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Despite the controversy over the governor's role, most pundits recognize that he has already gone a long way to instituting his credo of "safer, cleaner, greener" in the city of 1.2 million inhabitants.
Asked for his own assessment of the progress made during his three years as head of the municipality, the popular and charismatic governor waxes eloquent, AFP reported.
"First security was improved. In 1997 there was fighting on the streets! We have also been collecting illegal arms in Phnom Penh," he says, adding that this has considerably reduced once-rampant crime in the city. "We have also improved infrastructure -- the drainage, road surfacing and flood control protection," says the governor, a close relative of powerful Prime Minister Hun Sen. "Now we have a cleaner city, a better environment."
"In the 1960s Phnom Penh was beautiful, but by 1975 it had become empty, so quiet," he says, referring to the murderous Khmer Rouge regime which sent the city's inhabitants to the countryside in a bid to create a Maoist Utopia. "Today I want to develop the city and attract tourism and investment."
Lying at the scenic confluence of the Mekong, the Bassac and the Tonle Sap rivers, Phnom Penh still retains its old charm as the "Pearl of Asia", with its colonial buildings rendered in ochre stone and adorned with green shutters.
When the sun begins to dip, residents can be found strolling along the banks of Tonle Sap which are once more a pleasant place to visit thanks to the promenades the governor has had built.
But the Cambodian capital is also a chaotic place heaving under the pressure of demographics, choked with building sites and dust, and with streets punctuated by potholes that fill up during the afternoon rainstorms.
It is a city where 30,000 people live fitfully in shantytowns and where thousands of migrants flock in search of food and shelter after natural disasters like the floods and drought that recently befell the countryside.
The governor's critics reproach him for his heavy-handed treatment of the poor, who are attracted by the bright lights of the country's only big city.
As the host of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit this November, Chea Sophara decided to make the city "even more beautiful", by rebuilding the grand boulevards named after the nation's royalty.
"But at what price?" asks one director of a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) operating in Cambodia.
the governor denies widespread reports that he has already ordered evictions to clear vagrants from the city before the ASEAN meeting -- the first ever to be held in the kingdom.
"We don't expel street children ... it is a misunderstanding," he says, explaining that if they were sent away by force, they would only come back after two or three days.
however, NGOs told AFP details of brutal pre-dawn round-ups of the city's street children, in the first phase of the pre-ASEAN `clean up'.
In recent years a series of raids have been carried out on the banks of Bassac to expel hundreds of poor families. Squatters were also summarily evicted from a nearby district next to the Russian Embassy.
"Some stay in front of the National Assembly, they wait for food. This cannot be. We prepare for their transport, but as soon as they cross the Mekong Bridge, they come back," says Chea Sophara.
Sebastien Marot from the NGO friends says the governor "wants to give the impression of prosperity, which is a nonsense in Cambodia", a country where nearly 40 percent of the population lives on less than a dollar a day.
Sometimes, however, Chea Sophara freely admits his errors. Like the time he asked city residents to paint the fronts of their buildings a uniform yellow.
"They painted the facades but they were not happy as they were soon all covered with dust -- so I apologized," he laughs.
For Chea Sophara, running Phnom Penh is not an easy task. While he has been handed extensive powers to do his job, he also has many enemies -- even inside his own party, Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party.