Steve Murphy: Council president defended clerk process, pointing to a 'tight timeline'An extra-inning game of inside baseball came to a merciful ending yesterday with the City Council’s 10-2 vote appointing Maureen Feeney to the position of City Clerk, which comes with responsibilities as the body’s parliamentarian and purveyor of City Hall permits. The two dissenters to a unanimous approval were Councillors Tito Jackson, who voted "present,” and Charles Yancey, who cast a vote for another applicant, Natalie Carithers.

So the $102,000-a-year clerkship that Feeney has coveted for years is finally hers. But the road that led her to the title of “Madame Clerk” was a rocky one, and the entire affair almost demands the application of an asterisk now, because the supposedly open process was a disservice to both her and the position.

Feeney, who served Dorchester for 17 years as a city councillor, was arguably a top candidate for the job, a standout among the 26 people who applied. But the search process was marred in a myriad of ways.

The rush to appoint a new clerk, when the current one, Rosaria Salerno, had said she would step down in February and there is an assistant clerk available to run the department in the meantime was never fully explained.

City Council President Stephen Murphy repeatedly argued there was nothing in the city’s charter about the appointment of a city clerk beyond a vote of the 13-member council. The open process – complete with finalists and interviews with the council’s Rules Committee – was unprecedented, he said.

But the public posting was only up for seven days; it could have been up for four weeks or more; and it could have been placed as an advertisement in Governing magazine.

All that aside, the view that the job belonged to Feeney took root in the political firmament long ago, so we’ll never know who else might have applied if they believed they had a fair shot at a job that carries a $1 million budget and 14 staff members.

In a Tuesday memo to his colleagues recommending her for the gig, Murphy wrote that Feeney was “the only applicant to meet all of the qualifications in the job description, and she demonstrated the depth and breadth of her knowledge and experience that will best assist the Council as it moves forward.”

Murphy, an experienced driver going back to his days spent in the employ of the late Councillor Dapper O’Neil, also sought to back up a car over the Boston Globe for daring to raise questions about the ham-handed search for a new city clerk.

“I find it frustrating that rather than focusing on the Council’s efforts to hold public interviews of the City Clerk for the first time in the history of that position or highlighting the Council’s continued efforts to comply with the open meeting law, instead [the Globe reporter] took the efforts by staff to ensure compliance with the open meeting law as a basis to raise an unfounded allegation about violations of the ethics rules,” Murphy wrote.

The ethics rules in question require that a candidate like Feeney be out of public office for 30 days before the Council can take action, and the Globe article suggested that the body went afoul of the law by publicly posting the time and date of the Rules Committee interview two days before the 30 days were up.

Murphy wrote that the council was “under a tight timeline to have a new City Clerk in place for 2012” and staffers were in compliance with the open meeting law.

“The Council complied with both the open meeting law and the ethics laws and conducted interviews of the most qualified applicants for the position of City Clerk,” he wrote.

Amid all the back-and-forth, and less than 24 hours before the council installed Feeney, a state representative from Boston stepped into the debate over the clerk and the tens of thousands of dollars collected in marriage fees.

All public employees, including city and town clerks, would be barred from keeping marriage fees earned while they’re on duty, under a bill state Rep. Marty Walz (D-Back Bay) plans to propose. The funds would be sent to municipal coffers instead.

If the clerks do attempt to keep the fees, they would be prohibited from using their government offices to perform the marriages. They would be able to perform marriages outside of work in a public park, according to Walz.

So if appointed to the seat, Feeney faces losing up to $60,000 in annual extra income if the Walz proposal is approved by the Legislature and signed by the governor. The state currently allows clerks, who are also justices of the peace, to keep the fees if they perform the marriages during the workday, which Walz called “double-dipping.”

“I am announcing this legislation today so the new clerk knows that the days of using the Clerk’s office as a private for-profit wedding chapel are numbered,” Walz said in a kicker quote at the end of her press release.

Murphy and District 8 Councillor Michael Ross have their own proposal. But it’s more limited than the Walz plan, allowing the clerk to keep any fees collected before 9 a.m. and after 5 p.m., and during 60-minute lunch breaks.

“I didn’t know about this until recently and it struck me as inappropriate,” Walz told the Reporter.

State ethics laws prohibit public employees from running their own businesses while they’re on government time, she said. “I don’t think the city clerk should be allowed to do so either.”

Walz said the bill was not targeting Feeney, who resigned abruptly after the November election that picked her successor, and she has “no opinion” on who should be the next city clerk. “This has nothing to do with her personally,” Walz said.

Ross said he respects Walz, but he defended the council’s proposal, saying it was appropriate for the city and a “responsible first step.”

Murphy’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

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