Episode Details

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. W