Roles and Relations
This document is reprinted with permission from "The Manager Plan in Maine" published by the Margaret Chase Smith Center for Public Policy. Copies of the complete book may be obtained by calling the Center at (207) 581-1646.
The municipal reformers of the early twentieth century had developed the council-manager plan as a major part of their prescription to address the evils of bossism, corruption, and machine politics. To accomplish these ends they wanted to eliminate politics or at least restrict it to the arena of council deliberations. The notable reformers such as Richard Childs were successful in the creation and development of a new profession of appointed, administrative experts -- the city manager. These chief executives would lend their knowledge and experience in helping solve the city's problems, while running the city on a day-to-day basis. However, it soon became known to academics and practitioners alike that the pure separation of policy and administration, the former to be practiced by elected officials and the latter restricted to the appointed managers, was an ideal of the council-manager plan's founders and by the post-World War II period was largely accepted as myth. Clearly, some form of politics will emerge, whether in Boston, Chicago, or Portland, but it would not necessarily have to be "partisan politics" with Democrats and Republicans. Ironically, some of the dirtiest politics still occurred in communities that were technically "non-partisan."
An extensive study by Ronald Loveridge of city council members and city managers in 58 communities in the San Francisco Bay area revealed major gaps in the perceived roles of each group. Managers viewed themselves as policy activists who exhibited policy leadership in most key areas. However, council members tended to view the manager as a staff assistant or advisor. Loveridge warned of the strong likelihood of continuous conflict between councils and managers on numerous issues because of these divergent views (Loveridge 1971).
Another study of Pacific Northwest managers reported on the growth of attitudes that support more involvement by managers in policy initiation. The authors document these increases in a longitudinal study, first in 1966 and later in 1974. (Lyden and Miller, 1977). By 1975 it came as little surprise when Huntley and Macdonald confirmed that an ICMA survey of managers reported that 90 percent of the managers responding either always or nearly always participated in the formulation of municipal policy and 63 percent of the managers revealed that they "always" or "nearly always" played a "leading role in policy-making" (Huntley and Macdonald, 1975, p.153).
Collectively these studies helped prove that managers ranged widely from active policy-makers to weak administrators, with typically half or more classified as policy-oriented types (Wirth and Vasu, 1987, p.455).
Building upon Wright's earlier work, Newell and Ammons survey of 839 chief executives (managers and mayors) and assistants in the 418 cities of 50,000 or more in population delves further into the issues of managerial time and allocation. Earlier studies had expanded on the narrow technician role, which was devoid of policy and political ingredients, but said little about the priorities of these roles. Newell and Ammons concluded that, "The job of the city manager has evolved over time, with fewer managers perceiving community leadership as their key role and more according policy initiation and council relations that priority. One may speculate that these differences have been propelled, at least in part, by the trend beginning in the 1970s for council manager cities to amend their charters to provide for direct election of the mayor and council elections by districts" (Newell and Ammons, 1987, p.251). For these authors, "the most striking contrast between Wright's 1965 findings and their 1985 responses was the dramatic increase in the proportion of city managers perceiving the policy role to be the most important and a correspondingly dramatic drop in the percentage perceiving the political role as most important. While 22 percent of Wright's respondents deemed the policy role most important and 33 percent the political role, 55.8 percent of the 1985 survey of city managers regarded the policy role as most important and only 5.8 percent so designated the political role" (1987, p. 248-50). It should be pointed out, however, that the framework categories used by each set of authors were slightly different, so as to make pure comparisons somewhat problematic.
James Svara proposes a new "Dichotomy and Duality" model, which was based in part on his in-depth observations of five cities in North Carolina. Policy and administration are now placed between mission and management and thus the shared responsibility of both elected officials and managers (Svara, 1985 and 1988).
In 1987-88 Svara surveyed 189 city and county managers in North Carolina to better gauge the time they devoted to the categories of his framework, when compared with the activities of council members. His findings reveal that managers rate themselves as more involved in all four areas of his model (missions, policy, administration and management) than the council members (1988, pp. 22-33). Thus, there is some overlap in the council-manager plan's "gray area."
His study also documents an apparent ambivalence in the managers' own assessment of policy-making issues. Eighty percent of the respondents agree that the manager should "assume leadership in shaping municipal policies," while 52 percent also agreed that, "A manager should act as an administrator and leave policy matters to the council" (Svara, 1988 and Nalbandian, 1989, p. 265).
Separation of politics and administration may not be as dominant a concept for city government as was once assumed. As Rowe suggests: certainly some early supporters of the Council Manager Plan saw the two not as separate, but as inextricably intertwined components of a larger American political process (Rowe, 1987, p. 14). In another study of 213 California city managers, former city manager Schilling asked the respondents to rank order 18 values (i.e., rationality, idealism, accountability and practicality) and "administrative leadership" was scored the highest value (Schilling, 1989, p. 145).