TOWN MANAGERS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4795, 5 January 1925, Page 3

TOWN MANAGERS.

THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT. APPARENTLY EFFICIENT. An interesting experiment in local government is now being worked out in the United States (writes the New York correspondent of the London Times). For generations it has been notorious that municipal administration in this country, whether of large or small towns, was either hopelessly corrupt or else so inefficient as to oe an almost unbearable burden upon the pockets and pride of the citizens. There were towns which, for greater or lesser periods, escaped reproach ; but the generality of them were all tarred with the same brush, and they were a happy hunting ground for the “muckraker.” That was a generation ago. Fashions in (sensational journalism change, and the "muckraker” is now a forgotten figure. The field in which he laboured, however, is but little altered; or, rather, it was but little altered until this new experiment began to make some headway, at about the end of the war.

The experiment which is being tried in a number of American cities is merely the application of ordinary business methods to what is, after all, just as much a business as the operation of railway trains or the manufacture of boots. It consists in turning over to a general manager, called city manager, full direction and control of a municipality’s administrative operations. THE SCHEME AT CLEVELAND. In Cleveland, Ohio, Cor example, where the scheme has been tried since the first day of the current year, there is a city council of 25 members, elected by the people on a basis of proportional representation. They correspond to the board of directors of a joint stock company. The power to select the city manager is in their hands. They have the power to dismiss nim, too, if the need for that arises. He is responsible to them, and must “get 1 results” piecisely as the manager of an industrial corporation iis responsible to his board of directors.

The city manager of Cleveland is Mr William R. Hopkins, who at Cine time of another has been a practising lawy'er, a builder of railroads, a business man, and a trustee of Western Reserve University. He is paid 25,000 dollais (about £5000) a year to man•age a 2,000,000,000-dollar corporation which transacts about 40,090,000 dollars’ worth of business. When Mr Hopkins took office he consulted the. council. i« his choice of heads of departments, but merely as a matter i f political wisdom —theoretically he has a free rein—and then drew up for the men appointed, who are not politicians but technical experts, a few rules to guide them. All departmental chiefs were to be held responsible for results, and “make good or get out” was to be the basis of all employment. He drew up a budget covering an outlay of 14,000,000' dollare (£2,800,000 j and then a year’s programme of permanent i mpr oveme nts —wi denin g of streets, reorganising of police and fire departments, reclaiming of waste land, building municipal bath-houses, extending parks, etc. 11l tliis, and in revising the city’s system of purchasing supplies so as to eliminate overlapping and to take advantage of casli discounts and good terms for quantity purchases, he took a long step in the direction of economy.

,So far there has not been time to afford a proper comparison of “city manager” government in Cleveland with the older form of government by an administrative Mayor and a cabinet of department heads working with little regard to co-operation and always with a thought to .their political futures- But dispassionate observers report a considerable gain for efficiency in tlie new regime. THE FIRST The city manager plan was first taken up at Staunton, Virginia, in 1908, when the Mayor and council, in despair over the tangle of affairs which they had inherited from their predecessors, passed an ordinance creating a general manager, to whom was delegated all administrative detail and responsibility. The first city to adopt it by. charter, however, was Sumter, South Carolina, in 1912. But it was the application of ,the experiment to Dayton, Ohio, after the disastrous floods of 1913, that first attracted national attention. The famous “Dayton experiment!” came when the afflicted citziens, attempting to restore the borrowing power of their city, which a ruinous financial policy, together with the floods, had nearly drowned in a morass of debt, called on General Goethals, the builder of the Panama Canal, .to show them the way out of their troubles. At that time there were only eight municipalities in the whole United States gperating under city managers. Some of them, like Dayton, had chosen a small commission as well as a manager to handle their affairs. Others dispensed with the commission and employed the system afterwards adopted at Cleveland. By 1924 tlie number of towns and cities under city managers, with or without commissions in addition, had grown to 321. Of these the largest was Cleveland, with a population of about 800.000. Akron, Ohio, previously the largest city under a manager, abandoned the plan by a charter amendment vote aft»r several years’ trial. It was one of tlie 16 cities which reverted to the old form of government. City managers are not invariably regarded by the cities themselves as precious possessions. . Forty per cent, of 219 managers have been allowed to serve for less than two years ; 59 per cent, for less than three years. One city in Oregon has had ten managers in nine years, and Columbus (Georgia) had three in one year. Nevertheless, for all its drawbacks, in theory and practice the citym anager plan seems to be making steady headway.