The spasm of meeting cancelations — the Arts Commission, the Parks and Community Services Commission, the Active Transportation Committee, and the Finance and Pension Advisory Committee (FiPAC) all canceled their meetings this month — means the Summer season is well and truly upon us.

That said, given that the city’s plate is surprisingly full at this point in the year, the City Council may not enjoy such luxury. In fact, not only were they pressed into service for a special closed session meeting last week, they are holding a study session today as well.

But first the city has some big leadership decisions to make. Right on schedule, former Costa Mesa Police Chief Ron Lawrence conducted his walk out and last call at the end of June. Shortly after doing so, Lawrence formerly handed the baton of leadership to Deputy Police Chief — now Interim Police Chief — Joyce LaPointe.

Speaking at Lawrence’s retirement ceremony was another leader-in-waiting, Interim City Manager Cecilia Gallardo-Daly. Which invites the question: will the city keep these two managers on permanently, or undertake a recruitment effort to replace them?

LaPointe and Gallardo-Daly: Different Routes to Leadership

Ultimately the path for each may be very different, as the “interim” title is where the similarities between their situations end.

With respect to Interim Chief LaPointe, it would not be at all surprising if the City Council decides to promote from within and skip an expensive and time-consuming recruitment process. Former Police Chief Ron Lawrence was exceedingly well liked within City Hall and his administration was universally praised by the City Council. If anyone on the Council wanted to break with his approach, they hid it well.

Additionally, to all appearances, Deputy Chief LaPointe was Lawrence’s hand-picked successor. Not only did Lawrence elevate LaPointe to the position of Deputy Chief, he made the position for her. “I know she has what it takes to be a deputy chief and, someday, a chief herself,” Lawrence had remarked upon her promotion.

So the City Council doesn’t really have a good reason to pass over LaPointe for an outsider.

On the other hand, Gallardo-Daly finds herself in a very different situation. Rather than her successor retiring to universal acclaim, former City Manager Lori Ann Farrell Harrison was abruptly dismissed earlier this year following what appears to have been a contentious closed session performance evaluation. The 4-2-1 split decision to fire Farrell Harrison for reasons other than “for cause” suggests that the majority fundamentally disagreed with Farrell Harrison’s approach.

And, superficially at least, Gallardo-Daly is a product of that approach. Farrell Harrison hired Gallardo-Daly just two years ago from San Clemente, and the press at the time implied that Farrell Harrison was the key reason Gallardo-Daly took the position.

So with the City Council (or four of them, at least) looking to go in a different direction and it being an open question whether Gallardo-Daly would want to stay when the city had just unceremoniously canned her presumptive mentor, it wouldn’t shock me if we soon learned the City Council would be engaging in a formal search for a permanent City Manager. The general approach seemed to have been the topic of the special closed session last week, where “Public Employee Appointment: City Manager” was the sole agenda item.

But, looking at the agenda for today, is it possible that Gallardo-Daly is making a case for herself to get the job? Let’s look at the evidence.

Addressing Costa Mesa’s Slow-Motion Policy Revolt

Looking back at the last year or so of Costa Mesa politics, a key theme has been the clash between the City Council majority, on the one hand, and the City Council minority and former City Manager, Farrell Harrison, on the other, over proper control of city policy. This conflict centered primarily in two areas: City Council agenda control, and the activity of the City’s resident commissions and committees.

First, with respect to agenda control, one significant source of resentment in the past few years has been council members’ seeming inability to request items for future discussion. I’ve lost count of the number of times council members have used their comment period to request reports, agenda items or study sessions on various topics, only to be effectively ignored by City Hall. Remember Mayor John Stephens trying to agendize discussion of forming a Housing Committee? What about Mayor Pro Tem Manuel Chavez’s request to consider a drive-thru moratorium, or his repeated request to bring back a discussion regarding the City’s membership in the Orange County Power Authority?

Yeah, me either. Requests like these got repeatedly memory-holed in the Farrell Harrison era, a practice that was pointedly discussed by Council Member Mike Buley and Mayor Stephens a few months ago.

But has that changed under the interim Gallardo-Daly administration? Early indications suggests it may have. First, we had the (ultimately aborted) attempt by Council Member Loren Gameros to agendize an item to potentially remove Zoom as an option for public comment during City Council and Commission meetings. While that item ended up being pulled, I and other council watchers noticed how quickly Gameros’s request the meeting before was translated into an agenda item. “We’re finally getting towards a process of a council member requesting an item and the item being brought forward to the city council. I think that’s wonderful” said Planning Commissioner David Martinez in public comments on the item.

Now, looking at the agenda tonight, we have an entire study session devoted to items requested by council members. First we have a discussion of city committees and commissions, which was requested by three council members back in the beginning of May. And second, we have an item looking at adopting a city code of ethics. This idea was last mentioned in Council Member Arlis Reynolds’ passionate comments following the removal of Farrell Harrison as City Manager.

So from this outsider’s perspective, it certainly looks like Gallardo-Daly is attempting to course-correct when it comes to policy directives originating from council members.

But what about resident commissions and committees? After a long dormancy under the bulk of the Farrell Harrison administration, those bodies have been increasingly asserting themselves in recent months. First we had both a residential beekeeping ordinance and a trap-neuter-release ordinance proposed out of the Animal Services Committee, which had, to that point, not been used as policy-making body (brief confession: I might have had something to do with both of those). Then, we had both the Parks and Community Services Commission and the Arts Commission decide to take more ownership of their budget oversight responsibilities, occasionally to the Staff’s chagrin. And, most recently, we had the FiPAC issue a blistering letter to the City Council on this year’s shaky budget, taking a far more active role in budget discussions compared to prior years.

To address this new activity, Gallardo-Daly has shrewdly agendized an open-ended discussion this evening regarding committee and commission reports to the City Council. And I’m impressed, because this really gets at the crux of the problem: the City Council has defined the powers of the commissions and committees, but not their work product. Without clear deliverables, the commissions and committees have been flying blind. They have no obvious path to get their thoughts before the Council, and the Council hasn’t paid enough attention to them to direct what they want them to do.

So it isn’t surprising that these bodies, which are staffed with competent and public-service-minded residents, would eventually take matters into their own hands.

So Gallardo-Daly faces her first big test of what must, at this point, feel like an extended job interview. Will she try and steer the Council towards minimizing the role of the commissions and committees, which certainly eases the administrative burden on City Staff? Or will she open up a path to more resident involvement by allowing the commissions and committees get more reports in front of the City Council?

Either way, it certainly seems to me like Gallardo-Daly is working hard to prove she’s the right choice for the permanent City Manager post. So maybe the City Council’s first big test of the summer won’t be so hard after all.

Finally: I don’t think Farrell Harrison is done with Costa Mesa, yet

It’s probably worth mentioning as an endnote that the city council is actually meeting twice tonight. Before they dive into the study session, they will meet in a special closed session to discuss “potential litigation”. My strong hunch (but only a hunch) is that this will discuss legal action Farrell Harrison may be taking over her firing.

So, depending on the settlement putting this matter to bed will demand, it may make even more sense to do away with an expensive recruitment process. We may need every penny we can pinch to address the past before we move onto the future.