Preserving The Republic One Town At A Time Updated

"You can fool some of the people all the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all the people all of the time." Abraham Lincoln

Most of us who are involved in small town government are volunteers or are paid only a token amount for our services. We are either elected or appointed to our boards, councils or commissions. We have families and jobs and are seldom political scientists or professional public servants. Not being professionals puts us at a decided disadvantage when dealing with the ever growing power of town managers over our communities. It is important to remember that it is the elected town government which employs the town manager. Increasingly, however, town managers seem to ignore this fact and act as if this arrangement was the other way around. The growth of the role of the non-resident and unelected town manager has led to many conflicts as citizens fight to keep control of their town's destiny.

Most town managers are itinerant moving from town to town over the course of their careers. This profession has one of the highest turnover rates of any occupation. There are many reasons for this. Being a professional, town managers often quickly assume an attitude of thinking that they know what's best for their employer's town. Such an attitude inevitably leads them to indulge in all kinds of Machiavellian maneuvers to manipulate various members of the community to achieve their goals. After a few years of this, enough enemies will have been made so that the manager becomes an election issue and is then sent packing.

A second reason for the high turnover is the fact that many small towns are governed by charters that never envisioned the need for town managers. Such charters don't even mention the position and are full of ambiguities that allow for all kinds of mischief. No party clearly knows what is expected of the other. Often, these charters provide for no elected mayor or long term commission president to counter the machinations of a manager. Ridgely, for example, rotates its commission president yearly, making management of the town manager difficult at best. Again, over time, ill will builds up and the manager faces the risks of growing citizen hostility.

The third reason for the instability of the position is the fact that our own American political culture is changing. Many citizens have lost their political self respect and ability to act as sovereign decision makers. Our society is run more and more on a bureaucratized or corporate model with less opportunities for the development of these traditional citizenship characteristics. People are elected to office unprepared to govern. They act as if they are serving on a charity board instead of a real flesh and blood political entity. Once again, after a few years, these folks wake up, assert themselves and it's off to the hinterlands for the town manager. This constant turnover doesn't benefit any one. The towns suffer from inconsistent management and town managers suffer from unemployment.

Let me retrofit an old saying here. "town managers or their equivalent consultants, you can't live with them and you can't live without them". For our citizen volunteers charged with governing our towns, their job is no small matter. We need the expertise of either a town manager or assorted consultants. Without them, we will find ourselves rudely awoken one morning by our fellow citizens, ready to lynch us because the waste water treatment plant is overflowing and their toilets won't flush. There is no question that we need these policy wonks. However, we are the ones who know what is best for our towns and set the direction of the course where we want to take our towns. We must make it absolutely clear that we are in charge. Failure to do so leads to unbalanced budgets, higher taxes and water bills and excessive ugly development. These are problems concerning the town's quality of life which our elected resident legislators must be attuned to. They are the kind of problems that get little attention from a non-resident and unelected town manager. This creates the sad opportunity for a town government to morph into the strange proposition of being (to borrow and retrofit another old saying) " a government by and for the employees". At this point, the town manager can even run candidates for office who are little more than water carriers for the town manager. Such a proposition gets expensive and the need for tax revenues will be ever growing. It's here that schemes including eminent domain abuse to raise more tax revenues raise their ugly head. In this situation, New London, Connecticut, the pioneer of eminent domain abuse is only right up the road. With its $238,000.00 deficit (which preceded the global financial meltdown), is Ridgely heading in this direction?

First, the town manager should be a stakeholder in the community. They should be required to live in the town they will serve as a citizen and taxpayer. This doesn't mean renting an apartment to use a few nights a week. It means residency plain and simple which must be written into a contract and clearly understood before being hired. Then, residency must be enforced. The negligence of elected officials to carry through on this first step is setting the town manager up for failure. A potentially successful town manager could be wasted if allowed to ignore this important step. A strong correlation seems to exist between town manager residency and an absence of autocratic actions. Ridgely has failed to pass this test and the consequences are a huge deficit.

Elected officials must make it clear to the manager that they haven't hired a municipal union leader (sorry grandpa). The town manager is management and works for the elected officials serving the taxpaying town residents. This isn't to advocate not paying employees what they are worth. You won't, for example, be able to keep a police force in a small town with the state and county constantly trying to recruit your recruits with promises of more money. It is, however, about the loyalty of the town manager to the elected officials who hired him. Too often town managers view the employees as their first constituency. If the manager has somehow avoided step one and not really moved to town, what does it matter if requests for salaries and benefits for staff will far exceed the town taxpayer's median income? Also, it's not money out of his pocket if deficits grow as they have in Ridgely.

Development and growth for the sake of raising enough tax dollars to maintain an ever increasing payroll destroys towns. The town manager's bottom line is often in conflict with the town resident's interest in maintaining their quality of life. When a choice must be made between revenues or quality of life issues, the manager frequently favors the first. This is particularly true if he isn't a town resident. Great plans emphasizing "smart growth" and "traditional neighborhood development" will all fall by the wayside in an economic crunch. It is at this juncture that the mettle of elected officials and town planning commissions will really be tested. Ridgely has arrived at this point and our Planning and Zoning meetings are now battle zones.

Certain citizens drive autocratic town managers nuts. They are usually the activist types who overwhelmingly make up a town's volunteer commissions. These are the natural enemy for autocratic town managers because they also think they know something about how their town should be run. They also can still think and act like old fashioned American citizens. Usually they aren't of one political persuasion. One of my favorite towns has an interesting coalition including Greens and Paleo-Conservatives. As long as national issues are avoided, they work well together trying to preserve their town from what Russell Kirk termed "the enemies of the permanent things".

If your town manager is having activist troubles, expect him to exploit any possible resentment of the activist group and attempt to remake the assorted commissions in the town managers image. People with no experience will suddenly be held up as planning experts to replace long term planning commission members.

Most of us don't want any of the above to happen. To start with, elected officials ought to start acting like they understand the power they have and exercise it on behalf of their constituents. Then, there are also ways to address the problem of inadequate old town charters which fail to address the role of the town manager. Ambiguity must be banished from these documents. A strong and consistent council presidency or mayor commission type of government must be established. This is absolutely essential to manage the town manager. Or, the new charter may not even provide for a town manager but more affordable and manageable consultants. Regardless, what's needed is a classic check and balance type of arrangement that can work well.

Charter change is not the panacea for all of the a town's problems. It's possible that a completely spineless mayor could be elected who actually sees nothing wrong with schemes for over development or using eminent domain to fatten tax rolls to cover overspending. However, in such cases, the citizen has a recourse through the ballot box. At least elected officials have records that can be made campaign issues.

Benjamin Franklin's observation at the conclusion of the Constitutional convention applies here. When asked what had been accomplished, he replied that: "You have a republic, if you can keep it". The history of republics is littered with failures from Rome to Weimar. All too often, it is the citizens themselves through their apathy, fear, or lack of knowledge, that allow the abrogation of their rights. We need to get to work here in our small towns to "keep" alive our part of this republic.

We Need Stimulus Too

The stimulus package contains plenty of pork. However, now that it's law we need to get our share. It is, after all, our tax money too. Ridgely has plenty of projects which would qualify that are either shovel ready or even shovels in the ground. We need to pay for the waste water treatment plant project which is already under way. We need our public safety building for the RVFD and our police. We also need a new water tower. What steps has our town administration taken to secure our piece of the pie?

A Tale Of Two Commissions

The following is from the November town meeting minutes:

"Joe went back to the Ethics Board nomination. He said in the past, when an individual has been serving on a commission, and has been inquired about it and wants to be reappointed, the normal thing has been that the commissioners have reappointed that individual. If there are other people who are interested in serving, there are other commissions and committees to get involved in. We have an individual who for two months has stated that he would like to be reappointed, and he feels it is disrespectful to him to hold this off. The policy has been in the past that if the name is brought up, unless there is something dramatically wrong, or some concern, that the individual would continue for at least another term."

Herman Dunst was reappointed. Last month Jeff Garrett asked the he be reappointed to the Planning and Zoning Commission and forwarded his application to the Commissioners who tabled it. There is someone else interested but by applying the Town Managers own words above, this request should be channelled into another commission. What is the difference between these two commissions and commissioners?

Our Planning and Zoning meetings haven't been the most pleasant recently as we continue to stand up to pressure to approve anything that comes before us. It's not the Planning Commissions job to undo the Town Manager's deficit. We have ordinances on the book which have succeeded in keeping Ridgley a great small town. Despite the pressure, we have been upholding these ordinances. We have not been too popular with the Town Manager. Removing long serving Planning Commissioners and changing the Planning Commission make up might make the whiz from Westover happy but will leave Ridgely seriously at risk.

When Pigs Fly

Our town manager has written a letter to me demanding that I apologize by March 2nd for my blog post "Charter Change Would Disenfranchise Elderly Voters". He doesn't seem concerned with the main point of the post which is summed up in the title. Instead, he's concerned that the town clerk gets credit since it was her idea to begin with. Whew...this is "I was only following der orders" turned on its head. Regardless of the who first came up with this brain fart, the fact remains that it was the town manager who presented this "idea" using the words "we" and "I propose" repeatedly at the January 26th workshop. No matter what the source, this proposal would disenfranchise voters not known for their fealty to the "town manager party" only a short time before the town election.

Instead of me apologizing for reporting the facts, I think that the town manager owes us an apology. In fact, I can think of 238,000 reasons for an apology as our budget deficit (which preceded the global financial crisis) leads to the shrinking of town services including police protection.

Even The Fig Leaf Has Fallen

The Ridgely town manager is contractually obligated to live in the 21660 zip code. When he was hired he made it clear that he understood what it meant to live here and repeatedly informed those at town meetings that he and his family were moving here. Many towns require the town manager to live in or near the town in order to become a stakeholder in the community. Being a stakeholder is a good way to ensure that a town manager doesn't run up huge deficits or become too cozy with developers trying to take advantage of a town.

Our town manager never fulfilled the original requirement of his contract. He simply rented a house on 480 where he stayed a few nights a week while remaining with his family in Westover. He used the rental address for a new drivers licence and a majority of the commissioners let the issue pass. Now it appears that even this pretense of residency has fallen by the wayside. It certainly doesn't look like the town manager is living in the 480 rental. Even this fig leaf has fallen. Is he staying somewhere else in the area a few nights a week? Have the commissioners pressed him on the issue which is still important to many of us? If not, why?

Since Ridgely has a $238,000.00 deficit (which predates the global financial meltdown), some may not worry so much about the town manager's residency requirement. On the other hand, if this requirement had been enforced to begin with (making the town manager a resident stakeholder in our community) many of us believe that our financial situation might be quite different.

Charter Change Would Disenfanchise Elderly Voters

Where in the world is our town going? The town manager proposed at the last commissioner workshop that our voter registration system for Ridgely residents be scraped.

As it now stands, people registered for national and state elections are automatically registered to vote in town. We also have a parallel system where people who (for whatever reason) are only registered in town for town elections. This is an old fashioned way of doing things and most of the registrants are elderly. There aren't many registrations like this and after all these years these people aren't going to register any other way. What's the problem? Have these Ridgely residents voted the "wrong" way in our town elections? Mean old Mr. Machiavelli would be proud.

Although we do need comprehensive charter change, we don't need this type of selective change which would only serve to limit the Ridgely electorate. Fortunately, time may be on the side of democracy here. There isn't enough time for a charter change before the April election. Also, it's not clear whether or not the commissioners took this proposal seriously. With all the problems Ridgley faces, I doubt they want to waste time tinkering with the charter and hearing the howls of protest from their fellow citizens.