Today's City Managers: A Legacy of Success-Becoming-Failure

Abstract

The theme here is commonplace: failure of success. You know how it goes. Some innovation suits times; sweet memories live on, often tenaciously; and paradoxically, greater initial success, greater likelihood of failure, in face of change. City has requisites. The concept has a heritage that attracts, but concerns are building. Alan Kiepper put his finger on issue in late 1970s. There has to be something fundamentally wrong with a profession, we paraphrase him closely, when it begins to lose so many of its best people just at time of their greatest successes. Two challenges dominate in this article and its companion, Tomorrow's City Management, in a future issue. Is success leading to failure for city management? And what mid-course corrections seem reasonable? In this article, we deal with first challenge, and follow-on article addresses second. How Success Is Becoming Failure Six themes carry brunt of present argument, and their time-line extends from yesterday to today, as it were. Many of problematic features have been recognized, but their combined effects require attention. The six themes are: 1. making too much of once-useful distinction between politics/administration, 2. failing to aggressively reject conventional management seen as only or mostly implementation in bureaucratic contexts, 3. continuing to try to separate facts from values, and hence acting on impossible, or at least seriously limiting, 4. tolerating city managements conceptual rooting in narrow efficiency and economy, 5. limiting city by an awkward style of interaction trending toward distance and depersonalization, and 6. settling for, perhaps even glorifying, a sense of single and solitary manager. Frustrations of Dichotomizing Increasingly Seamless Following fashion in political science and public administration, city profession at start-up deeply incorporated a sharp separation of politics from administration. In short, policy making was said to reside in elected officials, and implementation remained firmly in hands and minds of professionals. This distinction worked well enough for a while, even famously, but has come increasingly undone. Conceptually, it is rare student of public who has gone untutored in many ways in which reality never did - nor should - approximate a dichotomy featuring politics and administration. Indeed, city literature contains a fair share of such revisionism (Svara, 1985), for reasons that seem clear enough. Old electoral coalitions lose power new contenders demand greater roles in administration, along with greater citizen access, and hence city managers must spend more time in encouraging cooperation or even civility among stakeholders, coordinating efforts, and playing policy-making roles (Blubaugh, 1987; Nalbandian, 1991). However, neither city literature nor practice have given up old or invented new. Hence, need for such reminders: |City Managers Don't Make Policy': A Lie, Let's Face It (Ammons and Newell, 1988). Indeed, a recent ICMA Green Book notes that one article rejects the popular politics/administration dichotomy... (Newell, 1993; 230, our emphasis). Why can one still find ample signs of old gospel alive and well, cheek-by-jowl with revisionist rhetoric (Anderson, Newland, and Stillman, 1983; 76-78, 88-106, 128-129)? Perhaps paramountly, traditional distinction left city a large and unfettered administration. Politics dominated in principle, but in practice substantial scope existed for administration. The underlying ideological themes were comfortable - of professionals as arbiters of public interest, of managers as so competent and public-spirited as to earn great discretion, and of once-conventional middle-class values as constituting something approaching a summum bonum consensus (Goldman, 1952; 161-187). …