Like President Obama, who has the right to nominate a replacement for Supreme Court Justice Scalia, New London Mayor Michael Passero has every right to choose his management team.   

He won that right in November's conclusive vote.

Still, I cringe at some of the new mayor's appointments, which seem to be going to whatever friend of somebody's who happen to be at hand and in need of a job.

I have yet to hear of any national job searches for the best and the brightest. Indeed, the new hires mostly seem to be back-door candidates, people who know someone.

So many old faces from City Halls past have turned up they should throw a reunion bash.

I am not sure all Mayor Passero's appointments rise to the level of cronyism, a harsh attack he leveled in the fall campaign at his predecessor, saying the appointments of the previous mayor's cronies offended him.

The Passero appointees do seem generally more qualified than many of those of the previous administration.

But finding a job for someone who helped manage your campaign is about as close to cronyism as you can get. And maybe candidate Passero had it right, it can be offensive.

With some of these appointments and some of the mayor's early decisions, he is setting a high bar for himself.

It seems to me he has established some very specific goals he will need to meet before he asks voters for another term.

One of those decisions was rescinding job offers to minority firefighter recruits, offers that were arranged by his predecessor and signed by him.

Mayor Passero based his decision to renege on the job offers on a legal opinion that cost the city $8,000 and which he has refused to release.

By accepting that secret opinion and rejecting job offers he himself had signed off on, it seems to me he has a responsibility to come up with his own successful plan for hiring more minority members for the mostly white fire department.

Voters should and probably will hold him accountable for that.

The other new challenge he has established for himself is to create development at Fort Trumbull and other undeveloped properties held by the city.

The mayor has made good on a campaign promise to work with Renaissance City Development Corp. in promoting the city.

But he never said anything while campaigning about using city money to hire staff for the renamed New London Development Corp., which, of course, is the same agency that took people's homes by eminent domain and destroyed a city neighborhood.

Indeed, we learned in news stories this week the agency is still represented by attorney Karl-Erik Sternlof, who helped arrange the hiring of the new Passero-approved agency executive director, with city money.

Sternlof's reign goes back to the darkest, home-taking days of the agency and continued right through the long years of development drought it presided over.

Sternlof was one of the recipients of the Christmas cards sent out one year by Susette Kelo, whose name graces the now famous Supreme Court decision on eminent domain.

"Here is my house that you did take from me," Kelo wrote in the cards, which included a picture of her pink house. "From me to you this spell I make ... Your houses, your homes, your family, your friends, may they live in misery that never ends ... I curse you all, may you rot in hell."

Let's hope the curse does not also include Sternlof's continuing work with the successor agency to the home-taking NLDC, the same one Passero is now funding.

I question some of these appointments and decisions, but not the mayor's right to make them.

Maybe he's got it all right. I wish him success.

But I would suggest that, at the very least, he is going to need to soon show a more diversified city firefighting force and the making of some significant development out of the ashes of eminent domain he is now kindling with city money.

I am sure voters will need to see that before offering him another term.

This is the opinion of David Collins

d.collins@theday.com

Twitter: @DavidCollinsct