Columnist Jon Ralston: Pettiness again takes center stage at City Hall

Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2000 | 10:13 a.m.

Jon Ralston, who publishes The Ralston Report, writes a column for the Sun on Wednesdays and Sundays. Ralston can be reached at 870-7997.

Downtown redevelopment is at a crossroads, and growth-related conundrums are multiplying. So were these the pressing issues that catalyzed the first post-millennial imbroglio at City Hall, that monument to vision and creativity?

Oh no. Those issues would be, of course, parking and pictures. As in who gets the plum parking spaces and whose picture gets to be in the standard City Hall portrait. Think I'm joshing? It gets worse.

Not only were those items the subjects of intense discussion on the 10th floor shortly after the New Year, but the political pyrotechnics (so that's where the New Year's fireworks were!) actually exploded into a brief discussion of ousting City Manager Virginia Valentine over these important concerns.

That proved to be a dud, however, as the votes were never there. Oh, yes -- all this occurred while Valentine was vacationing in Canada. Must be a Las Vegas local government aborted coup template -- County Commissioner Dario Herrera tried unsuccessfully a few months back to boot Manager Dale Askew while he was out of town.

The main difference at the city, though, is that the plotters won't step forward and those suspected of being the masterminds are pointing fingers at each other and proclaiming their innocence. (I wonder if their tunes would be different today if the votes had been there. Success has a thousand fathers, but ...)

What's clear, though, is that City Hall, despite Mayor Oscar Goodman's attempt to hoist a halcyon aura over the place, is full of nasty emotional detritus left over from His Honor's battle with Mayor Pro Tem Michael McDonald over those two council appointments. And Valentine, and perhaps everyone else including the two new councilmen, are caught in the middle and distracted from their jobs. The most severe assessment came from one city insider who harrumphed: "This is a den of puerility."

Hard to argue considering what happened while Valentine, who declined to comment on all this nonsense, was gone from the last week of 1999 until Jan. 4:

It all began Dec. 22 when her deputy, Doug Selby, issued a memo about how the City Hall parking lot was being revised because of the expansion of the council to seven members, with Lawrence Weekly and Michael Mack the newcomers. Turns out the spaces on the basement level, the prime location, had been reassigned, and that key aides to Goodman and McDonald had lost their slots.

At least three key city insiders say that Rick Henry, McDonald's aide-de-camp, and Bill Cassidy, Goodman's lieutenant, were apoplectic about losing their spaces, nay, their status symbols. Along with McDonald, city sources insist, they began making their feelings known soon after Valentine left for vacation.

"They (McDonald, Henry and Cassidy) said they had five votes (to fire Valentine)," said one 10th floor source. "They had the parking map. They were storming up and down the hallway. It was like a coup."

Well, more like a circus. When Goodman found out about all of this, sources say, he became Mount Vesuvius, even threatening to fire Cassidy if he could prove his culpability. Cassidy now insists that there was "a series of discussions and I sat there and listened ... I don't feel like I took an active role in any discussions about Virginia." The implication: It was McDonald and Henry, not me.

For their part, the Siamese councilmen say they are being fingered by the mayor and his minions for something Cassidy fired up. Both Henry and McDonald said they never would try to tell Valentine to hit the bricks. "Why would I fire someone who gets all my stuff done?" McDonald asked Tuesday with an air of incredulity.

Why indeed. There are those who speculate that McDonald, as he has been hounded by ex-opponent Steve Miller, a relentless stalker whom Victor Hugo couldn't have imagined, continues to seethe over Goodman's ability to block one of his appointments last year. And there also is talk McDonald is disturbed that Valentine appears to be so supportive of Goodman. Indeed, Goodman gushed about the manager Tuesday: "Without Virginia Valentine, I wouldn't know what I could do."

Considering there also was a flap over whether Valentine should be included in a standard city snapshot, and whether Goodman's picture should be larger than his colleagues' photos on the printed agenda, this all starts to make sense. OK, I won't go that far.

Several councilmen expressed fears when they learned of this idiocy that Valentine might decide to leave out of sheer frustration. Imagine how Weekly and Mack feel on their first few days on the job hearing what the priorities are at City Hall.

Goodman, who still occasionally lets his candor eclipse his good sense and whose self-editing mechanism needs a jiggle, clearly wants to be a strong mayor, even researching how to change the law. And McDonald, whose paranoia has been fueled by recent media scrutiny but who still has friends at the grass-roots and elite levels, is unlikely to ever be on Goodman's wavelength.

With those two seemingly irreconcilable in style, substance and goals, no matter what they say publicly, the question isn't where they're parked at City Hall. It's when they'll collide again and who else will be injured.