Legalities and a strong mayor | Federal Way letters
Published 10:43 am Friday, September 18, 2009
Our current Federal Way city government, the council-manager form, is not perfect, and I have sometimes strongly disagreed with the council. However, I feel it is far better for our city than the strong mayor form. I read pertinent parts of the Revised Code of WA (RCW) and I urge you to vote to keep our current council-manager form of government.
Should the voters choose to change to a strong-mayor form, the mayor will solely be the administrative head of the city and will receive a large salary. All alone, that mayor can appoint and remove all non-elected city officers and employees at his will. This will be the start of political patronage in our city — not a good thing for the taxpayers. This means that the mayor can at any time dismiss city staff, including the city clerk, chief law enforcement officer, any additional city managers, the heads of all the departments, etc., and put cronies into these positions.
The strong mayor is also the one who prepares and presents the budget to the council. The council votes it in, but the mayor would still be able to move money from one category to another after the vote, without the consent of the council. Thus the mayor could ignore projects originally in the budget, once the budget was passed, and put more funds into pet projects. The council could not stop it. Under our current system, the city manager works for the council and is more likely to keep the intent of the budget for which they voted. The strong mayor can also veto council-passed ordinances, requiring the council to pass them again with an even larger majority, if they are to actually be emplaced in the code.
By the RCWs, the strong mayor would be in office for a period of four years and cannot be removed by a vote of the council. Under our current situation, the city manager serves at the pleasure of the council who can dismiss him/her at any time. Thus, the mayor will be entrenched for four years at a time, can have cronies in the administration, and be able to strongly control whether an ordinance passed by the council actually goes into effect. The mayor could choose to both collect a substantial administrative salary, probably $125,000 to $150,000 per year, and still hire another top administrator, like a city manager, for another $125,000 to $150,000 per year, running up the city payroll.
If the mayor did not hire a city manager, but was not running the city effectively, the council might vote that the city needed one. Even then, the mayor could decide not to fill the position and keep running the city himself, or fill it with another crony and not delegate any authority to him, but let him receive that big paycheck from the taxpayers for no work.
In short, the strong mayor has great potential for running up salaries in city government and creating favor and patronage jobs. Those job holders would owe allegiance to the mayor and not to the people of Federal Way who would be paying their salaries. The strong mayor will have far, far more power than a reading of the RCWs indicates, and if we change to the strong-mayor government, we legally cannot change back or vote in another form of government until six more years have passed.
Think about the possibilities and vote “no” in November on the strong mayor proposal for Federal Way.
Margaret Nelson, Federal Way
