Deal of the Century

OK, you’re trying to sell your car. You put an ad online, and a couple of people call to ask some questions. A few of them show up to look the car over, kick the tires, take it for a test drive.

One guy likes it a lot. He asks your final price. “Ten thousand dollars,” you tell him. He balks, says he’ll have to think about it. He’s striking a hard bargain. The guy goes off for a while, then comes back a day later. “I like your car,” he tells you. “But your price is wrong. I won’t give you a penny less than Fifteen Thousand. Take it or leave it.” Of course, you make the sale, and cash the check before the guy comes to his senses!

I feel a little like that this morning. Yesterday afternoon the story broke that Mayor Tony Mack had accepted the provisional $22 Million grant in Transitional Aid from the State Department of Community Affairs (DCA). The accounts in the press made a lot of the purported “compromise” struck between the Mayor and DCA that eliminated the proposed 3-member panel (one appointee each from DCA, the Mayor, and City Council) to recruit and vet nominees for Senior positions and Department Heads for the City Administration. Mack had stated he’d let $6Million of that grant sit on the table if that panel included an appointee of City Council, which would infringe on the “power” of the Mayor to select his own appointees.

So the recruiting panel is gone from the final agreement, summarized in this letter from DCA. Mayor Mack is celebrating this agreement as a major victory for him. Through the afternoon and into the evening, I was leaning the same way, and was thinking Tony Mack had just won a high-stakes hand of poker, forcing everyone else to fold while holding only a pair of 4’s.

Looking over the letter now, I think Mack got rolled. This deal gives more control over our personnel processes – on both the Executive and Council levels – to the State of New Jersey. It is a much better deal for DCA than the first plan on offer. The Mayor is paying a lot more for this Transitional Aid used car than the State first wanted. And I think DCA got a better deal than they could have expected because Mack was so blinded by his need to freeze out City Council that he let DCA close a good deal.

Why do I say that? Under the original plan, nominees for Department Directors and other senior people would have been discussed, vetted and approved by the three-member panel before going to the City for confirmation. Two members of that panel would have been appointed by officials elected by Trenton voters, providing some chain of accountability right back to all of us. Under the plan agreed to by the Mayor, in the words of the DCA’s letter, the state department’s unelected bureaucrats “will assume responsibility for recruiting all department heads, including recruiting for business administrator and those department directors where there is currently an acting director. We will send resumes to the mayor from which he must select an individual to appoint within one week of receiving our notice.”

Sure, the Mayor will get to make his choice of whom to appoint, but only from the pool of candidates recruited, screened and recommended by DCA. The State is now the exclusive gatekeeper for the City’s senior personnel. Also, significantly, the Mayor will no longer have the power to dismiss these Directors without DCA approval.The 3-person panel still exists, but with no personnel authority; it has been given only an advisory role to study the city’s residency rule and other factors that make it difficult for Trenton to attract and keep good people. No doubt the panel will be asked to produce a report that will be gratefully accepted and politely ignored.

With this deal, Mayor Mack has been neatly, efficiently and effectively boxed into a corner, given less influence in picking his own people than in the plan he opposed. But he is ecstatically happy about the deal since the dreaded City Council won’t have a role in selecting his Directors!

How do I feel about this? Honestly, I have mixed emotions. I would feel better if I had more confidence in DCA, frankly. Their oversight of the City’s affairs over the last year has been spotty at best. They have not had the resources to provide the kind of consistent hands-on assistance this town needed. When they did get involved, they have often been ignored by the Mack Administration, as when their pronouncement that Harold Hall wasn’t qualified for his then-position was met by Mack with a promotion of Hall to “Acting” Public Works Director!

I really don’t know how good DCA will be at recruitment and background-checking. Head-hunting is a specialized skill; I don’t know if the folks at DCA have those chops. From the language of the Announcement letter, there is a great emphasis on the “qualifications” of candidates. I can easily foresee DCA reviewing candidates and mechanically ticking off quantitative requirements rather than trying to ensure a good “fit” in our town: “Master’s Degree? Check! Professional certificates? Check! Five years experience? Check! Good Communication Skills? Consensus Builder? Able to Articulate Goals and motivate Staff? Who Cares!!”  At the very least, we are likely to see more qualified people heading up City departments than those cronies and pals of Tony Mack we’ve seen, and they may last longer in their jobs than the last crowd. I just hope they are talented as well as qualified; and on that last count I am not that optimistic.

I hope I am wrong. I hope this is not setting us up for another year of floundering.  I am pleased that we may now finally have a chance to reduce the number of untalented “Friends of Tony” using up City Hall oxygen.

By itself, that just might be enough to turn things around. It would be nice to think that, right?