A Stronger Mayor, but Not a CEO

One of the most important questions that has faced the appointed charter reform commission is the role of the mayor. We have surveyed decades of Los Angeles charter reform studies, looked at other city charters, heard from key stakeholders inside and outside City Hall and conducted public outreach to assess how the people view this and other charter issues. And we have reached a conclusion: The mayor of Los Angeles should have greater authority in the management of city government, but should not have the sole authority to remove department general managers.

When we began this process, a substantial majority of us felt that the mayor should be able to remove general managers without City Council approval. Most commissioners come from outside city government, and many are comfortable with businesslike lines of authority and accountability.

We have found, however, and a Rand Corp. study confirmed, that the mayor’s office is not as weak as it has been portrayed. The mayor is the dominant player in the city budget, where the priorities of the city government are developed and implemented. The mayor appoints nearly all city commissioners and although the council must approve their appointment and removal, this power is almost never exercised. The mayor appoints general managers of departments, who report to the mayor. Most of all, the mayor is the city’s preeminent political leader. If the mayor has even six votes--the number needed to sustain a veto--on the 15-member City Council, he or she can fairly direct city government policy.

Nonetheless, we did find a number of limitations on the mayor’s authority that we have moved to eliminate. In our view, the charter overly restricts the mayor’s ability to organize and staff his or her own office. We have moved to give the mayor greater flexibility in that area. The current charter requires that both the mayor and the council evaluate general managers. We have decided that it would be better for the mayor alone to conduct evaluations of general managers for merit pay and potential removal and to simply communicate those decisions to the council. We also have voted to increase flexibility for exempt positions in the top levels of department management. And, we are considering enhancing the mayor’s powers by allowing him or her to issue executive orders that are binding on city government.

These changes and others represent constructive reform and will go a long way toward improving the ability of mayors to govern effectively. But the commission has not embraced a change that has been most avidly sought by some: giving the mayor sole power to remove general managers of the city’s 30-odd departments.

While some argue that mayors should have this power, just as presidents can remove Cabinet secretaries at will, we found that analogy does not work. Cabinet members at the federal level are political appointees. The federal government is run on a day-to-day basis by career civil servants. There is no equivalent in Los Angeles government to the secretaries of Cabinet departments.

We have also heard arguments for the “CEO model.” Isn’t the mayor really the city’s chief business executive? But CEOs of public companies are not elected; they are recruited and hired after many years of experience managing people in business environments. They can be fired by a board of directors, which is itself selected for its management experience.

I recently asked a friend of mine, a successful business executive, to imagine that we all worked for Arco and had all of our life savings in Arco stock. And then imagine that the CEO of Arco was not carefully recruited by a board of directors but rather elected by Arco employees every four years based on a political campaign. Would we want to give the newly elected CEO the same authority to fire corporate vice presidents and presidents of subsidiaries as the board of directors gives the CEO of Arco today?

Our commission had been thinking about these concerns when we began a two-month outreach program to hear what the public had to say. We conducted eight open houses throughout the city and circulated workbooks to community organizations soliciting public comment. We heard from a cross-section of more than 650 Angelenos. The only recommendation that drew majority and intense opposition was the proposal to give the mayor the sole power to remove general managers. The public response appears to reflect a deeply held sense that this is still a “reform” city in which political influence is balanced against professionalism and checks and balances.

Mayors are not corporate CEOs. They are political leaders, with all the strengths and weaknesses of political leaders. The authority of the mayor of Los Angeles should be increased. But the sole and unfettered authority to remove general managers is not so necessary to effective leadership as to outweigh the risks of mischief, incompetence and political abuse.