Who runs cities? In some places, it's not the mayor's job
In many cities, the chief executive is hired, not elected. Here's how Chattanooga and its neighbors do things differently.
By William Newlin
Cutting ribbons and shaking hands are part of any mayor’s job. But acting as chief executive and running day-to-day operations? Depending on the city, it may or may not be in the job description.
“I'm not a strong mayor,” said Red Bank Mayor Hollie Berry. “We have a city manager form of government, so I’m actually kind of a part-time pseudo-volunteer.”
Mayor Berry’s strength, or lack thereof, isn’t self-deprecation. She’s just describing the form of government in Red Bank. It’s different from Chattanooga’s, in which voters elect a mayor who has broad control over city finances and services.
Under a council-manager model like Red Bank's, mayors don’t have administrations with significant power. Instead, they typically preside over legislative meetings and act as city figureheads.
In Red Bank and Collegedale, for example, city commissioners choose a mayor from among their own ranks. Voters elect a “weak mayor” in other cities, as they do in East Ridge.
The legislative body then hires a city manager — sometimes from out-of-state — to create budgets, direct departments, draft resolutions and ordinances, and make sure city services are functioning.
“It's really kind of like a business model where you have a CEO and a board of directors,” said Red Bank City Manager Martin Granum.
All 10 of Hamilton County’s towns and cities do things a bit differently. While there are limitations based on the size of a new city, choosing a government model is a somewhat arbitrary decision.
How much power to give a mayor, how many legislators are on a council, and who gets elected at-large or from a specific district — voters decide at the time a city incorporates.
Citizens can always pick a new system or opt for hybrid models by voting to change their city charters. That usually happens in response to perceived leadership failures. But charter revisions aren’t cure-alls for poor policy, said James Brooks, a longtime leader in the municipal advocacy group the National League of Cities.
“Sometimes there is an expectation that somehow if you change the form of government, you'll end up with better government,” Brooks said. “In fact, that has nothing to do with anything. It's really who's in the government and not what form it takes by itself as the deciding factor.”
When the manager model ‘took off’
The City of Chattanooga has a similar structure to the state and federal government. City Council is the legislature, Mayor Kelly the veto-wielding head of the executive branch, and the city courts are the judiciary. Council members can create legislation of their own, but they also receive ordinances and resolutions from the mayor’s office and confirm his appointments and proposals.
Most cities in the United States don’t work like that. The mayor-council system is found in Tennessee’s largest cities (Nashville, Memphis, and Knoxville) and in a majority of the biggest in the U.S., but Americans more often opt for a council-manager system.
It’s a trend that has escalated over the past century. Starting around the 1920s, cities sought to remove machine politics and corruption from local governance, Brooks said. A professional manager, rather than party bosses, would theoretically increase government efficiency.
“It took off in the years after that,” Brooks said.
Nearly 80 years ago, Chattanoogans considered a referendum revising the city charter to add a manager alongside the city’s seven-member commission, which held combined executive and legislative powers.
Masthead of the Chattanooga Daily Times front page on Oct. 15, 1946. Image/newspapers.com
According to Chattanooga Daily Times archives from 1946, some residents thought an unelected manager was undemocratic, and they were skeptical whether a new charter would put a check on influential politicians.
Proponents of the plan saw it as a way to infuse expertise into local government and remove the control single commissioners wielded over city departments, such as the police and schools.
Jac Chambliss, who headed Chattanooga’s GI-Citizens Nonpartisan League, told the Daily Times on Nov. 3, 1946:
“We insist that by adopting the city manager plan, Chattanooga will be able to bring talent, both from business and labor, that will give Chattanooga the best government it ever had.”
Turnout for the referendum was relatively low for the time at 14,000 voters, and the referendum failed by just 612 votes. Chattanooga’s board of commissioners stayed in place until a civil rights lawsuit in the late 1980s forced the city to adopt its current mayor-council system.
An unelected leader
Granum, a native Oregonian who most recently worked in government on the Hillsboro, Oregon, school board, became Red Bank’s manager in 2021.
He’s a former U.S. Air Force engineer with managerial experience as the co-founder of a nonprofit library, the president of his church congregation, and his lengthy tenure coaching youth sports. (That includes his son’s high school basketball team: “There were expectations that we were going to win these games.”)
“Shake it up and pour it back out and you get a guy who's been exposed to all aspects of city manager, even though this is my first city manager gig,” Granum said.
As an unelected leader, Granum’s term of office isn’t spelled out in Red Bank’s charter. His job is to keep the city running day-to-day and to meet the goals set by his employers, the city commission, who have hiring and firing power over him.
The role contrasts with the political power of Chattanooga’s mayors. They bring their own policy platforms to the office and are more directly accountable to the electorate, who can vote them out of office.
“(Managers) are a little bit insulated from some of the dynamic factors and forces that play out in the community, because they're hired by the council members, whose job it is to deal with the dynamics of the community,” Brooks said.
Joining local civic organizations and holding regular office hours at a coffee shop have helped de-insulate Granum from the public, he said. Their input, and the strategic planning of the commission, will guide an upcoming first-of-its-kind comprehensive plan for Red Bank.
While Granum said Red Bank’s structure creates a “steadiness” in local government, it’s not guaranteed to be more cohesive or more efficient than cities with a strong mayor.
“I think whatever form of government you have, if you have good people involved, you can make it work,” Granum said. “Will it work consistently, generation over generation? That's really a different question.”