The job mayors actually have
Winning an election does not mean a mayor takes control of city government.
A newly elected mayor arrives with ideas about what needs to change. But the organization waiting at city hall was built over decades. It comes with employees, contracts, financial obligations, state and federal requirements and longstanding ways of doing business. Much of the budget may already be committed before the new mayor proposes spending the first dollar.
Today’s mayor inherits yesterday’s city.
That’s easy to overlook when discussing municipal policy. We tend to evaluate cities by what elected officials should do: allow more housing, improve public safety, reform economic development, fix permitting and maintain infrastructure. Getting an organization to do those things is another matter.
People inside city government understand the difference. A mayor may want something done immediately only to discover that legal counsel has concerns, procurement rules apply, another department must sign off or a contract does not expire for three years.
Most civil servants are professionals trying to do their jobs well, and a sensible mayor depends on their expertise. But organizations develop habits of their own. Departments defend responsibilities and budgets. Programs and procedures can outlive the circumstances that created them.
A mayor may have four years or eight. A staffer may have been there for 20 and expect to remain for another 20. They’ve seen mayors come and go.
Resistance to change does not require dark motives. Study, legal opinions and outside consultation may all be legitimate, but elected officials quickly learn that time itself can be a barrier to reform.
My colleague Mark Moses, who spent decades in municipal finance and management, has observed that cities accumulate programs and obligations much more readily than they reconsider whether they still make sense.
Then there are the voters.
We want affordable housing but may oppose new housing nearby. We want economic growth but object to development. We want lower taxes and better services. We want government to spend less but have strong opinions about the library, park, fire station or other service we use.
We can sincerely believe all these things because we don’t have to reconcile the tradeoffs.
Mayors do.
That’s why ideology is a less useful guide to municipal government than to national politics. Residents judge city government more directly. Is the neighborhood safe? Are permits issued promptly? Are the streets in good condition? Are property taxes reasonable?
We also judge local officials on what gets built, creating another problem.
Consider economic development. There’s plenty of reason to question tax abatements, tax increment financing and other subsidies cities use to attract investment. Sports stadium deals are a familiar example: cities often spend heavily to keep or attract teams even when much of the promised economic activity is simply shifted from one part of a region to another without any net benefit.
I’ve criticized these programs for years, but I understand a mayor’s point of view.
A company proposes a new facility. Hundreds of jobs are promised. Business groups support it. Economic-development officials and consultants have spent months making the case. Perhaps another city is offering an incentive.
Supporting it allows a mayor to claim new jobs and investment, complete with a ribbon-cutting photo-op at a building everyone can see.
Opposing it is more difficult. San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg faced that challenge when Amazon invited cities to compete for its second headquarters, promising as many as 50,000 jobs. He declined to submit a formal bid, arguing that while the city welcomed the investment, he was “not going to mortgage our future to do it.”
I’ve spent years making similar arguments. They can be a tough sell to the public—perhaps even more so from an elected leader.
Tough sells don’t justify bad policy, but they help explain why policies with unimpressive records remain politically viable. Government is much better at counting what it does than defending what it doesn’t. Visible action has an enormous advantage and can produce a government that becomes busier without becoming better.
Families, businesses, religious institutions, schools, charities and entrepreneurs create much of what people value about a place—and what distinguishes one city from another. Fort Worth’s Western identity or Grand Rapids’ tradition of churches and philanthropy cannot be reproduced through a municipal program.
Government matters because it can make those choices easier or harder. Its job is not to create the community, but the conditions in which residents can.
Infrastructure needs to work. Rules should be reasonably clear and consistently enforced. A business owner should understand what is required to open. A developer should have some idea how long an approval will take.
None of this is sexy. Nobody congratulates city hall because the sewer system worked again today. But these are areas where competent local government matters.
That includes periodically asking questions an established organization may no longer ask itself. Why do we do this? Does it work? Why does this permit take six months? Would this project happen without a subsidy?
What happens if we stop?
The fact that a city has done something for 30 years demonstrates that the practice is durable. It does not demonstrate that it’s useful.
Yet elected officials can do something an established organization has difficulty doing itself: reconsider settled questions.
Doing that well requires understanding the difference between the government a mayor inherits and the city the mayor was elected to serve. Most of what makes a city prosperous, distinctive and worth living in happens outside city hall.
The mayor’s job is not to transform the city. It is to make sure city government does its job well enough that everyone else has room to transform it themselves.
Patrick Touhey is co-founder of Better Cities Project, 501(c)(3) nonprofit focused on municipal policy solutions and a senior fellow at the Show-Me Institute.
