Forms of Municipal Government in Maryland

By Victor K. Tervala

For most of Maryland’s history the state has been in solid control of itslocal
governments. In the colorful phrase coined by the man who gave us Dillon’s
Rule, local governments are nothing more than “creatures of the state,” from
which a local government derives all its powers and rights. Since 1954, and the
advent of municipal home rule in Maryland, our towns and cities have enjoyed a
measure of freedom from intrusive state interference in a number of areas. One
such area is the structure and organization of our municipal governing bodies.

If the size of the governing body needs to be altered, perhaps increased

from five to seven members, or maybe decreased from nine to three members,
home rule powers allow changes to be accomplished locally. Similarly, it is purely
a local matter as to whether a governing body will contain a mayor or whether a
professional manager will be hired. If these public officials are desired, the
municipality determines their duties and responsibilities and the processes by
which they interact with other elected officials. The state is not involved.

The Choice of Reform

When municipal reform involving structure and organization is being

considered, it stems from the belief that a different form of government can lead
to more efficient and effective service. It may be that government has grown in
complexity and structural change appears necessary. The rough and tumble of
politics often is a prime mover for such change as well. Perhaps a mayor is
unresponsive to members of the governing body or maybe the members are
unable to reach consensus on all but trivial matters. Under such circumstances,
elected officials will look to change how business is conducted. They will argue
that reform is necessary to realign responsibilities, reduce stress and relieve the
tensions undermining performance. While reform is not the only option available
(mediation is another in certain circumstances), if the problems confronting a
governing body appear to be long-term and intractable, changing the form of
government is a good choice.

Given the broad local freedom over municipal structure and organization,
one might expect a great deal of variation to characterize them. In fact, variations
exist, but they revolve around four basic models: (1) Commission; (2) Weak-
Mayor; (3) Strong-Mayor; and (4) Council-Manager. These forms derive from the
relationship between the executive and legislative functions. To the extent all
elected officials perform both the legislative and executive functions, the form of
government is known as either a Commission form or a Weak-Mayor form. When
functions are specialized, so that a set of elected officials performs the legislative
function and another elected or appointed official performs executive work, the
government is labeled a Strong-Mayor or a Council-Manager form.
 The form of government typically is expressed in the municipal charter. It
would be unusual, however, for a charter to name the form of government
provided. Don’t expect to see a bold statement in a charter that says the
municipality operates as a Strong-Mayor form, or any other form. Instead, the
charter contains provisions that, when read together, establish the form of
government. Specifically, the form becomes known by examining charter
provisions that describe executive and legislative functions. By looking at who is
responsible for performing these functions and how their performance is checked
and balanced by different municipal officials - the mayor, the professional
manager, and members of the governing body, specifically - the form of
government emerges.

Commission Form

The Commission form is the most fundamental form. There is no

separation of powers under it. Legislative and executive powers are equally
distributed to and shared by all elected officials. A presiding officer runs meetings
of the governing body. He or she may set meeting agendas, but no one person
exercises more control over legislative and executive affairs than any other. Each
elected official can sponsor and vote on local legislation. Each administers the
annual budget as well as day-to-day affairs.

In all but the smallest municipalities, however, a different elected official

oversees a different function or department. Under a commission form of
government, there may be one elected official responsible for overseeing and
managing the police department, for example. He or she may be titled “the police
commissioner.” Another elected official may be responsible for the public works
department, known as the public works commissioner. Another may control the
finance office and be known as the finance commissioner, etc. The determination
of which elected official oversees a particular department will be specified in the
charter. Often that determination process is informal, requiring little more than the
commissioners themselves to divide up the responsibilities as they see fit.

According to the Maryland Municipal League, approximately 20 percent of

all municipal corporations in the state employ the Commission form of
government. Its popularity undoubtedly stems, in part, from the fact that it has
been successful for as long as municipal corporations have existed in Maryland.
It also is a relatively simple system to understand, explain and operate.
Accountability to the voters is assured, since each department of government is
the bailiwick of a different elected official. If someone has a complaint about
sidewalks or streets, the public works commissioner is responsible for resolving
the problem. If a problem emerges with police services, the public knows that the
police commissioner is responsible.

If accountability is one of its strengths, leadership may not be one of its

virtues. No single official is authorized to direct the work or speak on behalf of the
municipal corporation. Leadership is intended to be exercised collectively. This

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cooperative element satisfies, in part, the desire to see democratic principles
reflected in the government, but may have the unintended consequence of
slowing the pace at which decisions are made. Cooperation takes time – and
perhaps this is a good thing - but it is not always successful. This weakness, such
that it exists at all, is overcome to some extent by having different elected officials
assigned to oversee different government departments.

The Commission form also is criticized for placing elected officials in

positions they may be ill qualified to serve. From time to time one hears
allegations that some officials know little about the departments they oversee.
Perhaps they’ve never been exposed to police operations prior to overseeing a
police department or, for a public works commissioner, to the various activities of
a public works department. Such problems are not insurmountable. Most
departments today are run by experienced and knowledgeable directors. There is
ample opportunity for elected officials to receive on-the-job training from
department directors.

Although the Commission form can be used in any municipality, it tends to

be the choice of smaller jurisdictions. At least in part, this may explain why some
view the form as unable to satisfy the complex demands of larger municipalities.
The criticism may be unwarranted. Eight counties in Maryland use this form of
government. All of them have populations and budgets that dwarf all but a handful
of our largest municipal corporations.

Weak-Mayor Form

The Weak-Mayor form of government is similar to the Commission form in

that each elected official shares executive and legislative responsibilities. The
key difference between the two forms is that under the Weak-Mayor form,
someone is officially designated as the mayor. This official, however, has no
more authority over legislation or administrative and executive operations than
any other elected official. Under a Weak-Mayor form of government, the office of
mayor has no real independent control over the budget, and no real independent
control over administrative affairs. Instead, the entire governing body, acting as a
committee of the whole, controls and disposes of all governmental issues.

Suffice to say, the Weak-Mayor is not a personality trait of an office holder.

It is a specific form of government articulated in the charter. The charter will
clothe the Weak-Mayor with ceremonial functions and little else. At public
ceremonies, for example, Weak-Mayors will speak on behalf of their
municipalities. They also may set agendas and run meetings. Other
responsibilities usually are not assigned them.

Typically, Weak-Mayors are not separately elected by the voters. Separate

elections for any given office usually signal that the office holder will function
differently from other elected officials; that is, his or her duties somehow are
unique in the government and a separate election for the office is justified. Since

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Weak-Mayors are not distinguishable, for the most part, from other elected
officials, the need to elect them separately does not exist. For this reason, a
typical Weak-Mayor charter requires elected officials to decide among
themselves which of them will serve as mayor. In most instances, the appointed
mayor performs the job for no more than a year or two before it is rotated to
someone else. The voters usually are not directly involved in these decisions.

The advantages and disadvantages of this system are similar to those of

the Commission form except, unlike the Commission form, the Weak-Mayor may
confuse the average voter. In my experience most voters are merely casual
observers of their municipal governments. Few have seen the charter, let alone
read the document. The everyday usage of the term “mayor” suggests an
executive fully in control of day-to-day operations; in other words, a Strong-
Mayor. If the relevant Weak-Mayor charter provisions are not read by or
explained to the voters, how could these individuals understand the duties of the
office? How could they know that the mayor exercises no more authority than
other elected officials? This misapprehension of the duties of the mayor has been
known to extend to a few elected officials as well who mistakenly cede their
authority over administrative or budgetary affairs to a Weak-Mayor simply
because he or she possesses the title of mayor.

Strong-Mayor Form

The Strong-Mayor is the form of government in use in many major U. S.

cities: New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C., to name just
a few. Under it, one person, elected by the voters, performs the executive
function. He or she is responsible for the efficiency and effectiveness of
government on a day-to-day basis. The Strong-Mayor prepares the annual
budget for deliberation by the council and has total authority to implement the
budget without council interference, barring certain executive actions requiring
council approval.

On a day-to-day basis, the service delivery and staffing functions of the

government, as well as all departmental operations, are directed by the Strong-
Mayor. He or she decides who is hired and who is fired, although the council
often is required to consent to the hiring of individual department heads. The
Strong-Mayor recommends policy to the council, but typically has no vote on the
council. He or she may have veto power over proposed legislation and may even
exercise a line-item veto in regard to the budget.

Under the Strong-Mayor form, the council does not involve itself with day-
to-day operations. Instead it operates at arms length from such activities. Its role
is to perform the legislative function, adopting municipal ordinances and policies.
Policymaking specifically includes establishing the policies under which the
mayor will run day-to-day operations. It is only through the instrument of
policymaking that the council has an opportunity to shape and influence daily
operations. It then becomes the council’s job to oversee the mayor’s

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implementation of council policies, thus assuring itself and the voters that the
government is being correctly run and managed.

The strength of this form lies in its leadership potential and in its useful
division of labor. The Council’s job, for example, is to take a long-range view of
governmental needs. The Council acts as the deliberative arm of the government,
studying its requirements, balancing the interests of residents against the
resources at the government’s disposal, and then thoughtfully promulgating its
budget, ordinances and policies. Meanwhile, the mayor’s job is to focus on
immediate administrative and operational demands. His or her job concerns the
details of government. The mayor is empowered to speak on behalf of the
government, lobby for its causes, and set its tone and direction. Strong
leadership and management skills in a mayor can never be assured, of course,
but this form of government makes available such tools in the event such an
individual is elected as mayor.

The Strong-Mayor form is structured so that its two parts – the mayor and
council – are interdependent. The weakness of the form lies within this very
quality. Each part has an important role to perform, although those roles cannot
be performed well, or perhaps not at all, without mutual cooperation. The council
must rely on the mayor to provide information of sufficient quality and quantity to
do its policy-making and oversight work. The mayor must rely on the council to
provide sufficient funds to run the government and to demonstrate sufficient trust
and forbearance in the office holder, allowing the mayor to work relatively free of
excessive council demands. In effect, the mayor seeks to avoid unnecessary
constraints on his or her actions. Typically the mayor will assert that the office
holder should be able to perform the job according to his or her own standards
and judgment when such discretion would be in the interests of the government.
When the roles of the two parties are not well understood by one another, when
sufficient information from the mayor’s office is not forthcoming for whatever
reasons, and/or when the council desires and attempts to interfere with routine
management decisions, this form of government is vulnerable to breakdowns,
some more serious than others.

Council-Manager Form

A professional manager can be accommodated in all of the four forms of

municipal government. In the Council-Manager form, however, the professional
manager is given formal authority, through the municipal charter, to run day-to-
day operations. If a professional manager exists in the other three forms, he or
she may have de facto control of daily operations, but formal authority to manage
and administer government affairs remains with one or more elected officials. The
International City/County Management Association reports that 49 percent of all
municipalities across the nation with populations exceeding 2,500 residents use
this form of government. In Maryland, the percentage is less. Approximately 11
percent of all municipalities in the state (18, at last count) employ it. They are
mostly the larger communities such as Rockville, Bowie, and Ocean City.

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 The Council-Manager form derives from the corporate model of
governance in which a board of directors appoints a professional manager - the
CEO - to run the corporation. It also is similar to the Strong-Mayor form, except in
this case, instead of an official being elected to serve as the chief executive
officer, a professional manager is appointed to the position. Unlike the Strong-
Mayor, who must be selected from the pool of municipal residents, professional
managers can be selected from anywhere in the world and can be selected solely
on the basis of their professional qualifications.

Under the Council-Manager form, the manager is the chief executive

officer. Like a Strong-Mayor, the manager prepares the annual budget for
deliberation by the council. Once the budget is approved, the manager has broad
authority to implement the budget free from council interference. The manager is
responsible for the operation of all municipal departments on a day-to-day basis.
He or she decides who is hired and who is fired except for department heads,
whose hiring typically is the joint responsibility of the council and the manager.
The manager is responsible for recommending policies to the council, although
he or she has no vote on the council. He or she has no veto power, either.
Professional managers are accountable to, and typically serve at the pleasure of,
the council.

Under this form of government, the council performs the legislative

function, adopting municipal ordinances and policies. The council is intended to
operate at arm’s length from day-to-day affairs, which remain the responsibility of
the manager. The council’s role is to establish the policies under which the
manager runs operations.

The strength of this form is its potential to displace, if not entirely replace,
political interests with economic, business or managerial interests in running
municipal operations. Municipal governments primarily are service providers.
Delivery of those services, it is asserted, should be based substantially, if not
entirely, on best management practices and principles that promise to maximize
government efficiency and effectiveness. The appointment of a professional
manager provides that opportunity. Moreover, while politics probably invades all
important decision making of a public entity, delegating operational control to a
professional manager signals the public’s desire to insulate administrative and
management functions from politics to whatever extent is possible. Nonetheless,
it may be worthwhile to bear in mind that it is a rare, and perhaps foolish, public
manager who conducts business blind to the political landscape over which he or
she treads.

Two weaknesses characterize this form of municipal government. To

illustrate them, consider the fact that elected officials are intended to operate at
arm’s length from management affairs. If there is a problem with operations,
elected officials are not empowered by the charter to correct them. They must
convey their concern and/or dissatisfaction to the manager and await the

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response. This is the crux of the matter. Regardless of what a charter might
dictate, many elected officials are tempted to involve themselves in management
decisions in a direct fashion.

The only persons accountable to the public for governmental performance

are the government’s elected officials. Incentives therefore always exist for
elected officials to involve themselves in any business that engages the
municipality, including management issues. Managers are not accountable to the
public, except in an indirect sense. An appointed manager is directly accountable
only to the elected officials who continue to employ him or her. If there are
problems with the manager’s performance, the manager may anticipate being
discharged, but the voters have only the elected officials to hold responsible.
Consequently, the dual weaknesses of this form of government are entwined: the
diminished responsibility of elected officials for daily operations and the
diminished accountability of the manager to the public. These weaknesses
suggest that a certain amount of interference by elected officials in daily
operations is inevitable, despite charter constraints to the contrary. How intrusive
and disruptive the interference will depend on the personalities involved. Some
council-manager systems are apt to be riddled with interference, others only
infrequently.

Hybrid Forms

Home rule powers have been used by many, perhaps most, municipal
corporations in Maryland to create “hybrid” forms of government. A hybrid arises
when the elements of one form are combined with the elements of at least one
other form. For example, consider a proposal that was recently posted on a
municipal web site. It would combine the elements typically found in a Council-
Manager form with elements of a Strong-Mayor form. In this case, the proposal
would delegate daily operational control to a professional manager, but retain the
office of mayor, requiring it to be a full-time position with its own staff. The
mayor’s office would be granted certain leadership responsibilities that span both
the governing body and municipal administration. In effect, the proposal would
create neither fish nor fowl; neither a Council-Manager form nor a Strong-Mayor
government, but elements of both. The government would be a hybrid.

The creation of a hybrid allows a government to select the structures and

elements that it perceives as most suited to local needs. In many cases the
selected elements aim to satisfy one or more important political interests. In the
above case, the municipality already operates as a Strong-Mayor form.
Proponents of the proposed change believe that the only politically viable way to
become a Council-Manager form of government is to allow some elements of the
present Strong-Mayor form to continue: hence, the splitting of certain authority
between the mayor and the professional manager and allowing the mayor to
continue as a full time job with dedicated staff.

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 Because hybrids are tailored to meet the needs of a given jurisdiction, in
many instances they should be preferred over the use of one of the four “pure”
forms outlined above. Nonetheless, care must be used in mixing and matching
the various elements. It should be performed with an eye toward whether the
selection of any given element fully comports with the selection of other
elements.

For example, in the above discussion of the Weak-Mayor form, this article
questioned the wisdom of having a Weak-Mayor elected separately by the voters.
In effect, this results in a hybrid where the election process typically found in a
Strong-Mayor form is grafted onto a Weak-Mayor system. Yet, as pointed out, a
Weak-Mayor functions only marginally different than other elected officials.
Separate elections are unnecessary for Weak-Mayors and potentially confusing
to voters who may be largely unaware of the workings of a Weak-Mayor system.

Biases

All of the forms of government discussed in this article have been

successfully used in Maryland. Efficient and effective government is possible
under any of them. Certainly each form has its drawbacks. Each has its strengths
and weaknesses. For this reason, the contention that one form of government is
generally superior to another, a statement often heard, is difficult to support. Bear
in mind that the efficiency and effectiveness of any government organization may
ultimately have more to do with the quality of the people serving in office rather
than its structural components. That said, the best form of government is the one
best designed to meet the needs of your municipal corporation. Those needs can
change with the complexity of operations and, as suggested, even with the
presence or absence of certain appointed and elected officials.

Victor K. Tervala is Chief Solicitor with the City of Baltimore. He is a former

faculty member of the University of Maryland’s Institute for Governmental Service
& Research, and is perhaps best known for his expertise in the structure of local
governments and options in structuring and restructuring these entities. He is an
advisor to the Academy for Excellence in Local Governance and is the lecturer
for the Academy Core class, “The Structure of Municipal Government.”