Charter Panel Leaders OK Key Reforms

The campaign to write a new City Charter cleared another hurdle Friday morning as representatives of the appointed and elected reform commissions agreed on language defining many of the mayor’s powers--strengthening the authority of that office in several ways.

Under the language accepted by a conference committee consisting of leaders of the two commissions, the mayor would have the ability to fire general managers without council agreement. The elected commission has agreed to let the mayor fire city commissioners without council approval as well, an idea that the appointed commission has not yet considered.

The agreed-upon language also would eliminate a step in the hiring process. Now, the mayor usually picks a new department head from a slate of finalists cleared by the city’s personnel department. The two commissions decided to drop that step.

And yet, as the charter process moves forward, it is also leaving behind some of the most hard-fought ideas of the man who initiated it.

Mayor Richard Riordan failed to persuade either charter commission to split the city attorney’s job in two, with the half handling civil matters reporting to him. The failure to win support from either commission virtually ensures that one of Riordan’s top goals for the reform process will not be achieved.

That setback came despite the mayor’s aggressive lobbying for the proposal. As a result, it left him without the substantive change he sought and signaled the degree to which the mayor has lost control of the process.

The elected commission did support one potentially important new power for the mayor’s office. It voted to make the mayor, not the council, the person responsible for controlling city litigation. In theory, that could shift decisions on when to file lawsuits and when to settle them away from the council and to the mayor. The commission did not settle on exactly what it meant by moving that control, and intends to take that issue up later.

Deputy Mayor Kelly Martin, an experienced lawyer who oversees charter reform issues for Riordan, said she was pleased to see some bolstering of mayoral authority, but disappointed not to prevail on the larger issue of restructuring the city attorney’s office.

“They made a fundamental change,” Martin said of the elected commission’s decision to give the mayor greater power in overseeing litigation. “We would have wished that they would have gone further.”

Meanwhile, the issue of creating neighborhood councils continues to bog down the process, as participants in a controversial group formed to negotiate a deal send out mixed signals about their prospects for success.

The group of labor, business and homeowner representatives met three times in secret and disbanded this week without reaching an agreement.

Judge William Norris, who oversaw the sessions, called the meetings productive. Some participants said a compromise might be at hand in which business and labor leaders would agree to elected, as opposed to appointed, councils, while homeowner groups would give in on their insistence that the panels have some authority over land use issues.

Others thought the gap between the two sides remains wide and doubt that any deal is close to being struck.