Charter Review Panel Sees Volatile Changes for S.D.

When 15 people of diverse backgrounds gather around a table to redesign a government, wide-ranging ideas are to be expected, if not encouraged.

But one does not have to spend much time at a meeting of the San Diego Charter Review Commission to recognize that its members hold dramatically divergent views on how--or whether--to reshape city government.

At one recent meeting, the topic was whether to alter the structure and scope of the office of mayor. Within 10 minutes, the arguments ranged from calls to expand and strengthen the mayor’s powers to a suggestion that the mayor’s office perhaps should be downgraded from an elective to appointive post. Still other members positioned themselves between those two philosophical end points, favoring preservation of the mayor’s job essentially in its present form.

Sweeping Changes Likely

Similarly, when the discussion shifted to the City Council, some panelists advocated increasing the council’s size, while others mused over the possibility of reducing the council to part-time members--a counter-argument founded on the premise that the district-election plan approved by voters Nov. 8 will curtail members’ responsibilities.

As those snippets of debate illustrate, regardless of which viewpoints ultimately prevail, adoption of many of the proposals now under discussion by the Charter Review Commission would spawn sweeping changes in the way City Hall has operated in the 57 years since the charter was passed in 1931.

Any changes recommended by the commission ultimately would have to be approved by voters--and, in the interim, perhaps by the council. The council initially promised the commission it would not alter any of the commission’s proposed ballot propositions. However, several council members now favor reviewing the proposals before placing them on the ballot, possibly next fall.

Although the panel’s weekly meetings began last spring, they have drawn relatively little public attention, with the commissioners typically outnumbering the audience at most sessions.

That may soon change, however, because the commission is approaching some potentially momentous decisions on critical issues--namely, those directly affecting the mayor and council--that were postponed to await voters’ judgment on Proposition E, the district-elec tion ballot measure. Without knowing how the council would be elected in future years, the commissioners felt, it made little sense to ponder other major changes in city government.

But with district-only council elections now set to become a reality in 1989, many commissioners view that change as necessitating other structural alterations at City Hall.

Politically Volatile

“District elections will set askew the symmetry established by the 1931 charter,” said retired 4th District Court of Appeal Justice Edward Butler, the commission’s chairman. “To restore the balance of power, that change demands others.”

Arguably the most politically volatile changes envisioned by some commissioners deal with the structure and scope of the mayor’s office.

Noting that the advent of district elections will leave the mayor as the only voting member of the council elected citywide, some commissioners argue that it may be time for the current city manager form of government to yield to a strong-mayor system. Under the old system, council candidates ran in district primaries, with the top two vote-getters facing each other in a citywide runoff.

“If you have eight mini-mayors coming out of the eight districts and one citywide mayor, it doesn’t make any sense to give that one citywide person one vote on the council,” Butler said.

Among the proposals the commission is expected to begin debating in earnest later this month are ones to remove the mayor from the council, to give the mayor veto power over council actions and to shift some authority now exercised by the city manager or council to the mayor’s office.

The 1931 charter established a strong-city-manager form of government in which an independent manager would administer the policies set by a part-time mayor and council. However, over the years, as the elected positions became full-time jobs, more power gradually came to be exercised by the council and mayor, with the balance often hinging on the force of the personalities occupying the various offices.

Reflect Years of Change

While the charter defines specific legislative and administrative spheres of responsibility, Butler points out that “those definitions no longer depict the reality of city government structure today.” From that perspective, some of the suggested added powers for the mayor’s office simply reflect the changes that occurred--outside the purview of the charter--over the past 57 years.

“The mayor, the council and the manager are locked in the small room of the 1931 charter, each intent on getting a larger space,” Butler said. “We need to redefine the role each of those components should have in the scheme of things.”

Under the present system, the mayor essentially functions as the first among equals on the council. Although Mayor Maureen O’Connor, like her predecessors, has only a single vote, the added publicity and ceremonial duties attendant to the office have enabled recent mayors to establish a preeminent position based more on implied than statutory authority.

Proponents of a strong-mayor system contend that removing the mayor from the council would further elevate the office’s status, and that giving the mayor added powers--among them, a veto that could be overridden by a two-thirds council vote--would reinforce the mayor’s citywide leadership.

“The argument heard is that moving in that direction would create the kind of mayor’s office appropriate for a city of more than 1 million, as compared to the kind of mayor appropriate for 1931,” said Commissioner Scott Harvey, a former city official who now is a lobbyist.

A diametrically opposed viewpoint, however, is offered by Commissioner Jeanette Roache, a former council aide who suggested that the panel should at least consider the possibility of reducing rather than widening mayoral authority. In a proposal that she later explained was offered “in a devil’s advocate sense,” Roache said at last week’s meeting that perhaps the mayor should no longer be elected by the public. Instead, the “mayor” would be selected by the other council members annually, much as the Board of Supervisors now picks its chairman, a largely ceremonial position rotated yearly.

‘Change in the Extreme’

“I’m not saying that’s what should definitely be done, but I wanted to at least lay that out on the table alongside the arguments for a strong mayor,” Roache said. “Change in the extreme, in any direction, frightens me. It scares me to see cities like Chicago and Los Angeles being used as examples by people who say, ‘That’s how it’s done there.’ My feeling is, I don’t want to do things like those cities do.”

In regard to the council, the major change being contemplated concerns the council’s size, with some commissioners suggesting that the eight-member body be increased by as many as three seats.

Each district now includes roughly 125,000 people--too large, critics argue, for what commissioner Ken Seaton-Msemaji terms “focused local services.” By increasing the number of districts and thereby reducing the size of each, constituent services and neighborhood interests would be better represented, he argues.

In a memo to his fellow commissioners, Butler, contending that the shift to district elections will reduce council members’ responsibilities, questioned whether members will still need to devote full time to their jobs. If not, staff sizes and council budgets perhaps could be reduced, he added.

However, in raising that question, Butler asked rhetorically: “Am I a lonely voice in the woods on this?” In this case, the answer probably is yes, because most other commissioners do not consider the prospect of a part-time council to be realistic.

Any changes recommended by the commission relating to either the mayor’s office or council size almost certainly will open up additional debates on myriad related proposals, ranging from division of appointment powers to elimination of the council committee system.

“If you change one thing, you impact something else,” noted Commissioner John Wertz, a lawyer. “Everything’s interrelated.”

For that reason, the commission’s deliberations now are reaching a stage where, as political consultant Jim Johnston noted: “Change A opens the door to B, which opens the door to C. Most of the tough decisions lie ahead.”