It’s almost comical if it wasn’t tragic.”

Martin said the experience with the charter amendment carries with it a lesson for those engaged in charter reform “that we have to be careful about unintended consequences. I don’t think it was intended--certainly not in our office--to make it harder [to win City Council approval to fill exempt management positions].”

One result: The mayor’s long-awaited effort to make the city more business-friendly by having a single, exempt employee in charge of a streamlined permitting process remains, despite years of talk, in an embryonic stage, probably months from fruition.

Riordan has also been plagued by delays in separate but related efforts to dangle merit pay increases in front of city department heads who meet their goals.

Those efforts are so far behind schedule that the goals that managers were to have achieved two years ago were only settled upon two months ago.

Riordan’s chief City Council adversary on Civil Service matters, Personnel Committee Chairwoman Jackie Goldberg, says the Riordan view of the amendment as a loss is “silly.”

“It may be a loss in absolute numbers,” she said. “But there’s a great deal more flexibility” to fill exempt positions. She was referring to a provision of the amendment that expands the use of exempt positions from assistant general manager slots to various management levels.

Blaming the delays on reaching merit pay goals largely on a lack of mayoral leadership, she said that approval of a management spot to coordinate permitting is moving ahead.

Charter Amendment J became a failure for the mayor primarily because his office did not assign a staff member to participate in critical negotiations between management, unions and the City Council on the amendment’s precise language.

“The mayor’s office was missing in action on this thing,” McCarley said.

As a result, some other mayoral staff members said, the mayor’s office may not have even understood what the amendment did.

Other staff members said they understood that it represented a compromise but went along after calculating that--in an atmosphere of distrust between the mayor and council and between the mayor and unions--it was the best deal they could get.

In addition, said Riordan’s assistant chief of staff, Greg Dawley, the mayor thought it was urgent to get even the limited authority the amendment provided for the city’s Department of Water and Power to hire at least a few outsiders as it geared up for deregulation.

The DWP has yet to use any of this authority.

The idea for the amendment originated with McCarley, who by then had left the mayor’s office and been appointed by Riordan as general manager of the DWP. He has since retired.

Heading a 10,000-employee agency that was getting ready to compete for the first time with private utilities in an open marketplace for electricity, McCarley found himself in a difficult spot. He needed experts in marketing, for example, that he could not find within the Civil Service.

But the City Charter gave him permission to hire only two people who were not already city workers. He could promote six insiders to exempt management positions.

To be effective, McCarley thought he needed much more room to move. He wanted the authority to promote or hire 40 or 50 people outside the normal Civil Service channels.

He persuaded the citizens commission that oversees the DWP and the mayor’s office that his needs were legitimate, then set out to persuade the City Council, which has the authority to put charter amendments on the ballot.

There he found himself in a broader discussion involving exempt positions for all city departments.

Accounts of who was responsible for broadening the talks diverge. One city employee union leader said the idea originated in the mayor’s office. But McCarley said it came from the City Council’s principal policy advisor, chief legislative analyst Ronald Deaton. Deaton credited the City Council Personnel Committee, particularly its chairwoman, Goldberg.

At any rate, numbers were bandied about. Charley Mims, who participated in the negotiations as president of the Los Angeles Professional Managers Assn., said: “Various numbers were talked about--from 250 to 300. Then we settled.”

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McCarley got 15 exempt positions for the DWP, and it was decided that the rest of the city departments would share 150 exempt slots--including spots for technical experts, such as veterinarians and psychologists, and managers. The managers were limited to 75.

This represented a net loss in the number of exempt positions citywide. Under the existing charter, there was authority to hire about 75 exempt high-level managers--all at the assistant general manager level--and to fill an unlimited number of positions requiring special technical skills.

The mayor’s staff was disappointed. They said they had understood that the authority to hire 75 managers was being added to existing authority to hire 75 assistant general managers--not substituted for it.

Deputy Mayor Stephanie Bradfield said that Deaton told her that the substitution was a mistake.

“Ron Deaton told me, ‘I made a mistake,’ ” said Bradfield, who arrived at the mayor’s office shortly after the charter amendment was drafted.

“It’s a huge error,” Bradfield said, because it took place in a way that can only be changed by voters rather than in an ordinary piece of legislation that can be amended by the City Council.

Bradfield said she believes that the error went undetected by the mayor’s office until after the measure passed.

But Deaton denied making a mistake or telling Bradfield that he had.

Deaton said that he told Bradfield only that he had not intended to make the process of hiring assistant general managers as difficult as the charter amendment made it. “It turned out a lot more complex than I had anticipated,” he said in an interview.

The complexity lies in the charter amendment’s requirement that a department head convince two-thirds of the City Council that no one in Civil Service can do the job. Then the department head has to perform a job search and win the approval of two-thirds of the council for his or her choice to fill the position.

In the case of Riordan’s request for a director of development services, intended to streamline permitting processes that now involve several departments, the council is considering requiring that the job search be conducted by officials of each of the affected departments.

Assistant general managers of all the affected departments would select finalists who would then be interviewed by all of the relevant general managers, said Deputy Mayor Martin. Their choice would then have to meet with the approval of 10 of the 15 council members.

Martin suggested that someone selected through such a cumbersome process might have difficulty believing that he had to be responsive to the mayor.