Council manager
Definition
Council-manager government is a structure where an elected council sets policy and hires a professional city manager to run day-to-day operations, prepare budgets, and oversee staff. The manager serves at the council's pleasure and can be replaced by a council majority.
Why it matters
This structure separates elected policymaking from professional administration, reducing the chance that a single elected mayor controls hiring and daily operations directly. But it also means the person actually running city government day to day was never on a ballot, making the manager's influence on policy implementation harder for voters to hold accountable directly.
Seen in the wild
As of 2019, more than half of U.S. cities with populations over 10,000, about 52.7 percent, used the council-manager form of government rather than a strong-mayor system, a structure the International City/County Management Association has tracked and promoted as the dominant municipal governance model in the country.1