2 Nat ional Civ ic Review

This issue of the National Civic Review features two contrast-ing articles on efforts to change the structures of local gov-ernment, one a successful charter change in the border city ofEl Paso, Texas, the second a failed campaign for charterreform in St. Louis, Missouri. As NCL Vice President DerekOkubo points out in his detailed account of the El Paso story,a successful change from the “strong mayor” form of govern-ment to a council-manager system bucks recent trends amongsizable cities. Before El Paso, the largest city to adopt acouncil-manager plan since 1998 was Norwich, Connecticut(population, 36,000). During that same period, Oakland,California, and Miami, Florida, changed from council-managerto “strong mayor.”

St. Louis was a very different story. The reform proposal wasneither to adopt the council-manager form of government norget rid of it, but to return to an earlier reform model, in factthe very same “strong mayor” form of government jettisonedby El Paso. St. Louis has an aldermanic system of governmentwith important executive powers dispersed among independ-ently elected offices.

All of this may be a bit confusing to any reader unacquaintedwith the history of municipal reform, but the strong mayor formof government was the original plan endorsed by the NationalMunicipal League in its first Model City Charter. The idea wasto move away from the large, bicameral local legislative bodiesof the late nineteenth century, with their plethora of inde-pendently elected executives and commissions, and to endorsea separation of powers between the executive (the strongmayor) and the legislative, the council, or board of aldermen.It wasn’t until 1915 that the Municipal League began advo-cating the now common council-manager form.

It is very fitting for a city in Texas to be the first largejurisdiction in recent years to return to the council-managerplan. After all, the idea was inspired by events in Galveston,Texas. After the horrific flood of 1900, the state’s governorappointed a five-member commission to oversee reconstruc-tion of the island city. Within a few years, the “commissionform” was adopted by cities all over Texas and in other statesas well. The original plan, however, was to vest both admin-istrative and legislative powers to this smaller, more account-able commission.

Then the “short ballot” crusader Richard Childs borrowed anidea from the city of Staunton, Virginia, which hired a “gen-

eral manager” in 1909 to handle executive and administrativeduties, and conjoined it with the commission form, nowreferred to as a council. The National Municipal Leagueadopted this plan in a revised edition of the Model CityCharter. Critics often chide municipal reformers for adoptinga “corporate model” favoring efficiency over democracy. Notso, said Richard Childs.

“The reformers of a generation past sought good governmentby way of ‘checks and balances,’ seeking to devise a frame-work of government so ingenious that under it no officialcould fail to give good government,” he wrote in the NationalMunicipal Review (volume 1, number 2) in 1912. “It wassomewhat like tying the steering wheel of an automobile tomake sure that the chauffeur would drive straight. The newgeneration, working for political reform, no longer tries to getgood government on behalf of the people, but seeks to putthe people in a position where they can easily get for them-selves whatever kind of government they want, believing thatthe people will be found to be conservative and at least aswise as that ruling class, the politicians, whose subjects theynow are.”

Ironically, although one of the driving forces behind themunicipal reform was political corruption in cities of theNorth and Midwest, the council-manager form mainly caughtin small to medium-sized towns and cities. Most of the largemunicipalities that adopted the plan were in the South andWest. Considering events in El Paso and St. Louis, the patternmay still hold true. Why the regional disparity? One reasonwas the relative strength of party organizations and machinesin the North and the greater influence of anti-party sentimentsthanks to Populism and Progressivism in the South and West.

Whatever the merits of this or that governmental system,reformers such as Childs believed in innovating and tweakinguntil the right balance of efficiency and democracy wasachieved. “The commission plan is not an ideal democracy,”wrote Childs. “Better ones have been found in foreign cities,and the new direction of political reform effort must be towardcreating ideal sensitive democracies.”

Innovators in cities such as El Paso and St. Louis are stillstriving to find that ideal form.

Michael McGrathEditor

Note from the Editor

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