Traveling on the Frontrunner north or
south takes one through multiple municipalities, allowing comparative views
from the rails—sometimes cramped and weed-covered, other times expansive and
manicured. Only a municipal councilor
likely would also notice that the succession of communities represents a
succession of different forms of municipal government as well. The brief ride between Provo and Orem is
illustrative. Provo’s government
exemplifies the Council-Mayor form of government and Orem’s the Council-Manager
form, two of the five forms defined by the Utah League of Cities and Towns.
What is often perceived as a
seamless visual transition between Orem and Provo belies their differences in
governmental structure and in the consequences for administrative dynamics and
policy making within each city. My
observations here are of Provo following nearly four years as a member of its
Municipal Council.
Provo’s municipal government is
bipartite and consists of a part-time, seven-member Municipal Council and a
full-time mayor, who heads a full-time administration. Council members serve for four years and have
staggered terms. The mayor’s term is
four years. The elections are
nonpartisan. The offices of the Council
and the mayor occupy different areas of the City Center on the top floor,
approximately 100 feet from each other.
The Council is led by a chair, who
fills a one-year appointment and is elected to the position by a majority of
her or his peers. Its staff of six full-time
City (spelling with an uppercase C denotes the legal entity) employees assist
the Council in researching, analyzing, scheduling, agendizing, and interacting
with the public, all while maintaining an emphasis on the Council’s twin
constitutional mandates: the annual City budget and the use of property within
the city (spelling with a lowercase c denotes the residents and the geographical
area in which they live).
Meanwhile, the mayor can turn to
more than 500 full-time employees and several hundred part-time employees for
assistance with his mandated duties, which are executive and operational and of
a scale much beyond the Council’s. The
mayor’s primary go-to assistants are officed with him, beginning with the City’s
Chief Administrative Officer. At the
ready are a dozen Department Directors, each a seasoned and canny professional and
each with her or his own staff on whom the moment-moment running of a major,
much-watched municipality rests.
This imbalance of resources between
the governmental branches may seem to work a disadvantage on the Municipal
Council. The Council doesn’t even come
close to matching the intellectual, financial, and social-capital resources of
the administration. For this reason, the
Council’s agendas and its priorities typically originate with the
administration, which means that the Council exists largely to advise and
consent. This is not to say that it is
beholden to the administration, dependent on it, or overshadowed by it. Rather, the Council exists not as a primary
source of initiatives so much as a well-informed judge of such, ideally
bringing abundant sense and sensibility to what should invariably be an
interactive endeavor.
The Council is not without means to
leverage its comparatively limited resources.
First, because it is in the legislative driver’s seat, it can turn to
the administration at any point with requests for further detail, including
comparative forecasts and the identification of unintended consequences. Moreover, the Council can appoint its own
nonpartisan advisory bodies independent of the administration, with the mandate
to study administrative practices, policies, and proposals carefully and at a
desired level of detail before forwarding recommendations directly to the
Council. The Council can also lend its
ear to citizen activists as reasonably informed, passionate advocates of
agendas that often depart from those of the administration— but at the cost of
partisanship. Through its outreach
efforts in the social and other media, the Council can poll or survey the
citizenry at large or in limited, targeted fashion. The Council’s recent introduction of the
Provo People’s Lobby represents a further effort to call on the wisdom and good
will of citizens at large as an adjunct to the Council’s formal resources.
Given the design of Provo’s municipal
government and the differential resources available to its two entities, an
overall rule of the thumb might be: Though independent by constitutional
mandate, it is nevertheless advisable for the Municipal Council and the City
administration to establish and maintain a cordial, if occasionally strained,
working relationship and not an adversarial one. The best interests, purposes, and future of
Provo are in the balance.
Note:
This piece is the first of four that will appear prior to the conclusion of my
tenure as a member of the Provo City Municipal Council. The others will focus on policy governance,
best praxis, and vexing challenges.
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