Should City Hall be run by a city manager instead of the mayor?

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Watch this video and just feel the civic impatience of Kathleen Farrell, a city resident who spoke on November 1 at the regular meeting of the St. Louis Charter Commission, the body recently set up to propose changes to the city’s foundational document, and thus, to the way that City Hall functions.

“In three and a half months,” Farrell told the commissioners, tapping the tabletop for emphasis, “I have heard nothing—no major discussion—of how to get major structural changes.” Rather than spend more time talking about the insertion of inclusive language or shifting election dates to November, she said, they should think big—for example, by exploring the possibility of a professional city manager who could ensure efficient services. “Excuse my passion,” said Farrell, who is a unit leader at the League of Women Voters of Metro St. Louis but was speaking only for herself at the meeting. “I want things to change. And the city has a shot with you. Don’t blow it.”

The new charter commission does have a rare opportunity to clean up some of City Hall’s dysfunction—no small thing to anyone who has struggled while registering a business, applying for a permit, researching a piece of property, reporting a pothole, calling 911, or getting a bulk trash item picked up. There are nine voting commissioners, all chosen by the mayor and Board of Aldermen. They can’t make changes unilaterally. Their proposals will have to be approved by the voters who head to the polls in November 2024. But if a consensus does emerge, the changes could be big. The biggest I can think of—and Farrell nodded in this direction—would be to fully empower a city manager. Recent empirical research suggests that such a change would confer some benefits.

In nearly 15 years of covering city politics off and on, I’ve only ever heard St. Louis city’s form of government referred to as a “weak-mayor” system. And it’s true that our mayor’s power is diluted in a way that’s unusual nationwide (for example, on budgeting, contracts, and real-estate matters). Yet some scholars of public administration now find the terms “weak mayor” and “strong mayor” misleading. Mayors with formally weak powers have exerted great informal sway over a metro area (e.g. Richard J. and Richard M. Daley in Chicago). Another way to classify city governments is to ask: Who has the executive and administrative juice: a mayor or a city manager?  

According to a 2017 tally by the Brookings Institute, the mayor had it in 35 of the 50 most populous U.S. cities. Those cities have what’s known as the “mayor-council” form. The City of St. Louis falls into this category. The defining feature here is a separation between executive (mayoral) power and legislative (aldermanic) power. 

But this isn’t how most U.S. cities govern themselves. 

Zooming out to the country as a whole, the most common setup—one used in 59 percent of cities that have more than 100,000 people, according to a 2019 survey—is the “council-manager” form. In this arrangement, executive and legislative authority are fused in the council. (There’s usually still an elected mayor, but that person is part of the council, builds consensus and vision, and cuts ribbons.) The council decides on policy, then appoints a professional city manager to make it real on the ground. 

The theory, which was born in the Progressive Era to fix rampant urban corruption, is that city managers will have the professional training and incentives to make the machinery of city government run better. They don’t need to ask for campaign donations. They’re less likely to want to hire unqualified people for political reasons. And they’re dually accountable, answering both to residents seeking services and to council members who will lose their power and livelihoods if the city runs poorly. 

Again, that’s the theory. But how have these two arrangements performed in practice over the past century? 

There’s still not much data showing that one form is far superior to the other, says Kimberly Nelson, professor of public administration and government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “But the data that is out there,” she tells me, “suggests that council-manager outperforms mayor-council.” 

One study from 2017, for instance, found that “municipalities headed by a city manager are associated with increased bond ratings (and thus lower borrowing costs).” Its author, the professor John Dove at Troy University, concluded that they must be more efficient in some way. He also pointed out that city managers tend to have relatively long tenures and their governments can more credibly commit to long-term policies, which the ratings agencies smile on. (FWIW, the city currently has a “strong” bond rating with Moody’s and just got an upgrade.)

Nelson pointed to another potential benefit of the council-manager form: It guards against malfeasance. She and a colleague at UNC, the assistant professor Whitney Afonso, just had a study accepted by the journal Public Administration Review. They compiled 30 years of data on convictions and guilty pleas for public corruption and kept track of where those cases occurred. The researchers found that the council-manager form of government reduced the incidence of corruption by an estimated 45–70 percent—an interesting finding here in St. Louis, where five former city aldermen have been federally indicted over the past few years for corruption-related offenses.

If high-quality people fill a local government, Nelson says, it’s likely to thrive, regardless of its structure. “But council-manager provides greater protection,” she says, “when the wrong people get into office.” But does it also protect against incompetence? I asked Nelson. “I definitely think that when you have a professional [council-manager] system in place,” she replied, “it provides safeguards against poor management, yes.” 

To be sure, there has been debate about council-manager’s practicality in the largest cities. Looking back in 2019 on the past century, Alan Ehrenhalt, then the senior editor at Governing, argued that “most city managers found it impossible to stay out of politics” and that they “tended to run their cities as offshoots of the local chamber of commerce.” The pattern, Ehrenhalt writes, has been nonpartisan government but also “closed government.”

In any case, a wholesale switch to a council-manager system is probably too heavy a lift for this charter commission, for whom the clock is ticking. By ordinance, they must “solicit input from the public and experts,” submit draft changes no later than mid-June, and hold public hearings before any proposals can go on the ballot. Since launching, they’ve broken up the charter into chunks and assigned them to three work groups. The commissioners just seem to be trying to wrap their heads around the text and decide on basics: whether to propose changes separately or in a bundle, whom they should hear from and when, etc. Not all are content with how it’s going. At the November 1 meeting, Commissioner David Dwight IV elicited some head nods from colleagues when he said, “All of our discussion today has been that we don’t feel like the last few months have set us on the path that we want to be on; we’re trying to change that process.”

But the ordinance calls for a new charter commission to gather every 10 years, so maybe by then, the council-manager idea will have percolated. There’s also the possibility that the commission proposes keeping the mayor-council form but codifying the role of a chief administrative officer (or CAO) who would serve under the mayor. According to the Brookings report, 85 percent of all U.S. cities have such a role or its equivalent. Room 200 has certainly seen potent chiefs of staff and deputy mayors over the years; this would nail down that role in the charter, though it’s not clear whether the benefits would be the same. 

The last large-scale effort to make big changes to the charter, in 2004, would’ve consolidated power in the mayor’s office. It got clobbered at the polls. By multiple accounts, voters were either confused by the ballot language or distrusted the motives of the reformers, who included the business establishment. I doubt this commission, picked by a progressive board and mayor, will be accused of being tools of big business. But the commissioners can, if they want, propose big, good-government reforms. Will they?

“I haven’t heard a discussion of good-government principles yet,” Farrell told me last week. “And I’ve witnessed at least 10 meetings.”