City Halls Overhauled Nationwide Some Adopt Strong Mayor, Others Choose To Dump It

Spokane has plenty of company this year as it considers changing its form of city government.

Voters in Los Angeles, Cincinnati and Oakland all gave their mayors more clout in 1999.

Citizens in Worcester, Mass., New Rochelle, N.Y., and Lewiston, Idaho, decided to keep their city manager systems.

And on Nov. 2, the same day Spokane voters decide whether to dump the city manager system in exchange for a full-time mayor, Vancouver, Wash., will hold an advisory-only vote on the same issue.

Spokane’s mayor has the same power as other City Council members, but with added ceremonial responsibility. The council sets policy and the city manager runs day-to-day business.

An initiative on next month’s ballot would give the new mayor an expanded role and a bigger salary. The more-powerful mayor would be elected in November 2000 and take office in January 2001.

Just how much power a mayor should wield has been debated for decades. The details vary from city to city.

“In places where things aren’t going well, people look for change,” said Cary Bozeman, former Bellevue mayor and City Council member for 16 years.

“Mayor forms of government are popular, cities like to have mayors. But there is no question that cities are better operated by managers,” he said.

Strong-mayor supporters, however, point to increased accountability, and a real chance “for leaders to lead.”

“We need a form of government that puts someone on the line and rewards them for success or punishes them for failure,” said Chip Gerhardt, a strong-mayor supporter in Cincinnati.

Michelle Frisbie of the International City Management Association said the form-of-government debate being waged in the 1990s is a different discussion than the one heard a decade earlier.

This time it’s not about city managers and mayors, she said.

“Now it is coming down to an empowerment of the mayor in relation to the City Council.”

John Arnold has watched both forms of government from the inside. He has been a city manager for more than 20 years. He was a city manager candidate in Spokane in 1991.

Now he is chief administrative officer in Topeka, Kan., which has a population of 130,000 and a strong-mayor form of government.

“I wanted to see how this form of government works,” he said. “It doesn’t work. This council fights with the mayor all the time. They can’t seem to find their role, except to oppose the mayor and fuss.

“I see people spending their political capital on self-aggrandization rather than doing the right thing,” Arnold continued. “The mayor spends a lot of time in office positioning to get elected for the next four years.”

The most common argument against the strong-mayor form of government is that it gives too much power to one person.

But that’s exactly what citizens in Oakland, Calif., seemed eager to do when 75 percent of voters approved changing to a strong-mayor system. Former California Gov. Jerry Brown got the job.

During his first six months in power, Brown cleaned house at City Hall.

He collected resignations from the police chief, personnel director and public works director and reassigned the parks and recreation department director. Deficiency notices were issued to 60 employees.

A new police chief was named, Brown appointed a 16-member commission on education, and rallied 7,000 volunteers for one day to clean and beautify the city.

Wayne Raffesberger, who is trying to organize a campaign to bring a strong-mayor system to San Diego, is watching Oakland’s mayor closely.

“I am now a big fan of Jerry Brown. I say God bless the man. Give him the tools, let him do the work. If he screws up, throw him out,” Raffesberger said.

Citizens who are unhappy with a strong mayor can elect a new one every four years. But supporters of the city manager system are quick to point out that in Spokane, the council can “fire the city manager any Monday night.”

Frisbie, with International City Management Association, said the manager-council system remains the fastest-growing form of government in the country.

“Despite all the publicity the Oakland situation has garnered, we aren’t seeing a lot of larger communities abandoning the council-manager form of government, although there is a lot of discussion,” she said.

More than 60 percent of all cities with populations over 25,000 use the council-manager form, according to the association.

Strong mayors do run some of the country’s largest cities, such as New York, Chicago and Seattle, and many of the tiniest cities.

In midsize cities such as Spokane, the council-manager form remains the most common.

The city manager form of government took hold in the 1920s and 1930s in an effort to stem political corruption.

Cities that change the form of government usually do it during an economic boom or bust.

Vancouver’s advisory-only measure is the result of recommendations from the city’s charter-review committee. The strong-mayor proposal is gaining favor among neighborhoods feeling pressured by Vancouver’s rapid growth.

A proposal last spring to give the mayor more power in Worcester, which is about the same size as Spokane, never made it onto the ballot.

Miranda Akstin, a writer for Worcester Magazine, said the proposal was pushed by some big businesses.

“It wasn’t a grass-roots movement,” she said. “It wasn’t a ground-swell from the bottom up. It was perceived as a fiat from the top down.”

In Spokane, the strong-mayor initiative was proposed by attorney Stephen Eugster, a tireless critic of City Hall and a candidate for the City Council.

Eugster introduced a similar initiative three years ago. When it was rejected, he blamed the City Council for rushing it onto a ballot before supporters had time to educate voters about the issue.

But this time around, besides a few pages on the Internet and a 30-second television commercial paid for by a political action committee, little has been done to get voters to change Spokane’s government.

In Cincinnati, where voters approved a stronger mayor in May, proponents said the key to the campaign was massing community support long before the measure was put on the ballot.

Gerhardt, manager of public strategies for Cinergy Corp., a company that pushed for the change, said supporters spent six months holding 80 public meetings with a wide range of community groups.

“We wouldn’t let it die,” Gerhardt said.

The last 60 days were spent in “a very aggressive campaign.”

The strong-mayor proposal won 53 percent of the vote.

Gerhardt said the timing was right.

“People realized the manager-council form of government is not conducive to getting things done,” he said. “We need someone to take it to the hoop.”

Two sidebars appeared with the story: 1. UPCOMING Discussion The Citizens League is sponsoring a forum, “Strong mayor, weak mayor - does it really matter?” at noon Oct. 22 at the Ridpath Hotel, 515 W. Sprague, in the Legend Room. Scheduled speakers include Stephen Eugster, the author of the strong-mayor initiative; Larry Luton, government professor at Eastern Washington University, and Cary Bozeman, former mayor of Bellevue.

2. CLOSER LOOK If it passes … Here are some of the changes that would be made to the city charter if voters approve a strong-mayor form of government: The city manager position would be eliminated. The City Council would still have seven members. Instead of a mayor, a council president would preside over meetings. The mayor would be be elected every four years. The mayor would be paid at least $80,000 a year, or the same as earned by the highest-paid department head. The mayor could hire a chief administrative officer, who could be paid up to 110 percent more than the highest paid employee other than the mayor. The mayor would have power to veto ordinances approved by the council, but the veto could be overturned by a majority plus one of the council. The mayor could hire or fire department heads, with council approval. Annual salaries for the City Council would remain the same, at $18,000. The council president would earn $22,500 annually, compared with $36,000 now paid to the mayor.