By Doug Miller
Laffey will remain the titular head of the government through the end of June, but a replacement has not been named, and the coalition Republican minority has insisted he not make any appointments before he leaves.
City Council President Leonard Remo said Tuesday he expected an interim city manager to be chosen from among the city's officers and department heads by the July 5 council meeting, but remained mum on whom he expected to be named. Meanwhile, he said, a national search is underway for a full-time replacement for Laffey.
But whether the city should be looking for an entirely new charter is a conversation many would prefer to have.
The council's vice president, Rob Tepper, wrote an opinion piece for last week's Herald insisting the current structure - in which a presumably non-political, professional city manager answers to a five-member council - leaves a vacuum of responsibility at the top of the government, where the chief executive is not directly answerable to his constituency.
"The chief executive is the most powerful person in the city," Tepper wrote. "In my opinion, an individual assuming this level of responsibility should be directly approved by the voters."
As it currently stands, the city manager runs the day-to-day operations of the city and its government, which employs hundreds of full- and part-time employees and has an operating budget of more than $70 million. While serving at the pleasure of the council, he wears many of the hats a mayor would wear, such as head of the city's police and fire department, in addition to drafting the city's budget.
Tepper's theory has support in some circles but certainly not all. In interviews with several current and former councilmen, city managers and political leaders, it is clear that no consensus exists as to how best to govern this sometimes ungovernable city.
For example, Bruce Nyman has served as both a Democratic councilman and as a city manager, and in strong statements to the media this week and last said he thinks Laffey should be the city's last unelected chief executive.
"If [Laffey's departure] doesn't finally prove that this city needs an independently elected mayor, I don't know what else will," said Nyman, who now runs the press office for Nassau County.
The issue creates strange bedfellows. Agreeing with Nyman and Tepper is Glen Spiritis, who served as city manager under the recent Republican administration, and served as deputy city manager in the 1970s under the Democrats and City Manager Edwin Eaton.
From his perspective, it's a job he'd like to see overhauled. "I'd like to see a mayor-manager system," Spiritis said. "I think the mayor should be a political person, and both he and the council should have term limits. And you should hire a professional city manager who would handle the day-to-day operations while working for the mayor."
A by-product of the current system, Nyman said, has been the accountability vacuum at the top, which he claims has allowed so-called political bosses to rule from the shadows.
But that is a theory that is not supported by history, according to Patrick Gallagher, a board of education trustee who has studied public policy and who wrote his master's thesis in 1982 on the Long Beach city government.
The city had a mayor-council system in place from its founding in 1922 by William Reynolds through the tenure of Mayor Theodore Ornstein, who served from 1939 through 1946. It was in response to the rule of Ornstein, who was regarded as an all-powerful - and by most accounts crooked - political boss that the city switched to the current city manager form of government.
Certainly, the leaders of the two political parties in Long Beach have exerted tremendous power under the current system, Gallagher conceded, but they did so before as well.
"The city of Long Beach had 40 years of bosses before we adapted the city manager form of government," Gallagher said. "The form of government is not the culprit today, it's the dynamics of what our city is going through. These are growing pains."
According to Gallagher, the transformation in 1946 was not a smooth one. The revisionists were ill-prepared to rewrite the entire charter, and in many cases simply substituted the words "city manager" for the word "mayor."
None-the-less, once the manager is freed from the distraction of running for his office, Gallagher said, the system operated much more smoothly.
In the city's history, three city managers enjoyed long and successful tenures in the job, thanks to certain traits they had in common, Gallagher said. "Look at Maurice Fleischman, Foster Vogel and Ed Eaton," he said. Fleischman served from 1948 to 1965, Vogel from July 1965 to the first day of 1970, and Eaton began in June 1979 and served a total of 22 years.
"These three men were Long Beach guys and they all understood the city," said Gallagher. "And Fogel and Eaton had great people skills. Look at the personalities Eaton had to deal with on the council: people like Harvey Weisenberg, Roy Tepper and the 'Water Ladies', but it worked because he understood the system."
But since the changeover, the city has undeniably seen its share of outsized personalities wielding tremendous influence from the top of a political party. Men like Phil Kohut, who ruled the Democrats in the 1950s and '60s before being indicted in a kickback scheme (the charges were eventually dropped); he was succeeded by people like Larry Elovich, who ran the party in the early 1970s and is still very influential today as president of the Long Beach Chamber of Commerce. More recently came Kevin Braddish, who was Democratic party leader and a councilman in the 1980s, and Eugene Cammarato in the 1990s.
Cammarato, who did not return several calls for comment, stepped down from the leadership in 2004 after the Democrats lost control of the council for the first time in memory. In the ensuing two years of GOP rule, the party boss was former councilman James Moriarity.
"Long Beach had tumultuous politics during the era of the mayors," said Moriarity, who runs the press office for the Town of Oyster Bay, on Tuesday. "I'm not going to say I'm for or against switching to a mayor. But I'm open to any conversation about reform."
Comments about this story? Dmiller@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 213.
