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You probably learned about American government in high school. Three branches. Checks and balances. Bi-cameral legislature. You may even remember that, before the Constitution was drafted, the Articles of Confederation first adopted by the founding generation didn’t include a presidency separate from congress.
But you probably didn’t learn about the way cities and counties govern.
For that you’d need to read your local charter (it’s like the municipal version of the Constitution). Across the country, cities and counties have come up with thousands of diverse ways to organize a government. Sometimes the mayor is part of the local council and other times the mayor is a separate entity. Sometimes the mayor gets a vote at council meetings, other times not. Frequently the mayor is simply a figurehead who appoints a professional city manager to oversee the government’s various operations and departments.
Broadly speaking, all of these combinations can usually be classified as “Strong Mayor” or “Weak Mayor.”
There’s some variation in how cities refer to these arrangements, but more often than not a “Strong Mayor” system can also be called a “mayor–council government” system and a “Weak Mayor” system can be referred to as a “council–manager government” system.
Usually, in a “Strong Mayor” system an elected mayor has direct administrative authority over the government and its departments. Under a “Weak Mayor” system, an appointed city manager (something like a municipal CEO) has that administrative authority.
Regardless of which form the government takes, we’re typically dealing with two branches of government: (1) the executive either in the form of a “Strong Mayor” or a city manager appointed by a “Weak Mayor” and (2) a legislature in the form of a city commission, town council, board of county commissioners, etc. and all of the lower boards and committees that may comprise or report back to the main legislative body.
Either way, it’s most often the executive who has direct authority over the government’s departments and professional staff while the legislature is able to enact laws or sit in a quasi-judicial capacity to authorize various permits, waivers, licenses, etc.
The mayor-council system is a common form of municipal government in the United States. In this system a mayor heads a locally elected council. The mayor may be either popularly elected or elected by the council from among its members. There are two types of mayor-council government. In the weak mayor-council form, the mayor is merely council chairman and has largely only ceremonial and parliamentary functions. In the strong mayor-council form, the mayor acts as real chief executive of the city or town, with the power to veto actions of the council.
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The mayor–council government system is a system of organization of local government that has an executive mayor who is directly elected by the voters, and a separately elected legislative city council. It is one of the two most common forms of local government in the United States, and is also used in Brazil,[1] Canada, Italy, Israel, New Zealand, Poland and Turkey. It is the one most frequently adopted in large cities, although the other form, council–manager government, is the local government form of more municipalities.
The variant may be broken down into two main variations depending on the relationship between the legislative and executive branches, becoming a weak-mayor government or a strong-mayor government variation based upon the powers of the office. These forms are used principally in modern representative municipal governments in the United States, but also are used in some other countries.[2] In a weak-mayor system, the mayor has no formal authority outside the council; the mayor cannot directly appoint or remove officials, and lacks veto power over council votes.[3] As such, the mayor's influence is solely based on personality in order to accomplish desired goals.
The weak-mayor form of government may be found in the United States, mostly in small towns that do not use the more popular council–manager form used in most municipalities that are not considered large or major cities, and is frequently seen in small municipalities with few or no full-time municipal employees. By contrast, in Canada the weak-mayor system is popular even in large cities.[citation needed] The strong-mayor form of mayor–council government usually consists of a mayor elected by voters as the head of the executive branch, and a unicameral council as the legislative branch.[4] In the strong-mayor form, the elected mayor is given almost total administrative authority and a clear, wide range of political independence, with the power to appoint and dismiss department heads without council approval or public input. In this system, the strong-mayor prepares and administers the city budget, although that budget often must be approved by the council. Abuses of this form[example needed] led to the development of the council–manager form of local government and its adoption widely throughout the United States.
In some strong-mayor governments, the mayor will appoint a chief administrative officer who will supervise department heads, prepare the budget, and coordinate departments. This officer is sometimes called a city manager. While the term city manager is used in the council–manager form of municipal government, the manager in the strong-mayor variant is responsible only to the mayor.
Most major American cities use the strong-mayor form of the mayor–council system, whereas middle-sized and small American cities tend to use the council–manager system.[5]
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