July 12 Incompetent Tyranny of City Managers

Hello, this is George Caylor, TeaWithGeorge.com, and today's session of Get Real is with my dear old friend, Dr. Kevin Clauson. As far as intellect is concerned, I've always considered there's Kevin Clauson, and then there's the rest of us. He is an encyclopedia of history, of constitution, of theology, of common sense, and I don't find that much out there in the world like I used to.

Common sense. Welcome, Kevin Clauson to the show. Do I need to call you doctor? No, you do not.

Good, because I wasn't anyway. We're just old friends. Kevin, I know a town that's run by a city manager, and I'm very familiar with the town by the way, won't say where it is, and the city manager has become unaccountable.

In fact, members of the city council of that town wanted the books audited, see where the money goes, see where, well, the town is paying him around $300,000 a year to make decisions. But he said, no, I'm not going to tell you. And the mayor of the town said, okay, let's not make trouble.

The city council members who did want to make trouble by finding out where the money's going have been blasted as non-cooperative, troublemakers, and everything else. So city managers, why is that sometimes not a good idea? You're more familiar with this than almost anybody in America. So talk to us.

This is typical of city manager forms of government, which make up about two thirds of the cities and towns in America. The rest are either a strong mayor or a city commission form of government. But the city manager form took off in the early 20th century based on the ideas of people like of all people, Woodrow Wilson, who had been a president, but of course, and a governor.

But before that, he had been a professor at Princeton University of Political Science. And he basically invented, as it were, modern public administration. The problem is that modern public administration is very bureaucratic.

It's made to be bureaucratic. Wilson believed in the governing or governance by experts. He believed that, yes, the people could vote for their leaders, just the top leaders, nobody else.

Vote for their leaders, and then the leaders can appoint these managers, these experts, and leave everything else to the experts. Government by experts was what he believed in. And he practiced it when he was governor of New Jersey.

He practiced it when he was president, especially during World War I. But the idea grew and made its way into city governments in America, starting in the 1920s in America, and spread from there. The idea was to keep politics out of government. Well, the problem is you can't keep politics out of government.

Government is about politics. Politics is about policy. And you can't separate the two without actually handing over the policy-making, decision-making to somebody else, besides the elected representatives.

And this is the problem. The city manager for government involves a part-time city council, low paid. They defer to the city manager.

The city manager is the full-time expert, highly paid, has a staff, you know, highly paid staff that works for him, basically. And the city council just kind of sits back and says, oh, well, we don't know these things. We're not experts like he is.

So what can we do? We'll just hire the city manager and let him run the city. He becomes the de facto mayor of the city. But he's unelected and unaccountable except for the city council.

But remember, the city council is part-time, low paid. They don't have an incentive to kind of monitor the city manager closely. They can't.

And he has every incentive to hide things, as it were. He may not always hide them intentionally, but he hides them because he's the expert. He's the guy paid the big bucks.

He's the guy who really runs the city. Kevin, this reminds me of the American government itself, the Deep State. We elect presidents.

We elect congressmen and senators. But who runs the country? The Deep State. And they are unaccountable.

I remember when I ran a company in Germany, I had several general officers who found out that I was a financial planner and a wealth manager. They asked if I would be their financial planner. And one of the generals, he was going to retire within about a month.

He said, is there anything I can do for you while I'm still a general? He said, yes, you have a GS-10, government service worker, 10, in your department that is so totally corrupt and incapable of making any good decisions. Could you have him shot? He laughed. And he said, well, no, we can't have people shot anymore.

And he said, George, I am a three-star general and I can't even have him fired. I can't have a GS-2 fired. He said, we don't have power.

If a general officer can't do that about one of the Deep State GS-10s, no wonder that we have the problems we have. What else is going on with the city manager type of government that makes things, they're unaccountable. They can spend money without even thinking about being, is this a good deal for the city or not? What else? Well, one of the things that's very common in these city manager forums is the city manager will kind of give favors to certain city councilmen.

They may be little favors, they may be bigger favors in order to entice them to support him and his agenda. Now, he may try to do that with all of them. If it doesn't work with all of them, that's fine.

As long as he gets a majority, he's okay. You know what you just said, it is that in the city. I'm thinking of, so you just hit the nail on the head.

So yeah, go on. I'm sorry. Yeah, no, it's very common.

It's very common that way. He stays in power. Most people don't think of him having power, but he has a lot more power than the elected city councilman do because the majority of city councils that he is councilman, he's favored are going to let him get away with anything because he's the expert.

He's the guy paid the big bucks. Here's a challenging question, I think, at least in America. We have a system of government, which involves, at least in theory, separation of powers and checks and balances.

Why is it that in two thirds of American cities, we've thrown that in the trash can? We don't have a system of separation of powers and checks and balances in a city manager form of government. We have a bureaucratic, top-down, expert-run system of government, unaccountable, unelected. Why is it we do this on the national level, the separation of powers, checks and balances, and the state level, but then when it comes to the local level, we want to be run by bureaucrats.

Why is that? Well, way back in the beginning, it was because we thought we could take politics out of policymaking. Remember that? I said that earlier. That's just not going to happen.

It never happens. You replace one person's policy with another. In other words, you replace the city manager's politics with the city council's politics.

As I said, he becomes a de facto mayor of the city, unelected, unaccountable, but nonetheless, de facto mayor of the city. The media seems to prefer the city manager and they blast the city council members, thinking of that same city again, blast those city council members that they think are troublemakers, wanting that city manager to be held accountable for his spending. We don't even know what he's spending on in that town I'm thinking of.

Yeah, well, see, the media is laboring under a severe delusion. And here's the delusion. The city manager is above politics.

The city council is all about politics, but the city manager is above politics. That's just crazy. It's not true.

It never has been true. It's his politics that's ruling the day because he has the real power, the real power. On paper, the city council can fire him, but will they? No, not as long as he controls.

I put the word controls in quotes. As long as he controls enough city councilmen, they will not fire him. They'll let him get away with what he wants to get away with.

And this is true in city council systems all over the country. Not just conservative and liberal. No, it's everywhere.

You would think that a conservative city that usually votes red would not allow the deep state, so to speak, to be their government in their town. Well, on our federal level, we have. And right now, our government's controlled by Republicans on the executive side and the legislative side.

And yet, we still have the deep state. We still have bureaucratic government from top to bottom. In our national government.

And even in conservative states, we have it in state governments, too, conservative states. These bureaucracies get in place, and then they never go away. They never disappear.

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