Ten years after the historic major overhaul of the City Charter, and in a year when City Manager John Nachbar is hiring an official sidekick for the first time, the City Council took a second look at the Charter last winter.
That is the previous City Council, which included Mehaul O’Leary, then the mayor, and Andy Weissman, then the vice mayor.
“The Council discussed whether they needed a full-on Charter review,” Mr. Weissman was saying. “It was determined not to be necessary.
“Instead, they appointed Mehaul and me to a Charter Review subcommittee to bring forward anything we thought worthy of discussion and change.”
Both of them would be term limited in April after eight years in office.
Mr. Weissman had been in charge of the Charter overhaul a decade ago.
The most disputed of recommendations they brought back to their City Council colleagues concerned transferring authority over the police and fire chiefs from the Council to Mr. Nachbar. That way, for the first time, control over all departments would be in the city manager’s hands.
Mr. Weissman said that he and Mr. O’Leary were equally strong in their convictions. “We both thought the change was appropriate in a city manager form of government for the city manager to have direct authority over departments he ought to be supervising,” said the ex-vice mayor.
Did Mr. Weissman suspect the proposal would be controversial, would be hotly argued at summertime Council meetings before qualifying for the ballot?
He paused. “Frankly, no,” he said.
“It was not particularly controversial in 2005, except for a couple members of the City Council (Carol Gross and the late Albert Vera). They did not want to give up the power the Council had over the two departments.
“Back in 2005, when we had a chief administrative officer form of government, the Council hired and fired 14 department heads. When we were going to the city manager form of government, if the voters approved, the Council members did not want to lose that authority,” Mr. Weissman said.
“The city manager and the city attorney always were going to be Council appointees. The model in most city manager cities was that he or she appoints everybody else. Except we left the power over the chiefs with the Council then, and now that it is on the November ballot, we will see how voters feel.”
