Council–manager government
Based on Wikipedia: Council–manager government
Phoenix, Arizona, the fifth-largest city in America, is run by someone you've almost certainly never heard of. Not the mayor—the city manager. This unelected official oversees a municipal budget of billions of dollars, manages tens of thousands of employees, and shapes the daily lives of over 1.6 million residents. And the city council can fire this person with a simple majority vote at any meeting.
Welcome to council-manager government, the system that quietly runs most American cities.
The Corporate Model Applied to Cities
If you've ever wondered how a publicly traded company works, you already understand council-manager government. The analogy is almost perfect.
Citizens play the role of shareholders. They elect a city council, which functions like a board of directors. The council sets policy, passes local laws called ordinances, approves budgets, and establishes an overall vision for where the city should go. But here's the crucial part: the council doesn't actually run anything day to day.
Instead, the council hires a city manager—the equivalent of a chief executive officer. This professional administrator handles all the nuts and bolts: managing departments, implementing the council's policies, preparing budgets, and advising elected officials on what's feasible. The manager serves at the pleasure of the council, meaning they can be dismissed whenever a majority decides it's time for a change.
What about the mayor? In a true council-manager system, the mayor is largely ceremonial. Think of a non-executive chairman of a corporate board—someone who leads meetings, represents the organization publicly, and perhaps casts tie-breaking votes, but doesn't actually control operations. The mayor might be elected directly by voters or simply chosen by fellow council members to hold the title.
This stands in stark contrast to what most people picture when they think of city government. In the more familiar mayor-council system, the mayor is a powerful executive who directly controls city departments and often battles with the legislative council for influence. Think of the dramatic big-city mayors you see in movies or on the news. Council-manager cities rarely produce such figures.
Why Would Anyone Want This?
To understand council-manager government, you need to understand what it was designed to replace: the political machine.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, American cities were often controlled by party bosses who wielded enormous informal power. They handed out city jobs to loyal supporters through the spoils system—if you helped the boss get elected, you might find yourself with a comfortable position in the sanitation department, regardless of your qualifications. City contracts went to political allies. Services flowed to neighborhoods that voted the right way.
The Progressive Movement, a broad reform effort that reshaped American politics in that era, took aim at this corruption. Municipal reformers asked a radical question: what if city government could be run like a business, with professionals making decisions based on efficiency rather than political favors?
The answer was the city manager. A trained administrator, hired on merit, whose job was simply to run the city well. No political debts to pay. No patronage networks to maintain. Just competent management.
Staunton, Virginia, claims the distinction of being the first American city to appoint a city manager, taking this step in 1908. The innovation caught the attention of Richard S. Childs, a businessman and reformer who would spend decades evangelizing for the council-manager form. When Dayton, Ohio, adopted the system in 1913, it became the first major city to do so, and the movement gained serious momentum.
The Rise and Spread
Council-manager government didn't spread randomly. It often followed another reform experiment: the city commission.
Commission government emerged after a devastating hurricane struck Galveston, Texas, in 1900. With the existing government paralyzed, the state appointed a small commission of experts to rebuild the city. The model seemed to work, and other cities adopted it. Under commission government, each elected commissioner directly runs a city department—one handles public works, another oversees public safety, and so on.
But commissioners weren't necessarily good administrators. And concentrating both legislative and executive power in the same individuals created its own problems. Minority populations found it particularly difficult to elect representatives when all commissioners were chosen city-wide rather than from specific districts.
Council-manager government offered a solution: keep the small elected body making policy decisions, but hire a professional to handle actual administration. After World War I, few cities adopted the commission form anymore, and many existing commission cities switched to council-manager.
The numbers tell the story of success. By 2001, over 3,300 American cities with populations above 2,500 had adopted council-manager government, along with 371 counties. As of 2019, more than half of all American cities with populations over 10,000 use this system.
The International City/County Management Association
City managers aren't just freelance administrators. They have a professional organization: the International City/County Management Association, known as ICMA. This body sets standards for what constitutes a true council-manager government, distinguishing it from arrangements where cities simply hire administrators with less formal authority.
According to ICMA, three characteristics define the real thing. First, all governmental authority rests with the elected council, except for specific executive duties assigned to the manager. The manager always serves at the council's pleasure—no tenure, no contract that can't be broken. Second, the manager's powers must be defined in the city charter or law, not just assigned informally by whoever happens to be mayor. Third, the manager answers to the entire council, not to any individual member. A mayor cannot unilaterally hire or fire the manager; only a majority vote of the full council can do that.
These rules matter because they prevent the system from sliding back toward the concentration of power it was designed to prevent. If a mayor could fire the manager alone, the manager would effectively answer to the mayor rather than the council, recreating a strong executive.
Across the Atlantic: Ireland's Adoption
The council-manager system isn't purely American. Ireland provides a fascinating case study of how the idea traveled and adapted.
Ireland in the 1920s was emerging from a period of extraordinary turmoil. World War I, the 1916 Easter Rising, the War of Independence against Britain, and then a brutal civil war had torn the country apart. Local governments were in chaos. The new Irish government found itself removing entire local councils and temporarily replacing them with paid commissioners.
Both Dublin and Cork experienced this. And here's the interesting twist: many people thought the appointed commissioners actually did a better job than the elected councils had. Services seemed more efficient and fairly delivered. This wasn't supposed to be a permanent solution, but it planted a seed.
In 1926, business interests in Cork began studying alternatives. They looked at the American experience with council-manager government and saw potential. After negotiations with the national government, the Cork City Management Act of 1929 became law, establishing Ireland's first council-manager system despite opposition.
Dublin followed in 1930, then Limerick in 1934, Waterford in 1939, and eventually the entire country under the County Management Act of 1940. The system spread to all Irish local authorities and remains in place today, having been updated most recently by the Local Government Act of 2001.
Ireland thus represents one of the most complete adoptions of council-manager government anywhere in the world—not just cities but every level of local government.
Germany's Brief Experiment
Not every adoption stuck. After World War II, the occupying powers helped reshape local government in West Germany. The British zone, which included the states of Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia, implemented council-manager government.
The Germans had their own term for city manager: Oberstadtdirektor, meaning something like "senior city director." For decades, this system operated in some of Germany's most important cities.
But in the mid-1990s, Germany moved away from the council-manager model, adopting instead a mayor-council system with directly elected mayors holding real executive power. The experiment had lasted about half a century before Germans decided they preferred a different approach.
The Hybrid Future
Cities aren't static. They evolve their governmental structures as circumstances change and as residents demand different things from their leaders.
Since the turn of this century, scholars have documented the rise of "adaptive" or "hybrid" forms of local government. These systems take elements from both council-manager and mayor-council structures. Perhaps a city keeps a professional manager but gives the mayor more policy-making authority. Perhaps the manager's tenure is more protected, or the mayor gains appointment powers over certain positions.
These modifications reflect a tension at the heart of the council-manager concept. The system was designed to separate politics from administration, to keep elected officials focused on policy while professionals handled implementation. But this neat division doesn't always hold in practice.
Voters want someone to hold accountable. A city manager fired for poor performance often generates less public attention than a mayor voted out of office. The ceremonial mayor in a council-manager city may frustrate residents who expect their chief elected official to actually lead. And city managers, despite their professional training and nonpartisan positioning, inevitably make decisions with political implications.
Understanding Your Own City
Here's a question worth investigating: how is your city governed?
If you live in a council-manager city, you've probably seen the effects without realizing the structure behind them. The city council debates policy at meetings, the mayor cuts ribbons and gives speeches, and somewhere in city hall sits a city manager whose name rarely appears in headlines but whose decisions shape everything from how quickly potholes get filled to how the police department operates.
If you live in a mayor-council city, your experience is different. The mayor is the center of power, for better or worse. Political drama plays out more visibly. The buck stops somewhere clearly identifiable.
Neither system is objectively better. Council-manager government tends toward professional competence and stability at the cost of political responsiveness and visible leadership. Mayor-council government offers clearer accountability and stronger executive action at the risk of inefficiency and politicization of basic services.
When your city council debates the budget—as Austin's recently did—understanding this context matters. In a council-manager system, most of the budget reflects decisions made by professional staff implementing long-standing policies. The council has meaningful discretion only at the margins. This isn't a flaw; it's the design. The system deliberately limits what elected officials can directly control, trusting trained administrators to handle operations efficiently.
Whether that trade-off works for your community is ultimately a political question, not an administrative one. But knowing the structure exists is the first step toward engaging with it intelligently.