Has the time come for an elected mayor? Cities across the country — San Diego, Hartford, Oakland, Salt Lake City — are moving toward strong executives. The idea may be once again gaining steam here BY ALEX IRVINE

Until 1923, the city of Portland operated under a weak mayor-council form of government, with 12 aldermen — nine ward-based and three at-large. That year, after a campaign that drew national notice for the aggressive electioneering of the local Ku Klux Klan, the city moved to a council-manager system in which the 12 aldermen were replaced with five councilors, all elected at large. The Klan, it seems, wanted to weaken the ward-based power of Portland’s Franco, Jewish, and Catholic neighborhoods; the move was a success, and since then the council-manager system has been largely unchanged beyond a few tweaks to add back some district-based councilors and fool around with appointment procedures.

Periodically a local crusader tries to drum up support for a return to an elected mayor. The last such effort, calling for a city charter commission to write up a proposal for a strong mayor with hiring and firing power over city officials, went down in flames in 1997. Last year, the Portland Taxpayers Association sought and received an opinion from the city on whether Portland could elect its mayor without creating a charter commission. The PTA proposal calls for what is known as a weak mayor — essentially a city councilor who serves a longer term and is the only at-large member of the council, but who can’t fire the city manager.

The issue is in the air because in the past couple of years, a number of larger cities — Des Moines, Salt Lake City, Hartford — have argued fiercely over elected-mayor arrangements, and several cities that already elected their mayors have given the position more power.

Des Moines recently turned down a proposal that combined two of the issues facing Portlanders. The measure would have combined the governments of Des Moines and Polk County, regionalizing a number of services and creating a strong mayor. City-suburb divisions killed the measure, but Des Moines Register political columnist David Yepsen pointed out that the underlying problem with city government can be corrected without involving the county. "One of the issues that’s been overshadowed in this debate is how a merged Des Moines and Polk County would be run by a full-time, well-paid mayor with real executive power," he wrote on November 2, 2004. "Des Moines can do that on its own. The new mayor would have the power to veto city council resolutions or budgets and hire and fire the city manager. We’d have a chief executive with many of the same powers given to presidents and governors."

Yepsen went on to diagnose the problem with weak mayors and powerful city managers. "The current system in Des Moines vests many powers in the hands of a strong, but unelected, city manager," he wrote. "The mayor and council are often his rubber stamps. As a result, many citizens believe City Hall is unresponsive and lacks the hustle and clout needed to put together economic growth deals in town."

This sentiment will sound familiar to some Portlanders, who have complained for years that the large number of at-large council seats, together with the ceremonial mayor, creates a system lacking in accountability and predisposes the council toward making pronouncements instead of getting anything done. One example of this toothlessness often cited around town is the police department, which appears to be its own separate kingdom under Mike Chitwood, brought to heel (sort of) only when one of its officers gets nailed with a legal judgment that puts a hitch in Portland’s budgetary getalong.

In the fall of 2003, one of the candidates for city council made a joke about "Mayor Chitwood," but not everyone finds the autonomy of Chitwoodistan amusing. The council seems unwilling to rein the chief in; an elected mayor with some executive authority would not be so timid.

In addition, while cities from Bangor to Lewiston to Scarborough have recently announced business relocations bringing hundreds of jobs, Portland hasn’t successfully recruited a business since . . . well, not counting hotels, since when? The city is often a poor advocate for itself, spending all of its marketing money to attract cruise ships instead of long-term jobs. Ocean Gateway is over-budget and behind schedule; the Scotia Prince situation has gone unresolved for a year. And the council is widely perceived among locals as unresponsive to citizen input, a perception that will no doubt be exacerbated by the council’s baffling adoption of procedures regarding "sensitive material" — a category that no one in City Hall seems to be able to define. The new procedures seem designed to keep more of the city’s decision-making processes out of the public eye.

The city, in short, suffers from a number of problems that a stronger executive voice might address more effectively than the current hydra-headed setup.

The trouble is, creating a strong(er) mayor doesn’t necessarily make these problems go away. Just look at the example of Oakland, California, which in 1998 gave Jerry Brown strong-mayor authority for a period of five years, after which the new city charter provisions would sunset unless citizens of Oakland made them permanent. Four years later, after Brown had embarked on an ambitious revitalization program backed by local business leaders but fiercely opposed by neighborhood groups, Measure CC — the scheduled proposal to make his strong-mayor powers permanent — lost by six tenths of a percentage point. Before the election, the San Francisco Bay Guardian explained its opposition to the proposal.

"When Jerry Brown first was elected mayor of Oakland," the Guardian wrote in an unsigned October 30, 2002, editorial, "we supported a change in the City Charter to give him the ‘strong-mayor’ authority he said he needed to carry out a sweeping agenda for revitalization and reform. But Brown has become an unaccountable, almost imperial mayor, ignoring citizens and refusing to attend city council meetings — all the while rapidly moving to gentrify the city. Measure CC extends the strong-mayor law, which is set to expire in 2004. Ultimately, Oakland may not be well served by returning to the old system, but the current plan hasn’t worked. The city council needs to rethink its relationship with the mayor in the light of the problems with Brown, but in the meantime, vote no on Measure CC."

Sixteen months later, with the strong-mayor powers about to expire, Brown got a new version of the extension onto a special-election ballot. Now called Measure P, it passed 69-31. This time, the Guardian was behind the proposal, for interesting reasons. "Most of the problems with having a ‘strong mayor’ — as opposed to a city council-city manager system — in Oakland have less to do with the structure of government and more to do with the current mayor, Jerry Brown," the paper wrote in another unsigned editorial. "The 1998 ballot initiative that created a strong mayor in Oakland was in may ways a power grab orchestrated by Brown, but it also reflected the fact that the city was getting too big, and the problems facing it too complex, for a city-manager system, which is more appropriate for small cities. Running Oakland is a full-time job, and it will continue to be once Brown leaves office."

These are questions for Portland voters to consider: Is Portland big enough to need a strong mayor, or any elected mayor? Is the Guardian correct when it claims that a city-manager system is best suited to small cities? Looking around New England, you’ll find that the two other cities most like Portland in population and importance to their states — Manchester, New Hampshire, and Burlington, Vermont — both have elected mayors. Look around Maine, though, and you won’t find too many elected mayors at all.

Don Meehan, president of the Portland Taxpayers Association, is careful not to mention the Klan when he talks about the 1923 reconstruction of city government. The powers-that-were, he says, felt that "there was a little too much democracy going on," so they cut down on direct representation and executive authority, creating a city government that looks more "like a corporate boardroom" than a democratically elected body.

That’s just the way councilor Jim Cohen likes it. The current form of government, "with a professional administration" and four at-large council berths, he says, makes city decision-making more democratic because every Portland voter can vote on five of the nine councilors. Cohen doesn’t believe much would change under Meehan’s proposal because the mayor would still be "one among nine" insofar as he or she would still be a member of the council.

"The nonpartisan, professional way that Portland city government has operated over these many decades has served the city well, and I’m not interested in making city government more partisan, and I’m not interested in making the administration of the city turn over on a regular basis," Cohen says. "The check and the balance in our city government" is that "the city manager serves at the pleasure of the council. Through that check the council ensures the responsiveness of the administration." Cohen sees the council as "House and Senate rolled into one," since members are both elected at-large and by district.