Casualties in the Mayor’s Brawl With the Council

Even before the city’s new charter goes into effect, the landscape of city government is changing. It’s clearly going to be a difficult transition. Neighborhood councils, probably the best understood and most eagerly awaited change, won’t go into effect for some time, but the rest of the charter is expected to be in place by July 1. Unfortunately, the mayor’s office, in its eagerness to exercise the greater authority bestowed upon it by the charter, is behaving as if he has absolute power over city government. The new charter seeks to create a better balance between the mayor and City Council, not an unrestrained ruler.

Apparently, Mayor Richard Riordan is seeking a different kind of balance. He’s already trying to wean general managers from any sense of loyalty to the City Council by requiring them to submit all communications to the council to his office first. Furthermore, he has fired some key managers, such as William T. Fujioka, the chief administrative officer he hired to succeed Keith Comrie. Is this really what the new charter means?

When Riordan was elected in 1993, he succeeded an administration that had been in power for two decades. It was to be expected that he would want his own general managers to run city departments. But changing the guard requires leadership, not just authority. Civil Service and the culture of city government that fosters professional knowledge of and loyalty to the job complicate change. Riordan’s relative indifference to the nuances of human behavior, or what he considers to be arcane rules and regulations, made the transition particularly graceless, but he battled on and brought in new people.

The raw wounds of the early years of the Riordan administration closed, but general managers kept leaving. Just as troubling was the exit of middle management, those in service long enough to rise to the top. Lately, one reason for their exodus has been greater economic opportunity in the private sector. A more disquieting explanation was the strained relationship between the mayor’s office, on the one hand, and city departments and the council, on the other, a tension that has characterized the Riordan administration from the beginning.

The issue of mayoral authority to fire general managers was among the most controversial during charter reform, partly because of Riordan’s style of conducting government business and partly because of a general distrust of centralized power. Initially, both the elected and the appointed charter-reform commissions gave the mayor the authority to fire general managers, but when the appointed commission took its draft proposal around the city for comment, an overwhelming majority of voters balked. So, too, did Comrie, the city’s then-chief administrative officer, who spoke out strongly against it, as had his predecessor in the last round of charter reform in 1970.

Comrie feared corruption if a mayor could fire at will, but he also was protective of the professionalism of the city’s Civil Service, a goal of the progressive 1925 charter. In the end, Riordan compromised. Under the new charter, he can fire general managers, but they can appeal dismissal to the City Council, which, after a two-thirds vote to hear the case, can reinstate the ousted official by a two-thirds vote. Fujioka says he will appeal his termination on the ground that it violates the charter.

The new charter and the voters who embraced it seek a better balance of power and a more effective mayor. The charter still gives the City Council all legislative power, even if subject to mayoral veto. But council members can’t legislate if they don’t know what’s going on in city departments.

It would be a shame if Riordan’s last year in office were marked by the same kind of skirmishes between him and the council that have marred his administration. It would be equally shameful if the city were to lose the best and brightest of its civil servants because the mayor overstepped his executive authority. The City Council’s initial mistrust of the new charter reflected its anxiety that a newly empowered mayor would be too quick to grab undue power. That was also why the charter-reform commissions followed the National League of Cities in recommending delayed implementation until a new administration takes office. Under any circumstance, it is disruptive to have new people coming in--if they can be found in such a short time--only to be replaced by a new mayor within a year.

Riordan’s legacy of a new charter gives the city an opportunity to take hold of itself and find a new path into the new century. He cannot lead us far down that path because of the term limits he himself proposed. Now he’s undercutting the charter he helped bring into being by reaching for power that is not his to exercise. *