In Alameda, an island community with a long history of strong labor influence, the city manager could lose her job because she resisted political pressure to hire a union leader as fire chief.
The people who probably should be removed from City Hall are council members Malia Vella and Jim Oddie, who apparently violated the city charter by meddling in the selection process. Oddie even threatened to fire City Manager Jill Keimach if she didn’t bend to his wishes, the police chief says.
The charter specifies that hiring decisions rest with the city manager. Council interference is prohibited and grounds for removal from office for malfeasance. City Attorney Janet Kern said Monday she will hire an outside law firm to investigate.
Rather than capitulate to the union, Keimach conducted an open and rigorous recruitment for a new chief to manage the 111-person fire department and its $34 million annual budget.
Last week, she hired Edmond Rodriguez, the chief of the Salinas Fire Department, to fill the post. Questioned by four interview panels, Rodriguez ranked highest in the selection process.
After announcing her selection, Keimach sent the council a three-page letter detailing the “unrelenting” and “unseemly political pressure” on her to appoint the candidate who had “been handpicked by the local (firefighters) union.”
She said she had been “asked to cast aside the requirement of a fair and transparent process and give no consideration to other candidates who present superior qualifications and experience.”
The union candidate was Domenick Weaver, a captain in the Alameda Fire Department, a post two steps down from the chief that typically supervises a fire engine team of three people.
A 25-year department veteran, Weaver has no degree beyond high school, served 17 years as a labor leader and was president of the firefighters union for seven years.
In contrast, Rodriguez has a bachelor’s degree in fire science, a master’s degree in executive fire service leadership and 21 years of fire department experience, including five as chief.
“Hands down” the best candidate, said Piedmont City Manager Paul Benoit, who served on one of the review panels. “I had no doubt in terms of experience and capabilities that Rodriguez was the candidate.”
But the politically active and influential local firefighters union — which helped elect Vella, a Teamsters lawyer, and Oddie, district director for Assemblyman Rob Bonta, to the City Council — backed Weaver.
Writing to Keimach on official city letterhead, Oddie “strongly” recommended that she pick Weaver. A day later, in a conversation with Police Chief Paul Rolleri, Oddie threatened Keimach’s job.
“He said, ‘well she better do the right thing,'” Rolleri recalled. “‘There are already two council members who are ready to fire her if she doesn’t.’”
The police chief was stunned when he realized “they’re actually thinking about canning her if she doesn’t pick the right guy.”
Separately, Oddie and Vella, in a private meeting with the city manager, suggested, as Keimach recounted in her letter, that “the selection of their candidate would be in the interest of labor peace and would avoid an incident similar to the one involving Raymond Zack.”
Zack was a 52-year-old suicidal man who stood neck deep in water off the city shoreline in 2011 as police and firefighters stayed on land for nearly an hour and watched him eventually drown.
Raising the Zack incident, which pre-dated Keimach’s tenure, was a “thinly veiled threat (that) insults the very notion of good government,” the city manager wrote.
Oddie and Vella did not respond to requests to discuss the allegations. But in an email Oddie said he had not improperly influenced the selection process.
“As elected officials we have a duty to express our views on matters of concern to our constituents,” he said. “As Americans that is our Constitutional right.”
During the selection process, the council had postponed Keimach’s performance evaluation, which was supposed to have been done in March, a year after she started working for the city.
The council has now scheduled Keimach’s evaluation for Tuesday, ignoring the city attorney’s advice to delay it while an investigation is pending.
The question now is whether Keimach will lose her job for taking a principled and professional stand — and whether the city manager runs Alameda or the fire union does.
