The outdated and parochial way to run cities that just won't go away
The commission form of government long ago fell out of favor in most places. It may have contributed to one city's bankruptcy.
Happy Finance Friday! I’m (mentally) back in Chester, Pennsylvania, this week because a judge ruled on the city receiver’s bid to, among other things, remove councilmembers from their positions as department heads and appoint career professionals to run them. (Spoiler alert: The judge in her ruling sided with the receiver on that point and didn’t have flattering things to say about how the city was being run.)
Currently, the mayor, who also runs the city’s office of public affairs, assigns a councilmember to oversee each department whether they have any related subject matter expertise or not. If this sounds strange to you for a city of 36,000, you’re not alone. This form of governance is called a commission government and it fell largely out of favor a while ago. This week, I’ll explain the relatively short-lived rise and fall of this type of governing and how it may have contributed to Chester’s problems. Or, in the judge’s words, led to “a municipal government that is internally dysfunctional.”
The Galveston idea: governing by commission
When a devastating hurricane hit Galveston, Texas, in 1900, local business leaders worried that the city council wouldn’t move fast enough to provide a proper recovery effort. So they successfully lobbied the governor to appoint a commission, which quickly transitioned to become an elected body. The idea was that a commission would provide a more centralized, efficient governing body because the traditional purse holders and policymakers (elected officials) and the policy implementers (department heads) were one and the same.
Over the next 20 years, this structure of government spread throughout Texas and other states. Leading Progressives of the time (not to be confused with today’s progressives) like Theodore Roosevelt championed the idea because it appealed to their notions of scientific progress and efficiency.
Learn more from the Texas State Historical Association
But this soon gave way to the council-manager form of government in which an elected council determines policy and budget and an appointed city manager is in charge of executing that vision and overseeing day-to-day operations. Statistics vary on just how many of these types of governments are left—some say just 1% of governments while the International City/County Management Association’s 2019 survey data suggests it’s more like 11%. But either way, they’re not common, and those left are mostly in smaller towns.
What went wrong: Instead of generating efficiencies, commission governments more often than not tend to lack organizational unity and operate slower than council-manager or strong mayor governments. “Every commissioner has his/her own ‘turf’ and will be less inclined to see ‘the big picture’ when voting on city matters,” wrote a Tennessee consultant, advising the city of Dyer in 2006 not to change to a commission government.
Worse, the commission plan blends legislative and executive functions in the same body which creates a lack of accountability, gets rid of the idea of checks and balances, and overall makes it more likely for mistakes and mismanagement to go unnoticed. As I’ll explain next, all of these things happened in Chester.
‘Widespread nepotism’
Judge Ellen Ceisler did not hold back in her ruling this week allowing Chester’s receiver Michael Doweary to install hired professionals to manage city departments:
“[T]he evidence shows that City officials frequently ignore Receiver’s advice and directives, and even direct other employees in their departments to ignore his directives. City officials also have historically overlooked issues such as the unauthorized payroll payments to an incarcerated employee, the former police chief allowing his friends to boost their pensions by working extra overtime before retirement, and the City’s seven-year default on its MMO payments. These incidents, together with the evidence of widespread nepotism within the City’s government, demonstrate a pattern of City officials taking care of their own and intentionally turning their backs on wrongdoing within their departments. Further exacerbating these problems is the Mayor’s assignment of Council members as department heads based on their loyalty to City Council and the Mayor’s own inclination in a particular year, rather than on the person’s actual qualifications to oversee a particular area. These practices cannot continue.” (emphasis added)
There’s a lot to unpack here, starting with keeping a parks employee who was incarcerated on child rape charges on the payroll. I could write two or three newsletters on just this list of financial misdeeds alone so if you’d be interested in that, reply to let me know.
Overall, the vibe of Judge Ceisler’s ruling was one of professional exasperation bordering on outrage. In addition to the referenced misdeeds above, she reviews other incidents including:
The finance director waiting months to publicly disclose that he lost $400,000 of the city’s money in a phishing scam;
The mayor’s former son-in-law’s stint as head of economic development during which he acquired several downtown properties. “By all accounts,” Ceisler wrote, “the only progress Mr. Starr made on that front during his tenure was to obtain a liquor license for one of his businesses.”
The mayor’s claim that he was unaware of the mounting pension debt despite being head of the city’s pension board;
And she refers several times to city officials’ lack of compliance with her previous orders to cooperate with Doweary.
She’s protective of Chester’s right to home rule and the residents’ right to democracy in that she doesn’t grant the receiver’s request to act unilaterally on behalf of the city. But not only does she say that the city “suffers from a municipal government that is internally dysfunctional,” she says Doweary’s “proposed initiatives are necessary…to save the City from the brink of financial doom.”
While this reads like a takedown of the sitting officials, this lack of accountability has been going on in Chester for a long time and is in part a result of the way the city government was structured in its 1980 city charter. I spoke this week with Fred Reddig, a long-time state employee who has coordinated the recovery effort for a number of distressed municipalities, including Chester from 1995 to the early 2000s. (He’s now retired.) During one of his first visits to the city, he said found piles of unpaid bills stuffed in drawers and file cabinets. “It was indicative of the generally ineffective governance and financial management that existed at that time,” he told me. “The form of government plays a role.”
It’s never too late to change
There is one very big exception to my earlier statement that commission governments have fallen out of favor in cities because they don’t work well. Portland, Oregon, hung onto it well into the modern era and was the only large city in the nation to do so.
This wasn’t a matter of an antiquated rule just sticking around because it’s too hard to get rid of—Portlanders were asked eight times between 1913 and 2007 whether they wanted to change their form of government and the result was always a landslide in favor of keeping it.
In 2022, as voters considered yet again whether to change the city’s form of government, an Oregon Public Broadcasting article summed up the situation:
“City Hall has proven ill-equipped to deal with some of Portland’s biggest problems, namely homelessness and gun violence. Bureaus, particularly those overseen by different commissioners, seldom work well together. The wait time to get permits processed and 911 calls answered is, leaders concede, far too long. Polls show Portlanders are beyond fed up, with a vast majority of constituents viewing the council as ineffective.”
The amendment passed with 58% of the vote.
What this means: The city didn’t just modernize its governance structure, it adopted ranked-choice voting, a more progressive measure which advocates say supports more representative outcomes. A lot remains to be seen as the city launches its transition over this year and the next. But Portland’s election—in which 67% of voters turned out to cast ballots—shows that big leaps are possible when voters want it enough.
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