Press Release

"Letting City Management Manage"

If the draft ordinance passed on February 5^th by the San Diego City Council ultimately becomes law, stock up on No-Doze.  Council meetings will get a lot longer and become even more a theater of the absurd.  Burning issues such moving a recreation center scrap booking class to Saturday morning or redeploying patrol offices from day to the swing shift will clog the agenda and require council action.  San Diego’s experiment with a strong Mayor form of government will be over before it really began and we will get to see what municipal government under a drastically weakened executive and a significantly strengthened district-elected legislative branch looks like.  Watch your pocketbooks.  If you were hoping for real reform, don’t hold your breath. 

The origins of this dispute are almost comical.  This fall, observing declining enrollment, high fixed costs, and growing deficits in other programs in the City’s Park and Recreation Department, Mayor Sanders moved to eliminate a competitive swim team the City had sponsored.   As noted at the time, there were other options, admittedly not as great, for kids using city pools interested in swim competition.  But if the department was to live within the appropriation limit set in the FY2007 budget something had to give.  The swim team was it.

The action taken by Sanders was consistent with how most Mayor-Council forms of government work.  The San Diego Institute for Policy Research recently released a policy brief (www.sandiegoinstitute.com/policy) which examined 15 large cities operating under the form of government San Diego voters adopted in 2004.  We found that 13 of these municipalities allow their mayor wide discretion, after the budget is passed, to make decisions about how to spend a department’s budget.  While bound by statutes, ordnances, and resolutions that require the City to provide a particular service or carry out a particular function, management ultimately has discretion to efficiently and effectively spend the resources the legislative branches appropriates.  If a council member disagrees with management, he always retains the power to bring forward a bill that, if supported by a majority of the council, would reverse a decision by management.

But the San Diego City Council balked at this extremely reasonable and sound course of action. Rather than follow the lead of these 13 cities, the Council based its response on an ordinance adopted in Oakland – a city that has a spiking murder rate, a completely failed stadium renovation effort, and a struggling central business district.  As passed on first reading, the Mayor of San Diego, like his counterpart in Oakland , would need council approval before he could make any management decision that materially impacted “service levels.”

The most absurd aspect of the Council’s decision is that San Diego’s budget does not specify “level of services.” Consequently, every action by management could be potentially challenged as somehow altering the status quo and thus requiring council approval.  Management would be required to identify every contemplated change in operations, no matter how trivial, publicly notice the proposed change, wait for the council to place the matter on the council agenda, and then seek legislative approval.  The Mayor rightly argued that this is a direct challenge to the idea of a Mayor/Council form of government and that it would make reform impossible.   It is a recipe for disaster – either endless council meetings haggling over the most trivial of issues or, after the budget is passed in June, “management by autopilot.”   Either way, taxpayers and citizens will be the biggest loser.

So how might we resolve this dispute?  One possibility is to continue to allow the Mayor to exert managerial powers but to increase the transparency of the choices he makes.  One could, for example require the Mayor to inform the council and the public if actions result in a certain amount of savings and/or would require shifting a certain number of personnel from one program to another.  The City Council, informed of the decision, could then decide if any of these decisions rose to the level of importance as to require holding either an informational hearing (a power the Council currently has under Charter Section 270) or the docketing of a draft resolution reversing management’s decision.  The public would thus get an opportunity to weigh in, but management would not be paralyzed by needing to prospectively bring before the council every action that might impact “service levels.” 

There is still time to act.  On March 5 the City council will revisit this issue and San Diegans concerned about reform should attend the council meeting and urge their adoption of a budget process that actually works.

Ultimately for San Diego to thrive and prosper the Council and the Mayor must work together.  But that does not mean abandoning reforms that allow the Mayor to manage and use resources wisely.  Far better that the council reverse a few decisions of management than require council meetings to drag long into the night so as to take action on the most trivial of items and endlessly discuss the most narrowly focused of programs. 

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