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.
Spiraling toward one
With a cabinet full of acting heads, Menino is free to indulge his worst tendencies, particularly his inclination to get involved with every decision made in his government. “The micromanagement of city government is at the highest I’ve ever seen it,” says one veteran City Hall observer. Others in and around City Hall agree. Every development decision must get his personal okay, says one. City councilors call him directly with city-service requests, says another. “That’s kind of odd, that they’d be calling the CEO of, essentially, a $2 billion corporation,” he says.
Others make the same point: Menino wants the stature (and pay) of a corporate CEO, but he wants to run the place like a small family business. He boasts that he is constantly out in the neighborhoods, learning what people want and need, generating ideas. But that’s supposed to happen several rungs below him on the organizational chart. Rather than let good ideas percolate up, and then put the power of his office behind the best ones, Menino tends, for example, to launch a high-profile gun-buyback program that nobody in the police department wanted.
No wonder Kathleen O’Toole left, and homeland-security chief Carlo Boccia is about to, after barely two years in office. Menino’s meddling undercut their authority, and is likely a reason he’s having a hard time finding replacements, some say. “I think that his reputation is a big reason he finds it hard to fill these positions,” says a veteran political player, referring both to Menino’s micromanagement and his notorious temper.
