Governing Magazine/July 1993

FEATURE: STRONG MAYORS

THE LURE OF THE STRONG MAYOR

Cities have been turning to professional managers for the past 80
years to try to get the politics out of local government. Now a few of
them are wondering whether it is time to put some politics back in.

By Rob Gurwitt

Sometime during the next few years, there is a good chance that Dallas
will do the unthinkable: discard its city manager form of government.
For the field of local administration, that would be a bit like
England deciding to scrap Parliament. And it would be something more:
a sign that the age of municipal reform, as it has been practiced in
America for the better part of this century, is coming to an end. For
Dallas is an emblem of sorts.
 For years--until San Diego passed it in size--Dallas was the largest
city in the country with a so-called "council-manager" form of
government, in which an elected council sets broad policy guidelines
but an appointed manager actually runs the city day-to-day. For
decades, Dallas has been a thumb in the eye to those doubters who
argued that the manager system might be fine for medium-sized,
uncomplicated cities, but that large cities need the firm hand of a
mayor with power. Dallas has routinely ranked among the best-run
cities in the country, zealously guarding its triple-A bond rating and
setting a national example for the businesslike way it has managed its
affairs.
 So why, all of a sudden, is there talk of change? For exactly the
reason you'd expect: politics.
 Dallas has changed radically since it first adopted the city manager
plan in 1931. For years, the city was essentially run by its business
community, the political leadership drawn exclusively from the
prosperous white neighborhoods of north Dallas. The manager was
essentially the instrument of that leadership.
 These days, though, power has splintered. Many of the city's top
business executives now work for out-of-town corporations or have
moved themselves to the suburbs; meanwhile, the city's Hispanic and
African-American communities are starting to come into their own at
City Hall and are finding they don't always like the established ways
of conducting business. The present mayor--who is elected at-large but
has little administrative authority--has been unable to develop a
steady working relationship with either the council or the manager. As
the entire community struggles to deal with a limping economy and a
rising tide of the usual urban troubles, there is a growing feeling
that Dallas is adrift without strong leadership.
 So the city's hallowed institution of manager government is getting
hit from all sides: from business leaders who mourn the loss of the
old Chamber-of-Commerce consensus, and from newly elected black and
Hispanic politicians who think their constituents are not getting
enough attention. The result is that there is public talk of junking
the whole system--quite possibly in favor of a strong-mayor plan.
 "There are some who are beginning to appreciate that the great
problem in Dallas is no longer how to do those things on which the
city leadership has a consensus, but instead is to figure out what to
do in the first place," says Royce Hanson, dean of the School of
Social Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas.
 It may be that in the end, Dallas will opt to keep its structure
intact. If it does, though, it will be for reasons quite different
from the good-government reform sentiments that have maintained the
city manager system all these years. For what the city's situation
makes clear is that the demands of the moment are not for less
politics--they are for more.
 "The era of municipal reform is clearly over," public administration
scholar George Frederickson writes in a recent paper on the subject.
The battle over reform, he points out, was fought on such issues as
efficiency, economy and ending corruption. "Today," Frederickson
argues, "issues of political responsiveness are as important as
efficiency and economy."
 That is because even in once-homogeneous communities the claimants to
power--neighborhoods, minority groups, citizens' associations--are
multiplying. It is no longer just the Chicagos and New Yorks of the
country that must forge consensus from a cacophony of voices before
they can move forward; that is now the task for Dallas and a host of
other cities that used to pride themselves on being far less
complicated.
 So it shouldn't be startling that some communities are looking to
reshape how they are governed, and in particular are considering
boosting the powers of the mayor. It may not be possible to end
poverty, house the homeless, disband gangs, repave corroding streets,
find the money to revive a wither-ing economy or put an end to civic
squabbling. But one thing citizens clearly can do is refashion local
government with the hope that someone--a mayor, an elected county
executive--someone--can assemble the political authority to grapple
better with those problems.
 Which is why Dallas isn't alone in considering change. Dade County,
Florida, which includes Miami and has a population of more than 2
million, is hearing a new round of demands for a strong elected
executive. On the other side of the same state, St. Petersburg has
just decided to jettison 60 years of city manager government in favor
of a strong mayor. And in the West, where so-called "reform
government" is considered as much a birthright as unlimited access to
water, Sacramento is gingerly looking at change. A good 80 years after
Dayton, Ohio, became the first major American city to put a manager
system in place, the argument over which form of government is best
appears ready to heat up again.

To some extent, of course, it never died down. Ever since the reform
movement got rolling in the `teens and `20s, cities have been turning
to manager government in an effort to become more businesslike or to
rid themselves of corruption.
 The strong-mayor system, usually accompanied by intense partisan
warfare, was seen by the original reform generation as fiscally
wasteful and too susceptible to patronage abuses. The main alternative
existing at that time--commission government, in which a small number
of commissioners serve both as legislators and as the heads of city
departments--seemed a poor substitute: It diffused leadership and
often produced incompetent administrators. The idea of a professional,
non-partisan city manager, administering government while avoiding
politics, neatly matched the taste of reformers for re-constituting
local government on a professional basis.
 As a public policy idea and as a national movement, the city manager
system probably reached the peak of its popularity by the 1950s. But
cities continued to switch to it long after that. It was only in 1986
that the International City/County Management Association, in its
quinquennial "Forms of Municipal Government" survey, found for the
first time that manager government had passed the strong mayor form in
popularity, holding sway in 53 percent of the cities that responded.
That figure dropped to 51 percent in 1991, although the slight shift
may have been due to changes in the sample, not to abandonments of the
plan.
 And over the years, the values that the reform movement advanced have
become a permanent part of the civic landscape. The 1991 ICMA survey,
in fact, found that the most likely structural change being made by
cities--even those with strong mayors and partisan politics--was the
addition of a chief administrative officer, a professional appointee
who could coordinate the running of the city. Indeed, more than one-
third of the strong-mayor cities have hired an administrator. The
administrator in a strong-mayor city is sometimes in a rather tenuous
position; the mayor can fire him or her virtually at will.
Nevertheless the clear trend is for cities without managers to aim for
some of the professionalism that cities using the manager system have
achieved.
 At the same time, though, manager government has itself been
evolving. In fact, it is difficult these days to find places that
still adhere to the orthodox reform structure. As laid out by Richard
Childs, the generally acknowledged father of the city manager
movement, a reformed city should have a small (generally five-seat)
council whose members are elected at large; the mayor comes from the
council, and is little more than a presiding officer and ceremonial
presence. The operations of government are the responsibility of the
appointed manager.
 In city after city, the result of those reforms was a government
devoid of the patronage-mongering and political selfishness that had
afflicted cities with strong mayors; it was also, however, a city
government whose leaders were relatively insulated from the electorate
and who, in many communities, were all drawn from the Chamber of
Commerce and from a single upper-crust part of town. Those are
difficult features to justify in an era when neighborhoods are trying
to reassert themselves in the councils of power and Hispanics and
African-Americans are taking a place at the table.
 And so the manager system has itself adjusted. Either by vote of the
people or by judicial fiat, city councils have been expanding in size
and abandoning at-large elections for district elections; only one-
third of the councils in cities above 100,000 are now elected at-
large. Just as important, a full 61 percent of the manager-run cities
now have directly elected mayors, a shift designed to give the system
a greater measure of political accountability and leadership. These
mayors still lack administrative clout--the manager continues to wield
that--but they do serve as figures of political accountability to the
community at large. "The council-manager plan has been greatly
modified, and that has made it more responsive," says George
Frederickson. "Like a willow, it has bent with the times." One
political scientist, the University of Alaska's Greg Protasel, has in
fact suggested that were it not for the council-manager plan's ability
to become more politically sensitive, it might have been abandoned in
greater numbers.
 But there are times when "reforming reformism," as some onlookers
have dubbed the process, is simply not enough. Take, as an example,
St. Petersburg, a manager city that long ago modified its system by
adding both district council elections and a directly elected,
although administratively weak, mayor. This spring St. Petersburg
decided to go much further--it threw out city manager government
altogether.
 On the surface, the city's decision to go to a strong mayor seemed
mostly to be about personalities. The city manager system had become
an issue after an acting manager fired Police Chief Ernest Curtsinger,
whom many blacks considered racially insensitive but who was
enormously popular with many white retirees. Curtsinger's firing led a
group of outraged supporters to push for changing the city's council-
manager charter to create a strong-mayor structure; that proposal
wound up on the March election ballot, along with the regularly
scheduled election for mayor--which, not coincidentally, featured both
Curtsinger and the sitting mayor, David Fischer.
 The contrast between the two candidates was striking. Fischer, a
longtime consultant on municipal finance with an intellectual,
somewhat remote style, drew the bulk of his support from the city's
black and affluent white communities: Curtsinger, a smooth politician
with a populist bent, took the white middle class. To a remarkable
degree, voters' opinions on the charter change paralleled their
opinions of the candidates: Where Curtsinger was strong, so was the
proposal for a strong mayor; where Fischer drew support, so did
opposition to charter change. And yet an odd thing happened on
election day: The charter change passed while Curtsinger lost, and
Fischer, who had supported keeping his position formally weak,
suddenly found himself with new powers.
 Even in an election so firmly rooted in the politics of the moment,
though, the city's abandonment of the manager system had its origin in
a far more basic question than whether Ernest Curtsinger should run
the city or not. Over the past decade and more, the city's leaders
have been trying to reshape St. Petersburg, to redevelop its downtown
and change its image as a sleepy haven for senior citizens. After a
major downtown redevelopment proj-ect was rejected by voters a decade
or so ago, the city council--with the active support of the city
manager and much of the downtown business establishment--went ahead on
its own and pushed through both a new office/retail development and
construction of a new baseball stadium. Both were approved and built
without much input from the average citizen.
 That might have been all right if the city's neighborhoods felt they
had gotten something in return, but they haven't; both major projects,
in fact, still sit unoccupied. So by this year's elections, the
neighborhoods had grown restless.
 "They feel all their tax dollars have gone downtown to this economic
revitalization, their tax rates have gone up because of shortfalls in
the projects and money has been reallocated from service areas to pay
the debt," says Darryl Paulson, a political scientist at the
University of South Florida. "So there's great dissatisfaction,
particularly because they were not allowed to publicly participate in
whether or not these projects should go ahead." The neighborhoods'
vote for a strong mayor was, as a result, not only a vote against
particular officials but a protest against the whole idea of a
government system that seemed so unaccountable to citizens' desires.

Whether that same participatory impulse ultimately produces a similar
result in Dallas remains very much in doubt. It is only in the last
couple of years--since the 1991 court-ordered switch from an at-large
council to 14 members chosen by district--that the Hispanic and
African-American neighborhoods of south Dallas have had real
representation at City Hall. Some of the current calls for change come
from newly elected black and Hispanic council members, who argue that
their communities have been given the short end of the stick by the
city's professional managers. "We can't prioritize based on community
needs," says one of the city's new African-American council members,
Don Hicks. "The system is just not responding."
 But other blacks and Hispanics, and liberal whites who are allied
with them, believe something very different: that it would be foolish
to change the system just as the disadvantaged begin to accumulate
power within it. Indeed, for some of those who fought to make city
government more pluralistic, the talk of moving to a strong mayor
looks a lot like a ploy by the Old Guard to shift power away from the
newly diverse council.
 "Now that minorities are finally at the table, and we have all
geographic areas of the city equally represented," asks Lori Palmer, a
white council member from south Dallas, "why would there be a
suggestion that we transfer power from the council to the mayor? In
this city, voting strength is still in north Dallas, with Anglo
voters, so for some time I would predict our mayors will be elected by
the northern and Anglo side of city. It is suspicious that there would
be interest in consolidating power in a mayor's position."
 The argument that the city needs the steadying leadership of a strong
mayor draws little sympathy from this camp. "We've just gotten into
the loop," says Al Lipscomb, who as deputy mayor is the city's
highest-ranking black official. "Are you saying that self-
determination is cumbersome compared with one ruler?" His answer is
straightforward. "Hell no. That's what makes this city thriving,
refreshing and full of effervescence."
 In fact, there is a strain of thought in Dallas that holds that, like
an Eastern European country, the city is adjusting to the realities of
democracy brought on by the perestroika of district elections. If all
the city's politicians learn their roles under the current system, the
reasoning goes, the city will get back on track. "What needs to happen
is the city manager needs to exercise greater demand for policy
decisions to come out of council, and less day-to-day micromanaging,"
says Jim Buerger, a former council member and one-time mayoral
candidate. "And the council needs to establish its role in relation to
establishing policy." In the meantime, Buerger and others argue, the
mayor, Steve Bartlett, has been trying to act like a strong mayor
despite the fact that he is a constitutionally weak one. In a system
that demands consultation with the manager and the council, that
cannot help but create bruised feelings and political squabbling.
 If Dallas ultimately decides to stick with its council-manager form,
then, it will be as much an effort to safeguard political diversity as
it is to ensure administrative efficiency. The question is whether
that sort of decision will produce the leadership the city needs.
 That is because "effervescence," as Lipscomb puts it, exacts a price:
The more hands there are on the tiller, the harder it is to steer.
Diversity places a huge burden on the one person elected to perform
the task of bringing people together: the mayor. But in a manager-run
city, the mayor has very few tools he can use to accomplish that task.
 The best that such a city can hope for is that its mayor will prove
adept at what some experts like to call "facilitative" skills. James
Svara, who teaches political science at North Carolina State
University, argues that the pressures of civic diversity will, in
fact, produce just such people. "The facilitative mayor," Svara wrote
recently, "leads by empowering others--in particular the council and
the manager--rather than seeking power for himself or herself." In
this view, the mayor is a kind of information broker, promoting
communication among politicians and trying to manage conflict and
settle differences.
 Interestingly enough, one of the more adept facilitators in office at
the moment is the mayor of perhaps the preeminent strong-mayor city in
the country--Ed Rendell of Philadelphia. Rendell has put an end to
years of discord by carefully sharing both the spotlight and his
thinking with other politicians, especially City Council President
John Street and members of the city's state legislative delegation.
"He recognizes," says Frederick Voigt, who directs a reform-era civic
watchdog group known as the Committee of 70, "that while he possesses
tremendous power, he has to share it; he has to deal in consensus
politics."
 At the same time, though, Rendell has been unabashed about using the
powers of his office to face down public employee unions and make
steep cuts in the city's budget. It has been an extraordinarily
difficult task, in large measure because the city's disparate
communities take pride in a sort of prickly independence. "It is a
city of Balkan states," says Voigt, "and that makes it politically,
racially and ethnically combustible. They have had to distribute the
pain equally, and that could not be done without the centrality of
power. If you fragmented it, there would be too many discordant voices
without anyone in charge."
 A similar calculus lies behind the push in Dade County, Florida, to
look seriously at moving to an elected chief executive. "It would be
very difficult for a weak mayor in Dade County to call upon support
from all the diverse elements of the community during a time when some
of the decisions are bound to be unpopular," says Tom Fiedler,
political editor of the Miami Herald. "It's too easy for the rest of
the community to disown that person and say, `Well, that's what
Hispanics do,' or `You can't trust the blacks,' or `It's just the
Anglo good-old-boy system.' There's got to be leadership in which
every element of the community is invested in some way."

None of this is to say that it is impossible for manager-run cities to
produce leadership of that sort. Several of the more highly respected
mayors this country has produced in recent years gained their stature
precisely because they were able to implement their visions in
communities with appointed managers--among them Henry Cisneros of San
Antonio, Pete Wilson of San Diego and, among current mayors, Emanuel
Cleaver II of Kansas City, Missouri.
 Nor, for that matter, do strong-mayor cities produce winners all the
time. "Strong political leadership is a very rare commodity," says Bob
Kipp, a former city manager of Kansas City. "It doesn't correlate with
one structure or another: It's just difficult to find these little
diamonds in the rough who turn out to be effective and courageous
political leaders. People say you don't find many strong elective
mayors in council-manager cities; the fact is, you don't find many of
them anywhere."
 That is probably so. Which makes it all the more sobering that in
these days of shrinking municipal budgets, economic uncertainty and
social decay, mustering the civic will to make gut-wrenching choices
requires the deft touch of talented politicians. The most important
challenge isn't to write charters for them; it is to nurture them in
the first place.

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