MAYOR GAVIN NEWSOM told us that he was going to be a different sort of mayor, that the long local nightmare of Willie Brown-era cronyism and sleaze was finally over. He was a businessperson, he told us, a manager. The San Francisco Chronicle even referred to him in a flattering business section interview as the city's "CEO."

But his recent triple play is disturbingly reminiscent of the time when backroom political operatives openly ran City Hall – and it indicates Newsom may not be so different from his predecessor after all.

Newsom has just filled three key city jobs with people who are utterly unqualified to hold them – all, it appears, in the name of giving himself more political control over the Board of Supervisors. At least one of the moves may violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the City Charter. And in every case, he's done it under a mantle of secrecy that appears to violate the city's Sunshine Ordinance.

First Newsom named City Treasurer Susan Leal to run the Public Utilities Commission – a job that will involve overseeing a $4 billion rebuild of the city's water system, something Leal has no background or experience in. The PUC director ought to be the city's leading advocate for public power and ought to be pushing to take over Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s local system – but Leal has always been a PG&E ally. The charter lays out a process for choosing department heads that calls for the mayor to submit three names to the commission – something that clearly wasn't done in this case.

Then Newsom moved Annemarie Conroy, who had been running the Treasure Island Development Authority, over to the Office of Emergency Services (despite the fact that she has absolutely zero background in law enforcement, public safety, or disaster planning) to make room for Tony Hall to move off the Board of Supervisors and into the Treasure Island post (despite the fact that Hall has no background in real estate development, housing, planning, or large-scale contract negotiations).

Why did all this happen? Why did three incompetents get placed in positions of massive responsibility? Simple: Newsom wants more allies on the board. He tried to get Sup. Aaron Peskin to take the treasurer's job, which would have let the mayor replace a critic with an ally, and when that didn't work out (and none of the other supes would take the job), he found a way to get Hall, who sometimes clashes with him, out of the way and replace him with a staunch ally, Sean Elsbernd.

As even some of Brown's allies tried to tell him toward the end of his administration, this sort of cronyism and backroom dealing has immense costs – not just in public perception and faith in local government, but in the actual operations of the city.

But when you try to figure out who else applied for those jobs – if, indeed, the mayor made anything other than a token effort to look at other candidates – it turns out to be impossible. Newsom won't release the résumés of the other applicants (although the sunshine law requires it).

Hall's appointment also represents a colossal failure on the part of the city's Ethics Commission, which granted Hall a waiver of the law barring elected officials from working as lobbyists (which would be part of Hall's job) for a year after they leave office. (Kudos to Commissioner Joe Lynn for voting against this smelly deal.)

This is a bad, bad sign for Newsom's administration.