Weekly Update: 01/01/2024

For what it’s worth, “who will be mayor?” is probably right up there in the public’s interest with “who will be the next city manager?” And although I do get it, I wish it weren’t. In other words, if those two decisions are monumental, it is only because our system has become so broken by politics. Ironically, when we chose the type of government we have, it was specifically to have the least political system possible.

In cities like Seattle or Federal Way or Kent the CEO is an elected mayor. Voters elect the person who runs the government–like a state governor or the President. This is referred to a Council-Mayor Government.

But in the middle of the last century, another form of government, called Council-Manager, became very popular for smaller cities. The idea was to hire, rather than elect the CEO, called a city manager. ³The main benefit being (frankly) that a professionally trained manager would be more likely to do a good job than the typical part-time people who run for office in dinky towns like Des Moines.

So when we incorporated in 1959 that’s what we chose; as did Normandy Park, Burien, and SeaTac. In these cities, the city manager has the role of CEO that the mayor fulfills in Kent or Seattle.

What we call ‘mayor’ here is more like the chair of the King County Council or the president of the Port of Seattle Commission. It’s still an important role because someone has to run the meetings, and act as a bridge to the CEO (City Manager.)

But over time, the role of mayor here, and in most cities that have Council-Manager government, has expanded for two main reasons having nothing to do with running the government properly:

• Partly because most the public assumes that a ‘mayor is a mayor’, ie. that the mayor of Des Moines does the same job as the mayor of Kent. (eg. People write ‘the mayor’ all the time for issues that are actually handled by the City Manager.)
• Partly because each Council majority has tended to want the mayor they choose to have more authority, ie. to act more like a CEO, rather than as ‘one of seven.’ It makes it easier to push through the majority agenda.

Since the public already expects the mayor to be, well, ‘the mayor’, this has not been hard to achieve.

There is also another, more insidious problem with CMG. The council majority not only chooses the mayor, ultimately it also chooses the city manager. This creates a strong incentive for any city manager who wants to keep their job to align with that majority, rather than remaining above the fray and treating all seven CMs equally. That’s the irony. Despite being designed as a non-partisan form of government, in practice, CMG has often turned out to be even more partisan than other local forms of government. Since CMG is almost 100% ‘majority rules’, if the majority is too tightly aligned with the city manager, oversight goes out the window–and that leads to poor decision making. In an era of low public engagement, this is particularly troubling to me. As they say in comic books, ²who watches the watchmen?”

Whoever we choose as the next mayor, and then as next city manager, my hope is that we will start moving back towards the original intent of Council-Manager government: seven equal policy makers and a CEO who remains scrupulously apolitical. I write that not out of any sense of nostalgia, but because, according to every piece of data I’ve seen, CMG just works better that way.