Charter Reform Plan Would Create Worse Problems, Critic Says

Continuing his campaign to derail a set of controversial charter reform proposals, Los Angeles City Administrative Officer Keith Comrie on Thursday released a study amplifying his concerns and presenting them, as he put it, “in more basic words.”

Comrie’s four-page report adds new details to his contention that consolidating more power in the Los Angeles mayor’s office--a notion generally accepted by two different commissions reviewing the city charter, but endorsed with particular vigor by the elected panel--represents a dangerous move.

In fact, he titled his new report “Prescription for Incompetence and Corruption,” and bolstered some of his earlier arguments with new facts and figures regarding turnover at City Hall. According to research by Comrie, 45 people have held permanent or interim general manager positions at 17 large city departments in the past five years.

Any move to give the city’s mayor the power to fire those people without City Council approval, Comrie contends, would make the problem worse.

“We have too much turnover now,” Comrie wrote. “This city will certainly suffer from a change in the charter that will no longer allow us to recruit high-caliber professional managers.”

But members of the elected charter commission took issue with his analysis. One commissioner, Chet Widom, argued that top executives would be attracted to city jobs if the lines of authority in city government were clearer; the current system, he said, frustrates many talented officials by burdening them with too many bosses.

Noting that he and Comrie agreed that the system needs improvement, Widom added: “I see this as the solution. He sees this as the problem.”

Similarly, elected commission Chairman Erwin Chemerinsky took issue with several of Comrie’s points. Chemerinsky called the report inaccurate in one respect--it begins by saying that the commission’s staff “has continued to popularize the theory that the mayor should be able to fire city department heads without council review.” In fact, said Chemerinsky, that proposal was developed not by the commission’s staff, but by a committee of the full panel.

More significant, Chemerinsky said, Comrie’s argument against consolidating management authority in the mayor oversimplifies the issue.

Making general managers hard for the mayor to fire might, as Comrie suggests, encourage them to be independent, Chemerinsky said. But he argued that “independence comes at a cost of accountability,” and that striking that balance is precisely what the elected commission has been trying to do.