Would an elected mayor be better for Morgantown?

There are multiple ways to run a city.

This is the second story in a three-part series. Read the first part here.

“Wait—what? We don’t elect our mayor?”

We don’t. Morgantown has what state code calls a “manager” form of government. We elect our seven council members in April of every odd-numbered year, and they select the mayor from among themselves, all for two-year terms. The mayor presides over council meetings, serving a role that is ceremonial and not administrative. 

Our chief administrator is not the mayor—it’s the city manager. Council hires the city manager to carry out day-to-day operations. He or she brings professional training to managing the budget and ensuring city departments run effectively.  

A couple dozen medium-sized West Virginia cities—Fairmont, for example, and Martinsburg—also use this form of government. 

Contrast that with the “strong mayor” form of government used in Charleston, Huntington, and Parkersburg, the first, second, and fourth most populous cities in the state—Morgantown overtook Parkersburg a few years ago to become third. Residents of those cities elect their mayors directly to serve as chief administrator. 

Some strong mayors work alongside city managers—Charleston and Huntington use that model. Some, like Parkersburg’s, work without.

Would an elected mayor—a “strong mayor” plan—be better for Morgantown?

On the occasion of Morgantown’s fourth city manager hire in a decade, we posed that question last week, and it generated a lot of discussion and questions. 

Here are the pros and cons, as observed by two respected longtime West Virginia municipal administrators. Steve Williams was Huntington’s city manager in the early 1980s. Huntington switched to a strong mayor plan, and Williams was elected mayor in 2012 and has just won a third term. John Manchester served as both mayor and city manager of Lewisburg from 2003 to 2019.

Manager Plan

Pros

• “A city manager gives you an assurance of professional management,” says Williams. “You want an individual who knows how to manage budgets, how to make sure that streets are paved properly, garbage is collected on time, the sewer system works effectively, public safety is operating efficiently. Somebody coming in off the street doesn’t necessarily have the credentials to do that.”
• Manchester likes the city manager skill set, too. “If council takes the time to do the research and select someone who not only has the skill set but who’s likely to stay around for a while, that assures professional management and stability.”

Cons

• Depending on history and personality, a city manager hired from elsewhere may not connect with people or perceive emerging trends. “If you have a city manager who’s just blind to the needs of the neighborhoods and the adjusting needs of a community, that person will fall short,” Williams says.  
• Manchester notes the flip side of the stability inherent in a good city–city manager fit. “Sometimes they don’t pan out, and then you are looking again to find that perfect manager. You can spend a lot of time in interviews and trying to track that person down.” 

Strong Mayor Plan

Pros

• Manchester notes the “wisdom of the crowd” value of an elected administrator. “When people elect the person who’s going to run the city and be the front person for the organization, theoretically they’ve done their research and they make a wise choice.”
• And while a city manager might come from anywhere, an elected mayor is likely a local who works his or her personal network on the city’s behalf, “making connections through businesses, through other governmental contacts, through philanthropic pursuits, making sure those connections are coming in to be able to help the city,” Williams says.
• An advantage of a strong mayor that neither mentioned is identifying a person who has the authority to make decisions and is accountable for those decisions to the people.

Cons

• Both advise against a strong mayor who’s not backed up by either personal or hired administrative know-how. Manchester sums it up: “The skill set that allows a person to be elected mayor is not the same skill set that is required to efficiently run a city.”

In Manchester’s observation, whether a given system works well for a given city at a given time can come down to who’s serving—that is, any system can fail if the wrong people are running it. Williams offers the opposite: “Any system will work, if you let it.” Staff it well and give it the resources and authority to succeed.

Williams’ favorite plan of city government

He does, however, have a preference. “I think that the best structure is an elected mayor with a professional city manager.” That’s the situation he’s in, and he loves it.  

“When I was city manager, we had seven members on council. All I had to do as city manager was make sure I had four members agreeing with the direction we were going,” he says. “But as an elected mayor, all of a sudden I had thousands of individuals who had a vested interest in my success, because they elected me.”

That dovetails with one of Manchester’s observations above: Hopefully the electorate has chosen wisely—and, having chosen, they’ll support the one they elect.

Two cautions

The idea of a city administrator who could make the hard decisions and be held accountable is appealing. And at a time when we are all pandemic-frustrated, a charter change could feel like just the ticket. But it’s a change that should not be taken lightly. Consider these two thoughts:

• A strong mayor would bring new leadership and decisiveness to city administration—and add a salary to the city’s budget. To toss out an upper bound, the very experienced Williams makes $85,000 a year.
• Morgantown is already set to try something new. In the April 2021 municipal election, residents will vote on a referendum measure that would change council seats from two-year terms to staggered four-year terms starting in 2023. Four-year terms are expected to promote stability and better handling of long-term, complex problems.

Manchester is an advocate of four-year terms. “Two-year council and mayoral election cycles are too limiting, and the political environment remains too close to the surface and does not allow the elected officials and the city manager to create a work plan,” he says. 

And he suggests Morgantown might be best served by testing whether four-year council terms improve city progress, planning, and stability before also making a change in the city plan of government. “If you put two variables in the mix at the same time, you will never be able to test what one variable does to the equation. I think the timeline for considering change might be to push for the four-year terms and let that settle a little bit, and then let that be the basis for evaluating whether there should be a different charter change.”

What do you think? 

Since our last story generated a lot of discussion, we’d love to know your thoughts. Next week we’ll respond to your opinion.

This is the second story in a three-part series. Read the first part here.