The city of Boston is running on empty. The jobs of police commissioner and superintendent of schools are being held by temporary replacements. A fire commissioner was named just this Tuesday after a seven-month search. The city lacks a permanent homeland-security chief, city planner, and transportation director. The mayor’s chief of staff has left to become a judge, and his press secretary has returned to his writing career.
This is not the first time in Menino’s 13-year tenure that job vacancies have stacked up: he is notoriously slow to fill positions in his administration. But the number and nature of the current openings is staggering. Of the 16,500 or so Bostonians working for the city government, more than 13,000 had an “acting” boss. In addition to the premiere positions, mid-level vacancies clog almost every department, most notably the Boston Redevelopment Authority. Boards and commissions function with vacancies or “holdovers” whose terms technically expired months and even years ago.
Some of these vacancies cropped up unexpectedly, such as the sudden departure last spring of Police Commissioner Kathleen O’Toole and the reported resignation, expected to become official next month, of homeland-security chief Carlo Boccia. But Chief of Staff Merita Hopkins’s pursuit of a judgeship was no secret to Menino. The city-planner job has been vacant well over a year, and the city has been without an Empowerment Zone director for even longer.
Whether any of these posts is close to being filled is impossible to tell because Menino is shrouding his searches, for the most part, in secrecy. Paul Christian resigned as fire commissioner in January, and his replacement’s name never surfaced before Tuesday’s announcement — Menino even denied rumors of an impending hire as recently as Friday, August 25, during a phone conversation with the Phoenix.
The hiring of retired Navy commander Roderick Fraser is consistent with Menino’s promise to shake things up by naming a civilian commissioner for the first time, a city-commission recommendation that he rebuffed when promoting Christian five years ago. Yet the secrecy of Menino’s search left the department wondering whether the mayor had the stomach for such a controversial change — and now that he has proven that he does, yet another important appointment remains: that of fire chief, who will run the operation for Fraser. For that, Menino will almost certainly hire from within.
Similarly, the hush-hush police-commissioner search leaves department insiders and community activists speculating whether Menino will bring in an outsider or promote from within, either of which has ramifications for the highly factionalized force.
But we can expect more secrecy to surround these searches, not less, thanks to a search for a new school superintendent that turned into a fiasco. With more than a year’s notice, Menino hoped to make a new hire before Thomas Payzant’s June retirement. But then, four of the five finalists retracted their names after the list was leaked on June 27. A frustrated Menino had to go back to square one — just as his to-do list of appointments was growing: Hopkins’s judicial appointment came April 27; O’Toole announced her plans to leave for Ireland May 7; and press secretary Seth Gitell announced his resignation in mid-June.
One way to interpret the mounting vacancies — Menino’s view, as voiced in a telephone interview with the Phoenix — is that the mayor is taking time to select the very best leaders with care; that we have a mayor who, rather than plugging holes, still wants to accomplish much, is looking to the future, and is engaged and serious. “I’m always looking for the best person I can find,” Menino says. “We have a lot of applications for these jobs.”
The other view, espoused by many in and around City Hall, is that whether Menino knows it or not, his 13-year-old administration has run out of steam. The old-timers have grabbed their pensions and gone home, and the young talent doesn’t want to work for him. “With all due respect to the cast that’s in there now, it’s the double-A team,” says a City Hall insider.
Menino entered his fourth term aware that many expected his administration to grow listless, and he made a point of promising vigor and initiative. All of which makes the lingering-vacancy situation look that much worse. “To counter that perception, I would have thought that there would be more movement in both filling these positions and in announcing new initiatives,” says Samuel Tyler, president of the Municipal Budget Research Bureau (MBRB). “We haven’t really seen much of that.”
Perhaps, six months from now, we’ll be looking at a revitalized administration with a new, impressive roster of department heads. On the other hand, we could see even more vacancies if, as seems likely, a Democrat becomes governor for the first time in Menino’s tenure. The huge number of enticing job openings in state agencies could make it even harder for Menino to attract and keep people in city government.
