Phoenix reinstates former city manager amid community protest

After two Phoenix City Council votes that took place behind closed doors, zero community input and four years following the release of the Department of Justice (DOJ) report that coincided with the retirement of former City Manager Ed Zuercher, the job is his once more. 

The decision to reinstate Zuercher to the position he held from 2013 to 2021 and which he left during the DOJ investigation — which highlighted both the Phoenix Police Department and the City of Phoenix as discriminatory in its practices that disproportionally target marginalized communities by way of unlawful detainments, unjustified deadly force and the violation of civil rights, particularly to those exercising protected speech and expression — comes after a process that outraged community members.

When questioned at the confirmation hearing on Sept. 17 by opposing council members about the hiring process, City Attorney Julie Kriegh clarified that not only was there no community input prior to the meeting, but also no interviews were conducted, either internally or externally, to consider additional candidates. 

According to the City of Phoenix City Charter, the city manager is the chief administrative officer of the city, responsible to the council and all affairs of the city. The council is the body responsible for appointing this position and may remove the candidate with an affirmative vote of two-thirds of its members. 

The city manager role, as stated in the Phoenix municipal codes and charter, is charged with direction and supervision over all departments, which includes the police department, offices and agencies. Although the city manager may also have the power to appoint, approve, suspend or remove all city employees, they are still checked in power by the mayor and council, a leadership body that they advise about the financial condition and future needs of the city.

Organizations such as Mass Liberation AZ, Black Lives Matter Phoenix Metro and Semillas AZ hosted a call to action protest at the formal City Council meeting, where they encouraged people to place public comments in dissent of the vote. Despite the community uproar, the city council still confirmed Zuercher in a split 5-4 vote, a decision that District 7 Councilwoman Anna Hernandez, representing District 7, says “felt forced.”

“There is no better person to serve as our next city manager than Ed Zuercher, whose steady leadership will help provide the stability we need as an organization and can help us navigate the road ahead,” Mayor Kate Gallego said in a statement released by the city following the tense City Council confirmation vote on Sept. 17. “I’m looking forward to working with him, the City Council and every City employee to make our community even stronger.”

The Office of the Phoenix City Manager and the Maricopa Association of Governments did not respond to several requests for comment.

Following Zuercher’s reconfirmation, Hernandez released a statement in which she expressed overwhelming concern regarding the lack of input not only from Phoenix communities but also from city staff. She also referenced Zuercher’s time as city manager, where Phoenix experienced its worst years of police violence.

According to the Police Scorecard database, the Phoenix Police Department has had more police shootings per arrest than 77% of police departments in the nation, which is 4.5 shootings for every 100,000 arrests. Additionally, it was reported by the Mapping Police Violence database that Phoenix police killed over 156 people from 2013 to 2023. One of those individuals was Hernandez’s brother, Alex Hernandez, who was killed by a Phoenix police officer in 2019.

In an interview with CALÓ News, Hernandez said it was unclear to her why community input and additional interviews weren’t conducted. Especially, she added, if members of the community are unaware of the role a city manager plays. “I think there's a lot of value just in having a very transparent process and always knowing where the community is at with what they want to see as well,” she said.

When questioned on Zuercher’s selection and history in the role, the City of Phoenix provided no comment but referred to previously released statements which delved into his first eight-year stint as city manager where he led a workforce of over 14,500 employees and took the city from a $37 million budget deficit in 2013 during the Recession to a $30 million budget surplus in 2021.

Semillas AZ, a migrant-led group that aims to “dismantle racist institutions through the mobilization, organization and empowerment of marginalized communities,” said that in their goal to uplift and protect communities of color, they have seen and recognized the damage done by Phoenix police to the already frayed relationship the city has with communities that have called for change.

“Phoenix PD, specifically, has been the most murderous and most brutal police department in the nation for a long time, and the people that they’re putting in leadership, again, they’re people that have a history of brutalizing our communities,” Semillas executive director and organizer Joel Cornejo said. “Arizona, and especially the city of Phoenix, they have the responsibility to amend for that history because they have blood on their hands. And putting someone as brutal and murderous as the people that they're putting in leadership, it sends us a clear message, a message that they want to suppress the community. They want to suppress any efforts to bring accountability to the [police] department and the city, and they only care about control.” 

Community groups like Semillas AZ have brought forth reforms and resolutions geared towards moving away from relying on a violent police force and investing more in alternatives to keeping communities safe, as Phoenix police officers continue to be involved in violent and sometimes lethal incidents. The Council approved a budget increase for the police department to over $2 billion on the exact same day that the DOJ revoked their scathing probe at the behest of the newly inaugurated Trump administration.

“Regardless if I think the [police] reforms that the city has done have [gone] far enough… I think there's a very clear indication from the majority of the council that that's an area that we cannot afford to go back on,” Hernandez said. “I'm obviously going to be concerned, and I'm going to be making sure that I continue to advocate for us to push more and not backtrack on that. So, I hope that [Zuercher] was genuine and sincere in his position that he shared publicly, that we're not going to backtrack on this.”

Zuercher is set to return to the city manager position by mid-November, where he’ll be receiving an annual salary of over $415,542, a 28% raise from his current position as acting director of Maricopa Association of Governments (MAG), per the city’s drafted contract. Meanwhile, Semillas and other organizations continue to oppose the decision.

“We're going to be involved in a press conference this coming Oct. 15,” Cornejo said. “We're also going to collaboratively post and push an informative infographic on social media being transparent on the history of the people that the city just chose to put in power there, give context on the history of the brutalization that this department has committed against our communities and what steps we need to take as a community to protect ourselves right now that every power is against us.”