Mayor Jerry Sanders and Ronne Froman, the city’s chief operating officer, looked hard before hiring away Jay Goldstone from Pasadena as San Diego’s first CFO.

Mayor Sanders is a man on the move. Ten minutes late from a speaking engagement before a Rancho Bernardo business group, he hears about it from his top staff, all already positioned on the deck outside of Harbor Island’s Island Prime for a photo shoot. Sanders laughs and gamely sits where asked, all the while looking very much comfortable at the head of this informal triangle of teasing people. Of course he should be. As San Diego’s first strong mayor, he has enjoyed the freedom to handpick each of his eight top officers, who along with his inherited chiefs of police and fire make up the executive team. This is both his staff and the city’s top administrators. Team Sanders, as several of them say.

Whether Sanders can unwind the city from both its real and imagined financial demons, time will tell. But when he reports this month on his promised 90-day timeline for change, much of the information, bad and good, will have been filtered through this group, which is getting an unprecedented opportunity to re-shape City Hall. The team already is evolving, with Ellie Oppenheim, deputy COO of neighborhood services, resigning a week after the cover photo was taken and as the magazine was going to press. (We decided against digitally carving her from the photo’s edge.)

In putting together this group on City Hall’s 11th floor, Sanders started with Ronne Froman as chief operating officer.

“Having worked with Ronne since when I was the chief of police and she was (Navy mayor) I really admire her,” Sanders says. “Then when I had the opportunity to work with her at the Red Cross I thought she was the smartest person around. She has discipline, charm and is very systematic, which I like. She has experience in doing consolidation and system engineering. She also has such a wide network (of friends and associates). And the fact she was an admiral means a lot for so many people in San Diego. It is a position of trust.”

After winning the election, Sanders and Froman had 30 days to put a core staff in place. “We didn’t have time for an executive search firm,” he says. “We drew up the people we needed and started looking around.” Both had to agree they had the right person. “There were some people that only one or the other of us liked, but we always went on to the next person if that occurred,” Sanders says.

The mayor decided against using his campaign advisory team to vet candidates. “The only thing we used outsiders for was for recommendations,” he says. “We talked to people all over San Diego about the positions. We threw it out to fairly large groups and we got a lot of people calling us.”

One of the first people hired was Rich Haas, the deputy chief operating officer for public works. Haas was working for the county as assistant director of the department of environmental health and was originally loaned to the mayor’s transition team. Sanders liked Haas’ background in construction engineering, public works and executive-level experience in the Navy where he streamlined operations to run better financially. “The reports we got were that people really liked him and he had great people skills,” Sanders says. “Union folks liked him because he was very fair.”

Sanders worked perhaps hardest on filling the chief financial officer slot, a new position for the city and one of extraordinary importance as San Diego works to regain the financial market’s confidence. “When we started looking at CFO candidates we were of a mind to get an outside private sector CFO,” Sanders says. “We talked to a lot of them and it wasn’t working out. We are limited in the resources we can pay people. We heard from KPMG and other people about a guy in Pasadena who was very good. That was Jay Goldstone.” Goldstone joined the city on Jan. 23.

With images and explanations of the city’s troubled real estate division splashed about on local media, Sanders looked hard to find a deputy COO of land use and economic development before settling on Jim Waring. “It was a fairly long interview process,” he says. “We interviewed people who had been with the city and gone to the private sector and we interviewed people who had been public employees elsewhere. Then while talking with people in the community who used economic development services, one name that came up over and over was Jim Waring. He had been an environmentalist and developer. When I started talking to Jim I became convinced almost immediately he was the right guy.” Waring, a lawyer who served as of counsel with Ross Dixon & Bell since 1982, also co-owned a development firm and served on the board of River Network, a national environmental group that works on clean water and sustainable development issues.

Ethical issues seem chronic in San Diego. Sanders’ predecessor, Dick Murphy, rode the issue to victory in 2000 and even pushed through the city’s first Ethics Commission. But as misleading, or worse, city financial documents came to light, the citizenry grew more skeptical of local government. So Sanders created an office of ethics and integrity, naming Jo Anne SawyerKnoll to run it. SawyerKnoll was general counsel for the San Diego Unified School District, where she had worked with Froman, and earlier a litigator for the State Bar of California where she prosecuted lawyers for professional misconduct. “Ronne knew her from the school district,” Sanders says. “After the first interview I had with her I was convinced she was the right person. I really admired her ethics and perspective so I picked her right away. We didn’t interview anyone else.”

To run the office’s community and legislative services department, Sanders turned to Kris Michell. She had worked closely with him on the campaign while an executive with The Sickels Group, a land development firm. She also had worked on public accounts for Marsh insurance, in government affairs for the Padres and as chief of staff for Mayor Susan Golding. “I have known her for many years and on the United Way Board,” Sanders says. “I have admired her skills in understanding the (political landscape). She wasn’t really looking for a job and I had to put the hard sell on her.”

One of the positions Sanders got a lot of feedback on was deputy chief for neighborhood services, the person responsible for the library system, parks and recreation and the newly created function of customer services. He eventually settled on Oppenheim, a general manager in the city’s park and recreation department since June 2002. “She was already working here and seemed to be tireless,” Sanders says. “I kept going to events and she was at all of them. She and Ronne started talking and it was apparent she was a fit.” Apparently not, as Oppenheim has accepted a visitor industry job in Reno, Nev. “What is disappointing is we didn’t know when this started this was possible. Things might have been different,” says Sanders, who expects to name a replacement in early March.

Public safety is an obvious area of expertise for former police chief Sanders. But budget constraints kept him from filling his deputy chief of public safety position. Then Augie Ghio, the city’s director of homeland security, resigned in January to become chief of the San Miguel Fire Protection District. “We interviewed about five people for public safety but were not going to fill it until Augie decided to leave,” Sanders says. With money available, he hired Jill Olen, who had served in several senior level civilian emergency services planning posts at the Pentagon and was in the building on Sept. 11, 2001. She came to San Diego in late 2004 and was working as an adjunct professor in National University’s homeland security and safety engineering program.

“If you think about what we have in San Diego now, we have a mayor who understands that local (public safety) issue,” says Sanders. “We have a No. 2 who understands it from the Navy perspective. And now we have Jill... (This) really benefits the city as we move forward.”

While Olen will coordinate emergency services, the police and fire chiefs report directly to Sanders and Froman. Sanders says his relationship with both is good. “I am very pleased with how they interact,” he says. “Fire chiefs and police chiefs are pretty plain spoken people and you want them that way. You don’t want someone who is going to pretty it up for you. The good news is always nice, but I don’t need to hear it. The bad news I always need to hear immediately.”

With a collection of City Hall veterans and newbies essentially creating the strong mayor’s office, Sanders expects some bumps. “We are all learning together,” he says. “I am new to the finance world but we all have great contacts to turn to. Everyone here except Jim Waring has been in this kind of world. We understand a bureaucracy. I won’t tell you it is smooth every day because it is not. We are finding out things we didn’t know and will make mistakes. But we will learn from those mistakes.”

Early this month, Sanders will issue a report card on how he is living up to his campaign promises.

“People will see what we have accomplished as a team,” he says. “We are doing well in most areas, not so in one or two. It has been incredibly busy. I mean crazy busy. You have to pace yourselves a bit. We didn’t get this way in a day and we are not going to solve it in a day. On the other hand it is going to take a lot of work and we are spending a lot of hours on it.”