In this single post, I will offer remarks in reply to the published or publicly recorded views on leadership of the city manager from Whitewater, Wisconsin. I am a blogger from Whitewater, but the Whitewater manager’s views are likely common to career public officials in your town, too. If anything, they’re likely familiar to you, differing only in the delivery of the man or woman who speaks them where you live.
I have reproduced the remarks from yesterday in black; my comments will appear below in blue.
On the Authority of the City Manager in Whitewater, Wisconsin [From the City of Whitewater, Wisconsin’s Website, http://www.ci.whitewater.wi.us/Departments/citymanager.html]:
The City Manager plans and directs the administration of the City to ensure that efficient municipal services are provided and are in line with Common Council objectives.
Administration department functions include: Liaison to the Common Council advising them on all significant matters and presenting all items which require Council action or approval. Directs, develops and implements appropriate budgeting, including capital improvements and administrative planning and control procedures. Provides communications and public relations to the news media and people in the community through various communications media. Coordinates with other governmental agencies and represents the interests of the City in metropolitan, state, county, school district, and national activities as delegated by the City Council. Responsible for effective recommendations in areas of policies, planning, administering community services, community development, public safety, administrative services, financial planning, and human resources. Works closely with each department to plan and coordinate activities to ensure effective service to the public and efficient conduct of all municipal affair.
The City Manager oversees: City Clerk, Neighborhood Services Administrator, Finance Director, Park & Recreation Director, Public Works Director, The Community Development Authority, Police and Fire Commission, Library Board, and respectively oversees: Community Development Authority Director, Fire Chief, Police Chief, and the Library Director.
Adams: The list is expansive, but the responsibilities are meant to be restrained: “plans and directs the administration of the City to ensure that efficient municipal services are provided and are in line with Common Council objectives.” Providing efficient municipal services is hardly objectionable, or as our own city manager might say, is ‘fairly innocuous.’
The real question is not whether a manager assures efficient services, but what scope of services he believes his or her city needs.
On Encouraging Economic Growth [From the Northwestern of Oshkosh, June 3, 2008]:
“How to [sic] you spur private investment? You use public monies as incentives,” Brunner said. “We’ve got a (downtown) façade program … in the first two years of our façade-grant program I think we’ve given out over $200,000, but it’s an incentive that is leveraged then by the private investment.”
Adams: Why should government set the incentives for community economic development? This is a much bigger debate, but it’s telling that a long-term public employee sees nothing out-of-the ordinary about thinking that government sets the economic goals and pace of the community. It’s so obvious to career officials — I see what we should do, and if I spend some public money, then I’ll be able to produce that result. If I spend it, they will come.
Two other points to make, here. First, one sees how easily the benign idea of efficient municipal services becomes guiding the economy of an entire city. It all depends on what services a local official describes as services within the scope of the city’s authority.
The bureaucrat seldom adopts the true minimum — he defines minimum ever upward.
Second, one will quickly hear that this is the will of the community, and that all of this is what the community wants. Officials often over-state their community mandate, always to the advantage of their own schemes and plans. They then rely on the community’s indifference to their own supposed importance as proof of community support.
No one thinks that General Motors speaks for America, although it has millions of shares outstanding. City officials often insist that they speak for their entire communities, though they may have been elected only by a few hundred votes, and by a margin of only a dozen or less.
It’s not that they lack the lawful authority to speak; it’s that they lack the mandate they claim.
To insulate themselves from criticism, they contend that they’re mere public servants doing the will of the people, defending children, the elderly, small pets, etc.
These same officials will see self-interest in their critics, but somehow see themselves wholly free from the darker aspects of human nature they identify in others.
What power is it that suspends human nature and self-interest in them, but preserves it in their critics? If career bureaucrats truly have such a power, imagine how powerful they would be: no cartoon superhero would be greater. They are, in a way, half-way there already: it’s a cartoonish notion to think they have this level of self-command.
They are as we are; no more or less.
On A Flexible Leadership Style [From the Northwestern of Oshkosh, June 3, 2008]:
Brunner said he is open to being either a leader or a follower of the council.
“Here in Whitewater we don’t have a mayor. I’m the ‘mayor.’ I’m CEO and they expect me to be front and center as a mayor would be … If that’s what they want me to do, I’ll do that,” he said. “I prefer more to be on the sidelines, helping the council realize its goals, as opposed to being in the front leading the charge to be honest with you, but I think they’re both effective.”
Adams: There should be no sideline role for the man who oversees nearly a dozen departments and departmental leaders. Lead or follow, stand or hide, declare boldly or equivocate: these are the choices a man or woman freely makes when accepting a voluntary post.
Waiting to follow the loudest voice in the room, holding back or vacillating as the town fathers swing from one view to another, will not do — say what you mean, simply and plainly. Declare.
All that experience and training and education must erase at least a little timidity and hesitation, now and then.
On Community Pride [From the Northwestern of Oshkosh, June 3, 2008]:
As for community pride, Brunner said he thinks it’s important for the city manager to instill it.
“I think that the council and the manager have to be the chief cheerleaders for the community,” he said. “Because if you’re not excited about what’s happening in the community and where it’s going, how can you expect everyone else to be?”
Adams: A city might seek efficient management of municipal services, but look were it leads: The Chief Cheerlearder. Here ones sees the real view — a dangerous one — of an over-reaching, arrogant public servant. Shut up and cheer.
Consider this merely from a legislative perspective. The idea of legislators of the community as chief cheerleaders leaves no room for principled dissent, even from those lawfully elected. If the citizens of a legislative district elect a representative who disagrees with the legislative majority, must he remain silent, or acquiesce?
Of course not: nothing is farther from America’s lawful tradition of free, independent speech, and is farther from a legislator’s authority to speak as he wishes.
I note also the simple-minded and arrogant notion that care for the community must involve cheering for its current direction. No legislator, and no citizen, need feel that the only legitimate words are positive words. How many in American history have argued against a course, a view, as mature men and women who loved their county? I need not name them; anyone moderately knowledgeable of our history knows that many of our greatest leaders held, at one time, dissenting views.
Fewer pom poms, and more history books, would do our administration — and yours, wherever you live — well.
On Why There are City Managers [From the Northwestern of Oshkosh, June 3, 2008]:
Brunner said in the end he just wants to do what’s best.
“You’re trying to build a better community,” he said. “That’s the bottom line. That’s why I exist.”
Adams: Well, here we are, at the embarrassing truth of things — its’ not efficient municipal services after all, but an appointed public official’s role to create a better community. There is no more arrogant, self-aggrandizing role than the official who believes that his goal is to create a better community.
Government does not exist to build a better community — it exists to provide minimal services while the community freely grows and spontaneously organizes itself. We neither need nor should want a presumptuous career bureaucrat to build a better community for us.
When an official, in my town or yours, wakes each morning with the notion that he exists to build a better community, he’ll have trouble understanding America’s tradition of limited, restrained government. If one thinks that building a better community is one’s role, then what is unjustified in attainment of that better community?
There are governors, senators, and presidents who are more restrained in their presumed scope of responsibility. There are priests, pastors, and rabbis who are less presumptuous of their roles.
On Fostering Economic Development in Janesville [From a public recording of station WCLO of a 7/14/08 citizens’ panel interview of managerial candidates]:
We are very fortunate in this particular state to have a tremendous work ethic, we are very fortunate to have a tremendous, our intellectual capital is pretty outstanding and that obviously comes from our educational systems in this state whether it be, you know, at the local level or the outstanding university system that we have. So I think in a knowledge based economy that we are in today, we need to first really work on the collaborative approaches that we can do with our educational institutions….
The name of the game in today’s economy is continuous learning, and we have to provide our workforce the opportunities, accessible ready resources, for continuous learning. So I think that’s part of it. I’m going to throw out an idea to the Council this afternoon, but maybe creating a Janesville University where you bring the resources of all these great universities that we have nearby maybe right into the community…
Adams: We need not create more public schools or universities or programs. Wisconsin does not lack for schools and books. Having spent so much to offer education to so many, we need not pretend that additional public resources will heal the pain of a struggling working-class community.
I am a great advocate of learning, but it need not be public as against private. In any case, a government offering of re-training is only useful upon a private offering of employment. It’s a middle-class notion that schooling can accomplish just about anything; neither the lower nor upper class is so unrealistic.
People who are legitimately concerned about their immediate future have little comfort in a university education, or even most re-training; they are programs that work their benefits not immediately but over a lifetime.
I am not a strong advocate of education for a career, although others may choose differently; I am an advocate of education as its own enriching, civilizing, personal experience.
On Collaboration & Pronouns [From a public recording of station WCLO of a 7/14/08 citizens’ panel interview of managerial candidates]:
….If I use the term I, I don’t like to use the pronoun ‘I,’ I don’t use that very often, but if I say ‘I’ I am obviously trying to impress you all in what I’ve done, but everything I’ve done is in collaboration, in cooperation, with a lot of good people….”
Adams: Sometimes one has to be prepared to accept personal responsibility for oversight that is placed solely in one’s hands, as the oversight of nearly a dozen departments and their leaders requires. False humility need not apply; if a manager oversees a dozen, then he or she oversees that dozen.
If one really oversees those departments, what has one done when they’ve gone astray? What has one done, not what might a lot of good people have done?
Why are they good, by the way? Are they good for the execution of their jobs, or good because they say that they’re decent people, generally. If they’ve done their jobs well, so be it. If they’re just good people, generally, then that goodness, such as it is, should not be a consideration in the performance of their public functions.
‘Good people’ easily becomes an excuse for poor public performance from people we like, know, or who belong to a group that one favors.
On Exceptional City Services and President Kennedy’s Inaugural Address [From a public recording of station WCLO of a 7/14/08 citizens’ panel interview of managerial candidates]:
Well, first of all, I think there’s got to be a connection between what the city employees are doing and the larger goal. Let me explain that by telling you a story. I believe in management by metaphor, so I tell a lot of stories because people relate to stories real well.
I always sit down with new employees in the city, I really appreciate and understand the importance of that, and I tell them I might be the city manager but what you do is just as important as what I do. None of us are as important as all of us.
And I tell them a quick story, and I’m going to tell you this quick story. President John F. Kennedy, 1961, Inaugural Address, what did he say? He said we’re going to put a man on the moon, we didn’t have any female astronauts so I apologize for that … [appreciative laughter]… but we’re going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade….
A couple of years later, President Kennedy was going through one of the NASA buildings, and he saw this older man, and he was waxing the floor, the vestibule of the floor, and you could tell that he had great pride in what he was doing. Okay? And President Kennedy came up to this little old man and said, “Boy, thank you for taking care of this building, your doing a wonderful job.” He said [the older man], “Mr. President, I am helping to put a man on the moon.”
That’s what we have to do…
Adams: I’ll offer two remarks here. First, it’s fair that the janitor sees himself as part of a larger project. If, however, he believed that his work was most important because it earned him the money to take trips with his family, then I would feel that private motive no less admirable. If anything, I would favor the private motivation. A good worker — including a good public employee — need not have a public purpose as the motivation for his work.
Second, I find the story about using the Kennedy Inaugural Address as an employee motivational story odd. I am not sure how often the same story has been told, but anyone who has read the Kennedy address even once knows that it does not include a reference to a moon landing. That speech’s beautiful, soaring — but often over-reaching — rhetoric offers no policy prescription of that kind.
(Kennedy, upon taking office, had no idea if a moon landing within the decade might be possible. He delivered a speech proposing a moon-landing within the decade months after taking office, at a joint session of Congress, after being assured that the ambitious effort might be achieved.)
Either the account of using the story of the inaugural address was wrong when told at the manager’s Janesville interview, or has been wrong more than once. If wrong when told in Janesville, then no matter. If wrong when told often to new employees, then why has no employee offered a correction? If it should be true that all employees are meant to feel that their work is equally important, and everyone is on a first name basis, then why would an employee not be comfortable offering a friendly correction to the manager’s erroneous reference?
Perhaps the employees are not as comfortable as the manager believes.
Choosing One’s Words Carefully [From the City Manager’s Weekly Report, 3/7/08, inspiration quotation at the end document]:
“Be careful; think about the effect of what you say. Your words should be
constructive and bring people together, not pull them apart.” – Miriam Makeba
Adams: Excuse me for admitting that I did not know who Miriam Makeba was — I have only limited knowledge of South African singers. That’s a joke — I have no knowledge, and had to search to find who she was — I had no idea. (I’ve since learned that she has several albums available on iTunes, and Live from Paris and Conakry is really good. Thank you, Mr. Brunner — is this recommendation all part of that better community for which you’ve been working?)
I’ve teased about our city manager’s use of quotations in his Weekly Report. He offers two each week, on enlightenment, a success force, etc. (See, Quotations, Right, and Hope for how odd and inapt these quotations can be.)
Your city manager may do something similar. If ours reads all these words in their original, then he has a breadth of learning vastly greater than ordinary people. I am just a common blogger — I do not have this august span of learning. (Then, again, if one truly did, it might be apparent that some of his quotations are inapt, as with one from Franklin, for example.)
What does it mean, though, that someone should be careful with his words, in modern day America, lest they not be ‘constructive and bring people together?’ This injunction is unsuited to a community that truly respects free speech. The implication of the quotation in contemporary America is to scorn dissent, and to expectsa certain, ‘appropriate’ manner of speech and conduct.
It’s a view of the public official as scold, as arbiter of what’s appropriate and suitable. The city has no lawful ability to restrict, nor should it even suggest, that dissent be moderated lest people not ‘come together.’ Many lawful debates pull people apart — Bush v. Gore, McCain v. Obama, etc. People have a right to argue, dissent, and be impolite to each other.
We need neither a government as school marm nor government as clergyman.
It’s all just a shallow Victorianism that’s unsuited to the robust men and women of America.
Municipal government as hectoring, fussy, scolding nanny is no government for free citizens of individual, Constitutional rights.