Councillors asked the City Manager in February for the city-issued cell phone numbers of department heads, so they could reach them directly when a constituent calls. The answer was no. Constituent issues, the City Manager wrote, go through the Director of Constituent Services.
The request and the reply
Council Order 2612 asked for “a list of City-issued Cellphone numbers.” The response, 26CM24, read into the record on March 2, opens with praise for “such a dedicated and talented leadership team” and states the administration’s two values, “responsiveness and accountability.” It then explains that the city has a constituent services office for exactly this purpose and that councillors should use it. The phone numbers were not provided.
Three weeks later Councillor Giovanni Recupero filed Order 2625, asking the council president to set up a process for the council to hire its own lawyer “in the event the City Council desires a second legal opinion” independent of the City Solicitor. The two orders are about the same thing. The council wants lines to the executive branch that do not run through the City Manager’s office, and the City Manager’s position is that the charter puts him between the two.
The charter
Chelsea has a council-manager government, written into the charter after receivership in 1994. The council sets policy and the budget and hires the manager; the manager runs the departments. The charter’s non-interference clause bars councillors from giving orders to city employees, and a manager who lets eleven councillors call his department heads directly has, in practice, eleven bosses for each of them. That is the argument for routing calls through constituent services, and it is not a bad one.
The argument on the other side is practical. A councillor whose district has a water main break at 9 p.m. wants the DPW commissioner, not a voicemail at City Hall. Department heads’ city cell numbers are also public records; a records request would produce them, and the administration presumably knows that. Declining to hand them over in a council response, while routing the request to an office the manager controls, is a statement about who answers to whom.
The council’s annual evaluation of the City Manager is underway, chaired by Councillor Taylor with Councillors T. Garcia, Santagate, Recupero and Brown. The cell phone response, the second-opinion order and the year’s records disputes are the friction the evaluation will have to weigh, and this is the smallest and clearest example of it.