“Any mayor or elected official should surround themselves with competent employees who are concerned primarily not with their own interests, but with the city’s interests,” said Gallo. “People who share their vision and have no political agenda.”
Dick White was mayor of Kingston from 1986 to 1989. White said he, like mayors before and after him, made political appointments. He also spared Shayne Gallo, then the city’s civil service administrator from the ax, despite the fact that Gallo had supported his opponent. White said he drew a distinction between appointments that were straight political payoffs and those that furthered the city’s goals and the mayor’s agenda.
“I guess I could plead guilty [to making politically motivated appointments] but you want to have people around that you know and you know their capabilities,” said White. “Let’s put it this way, that would have been my reason.”
Dance with them what brung you
Council Majority Leader Tom Hoffay (D-Ward 2) said he had no problem with any of Gallo’s appointments, or what he called the routine practice of placing campaign supporters in city jobs. Hoffay, who worked in the state Attorney General’s Office under former governor Eliot Spitzer, said campaign staff offers a newly elected official a ready-made cadre of loyalists who understand, and presumably support, their agenda. During Spitzer’s brief reign, Hoffay said, the soon-to-be-disgraced governor insisted on an apolitical candidate search process for dozens of traditionally political appointments. The result, Hoffay said, was long delay in filling key posts which either remained vacant or in the hands of holdovers from the George Pataki administration, who were eager to undermine their new Democratic boss’s agenda.
“It’s the same way with every new administration,” said Hoffay. “These are the people who got you to the dance and people you trust.”
Tony Sinagra, an old hand at city politics who recently stepped down as chairman of Kingston’s Republican Committee, said the problem was less with mayors handing out existing jobs to supporters, but with mayors creating new positions in city government as a means of increasing their patronage powers. Sinagra singled out the “Mayor’s Task Force” as a particularly egregious example of how the spoils system can swell city government. The task force was created by Gallo’s brother, the late T.R. Gallo, and continued by his successor Mayor James Sottile until a budget crunch killed the program. The seasonal program hired young people to carry out beautification and cleanup jobs at the mayor’s direction. To critics like Sinagra, it was a transparently patronage-driven program used to reward the sons and daughters of allies.
“Nobody will ever admit it,” said Sinagra. “But look at the names of the people on those jobs and you can see it was payback.”
But the city’s dire fiscal straits may end up doing more to put a damper on political patronage than decades of government-reform rhetoric. Despite describing City Hall as a “bare-bones operation” Gallo since taking office has moved to eliminate at least one city post, director of urban cultural parks, and promised consolidation elsewhere in city government. As for the Mayor’s Task Force, Gallo said he has no plans to bring it back. Instead, he’ll be asking for volunteers to plant flowers and spruce up street medians this summer.
