City Hall’s custom of spending as long as possible to get almost nothing done has sadly slowed the effort to install a monument to Maya Angelou outside the Main Library and has left a talented local artist fuming.

You’ll recall that 2½ years ago, our so-called progressive city realized its public art collection included 87 statues, but only two represented real women.

The Board of Supervisors passed legislation to increase the representation of women in the public realm, including adding the Angelou statue, and raised money to pay for it.

In the tortoise-like pace of City Hall bureaucracy, it took two years for three artists to be named as finalists to create the Angelou monument and another few weeks for a selection panel to name Berkeley artist Lava Thomas as its top choice.

But in the old allegory, the tortoise keeps plodding along and ultimately wins. In the Angelou saga, the tortoise has declared the competition invalid and has returned to the starting line. Thomas is not the choice after all. Nobody is.

The dispute stems from Supervisor Catherine Stefani, who sponsored the legislation creating and paying for the monument, only specifying after Thomas was selected that she wants a literal statue. A traditional, person-in-bronze statue like all the old-school ones depicting men that dot Golden Gate Park, City Hall and elsewhere. Nothing more creative. Nothing like what Thomas designed and the selection panel loved.

Understandably, Thomas is irate.

“Artists in the Bay Area work hard for very little reward, and to be disregarded this way, it’s unconscionable,” Thomas said. “The fact that this process lacked integrity, it lacked honesty and it lacked accountability defies everything that Dr. Angelou stood for.”

The ridiculous outcome stems from the November 2018 call from the Arts Commission for proposals to honor Angelou, the late writer and civil rights activist who lived in San Francisco as a teenager and young woman. It sought a “significant figurative representation” of Angelou, and 111 artists responded.

Thomas, along with New York artist Jules Arthur and East Bay artist Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, were chosen as the three finalists — and their proposals were all fantastic.

A selection panel that included Angelou’s son, Guy Johnson, convened Aug. 9 and named Thomas’ monument, called “Portrait of a Phenomenal Woman,” its top pick. It’s a towering, 9-foot bronze book with Angelou’s face on the cover and an Angelou quote, “If one has courage, nothing can dim the light which shines from within,” on the bottom. Selection panels’ recommendations are not binding and are subject to votes of the Arts Commission’s Visual Arts Committee and the full commission, but they typically sail through.

Thomas told me she chose an image of Angelou that wasn’t widely familiar — of Angelou in her 40s with close-cropped natural hair and big, gold hoop earrings.

The selection panel called Thomas’ creation “quietly radical” and praised its powerful simplicity. It said it fit well with the library site, was made of durable materials, met the project’s goals and had a reasonable cost of about $181,000.

In other words, a masterpiece.

But not to Stefani. She prefers the second-choice pick by Arthur, which depicts two Angelous — a young girl reading and an older woman typing — in statue form.

Stefani said she always wanted a statue, but the Arts Commission staff didn’t want that word included in its request for proposals. It compromised on the phrase “significant figurative representation,” which prompted the confusion, Stefani said.

“They knew the entire time that what was envisioned was a statue-type figure of Maya Angelou,” she continued. “This was not their legislation, it was not their idea, and it was not their fundraising effort.”

Johnson, Angelou’s son, also preferred Arthur’s proposal, but when he learned of the controversy, he wrote a letter to the Visual Arts Committee, which took up the issue at its Wednesday meeting, saying it should confirm the selection panel’s choice of Thomas.

“While I may have wanted a different artist, I know my mother would be happy to know that a local artist who is a woman of color had been selected to develop her monument,” he wrote. “It is important for me to state that I support the democratic process. ... Ms. Thomas was selected by such a process, ergo she has my approval.”

Nonetheless, after Stefani spoke at the Visual Arts Committee meeting Wednesday about her desire for an actual statue, the committee opted to select none of the three finalists and to begin the process all over again. It will redo the request for proposals to clarify the monument must be a statue and begin the selection process from scratch. It maintains it will still meet its deadline of installing the statue by December 2020, but at this rate, that seems highly dubious.

Dorka Keehn, chair of the Visual Arts Committee, said it’s not uncommon to go back to the drawing board if a client — in this case, Stefani — isn’t happy with the outcome. The commission, she explained, is like an art consultant, working to ensure the client is satisfied.

“What became apparent was that the project sponsor did not understand what figurative means,” she said. “Figurative does not mean a statue. ...The issue was that the project sponsor wants a statue. Period.”

This may seem like just a blip — it’s just a slowdown in creating one statue, after all. But it’s more than that. It’s the latest example of City Hall politicians who bemoan the slow pace of accomplishing anything in San Francisco contributing to the sloth-like culture. And wasting an incredible amount of other people’s time in the process.

And if what should be a simple process to install one statue gets this convoluted, how can any of our bigger issues ever get addressed?

Moreover, while I’m no art expert, even I know the effort to depict an African American woman should not look exactly the same as the dozens of depictions of white men all over our city. The whole point is that Angelou is different — in gender, in color, in political viewpoint, in priorities — and she deserves to be celebrated for that difference.

“She represents freedom, possibility and potentiality,” Thomas said. “Why would the city want a European figurative convention that colonial and Confederate monuments are based on? What I wanted to do with my proposal was to give the city of San Francisco a new icon.”

It would have been great to have that new icon, but Thomas is refusing to participate in the do-over, and I don’t blame her.

“I don’t trust the process, and I resent being the test case for this mess,” she said. “Artists deserve better, women deserve better, and black women deserve better.”

In fact, we all do.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf Instagram: @heatherknightsf