The senior member of one of the most dysfunctional political bodies I’ve seen during 48 years here recently decided to order Tucson City Manager Mike Hein to resign or be fired.

But five-term Democratic Councilman Steve Leal apparently forgot he needs four votes to do that ... or anything else.

And his staff couldn’t remember when Hein was leaving on vacation or how to send him the message. They tried to e-mail the letter June 18, the day Hein left, but they failed. So they finally re-sent it June 23.

Meanwhile, County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry and his Board of Supervisors proudly announced that 46 county employees worked for six months to jot down 115 steps county departments could take to make the bureaucracy "greener" in the environmental sense.

But they didn’t bother to calculate what their wish list would cost in greenbacks. Money is scarce, so it’s the thought that counts, I guess.

In another move to keep the city’s mayor and council from basking in the local foolishness spotlight all by themselves, county officials have stopped work on the $76 million county-city courts building at Stone and Alameda downtown.

Voters OK’d it in 2004, but there isn’t enough money to build it because the county bond proposal was unrealistically low.

So when our summer rains come, the excavations for the court building and for the city’s stalled Rio Nuevo attractions west of the Santa Cruz River will either give us some giant outdoor swimming holes or make us the mosquito capital of the West.

Policy makers like Leal are right to complain when they read of staff-dictated policy decisions in the newspapers.

Council Democrats didn’t like the staff announcement that the Greyhound-Sun Tran bus building the council voted to put downtown would be moved several miles northwest. When the elected officials complained, the project was returned to downtown.

Four council members also opposed a staff idea to cut the city subsidy to Sun Tran so bureaucrats could cite that as a reason to raise bus fares by 25 percent. The council restored the subsidy and killed the fare increase.

Making policy or reversing earlier council decisions are jobs for the elected officials, not Hein, Transportation Director Jim Glock or their underlings.

But firing the city manager for staff misbehavior goes too far and is a bad idea. It would stop Rio Nuevo and other city efforts during a nationwide search for a new manager who might know a lot about Des Moines, Colorado Springs or Eugene but very little about Tucson.

Now let’s turn to Pima County’s history of intentionally low-balling bond costs for major projects to hoodwink voters into approving them.

The new courts building is the latest example, but it will have to return as part of two or three more bond elections to outdo the Roger Road sewer plant. Generations of voters have approved bonds to deodorize it, but the plant still stinks.

Two weeks ago, I mentioned the countywide universal radio system voters approved in 2004 for police and fire departments, the sheriff and emergency medical teams. It hasn’t been developed because the proposition didn’t include enough money to do it right.

Voters are getting restless about government inefficiencies. The high property tax bills they receive this fall may produce more anti-incumbent votes in the primary and general elections than county officials expect.

At the city level, a well-connected businessman asked me June 24 about the possibility of recalling some or all of the members of the mayor and council.

I told him we haven’t had a recall in 30 years or so and the process isn’t easy.

But I think a recall probably would be more popular with Tucson voters right now than firing the city manager.

Contact Steve Emerine or e-mail comments for publication to editor@azbiz.com. Emerine, a Tucson resident since 1960, has run Steve Emerine Strategic Public Relations since 1994. He is a former local newspaper reporter, editor and columnist and served as Pima County Assessor from 1973 to 1980. He is a regular Monday guest on the John C. Scott radio talk show, which airs from 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. and from 11 a.m. to noon weekdays on The Voice KVOI 690-AM. This column appears weekly in Inside Tucson Business.