In all honesty I’m still processing the shocking news that, in a split vote, the Costa Mesa City Council acted in closed session to terminate City Manager Lori Ann Farrell Harrison.

Very little is known about the decision at this time. We do know, thanks to a clarification from the city attorney, that the termination was not “for cause,” meaning that there was no specific bad act that precipitated the firing. But the council members that voted to remove her — Mike Buley, Loren Gameros, Jeff Pettis and Manuel Chavez — spoke little or not at all about the decision in their council comments. And no comment was given to the Daily Pilot from the city’s spokesperson, Tony Dodero, though hopefully some kind of statement will be forthcoming soon.

That said, the two dissenting votes, Council Members Arlis Reynolds and Andrea Marr, were quite vocal about the decision. Council Member Reynolds, her voice occasionally breaking with emotion, described the action as “the most questionable decision I have observed” in her time on City Council. She later declared that while she is “at a crisis of confidence in this City Council, I have full confidence in the staff here, full faith in the staff” (emphasis mine – we’ll come back to this comment later). She then pointedly asked the acting city manager, Cecilia Gallardo-Daly, and the city attorney to agendize “a code of conduct and a code of ethics.”

The reference to the code of conduct and ethics — an idea that has been pushed by the super-resident team of Cynthia McDonald and Rick Huffman for years, but has only gained public traction with Reynolds and Marr in the last few months — was an unmissable suggestion that Reynolds suspected that her fellow council members had acted unethically in firing the city manager. Exactly what unethical conduct she is indirectly alleging is unknown.

For her part, Council Member Marr didn’t mince words. “Look, what happened tonight was incredibly frustrating, and deeply disappointing, and frankly a reminder of the fragility of our system of government,” she said as she opened her council comments. Later, she went on:

Frankly I am embarrassed this is how we chosen to treat the woman who has so capably led our city for so long…I am extremely concerned that, instead getting some our priorities across the finish line, we are now going to spend the next 18 months mired in self-imposed chaos. I will do what I can on that front, but as has become abundantly clear in recent weeks and tonight in particular, my particular brand of reasonableness is now clearly in the minority.

Council Member Andrea Marr, Meeting of the Costa Mesa City Council, May 6, 2025

Marr then appealed to the public for help by “speaking out” and “paying attention”, though about what and to what, she didn’t say.

So, clearly, Reynolds and Marr view the decision as being, at best, unreasonable and, at worst, unethical. But that doesn’t shed light on the critical question: why would strange political bedfellows like Gameros, Chavez, Pettis and Buley team up together to do this? And what was Stephens’s motivation in abstaining, which risked a crippling 3-3-1 result if one of the majority defected?

I’m sure each of them had his reasons, and I hesitate to speculate on those. But for my own sake, I see one big, over-arching theme emerging that might explain the split. And it comes down to a fundamental question we’ve all been asking ourselves for the past year or so.

What is the point of democracy, anyway?

Remember that Marr said that this decision was “a reminder of the fragility of our system of government”? Well, I didn’t give you the rest of the quote:

Look, what happened tonight was incredibly frustrating, and deeply disappointing, and frankly a reminder of the fragility of our system of government. Too often our leaders seem to forget the limits of their own power. We are a part-time council, at best — all of us. We all have full-time jobs. We show up here every other Tuesday and make decisions, but we should all know that, when the rubber meets the road, where things actually get done, from the paving to the meals at the Senior Center, to Fairview Developmental Center negotiations in Sacramento, that all happens at the staff level. Our agendas are in Spanish because staff made that happen. Yes, we give direction, but that is all we give. As a city manager, Lori Ann knew that deeply.

Council Member Andrea Marr, Meeting of the Costa Mesa City Council, May 6, 2025 (emphasis mine)

While Pettis and Buley did not comment on their decision to terminate the city manager directly, I did notice that both of them spent a lot of time during their council comments discussing the resident committees and commissions and their recent clashes with staff over their authorities. I’m also reminded of Mayor Stephens’s push last year for more comprehensive performance metrics so that City Council could monitor the city’s progress towards its many goals, which was effectively rebuffed by staff. And both Chavez and Gameros have chaffed in recent months over the lack of responsiveness by City Hall to complaints that building and construction permits were taking far too long to process.

Taking these stances into account and contrasting them with the comment from Marr, it seems like this council has a big problem: I’m not sure they agree on what “system of government” we even have.

On the one hand, as Marr and, as illustrated by her comments about losing faith in the council but not in the staff highlighted above seem to indicate, Reynolds seem to favor, we have a vision of the City Council as merely a part-time advisory board for a fully professionalized staff that actually runs things. The City Council’s job, then, is only to ensure that the residents’ opinions and viewpoints are effectively conveyed to upper management, who, in its good judgment, will take or leave those views. Yes, the City Council may occasionally “make decisions,” but that is almost a ceremonial function: something to lend democratic legitimacy to what the highly competent, full-time staff has already decided is the best course of action. So long as things are going well — budgets are balanced, projects are getting completed, services are being provided — there is no role for the City Council in the direct management of the city. Government, in this telling, is by a “strong staff,” not a strong council.

On the other hand, the complaints about the marginalization of the committees and commissions, the lack of responsiveness by City Hall to expressed concerns, and the disinterest of the City Manager in pulling back the curtain to show how employees are being evaluated, are all connected by a different impulse: the City Council should be a powerful institution precisely because it embodies the public will, and elections must have consequences. It is not a mere caretaker for an unaccountable and unelected professional bureaucracy. In this “strong council” view, the city council is meant to govern. It is to take the reins of government, make consequential decisions, and to enact policies that are supported by the residents. And when the city staff usurps that role by asserting its own priorities, then that staff must be reined in by whatever means available.

Through her actions it is clear, to me at least, that Farrell Harrison was firmly on the side of a strong staff. When given the opportunity, she severely curtailed the ability of resident committees to form subcommittees, undermining their power significantly. She empowered staff to further rein in the committees and commissions by miring them in procedural hurdles to get their items agendized or brought up to the City Council. She took firm control of the City Council’s agenda, instituting a “four-hour rule” that required any agenda item that could potentially cost more than four hours of staff time to be preceded by a memo justifying that expense — a rule that effectively eliminated council-member-led agenda items from routine meetings. And of course, she balked whenever the city council requested reports or metrics tracking the city’s performance on stated goals. She also either instructed or permitted the reduction of routinely provided public information, especially from the police department regarding traffic incidents and incidents reported by the city’s park rangers.

So while I am sure that each of the acting council members had specific motivations that aren’t captured by this divide, I do think it is doing work in the background. Each of the members of the majority, as well as the abstaining Stephens, have expressed frustrations in the past that boil down to wanting a stronger hand for the council in city decisions.

And, frankly, how could it not, when this divide is roiling this country more broadly? Some view the rise of Donald Trump as a mere spasm of the culture war, but I do not. I see his appeal as a revolt against the sensation that, in some sense, government by the people has been quietly replaced by government by the professionals. And, frankly, maybe it has.

Which is why I have been, and will continue to be, firmly on the side of a strong city council versus a strong staff. Don’t get me wrong: I love our city staff, and I think a professionalize civil service is critical to the functioning of democracy. But the ugliness, messiness, and occasional counter-productivity of letting the people get what they voted for good and hard is critical, too. Without the immediate, tangible feedback that the residents’ voices and votes mean something — that they are more than just slips of paper in the suggestion box — government suffers from something worse than mismanagement. It will suffer from public disengagement, resentment, and eventually: corruption and failure. Despair is worse than mistakes. It leads either to despondency or voters taking desperate measures to assert themselves.

This is a terrible time for the city to fire its city manager. We are taking on water in the budget, our development plan is effectively in disarray, and we’re about to lose our police chief to retirement next month. But it almost doesn’t matter. The city must have a democratically responsive government it if it is to survive. And for now, for better or worse, it does.