City Council Manager

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Recommended: Importance of selecting a good city manager

When the average citizen goes to vote in city elections, they expect the mayor that they elect will be running the city; however, in a city with a council-manager system in place, the daily operations needed to run a city are completed by a city manager, not the mayor. In fact, many times in a council-manager system, the mayor really has no control and is mostly a figurehead whose only power comes from his or her ability to influence the council. While this does allow for the decisions on how to run the city to be less political, it also places an individual that is often unelected into a position of major power and causes the city to end up being operated more as a business than a community. Since a city manager is usually required to have graduated with a master’s degree in public administration, they are more qualified than a mayor would usually be since their education consists of how to run city. Additionally, they are expected to neutrally and ethically ensure that the policy created by the council of their city is implemented. This typically ensures that when the city manager is trying to advise, convince, or carry out the decisions of the council of a decision, they do so not to better themselves politically, but to better the city. However, should a city …show more content…

Conversely, this is not possible for a mayor that is elected, meaning that the city and council would be forced to make up for their inadequacies until their term is over. Unfortunately, since the city managers need to keep over half of the council happy to not be fired, the turnover rate for city managers is extremely high, which can cause the city manager to form a conformity bias toward the council. Since the city manager wants to keep their job, they are more likely to conform to the decisions made by the majority of the

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