Vacancies Offer Chance for Mayor to Mold Bureaucracy

From the Los Angeles Police Department to the Department of Water and Power to the Harbor to Housing, many of the most important managerial posts in Los Angeles’ local government are vacant or about to be, fueling uncertainty throughout City Hall but giving Mayor Richard Riordan a rare opportunity to make his management mark.

Although turnover is a natural part of any large organization such as the city government, never in modern times have so many vacancies come up in so short a time. That gives Riordan, who has devoted much of his four years in office to streamlining the Los Angeles bureaucracy, a chance to overhaul it from the top down.

“As mayor, by far the most important thing I do is picking the best and brightest,” the mayor said Monday. “If I have any genius at all, it’s at going out and finding good people. It’s what I did in venture capital.”

Even his critics acknowledge that Riordan stands poised to revolutionize the city’s management. They just worry about the results.

Asked whether the slew of recent vacancies gives Riordan a chance to make a historic mark on Los Angeles, City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas responded: “I believe that’s true. What he will do with that opportunity is another question altogether.”

Already, much of Riordan’s schedule is occupied by interviews of candidates for a host of top jobs--and by the time he sets aside to run his own background checks.

Last month, just days after he won reelection, Riordan personally vetted contenders to lead the Metropolitan Transportation Authority before pushing other MTA board members to extend a bid to Theodore Weigle, an executive with Bechtel.

This week, his schedule blocks out time to research possible street maintenance directors. Meanwhile, his friend and confidant Bill Wardlaw has helped him cull through possible choices to run the DWP, and July will bring a list of possible candidates to run the city’s most controversial agency, the LAPD.

The result is that with Riordan’s second term barely underway, at least 14 of the city’s 33 agencies--as well as the MTA, which is jointly overseen by the county--will be directed by people the mayor had the primary hand in selecting. And that includes its biggest and most important ones.

“This offers Mayor Riordan a tremendous opportunity,” said Wardlaw. “The kind of people he’s looking for . . . are the most entrepreneurial people he can find, people who are willing to make decisions, tough decisions, people who are willing to make mistakes. He would love to have people who are willing to take more chances.”

That opportunity does come at a price, however.

Aides to the mayor are juggling more than half a dozen search firms dedicated to rustling up talent from outside the city government and to assessing candidates inside it. That is a time-consuming task, and one that is subject to extensive second-guessing by the mayor, who likes to tap his own sources rather than rely on those supplied by the firms or by the contenders themselves.

Robin Kramer, the mayor’s chief of staff, said aides have reached out to employee groups, constituents and other “stakeholders” as part of the searches. “It’s a whole new skill we’ve had to create and develop,” she said.

Riordan, however, brought some of those same skills with him to the mayor’s office.

As a businessman, investor and the founder of his own law firm, Riordan has a network of sources to draw on in considering possible appointments. In seeking advice on hiring a new MTA director, for instance, he called associates on the East Coast and asked for their thoughts on Weigle and other potential candidates.

His contacts can be widely varied: old classmates, business associates, civic leaders, just about anyone Riordan can think of who might have insights and who will take a call from the mayor of Los Angeles.

“He makes calls to people who are unconventional,” Kramer said. “He thinks about who ought to be familiar with this person’s past work or current work, and then he calls them. He draws on 30 years of civic work in this city and elsewhere. . . . He doesn’t make one call. He makes a number of them.”

Kramer and other mayoral staffers said Riordan has been known to solicit comments from business leaders, foundation executives, union members, even newspaper reporters. “Some of the human element comes out that doesn’t necessarily come out through the formal search process,” Kramer said.

Riordan’s choices are circumscribed by the council confirmation process, but his record so far suggests the kind of leader he may look for.

“I look for people with strong will and a commitment to make changes, people who empower employees to go out and make decisions,” he said. “I want people who are willing to let their employees make mistakes . . . and who foster a spirit of accountability.”

His selections of general managers over the past four years have generally been young, assertive and most often, but not exclusively, men. Some have been unorthodox--not simply the next in line at the agencies where vacancies have arisen.

William McCarley was dispatched to run the DWP even though he was not a veteran of that department. Faye Washington was tapped to run the Personnel Department even though she was the veteran leader of the Department of Aging.

Both of those officials came from within city government, but at times Riordan has reached outside the bureaucracy. This year, for instance, he chose William Fujioka to replace Washington at the Personnel Department. Fujioka came from Los Angeles County after a tumultuous assignment at the High Desert Hospital, where his efforts were credited with helping to turn around that troubled institution.

Similarly, Riordan went outside the city bureaucracy to hire John D. Hwang as head of a new department, the city’s information technologies office. Hwang came to Los Angeles from Washington, where he had worked with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Army.

In other appointments, Riordan has searched within a department to find his choice. Bill Bamattre, the new fire chief, was a battalion chief, several ranks below the department’s top job, when he was tapped to serve as interim chief in 1995. Riordan chose him for the permanent job a year later. Bamattre is the youngest person to serve as chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department.

Even critics of the mayor applaud some of his choices to lead departments. Hwang, for instance, has won widespread praise for his efforts to modernize and streamline technological services at the city.

At the same time, some critics of the mayor worry about the latitude that Riordan’s pending appointments may give him and warn that they have not always been impressed by the mayor’s picks so far.

“I don’t know that there’s been a qualitative difference,” Ridley-Thomas said of Riordan’s appointees. “Pound for pound, these people tend to be relatively competent in their fields of expertise but not qualitatively different from other general managers.”

In addition, Ridley-Thomas hinted at the turnover that has bedeviled Riordan’s personal staff--the mayor went through several chiefs of staff before settling on Kramer and has seen an array of top deputies come and go--as well as some of his commissioners.

“I think it’s pretty clear that the mayor has experienced disappointment in terms of some of the choices he has made,” the councilman said. Although he declined to be specific, Ridley-Thomas added: “They have been quite significant in number.”

All of the general managers tapped by Riordan will inherit agencies that have some role in the daily lives of Los Angeles residents. But none are more likely to get close scrutiny than his picks for the LAPD and DWP, two agencies perched on the edge of historic transformations.

Those searches are underway, and the early favorites include people profoundly different from one another. Deputy Chiefs Bernard Parks and Mark Kroeker, longtime insiders--one black, one white--with different personal and professional styles, lead the speculation to emerge as the next LAPD chief, with Parks appearing to enjoy the inside track at the moment.

Meanwhile, the current front-runner for the DWP job appears to be Dave Freeman, a 71-year-old consultant whose job experience is outside Los Angeles and whose rough-and-tumble management style has impressed some people close to Riordan.

In each case, Riordan aides stress that the mayor awaits recommendations from search committees and commissions--and that he is pressing ahead with his own personal background checks as well.

Riordan declines to talk names, but says he looks forward to picking the newest members of his team.

“This gives me a chance to see the city run the way I think it should be run,” he said of the vacancies throughout city government. “And it means that once I’ve filled these jobs, I can really be held accountable for the results.”

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City Hall Vacancies

Almost a quarter of the city’s 33 departments, including several of the government’s most important, have vacancies in their senior management jobs. Mayor Richard Riordan is trying to fill these spots, adding to the six general managers he has selected since taking office.

The Vacancies

* Department of Animal Regulation

* Harbor Department

* Housing Department

* Convention Center

* Metropolitan Transportation Authority*

* Police Department

* Public Works, Sanitation

* Public Works, Street Maintenance

* Department of Water and Power

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Past Riordan Selections:

* City Clerk: J. Michael Carey

* Fire: William Bamattre

* Information Technology: John Hwang

* Library: Susan Goldberg Kent

* Personnel: William Fujioka

* Public Works, Engineering: Sam Furuta

NOTE: The MTA is jointly overseen by the city and county. Riordan is scheduled to become chairman of the MTA board July 1.