A short while ago, The Wichita Eagle ran a column
of mine on the brouhaha
over whether the Wichita City Council ought to continue with the current limit
of two terms for city council members, or if it ought to be expanded to three.
Since talking about government is what I do for a living–and since this
argument is likely to come back sometime
in the new year –let me expand on this a little.
To reiterate, Wichita has a council-manager
form of government. That means that the city is divided into districts (in our
case six, meaning each council member theoretically represents the concerns and
interests of roughly 65,000 people per district), and the mayor is simply an
at-large member of the city council, with some particular procedural
responsibilities (supposedly enough to make it a full-time position, whereas
every other member of the council is nominally a part-time employee of the
city), but fundamentally no different from anyone else elected to the council
to a four-year term. Practical executive power–that is, the authority to keep
the city running on a day-to-day basis–is not vested in the mayor or the
council, but rather in a city manager, who is hired (at $228K a year, more than
twice what the mayor is paid) by the city council, and theoretically subject to
their oversight. It’s a perfectly respectable–and arguably much more
efficient–form of municipal government, one that became dominant in the U.S.
during the reforms of the Progressive Era a century ago, and is, in all its
many varieties, the most common municipal form, characterizing the great
majority of small- to mid-size cities.
Still, the complaint which motivated Council member Jeff Blubaugh to
propose the one-term extension to the term limits imposed on the Wichita city
council by the voters in 1991 is exacerbated under the council-manager
arrangement. His concern was that part-time, term-limited council members often
end up being entirely dependent upon the historical knowledge, the bureaucratic
expertise, and the institutional preferences of the city’s permanent staff,
with whom the city manager obviously has a long-term, professional relationship.
Such a relationship could, presumably, work to the detriment of any council
member who is seeking to represent their constituents’ interest. As he put it,
“Staff can tell you whatever you want to hear. And after a certain amount
of time, they know that you’re gone, and you’re leaving.” He’s not wrong
on this point. Though it’s worth noting that the same thing can be said about
the way elected council members often find themselves, upon entering office, in
a subservient position in regards to long-standing, well-established private
development interests as well. All of which, to my mind, is more than enough
reason to look at the deeper, more structural causes at work in Blubaugh’s
entirely valid concerns.
If you set aside the major financial and population centers in this part
of the country (meaning Kansas City, Denver, Oklahoma City, St. Louis, or
Dallas, all of which have metro areas with millions of people, and all of which
Wichitans too often compare themselves to), and look instead at actual peer
cities to Wichita (meaning mid-sized cities that serve as regional centers to
the mostly rural land that surrounds them, as we do), you’ll see a pattern than
our city ought to learn from: most of them have instead elected to embrace a strong
mayor form of government. That is, the mayor is elected separately from the
city council, does not sit and vote with them, and instead wields real executive
authority on behalf of a city-wide mandate, rather than having most power
outsourced to the city manager. The city councils in these cities are similarly
strengthened, with increased legislative responsibility and authority given
them to balance out an empowered mayor. An effort is also made to make them
more immediately connected to the people they represent, either by increasing
the number of people elected to the council (and thus shrinking the number of
residents which each council member is expected to represent), or by including
a greater number of at-large members elected (thus giving to citizens multiple
opportunities to connect with candidates and express their political ideas
through their votes).
Let’s run through a list of peer cities that fit the criteria I mentioned
above; for example, consider (from the smallest in population to the largest)
Des Moines, Iowa; Spokane, Washington (my home town!); Boise, Idaho; Fort
Wayne, Indiana; Lincoln, Nebraska; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Colorado Springs, Colorado;
Omaha, Nebraska; and Albuquerque, New Mexico. With the exception of Des Moines
(which, it should be noted, is barely 2/3rds the size of Wichita), every one of
them have opted for the strong mayor system. With the exception of Boise, every
one of them have at least seven elected members on their city council, and most
have nine, with an average council member-resident representation ratio of one
city council member for every 55,000 residents per district, significantly
lower than Wichita (and even that average is misleading, since five of the
above cities–Des Moines, Spokane, Fort Wayne, Lincoln, and Colorado
Springs–include at least one, and usually multiple, additional at-large
elected city council members in their total). And incidentally, none of them,
with the exception of Lincoln, have any term limits on those elected to city
government, and in Lincoln’s case the term limitation (of three terms, rather
than two) has been imposed on the mayor, not the city council.
Every city is different, of course, with a political culture that
develops organically over time. There were particular reasons why Wichita
voted–though keep in mind that the vote was a narrow one–to impose term
limits back in 1991. Still, cities grow and the times change. It has been
nearly 30 years since that vote, so perhaps it is time to think again about how
our city organizes its government, and consider the alternatives. The primary
idea behind the strong mayor alternative is the acknowledgement that, within a
city of hundreds of thousands of people, distinct interests and agendas will
emerge, and hence the city’s law-making body must be able to effectively
represent–and, where appropriate, contend over–that wide range of interests.
And similarly, such empowered representation would also require a mayor
democratically empowered to respond to, implement, or sometimes reject the
results of such a contentious process.
“Contention,” of course, scares some people; their ideal is a city
government that is apolitical, city elections that are non-partisan, city staff
that are disinterested and neutral, and overall a city political culture that
never, ever rocks the boat. There is much to be said for that
ideal, of course. One of the consequences of the strong mayor alternative
would indeed be the more explicit politicization of Wichita’s urban governance.
But as I’ve argued before,
there are equally good reasons for that politicization. And moreover, the claim
that city elections in Wichita over the past 30 years really have been
non-partisan, and really didn’t involve political parties and voting blocs and
all the rest, is simply false, and everyone who pays attention knows that to be
true. So perhaps Wichita needs a governing model that matches the actual
reality of the city we have become? We are not a small homogeneous hamlet with
only small-scale disagreements. A city council that is strengthened, and
balanced, so as to convey and put into effect the large-scale, contentious
disagreements and needs of a city like our own, might therefore be an
improvement which is long overdue.
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