A prerequisite to any sort of reform is being able to criticize what is wrong in general principles. As I said, there are many comments in this thread just plainly assuming that it's legitimate to consider the city as being bound by this deal due to unilateral actions of the mayor. Pointing out that this is an opinionated assumption and that we could instead use other standards to mitigate the principle agent problem is my attempt at articulating what is wrong with the situation. I'd say it has much better explanatory power for what people intuitively feel is wrong here.