Why don’t City Managers ever last at Milpitas City Hall?

What’s going on at Milpitas City Hall?

There’s so much we can’t know. Indeed, we can’t know anything. Most of us don’t work there. What we do know is, the place has a special revolving door installed just for its City Managers…

The Milpitas Beat is almost 7 years old. In that time, we’ve seen City Hall chew up and spit out City Managers Tom Williams, Julie Edmonds-Mares, Steve McHarris, and most recently Ned Thomas. That means that on our watch, Milpitas City Managers have lasted for an average of less than two years. By this point, there should be a countdown clock installed just above the City Manager’s desk.

What’s happening here? All four of the characters listed above had different stories and different forms of departure. The most meaningful common denominator is that the City Council decides who gets in, and stays in, the job. Milpitas has a Council-manager system of government, whereby the Council sets the policies yet the Manager runs City Hall itself. The underlying concept is that the Council, consisting of citizens who were elected to office, can benefit from leaning on the bureaucratic expertise of the Manager. Functionally, however, this system can bring with it built-in antagonism, insofar as the Council and the Manager can feel like they are playing on different teams.

I’ve seen something similar occur when directing films. The director, as a matter of course (almost always), has a cinematographer shooting the movie. The cinematographer, or cameraperson, has an exceedingly important job: to shoot the actual film. Yet it’s the director’s job to “call the shots,” deciding how the camera moves and where it goes. Theoretically, this arrangement makes sense, as the director, being busy with directing the entire cast and crew, cannot run the camera all by themselves. Yet it’s natural for directors to clash with cinematographers, because although they are unified in their ultimate objective – making the movie – they might fall prey to a natural power struggle over whose “eye” is really carrying the overall vision. (Note: Two years ago, I became my own cinematographer while directing, and ever since then I have directed in a state of joy.)

So we have the elected leaders and their appointed manager. One can see how these two forms of person might end up holding one another in contempt. The elected officials, in order to attain their seats, had to go out and shake hands with thousands of people, communicating complex and specific goals and visions. And yet they might come in lacking nuts-and-bolts expertise when it comes to implementing their policy ideas. That’s where the City Manager comes in, to supply the nuts and bolts. However, there is no natural union of sensibilities; the elected leaders are ideas people, communicators, possessors of ideology; the City Manager is an administrator, an executor, a studier of codes and rules and laws. 

It’s as though the two parties are speaking separate languages.

And yet, it would be deceitful to say that the Council-manager model usually fails. After all, it came about in the late 19th century. One can currently find it not only across the United States, but also in Ireland, Canada, and New Zealand. Indeed, Milpitas has a poor regional reputation due to its string of abbreviated City Manager runs. City Managers in Milpitas don’t go out with retirement parties and warm, loving speeches; they leave in what seems like inevitable disgrace, amid scandal and headlines and lawsuits.

How might this change?

Discouragingly, it is a matter of culture. I don’t mean ethnic culture; I mean government culture. Indeed, our City Hall radiates a kind of careerist, corporate culture, one marked by safe, predictable, and polite communication, all of which is outwardly pleasant but clearly masks (or tries to) an underlying discord. And culture is uniquely and intensely difficult to alter. For culture is an infinitely complex interweaving of uncountable unconscious factors. To state it more simply, it’s just the way that people behave in certain places. What leads to it? What sustains it? It’s upheld by so many unknowable, subtle contracts: people’s temperaments, their countenance, how much they express and how much they withhold.

And I daresay, where an excess of decorum brews, so does a marked deficit of authenticity. Politeness is safe. Niceness is safe. Simple conversations cannot get you into any trouble…

At least not in the near-term.

Over the long-term, though, you end up with repression. Tensions go unreleased. Resentments go unexpressed. Tiffs and squabbles are allowed to fester, so as to bloom into tense, aggressive clashes. Am I being too critical? Do we in fact have a City Hall of radically open communicators? Is Milpitas City Hall a place where, when conflict begins to arise, it is bravely and openly nipped in the bud, or steered away from, ignored, buried, and denied…until which time as it comes roaring to the surface?

The problem is, human reality – especially in the space of politics – can never only be pleasant. Where there’s light, there’s shadow. And until our city has a government culture where there is more room for frankness, candidness, and healthy conflict, as opposed to distance, judgment, and denial, then you can expect our City Managers to continue coming and going.

But whatever you do, don’t hire me for the job. I can’t even stand working with a cinematographer.