The two main systems of local governing in the US are the mayor-council and the council-manager. Dayton, Ohio has a council-manager system of local governance since 1913. We are often cited as the first large us city to adopt this system. 63% of cities with pop >25,000 have council-manager system. (Dayton population is 143,000)

The biggest cities all have mayor-council systems. Phoenix is the largest city to have the council-manager setup. So interestingly, strong mayors are prevalent at the smallest and biggest levels, but not in between.

I suppose the argument would be that, at the smallest city size, you’re too small to warrant an unelected CEO-type person. Then in the middle sizes, there are efficiency gains to be had from having a professional management type person running day to day stuff, then at the biggest level you should go back to an elected person running things because it’s too much power to put in hands of an unelected manager.

I know that lots of fellow Daytonians I talk to about this routinely express reservations about having an unelected person running things. At the very least my feeling is that there should be some requirements to the manager position that are designed to force that person to have a vested interest in the city—-basically, to hire only “local talent”.

One friend of mine who is particularly interested in this issue has told me that apparently it’s not uncommon for city managers to carpetbag between jobs, to basically see each job as a resume builder for their next job in a larger city.

One of the original motivations for the council-manager system was to emulate the board-CEO setup seen in the corporate private sector. This was very fashionable thinking throughout most of the 20th century. However, situations and cultures have changed, and one of the biggest changes that people have noticed about the corp world is that a company’s allegiance to a particular city or area has greatly eroded.

Nowadays, big companies will pick up and leave a city at the drop of a hat. NCR leaving Dayton, for example. In the old days, the labor force was seen as a stakeholder. These days, the work force is seen as more or less interchangeable. So, if the council-manager system was to a large extent emulating the wisdom of the board-CEO setup from a time when a company’s fortunes were linked to the fortunes of a city, it is certainly worth considering the implications of retaining this system when modern boards and CEOs’ fortunes are no longer linked to a particular city.

Perhaps it’s time to reexamine our own local governing structure and ask ourselves if a corporate-styled system still makes sense for us.