Saying Goodbye to Delgadillo
He's out of office now, replaced by Carmen Trutanich, but the L.A. Weekly kicks Rocky Delgadillo on his way out the door. They sum up his years of city service as a "too-clever-by-half, look-for-the-loophole style."
But it's not that the Weekly, or the city, doesn't have reason to be disappointed. As discussed earlier here at City of Angles, Delgadillo tried to stuff the city attorney's office with many of his appointees--a plan that the City Council worked around, as reported in the L.A. Weekly story:
City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo suffered one last humiliation on his way out the door last week, when the City Council squashed his scheme to pack incoming City Attorney Carmen Trutanich's senior staff with Delgadillo's cronies.....Delgadillos's two terms in City Hall were tarnished by backroom deals with billboard-industry lawyers, which fueled the billboard plague; political failure when he prematurely ran for attorney general; and credibility issues over his padded résumé and his family's blatant misuse of official city cars. The decisions he made and his stumbling explanations prompted the Los Angeles Times to formally call for his resignation in 2007.....
Here's how the City Council tried to help Trutanich out from the bind Rocky tried to leave him in:
Termed out of office, [Delgadillo] is leaving behind a successor stink-bomb disguised as a welcome-wagon present. The 49-year-old drew widespread scorn for his unusual decision to give job tenure to most of his top aides, thus forcing the newly elected city attorney, Trutanich, to rely on Delgadillo loyalists instead of his own picks, just as the city is facing a historic deficit and hiring freeze.....The City Council stepped in at the 11th hour on June 23, with a special funding plan to let Trutanich hire seven senior aides at a cost of $1.2 million. That didn't resolve the issue of Delgadillo sticking Trutanich with job-protected workers in senior positions -- and it added to the city's huge deficit by duplicating several senior positions. The Council condemned Delgadillo's scheme as contemptuous of taxpayers and subverting the clear intent of the City Charter....Councilman Dennis Zine contend[ed] that Delgadillo had "abused the City Charter by locking those positions in." .....the City Attorney's office is set up for an employment nightmare. Delgadillo's director of communications, Nick Velasquez, has been put on a tenure track at $118,000 a year and says he expects Trutanich to find a suitable spot for him and his salary even though he is not a lawyer. "I'm prepared to do whatever Mr. Trutanich wants me to do," Velasquez says. "But I hope he uses all of us to our maximum effectiveness. ...Otherwise it would be a waste of taxpayer dollars." ["City Attorney Carmen Trutanich in the House," L.A. Weekly]
Indeed, Mr. Velasquez! The Weekly has been critical of Delgadillo for a long time--see this June 2007 feature by Christine Pelisek that details what they were even then calling the city attorney's "flameout."
(Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images)
