A Flip-Flop on Mayor’s Firing Power

A commission charged with overhauling the Los Angeles City Charter voted Wednesday to retreat from one of its most important and controversial recommendations: giving the mayor the power to fire department heads without City Council approval.

That proposal is strongly supported by the mayor’s office and many leaders in the business community. But it has come under fire from a surprising coalition of forces, ranging from City Administrative Officer Keith Comrie to leaders of city employee unions and some City Council members.

The objections from Comrie and the unions have grown in recent weeks, and Wednesday the appointed charter commission also got bracing news about public reaction to the proposal.

In a report released Wednesday, commission aides tallied about 200 public responses received in the past several weeks, during which the panel has hosted a number of open houses and aggressively sought feedback on its tentative recommendations.

Although admittedly a small and unscientific sample, the responses suggested that there is support for many of the commission’s proposals but opposition to strengthening the mayor’s power to fire department heads.

Report Describes ‘Intense’ Opposition

Sixty-four percent of those responding to that idea opposed it. One third of the respondents described themselves as strongly disagreeing with it.

“This measure was strongly opposed in a variety of locales,” the report said, describing the opposition as “intense.”

Faced with what could be seen as widespread and passionate disapproval, the commission reversed its earlier position, voting to maintain the status quo on the firing issue. Under current rules, a majority of the council can overrule any mayor who seeks to fire a general manager.

“This is one issue that seems to really make people uncomfortable,” commission Chairman George Kieffer said Wednesday.

Before the panel voted on the matter, it heard impassioned appeals from Comrie and Theresa Patzakis, a representative of the mayor.

As he has before, Comrie urged the commission not to recommend giving the mayor power to remove department heads without oversight. Citing the example of New York City, where the mayor has that authority, Comrie warned that the recommendation was a prescription for corruption and mismanagement.

He also peppered his analysis with criticism of Mayor Richard Riordan, whom Comrie has attacked in increasingly pointed ways recently. Noting that Riordan had just dismissed his chief of staff and replaced her--marking the fifth time that the mayor’s top aide has left--Comrie suggested that such turnover would become commonplace if the mayor got similar authority over city departments.

“The mayor now, to use a baseball term, is five for five,” Comrie said. “In five years, he’s had five chiefs of staff.”

Such turnover citywide, Comrie added, would cause the government “literally to fall apart.”

In response, Patzakis dismissed Comrie’s argument and wondered aloud why the commission was entertaining second thoughts about its earlier decision.

“I’m not sure why everyone is so afraid of this,” she said. Patzakis added that it would not be in any mayor’s interest to sweep out department heads on a whim, and that common sense would prevent the mayor from abusing the authority to fire.

And she questioned the significance of the public objections to the proposal, given the small size of the sample.

“I’m not sure that at this point, this is really the voice of the people,” she said. “I’m not swayed by the results.”

Her argument did not prevail, however.

Not only did the commission vote to restore the council’s oversight over firing decisions, it also chose not to adopt a compromise that would have allowed the council to review those moves but required a two-thirds majority to overturn them. The commission’s vote was 8 to 6, with several of those in the minority favoring the compromise.

Comrie, generally a reserved executive, was clearly pleased by the vote.

“Reason prevailed,” he said, smiling broadly.

Growing Gap Between 2 Commissions Seen

In addition to gutting one of the reforms most urgently sought by the Riordan administration, the vote Wednesday highlights what many observers perceive as a growing drift between the appointed commission and its elected counterpart.

“This rollback of a previous decision reflects the basic difference between the two charter commissions,” elected Commissioner Rob Glushon said. “The appointed commission needs to be responsive to the City Council, while the elected commission must be responsive directly to the voters.”

Both commissions are trying to rewrite the charter by the end of the year. The appointed panel will submit its recommendations to the City Council, which will decide what, if anything, to put on the ballot. The elected panel can take its recommendations directly to the voters without council approval.

For weeks, the panels held regular joint conference meetings with the goal of drafting a common charter--which leaders of both panels hope would reduce voter confusion and increase the chance of a charter winning approval at the ballot box.

In recent weeks, however, the conference sessions have broken off, and the hope of presenting a common charter to voters seems to be dwindling as the elected commission stakes out a vision of stronger centralized authority and the appointed panel moves in the opposite direction.

Interviewed Wednesday, Kieffer acknowledged that some observers have questioned the progress of the conference committee effort, but he insisted that the cancellation of recent sessions has resulted from scheduling conflicts, not a breakdown in the process.

“As far as I’m concerned . . . we’re still very much committed to trying to seek one single set of charter recommendations,” he said. “We’re going to be sitting down shortly.”