The once-steel strong structure that was the Civil Service Commission woke up perspiring and shivering this morning after barely withstanding a withering attempt to shave some of its authority at last night’s City Council meeting.
Belatedly and bizarrely at the oddest, longest Council meeting of the year — finishing at 1:30 this morning — the Council rejected a city staff-written recommendation that, some say, would have reduced the once august commission to incidental status.
The commission’s immediate future remains uncertain but hopeful. Even after a bruising rhetorical wrestling match, it still could retain the thrust of its current authority. But the denouement is at least weeks away, if not months.
On the day after the City Council meeting a dispute still raged over whether the so-called new City Charter, approved by voters four years ago last April, demanded a re-channeling of the commission’s traditional role as the arbiter of City Hall employees, or left the decision open to thorny debate.
As of this morning, it appears that those prickly questions will not be answered anytime soon. The matter is suspended until after new City Manager John Nachbar, due to arrive from Kansas City on Monday, Aug. 16, has a chance to huddle with the commissioners. Since one side of the table is not only a stranger but the commissioners new boss, no one is predicting the outcome.
The Road Was Rocky
The quick-shifting volatile meeting was the first bumpy one for Mayor Chris Armenta since being elected by his colleagues in April. He was nearly overwhelmed at the outset when a possible record 21 speakers — mostly pleading on behalf of West Los Angeles College — consumed the first hour of the evening.
Later, after deftly shifting discussion of the role of Civil Service and three other bodies from the bottom of the agenda into the leadoff position, there followed a rambling, meandering, frequently arcane 2-hour, 20-minute centering mostly on Civil Service’s projected new role.
In the wake of a scholarly treatment of the recommended Civil Service role changes vs. the more popularly desired adaptations by Councilman Andy Weisman, all Council members commented before Mr. Armenta finally stepped into the amorphous discussion, two hours after the start. He managed to exactly reverse the momentum by novelly contending that key parties in the matter had received insufficient notice of the pending changes. His colleagues, possibly relieved over being offered an escape hatch, eventually concurred.
Mr. Weisman explained later what is at stake with the Civil Service Commission:
“The key change in terms of what the staff is recommending against what the Council is desirous of doing would be retaining the role of the commission on discipline and grievances, retaining their right as a hearing body to be the final arbiter regarding grievances, unless appealed to the City Council.
“No. 2, to provide direction to the City Manager to meet with the Civil Service Commission and bring forward duties and responsibilities to conform to the City Manager’s needs as well as to the commission’s belief about its roles on oversight. The two need to harmonize.”
In a shift of duties dictated by portions of the City Charter that have laid fallow for four years, the City Manager replaces the City Council as the boss or overseer of the Civil Service board.
Turf Protection
Rhetoric on the subject rambled all over the floor at the Council meeting, clarity being the scarcest commodity.
Instead of citing a strict, narrow definition of the law that is to be followed, City Hall officials indicated this morning that the Civil Service Commission’s heatedly contested updated role will be whatever Mr. Nachbar and the commissioners agree upon. Whether the changes will be ephemeral or substantive is equally clouded.
Civil Service commissioners and their largely labor union allies argued vehemently against any changes in the panel’s historic mission as the last bastion for city employees with grievances or who have been disciplined. Their motivation evidently was that the Civil Service Commission, appointed by the City Council, would be a more objective umpire than the City Manager, hired by the City Council.
Just as forcefully, some Councilmen insisted that the new City Charter called for the role and responsibilities of the Civil Service Commission to be altered because the city manager, instead of the City Council, would be the supervising authority.
Wendell Phillips, attorney for the Culver City Employee Assn., City Hall’s largest union, contradicted that stance. He said, flatly, the so-called new City Charter allows an option.
It seems that the new Charter, which was supposed to supplant governing ambiguity with ringing clarity, may have been mis-advertised.
Turns out that the new City Charter, promoted as the ultimate answer machine for every City Hall question even a bureaucrat could think up, generates as much fogginess as the old way of doing business.
A Night for Some Birds
It was bird-watching night in Council Chambers — the seats were mostly filled and a row of middle-aged and older grim-faced men lined themselves against the back wall, shifting impatiently, as if they were waiting to enter a restroom. Throughout the night, nearly all the birds in the room noisily flapped their wings over irritants, the least of which was an unorthodox protest organized by the continuing mysterious leadership of West Los Angeles College.
Presumably at the direction of Acting President Betsy Regalado, the college rounded up a vaguely unified assortment of students and personnel who said they represented construction agencies to protest the Council’s rejection two weeks ago of a largely college-authored Settlement Agreement regarding current construction plans.
The sometimes-embarrassed protestors did not seem to realize that the Council’s vote was unrelated to a scheduled Aug. 11 vote by the L.A. Community College District trustees that is expected to green-light all building plans.
