Democracy in Council-Manager Government

Abstract

FOR many years city managers and their form of government have been the darlings of the political science professors from coast to coast. In Public Administration Review of last summer, a Rackham postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan with wide experience in municipal research raised grave questions about the future for councilmanager government. It was charged that the plan often creates a political vacuum and that if the manager allows himself to be drawn in, he becomes an autocrat. If he stays out, the city flounders from a lack of leadership. The article charges that the manager's preoccupation with efficiency makes him sterile to political considerations and-in the absence of a strong political mayor-democracy goes down the drain. Also, warnings of growing criticism of council-manager governments by political scientists were voiced at last year's International City Managers' Association conference. Some of these views were partially confirmed last year by a report by Clarence E. Ridley who retired in 1956 after serving twenty-seven years as executive director of the International City Managers' Association. Ridley, a strong advocate of council-manager government, received questionnaire replies from eighty-eight city managers from coast to coast as to the importance they placed on their annual budget as a means of formulation of municipal policy. While in councilmanager government, the city manager has sole responsibility for recommending the coming year's city plan through an executive budget, few managers gave it the place of im> Further on the city manager's role in policy development and community leadership, a manager (with 12 years experience as a manager in three small and medium sized cities and two years as assistant manager in two larger cities) urges that more politics be put into the council-manager plan, but without any withdrawal by the manager from his key responsibilities in developing and presenting policy. Many managers, he feels, do not sufficiently throw open the policy development process to the public, particularly in budgeting. These questions, of course, apply with little translation to highlevel career executives in other units of government. Earlier articles on the same subject appeared in the Summer, 1958 and Spring, 1959 PAR.