Top City Official Declares War on Charter Reforms

Infuriated by a set of charter reform proposals that he believes will foster inefficiency and corruption, one of Los Angeles’ most senior officials Thursday blasted the efforts to rewrite the city’s constitution and blamed Mayor Richard Riordan’s overzealous and inexperienced staff for sidetracking the debate.

“I was going to retire in January,” the usually taciturn City Administrative Officer Keith Comrie said Thursday in a blunt, pointed interview. “I consider this such a threat to honest and good government that I’m going to stay on.”

Among other things, Comrie said giving the mayor the power to fire city department heads without council approval, allowing his office to prepare the annual city budget and giving him the authority to negotiate labor contracts--a function now performed by Comrie’s office--would badly undermine the city’s traditional checks and balances. Comrie also warned against the creation of elected neighborhood councils with real decision-making powers, which he said “would bog government down and bring it to a standstill.”

And, in direct criticisms of the mayor, Comrie accused Riordan of failing to wield his existing authority effectively and charged that he had held secret meetings with members of the elected charter reform commission. The meetings, Comrie said, were “possibly illegal” because they may have violated the state’s open meetings law.

Riordan did not respond to Comrie’s comments, but said through a spokesman that they were wrong and ill-considered.

“It’s incredibly disappointing that Keith chose to make such a personal issue of this,” said Noelia Rodriguez, the mayor’s press secretary. “The mayor hopes he will conduct himself in a more professional way in the future.”

One Riordan aide was more blunt: “Keith is just proving that he’s denying a village somewhere in the world its idiot.”

On the subject of the allegedly illegal meetings, Rodriguez noted that while Riordan has met with elected commission President Erwin Chemerinsky and other charter commissioners, those meetings have been small sessions and not with the entire panel. Such meetings are legal under the open meetings rules, Rodriguez said, dismissing Comrie’s suggestion that they were improper. “That’s absolutely baseless,” she said. “It’s absurd and false.”

Chemerinsky agreed. He said he had never attended any meeting with other commissioners and Riordan except during the commission’s public sessions. “I’ve also met with Keith Comrie,” he said.

The strong words from Comrie are particularly stinging because of his background. Few city officials command the tenure or respect accorded to Comrie, who has worked for the government off and on for 35 years and who works daily with the city’s top managers and elected leaders.

“He’s the lighthouse against which you navigate your budgetary decision-making,” said county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who has known Comrie for more than 20 years and who worked with him for more than a decade when Yaroslavsky served on the City Council. “If you don’t have that lighthouse, you crash.”

Moreover, Comrie is famously understated, so his fiery words regarding the Riordan administration represent a notable departure from his traditional style.

Tipping the Balance of Power

Comrie acknowledged that his comments were uncharacteristic. Nevertheless, he said he was driven to speak out because many of the city’s general managers are deeply concerned about the course of charter reform, but afraid to air their views because they fear retaliation from Riordan or his deputies.

According to Comrie, two recently hired department heads came to him after reviewing the elected charter commission’s proposals to reform government. Both said they would not have come to Los Angeles if it had such a charter in place, Comrie said.

“Why would I leave a fair system for one that could be arbitrary and capricious?” Comrie said one of the general managers asked him.

By proposing to give the mayor additional power over the city’s general managers, charter commissioners are tipping the balance of power in a city that doesn’t need it, Comrie added.

“There’s this idea that the mayor doesn’t have enough power,” he said. “He has plenty of power. The mayor’s job is stronger than the president of the United States. He can propose a budget, and he has a line-item veto. . . . Anything the mayor doesn’t want is gone.”

Rather, Comrie said Riordan’s frustrations with city government are largely of his own making. The mayor’s famously difficult relations with the City Council are his fault, Comrie said, and undermine his effectiveness.

“He has plenty of authority,” Comrie said. “Any mayor that can’t get eight votes [a majority of the 15-member council] is not very effective.”

In part, Comrie said he believes the shift in emphasis of the charter reform debate to one largely about mayoral power was the result of Riordan’s lobbying and his connections to the elected commission. Comrie was particularly critical of the elected commission’s administrative director, Geoffrey Garfield, who once worked for the Riordan administration.

Comrie called Garfield a “political trickster from New York” and accused Garfield of trying to import bad management principles from New York to Los Angeles.

That accusation drew a sharp response from Chemerinsky.

“I think that’s terribly unfair,” the elected commission president said. “Garfield was hired as our administrative director, and he has done a superb job in that position. That kind of ad hominem attack is insulting to Garfield and insulting to the commission.”

Garfield, his voice rising in anger, said Comrie was criticizing him to divert attention from the weakness of his arguments. “It’s an old axiom of politics that once the opposition scapegoats the consultant, that means they’ve run out of issues. . . . If this is his best shot, then he’s run out of ammunition.”

Comrie’s fierce rejection of New York management principles knows few bounds, and he unloaded with criticisms of that city during Thursday’s interview.

Noting that New York is the only major American city to declare bankruptcy in the past 50 years, Comrie said inefficiency, mismanagement and corruption are its hallmarks.

“It centralized all of its powers in one office, a dictatorship, the office of the mayor,” Comrie said. With that, Comrie produced a recent news release from New York’s Independent Budget Office announcing that that agency had filed a lawsuit against Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for refusing to turn over information to the office.

“That’s the kind of confusion you get in New York,” Comrie said.

Again, Chemerinsky said Comrie’s criticisms were off base. “We do not see ourselves as adopting the New York model,” he said. “Our charter will create a unique government for a unique city.”

Although Comrie stressed that he has always considered Riordan to be a person of integrity, the city administrative officer was far harsher about the mayor’s staff. Alluding to a number of controversies since the beginning of Riordan’s tenure, Comrie blamed Riordan’s aides for improperly pressuring the head of the city’s animal control department, for leaking a confidential legal document, and for “a series of dishonest moves” by a former economic development aide.

What makes matters worse, he added, is that Riordan has brought so many people to City Hall who have so little experience in government.

“It’s a very low-level staff,” Comrie said. “There’s no experience, no knowledge.”

Responding for the mayor, Rodriguez said: “The mayor is very proud of his staff. Throughout his time in office, he’s pointed with admiration to the people he’s appointed.”

So determined is Comrie to contest the drift of the elected commission that he pledged to stay in his job well into 1999 despite his earlier plans to retire. In part, he said, he wanted to be in that job so that he can conduct the budget analysis of any proposed charter reform.

But Comrie added that he expects his job to be made more difficult by what he anticipates will be retaliation from Riordan and his allies, including the mayor’s best friend, lawyer and political powerhouse Bill Wardlaw.

“I expect the mayor’s staff to be extremely vindictive,” he said.

“But I’ll be here,” he added with a smile. “I’ll be here . . . unless Bill Wardlaw hits me in an intersection.”