For our town to work, the borough assembly must lead.
A liberal assembly. A conservative assembly. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because each fall we hold another election when at least one third of our town’s elected body can change, an adjustment citizens can make to the assembly to more closely match their wishes.
This is the way our government was designed to work.
A friend concerned about the dismissal of manager Debra Schnabel told me, “Now the assembly is going to cut our borough facilities,” explaining that Schnabel was shielding facilities from assembly members determined to eliminate their funding.
I responded, “That’s fine. If the rest of us don’t want that, we’ll run and get on the assembly and reverse that and open the facilities back up.”
As former state Rep. Bill Thomas, R-Haines, liked to say, “What one legislature does, another legislature can undo.”
The idea that Schnabel was somehow blunting the effort by some assembly members to cut funding for the museum, Chilkat Center and library has everything to do with a corruption of roles that led to Schnabel’s firing and at least partially explains why our town can’t hold on to managers.
There’s nothing in the manager’s job description that says a manager ever should subvert the assembly’s will or engage in assembly politics. Just the opposite. Borough law says that the manager’s job is to carry out the directives of the assembly.
What happens in practice, however, is that assemblies get divided on issues, or they don’t develop their own common, political goals and agendas, or they take forever to come to a decision.
Ambitious managers like Schnabel become frustrated trying to follow the direction of an assembly that can’t or won’t lead, and they start taking on to themselves more and more of the government’s decision-making authority.
That’s the wrong move. It leads to an eventual falling out with assembly that results in a manager’s departure.
If assemblies aren’t functioning well, it’s incumbent on managers to help them become more functional, to urge them to hold workshops or retreats to come together in setting the government’s priorities and its tone.
Assemblies are comprised of six volunteers, with varying politics and differing levels of commitment to the job. Some may not even show up for a goal-setting meeting. That’s a weakness in the system.
Managers are expected to be professionals, earning up to six figures for their knowledge of how to manage staff and direct government functions. That’s a strength in the system.
In this instance, the strength needs to cover the weakness to make the assembly-manager form of government work.
The borough mayor also should feel obligated to help the assembly act efficiently and decisively. An assembly that is passive or fraught by infighting makes the government – including the mayor – appear ineffective, eroding citizen support and reducing the likelihood that worthy, hard-working residents will ever seek office, leading to additional difficulty.
The assembly’s role is to lead. If an assembly has difficulty leading, it’s incumbent for the manager and mayor to help them lead, not to take assembly leadership into their own hands.