If You Were the Mayor/ A Call for Reader Responses

During our most recent appearance on WGVA (available here), Ted Baker asked us “What would you do if you were mayor?” While we were quick to point out that neither one of us is interested in becoming mayor, we offered a few ideas of our own on solutions to the problems of local government in the City of Geneva.

For starters, we’d like Council to become a well prepared, highly informed, deeply engaged deliberative body, respectful of dialogue. In our view, it is up to the Mayor to facilitate the group. That would involve facing fears, moving forward with confidence, exercising strong leadership skills, and being well organized.

We’d also like to see the Mayor schedule more work sessions, such as the budget workshops held by City staff and Council in 2006, to allow close interaction between Councilors and City staff. People can roll up their sleeves, study the issues, and solve problems, with lots of interaction, and in a public way.

Another thing we might do is look at well-functioning government bodies to see if we can get ideas for improving our own operating system. We believe one of the reasons for the success of Ontario County Board of Supervisors and Canandaigua City Council is their committee system. Unfortunately, the Geneva City Charter frowns upon standing committees. The alternative, that we have right now, requires councilors to serve as a “jack of all trades” on issues from public safety to public works, debt service to recreation services. We know what the other half of that old cliché is, and we think it should be changed in the name of better government.

The buck should stop with the Mayor. The Mayor is the public leader, accountable to the voters, and ought to lead the Council in setting a course for the City. He is then responsible for giving direction to City staff, who are our career civil servants and government professionals.

Right now, we have an inversion, where city staff often sets the agenda for Council. Council is often in a reactive, rather than a pro-active mode. Whether you like the results or not, you can appreciate the problem of having non-elected people calling the shots. That needs to be the other way around and it is up to the Mayor to lead that effort.

Of course, we’d like more open discussion. Get things out of the back room and onto the Council floor. We shouldn’t worry about how much time that takes. If a proper discussion means two meetings each month, so be it. Council used to meet twice a month, until about 2005, and got a lot of business done, including the Hampton Inn, the Social Security Building, the Seneca Falls Savings Bank, and the Lyons National Bank

Lastly, the Mayor should foster a collaborative partnership between Council and the City Manager. There is an International City Manager’s Association of which our own manager is a member. They have a code of ethics that clearly specifies the role the Manager should play and how he should interact with his Council. The Mayor’s role is to ensure that these standards of professionalism are adhered to; that the City Manager deals with Council as a body rather than cultivating individualized personal relationships with councilors that lead to one-on-one deals being struck outside of the public meetings.

There’s much more to say, but that’s an overview of what we talked about with Ted Baker. We never have advance notice of the questions he’ll be posing to us, and the ideas we came up with in the interview were just our initial reaction to the question. But we realized, after the interview, that this is a great question to pose to the community at large. We’d now like to ask our readers the question Ted Baker asked us: “What would you do if you were Mayor?” Let us know .