Spotlight

How can we miss Passafaro if he won't go away? Plus, is any publicity good publicity for city councilors?

City Hall by Yvonne Abraham

How do you replace the guy who usually does the replacing? That's one of the questions Mayor Thomas Menino is tackling these days, in the wake of chief of staff David Passafaro's official departure October 13. Passafaro, a friend of Menino's who was lauded for his three and a half years in City Hall, was the fix-it guy of the administration, intervening in crises such as the stalled Mission Main development project and guiding some of the administration's biggest initiatives, such as the convention-center funding bill. By all accounts, he always discharged his duties with a smile, which won him many fans in town. City councilor Tom Keane calls him the id to Menino's ego. "Nobody's going to fill [the job] as good as David," the mayor told the Globe.

Often, it was Passafaro himself who was called upon to help fill high-level vacancies in City Hall. And he may continue to do that even as he takes up his new real-estate job with Boston Concessions. Indeed, it'll be hard for the mayor to miss him, since Passafaro won't be going completely away. According to City Hall spokesperson Jacque Goddard, he'll continue to oversee the birth of the Office of New Bostonians, which is still in search of a director. And he'll help put together departmental priorities for the mayor's State of the City address in January.

A Globe story last Tuesday said that Passafaro would be maintaining even closer links with the mayor -- that he'd be at City Hall for one full day every week.

Bosh, says Passafaro. "I'm doing a couple of things for the mayor pro bono," he says. "I'm reading and sorting résumés for the [Chief of] Inspectional Services job, and I also promised I'd help out with the State of the City address. It was not one full day a week. That was the imagination of a reporter, I suppose."

Passafaro dismisses claims that serving two masters will lead to a conflict of interest. "The mayor reaches out to people in the private sector all the time," Passafaro says. "I did it before I worked for him, and I'll do it after I work for him."

While it's true that Menino often seeks advice from friends in the business community -- developer and old friend Robert Walsh is one of them -- few of those advisers maintain the kind of presence in City Hall that Passafaro promises to. As long as he's around, the new chief of staff will find it difficult to have the autonomy Passafaro did.

Many of Passafaro's former duties have fallen to other high-level city bureaucrats. Newly hired, Washington-wired deputy chief of staff Julie Burns "is doing more than an adequate job filling David's shoes," says Goddard. And chief policy adviser Peter Welsh says he's picking up some of Passafaro's workload ("unfortunately, too much of his workload," he quips). Now, says Welsh, he's in charge of some of the development issues Passafaro was dealing with, in addition to the public-safety matters he's handled all along.

Goddard says résumés have started coming in -- some solicited, some unsolicited -- and that the mayor has "verbally put out feelers" to people he knows around the city. Few names have yet been bandied about for the position. Any day now, Menino will be appointing an interim chief of staff to keep the seat warm, and then the bigwigs will take their time. "This type of job is so important you don't put a deadline on it," says Welsh.

Choosing Passafaro's replacement will be the responsibility of Menino and his closest advisers. Passafaro denies that he will be among them. "That's a little bit ticklish," he says. "That's a very personal choice for the mayor. It was when he chose me."

When pressed as to whether he'd have any role at all in the choice of his successor, Passafaro demurs. "That," he says, "is between the mayor and I."

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Ordinarily, they're a low-profile bunch. City councilors can toil away for months on constituent issues like potholes and drinking fountains, with nary a mention in the local papers. And council hearings, those weekly meetings to discuss everything from new libraries to the mayor's budget, rarely draw more folks these days than you'd find at, say, a Vanilla Ice concert.

But a couple of weeks ago, the councilors were front and center on the regional stage. The Christopher Iannella Chamber was jammed with hundreds of people -- the crowd even spilled over into the corridors, eyes glued to the proceedings playing out on TV screens bolted high above them on City Hall's concrete walls.

The Boston City Council's first hearing on affirmative action, held October 8, gave the body the highest profile it's had in months. Council president Jimmy Kelly, who believes that thousands of highly qualified white applicants are being passed over for jobs in the city's police and fire departments because a consent decree won in 1974 demands that a certain number of minority applicants be considered, stood bathed in the spotlight. And he pulled the other councilors in with him.

Trouble is, not all of them were thrilled to be there. Although most of the councilors welcomed the attention, some wish it had come for another reason. And that has bred acrimony in City Hall.

District councilor Dan Conley did not attend the hearings at all. (He did not return phone calls from the Phoenix.) And Tom Keane, who arrived late, says the hearings were a bad idea in the first place. "As leader of the city council, Kelly defines what we are all about," says the District Eight (Back Bay) councilor. "He made it look like we are trying to reverse history. There's a real sense that he made the council look bad."

"Was this my bailiwick? No," says councilor Paul Scapicchio, who represents the North End, Charlestown, and East Boston. "Was it something I pushed for? No. Is it something I'll put on my campaign literature as one of my accomplishments? No." But, says Scapicchio, everybody should have been at the hearing. "If you're embarrassed, show up and say it. Are we here to do a job for the city, or are we here to look good?"

Since Kelly intends to hold at least one more hearing on the matter -- despite the fact that the statutorily weak city council can do nothing to affect hiring practices -- the council as a whole will land in the news pages again. Will that link the body even more closely to the dredging up of racial issues that rent the city during the '70s and '80s?

"I was wondering that in the hearing," says district councilor Brian Honan, who represents Allston and Brighton. "I don't know if it's the council that's been identified with this thing, or just certain members." Upon further consideration, Honan decides it's the latter. "The individual work we've done will outshine any negative ramifications of this hearing," he concludes. "Although there's been a tremendous amount of publicity on this issue, in the end people in our respective neighborhoods will look at the work we've done and go with that."

Tom Keane doesn't think the bad publicity will rub off on him, either. "It puts the council in a bad light in terms of being a beacon to the past," he says. "But personally, I know I'm not a part of that movement."

More worrisome to Keane is that the hearings might make the council even less effective as a public voice on issues such as neighborhood schools. "Now this race debate is going to get entangled in the new student-assignment plan discussion. This thing undermines that," he says.

Expect the subject of Kelly's hearings to be dredged up again in January, during the next battle for the council presidency -- and probably by Keane.

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Why, by the way, is Kelly holding the hearings at all? Back in January, he emerged from his election to a fifth term as city council president talking about fostering a local version of President Clinton's vaunted conversation on race. Come October, he's talking about "forced busing" and reverse discrimination again.

What happened?

Kelly, long an opponent of legally enforced racial integration of all kinds, told the Globe earlier this year that he'd been misunderstood back in January. Rather than seeing the error of his own ways, he'd wondered -- what with affirmative action being done away with all over the place, and even Judge Garrity relaxing racial set-asides at Boston Latin -- whether the rest of the world had come around to his way of thinking.

But last week, he told the Phoenix that he actually tried the dialogue-on-race thing and became disillusioned with it. Since January, he's attended two forums on race, one at UMass and one at the JFK Library. At both, Kelly says, he was outnumbered.

"Whoever puts those things together doesn't get several people from each side," he says sadly. "I found someone with my point of view to be in a clear minority. I thought people would be a bit more open-minded."

Instead, says Kelly, most of the participants talked about "slavery and how white people are responsible for that, and how the white people have all of the economic power in this country. And I'm a poor guy from South Boston and I never, never, never intentionally discriminated against anyone for any reason. I've never harbored a racist thought, certainly not consciously."

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yabraham[a]phx.com.