DURHAM - Patrick Baker said the sight of his sleeping 7-year-old daughter persuaded him to step down as city manager, a decision announced Tuesday that will take effect in June.

It wasn't, he said, the lumps he took for lead leaching into drinking water, fire at the yard waste dump, the botched Duke lacrosse investigation or any of the other gaffes that have punctuated his rocky three years at City Hall's helm.

"I know some people are going to talk about regrets, and they're going to talk about various things," Baker said at a news conference Tuesday, after which he did not field questions. "I don't have any regrets."

Baker won't be going far after he shepherds the City Council through one last budget. He'll move across the hall in late June to the city attorney's office, where he worked for seven years before taking over as interim city manager in August 2004.

He was an assistant attorney when he left, but he'll be the city's lead counsel when he returns.

Current City Attorney Henry Blinder will retire in January. Karen Sindelar, an assistant city attorney, will serve as interim city attorney for five months until Baker takes the reins. The city has begun a nationwide search for a new manager.

Baker said the attorney job will allow him to spend more time with his wife and two young children. He thanked them for the sacrifices they made so he could work the long hours of a big-city manager.

He said he was on a train ride to Washington, D.C., on Friday, a daddy-daughter trip to the opera, when daughter Chloe drifted to sleep on his lap. That made him realize, he said, that the city manager's job was robbing him of family time.

"I probably needed something like that to slap me in the face and say, 'Patrick, there's more to life than what you're doing right now,' " Baker said at the news conference.

City Council members, who met in closed session Tuesday to discuss Baker's desire for the attorney role, gave Baker their full blessing. They wouldn't say whether they gave him a nudge.

"I would say the majority was his decision," council member Mike Woodard said. "To be honest, there were conversations."

Former council member Thomas Stith III based much of his unsuccessful mayoral campaign this year on the idea that the council needed to be harder on Baker. He said the city made too many costly and embarrassing mistakes that went largely unpunished. On Tuesday, Stith felt some vindication.

"The manager's position, while he had some successes in it, given his lack of previous experience in that role, was a challenge for him and the city," Stith said.

"This clearly is a better fit for him."

Baker's experience both as a city attorney and manager can only serve him and the city well, many city leaders said.

'Not an unknown'

"The good thing about this type of transition -- at least for us, we think -- is we have a person who is not an unknown to us," Mayor Bill Bell said.

When Baker began the manager job, there was a honeymoon period where many said morale improved immensely, and Baker said a happy staff will be one lasting effect of his tenure. But Baker has been on the hot seat for more than a year after a series of embarrassing and costly problems.

Most notable -- and potentially the most expensive -- was the Durham Police Department's mishandling of the Duke lacrosse case, allowing a case to press forward in the face of mounting evidence that rape charges against three lacrosse players were unfounded. A federal civil suit is pending against Durham that could cost taxpayers millions. Baker was named as a defendant in that suit Tuesday.

Council members were asked Tuesday whether it put the city in a strange position for its top attorney to also be named in the lawsuit.

Woodard said that was discussed, and it was made clear that Steptoe & Johnson, the Washington law firm retained to defend Durham, would be the lead litigators.

Nothing precludes Baker from participating in strategy sessions or other behind-the-scenes activities, Woodard and Bell said.