Whitewater, Wisconsin has a common council form of government. There are seven members to the common council, five elected from districts across parts of the city, and two elected city wide, from across the town. Together, they are both the legislative, and executive, authority in town.
We have not merely a common council, but also a city manager, an appointed official who serves for a specified contractual term. Often, one will hear that we have a council-manager form of government.
The city manager’s position is not a true executive, as an elected mayor would be. It’s an appointed position for a term, and it has no independent power apart from the common council that appoints. There are specified duties, under our ordinances and Wisconsin law, but the authority of the position does not derive from, for example, a direct election of the municipal manager by the town’s voters.
Nor is the managerial authority like that of a parliamentary system, where the executive authority derives directly from the legislative, as a British government would derive from Parliament itself (and be liable to dissolution and new elections without sufficient legislative support).
You may have heard, and imagined, that small towns like ours must surely have a mayor, elected by the townsfolk, who governs wisely and well with their support.
We have no one so elected. We have a manager, and not a mayor; unelected, and not a direct choice of the people; responsible for conventional tasks, but never with a popular mandate.
Our situation produces several problems that make governance hard. First, our elected officials often come to office with only a hundred or so votes, from a population – large to us, if not the outside world – of fourteen thousand.
Even an at large representative will likely come to office with only several hundred votes, still a small fraction of the entire town.
State and federal candidates typically receive far more votes city wide than our local politicians.
There’s no one who can claim a mandate under those conditions. We had a candidate recently declare herself, I recall, The Voice of the People, but that would only be convincing if all the town had laryngitis.
Second, the position of city manager may by design be meant as a limited and appointed task, but it’s not long before the manager-bureaucrat begins to assert himself as though he were elected by acclaim.
So, even in a rural town, one hears about the city manager’s vision, etc. It’s not long before a career bureaucrat becomes instrumental – at least in his own eyes – to the survival of a small town founded without any bureaucrats at all.
Worse still, there may slowly develop the habit of cherry picking popular tasks, or shifting between insistence that managerial authority is broad (so that the city manager can insert himself in local matters he finds interesting or laudable) and that it’s narrow (and so problems are really the common council’s fault).
Third, it’s governance that suffers in this arrangement – the basic and fundamental assurance of a citizen’s or resident that rights will be respected and laws enforced fairly.
That’s the promise of America for all Americans, and small towns are respected, from among many reasons, for the individual respect and consideration each resident would like.
Some in Los Angeles would have to spend hours just to get to a city office, and then sit while hundreds of people milled around, a significant portion of them having no idea why.
We don’t have that problem; we can find city offices without a battle against traffic.
Yet management and governance are not the same. We have a small town that has acquired urban conceits of management, planning, and public relations over simple yet fundamental governance.