An independent auditor.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Eugene has a reputation as a city where it's impossible to forge political compromises on the toughest issues, ranging from hospital locations to new parkways.

On at least one difficult problem, the council has proved that reputation is undeserved: It resolved a dispute over the independence of the city's new police auditor office.

On Monday - the same night it voted to offer the auditor's job to Cristina Beamud, legal adviser to the Cambridge, Mass., Police Department - the council approved a critically important resolution clarifying that the new auditor will have complete authority to hire, fire and supervise her future staff.

While that sounds like an arcane personnel issue, it went to the heart of the external police review system approved by voters last November in the wake of an officer sex abuse scandal. If the council had failed to resolve this matter, it could have undermined the new system and thwarted the intent of the voters, who made it clear they wanted the new auditor to be fully independent of city administration.

By dealing with the issue through a firmly worded resolution, the council avoided the distractions, expense and controversy that would have resulted from asking voters to clarify the auditor's power with a City Charter amendment in November. While a charter amendment might have produced a higher degree of legal certitude, it also would have given those who oppose a strong, independent police review system an opportunity to undermine the new auditor's office at the polls.

The dispute focused on whether the new auditor or city manager should have authority over the auditor's staff. Historically, the city manager has had final authority over all city employees except the municipal court judge.

At first glance, the question seems easily resolved by common sense - and the clearly expressed will of the voters who overwhelmingly approved creation of an auditor's office independent of the city manager.

After last fall's election, however, City Manager Dennis Taylor said he retained final authority over the auditor's staff. Taylor issued an administrative order delegating day-to-day supervision of the staff to the auditor but cited a city attorney's opinion stating that the City Charter requires that the city manager retain the ultimate power of hiring, firing and disciplining the auditor's staff.

That seemed like the best-possible solution at the time. Then Art Johnson, a former city attorney, made a convincing argument that the auditor, not the city manager, should have the sole legal authority over his staff. The charter amendment approved last fall by voters, Johnson said, created a new city police auditing function, not a single new auditor position.

That interpretation was backed not only by the amendment's wording and documentation revealing legislative intent, but also by common sense. Allowing the city manager to retain final authority over the auditor's staff would fundamentally compromise the independence of the auditor's office from city administration. Such a jury-rigged administrative arrangement also would have obvious potential for creating bureaucratic confusion and inef- ficiency.

More importantly, the severity of the scandal that prompted creation of the police review system requires that the auditor's office be fully independent of the same city management that allowed the scandal to fester undetected for six years before bringing predatory officers Juan Lara and Roger Magana to justice.

Much credit for this compromise goes to Johnson and Mayor Kitty Piercy, who rightly recognized the importance of building the new police review system on a sound foundation. Credit also is due to former state Labor Commissioner Jack Roberts, who helped negotiate a final compromise, and councilors Jennifer Solomon and George Poling, who voted in favor of the resolution even though they originally opposed the charter amendment that is leading the city to create an independent auditor's office.

With the passage of the resolution and the hiring of an auditor, the city is finally ready to put in place a new police oversight system that should be more accessible, impartial, responsible, transparent, accountable and fair - and that should go a long way toward restoring Eugene citizens' trust in their police department.