Commission Meeting Paper

In the State of Texas, the Council-Manager form of government is preferred by all of the major cities, except for Houston who prefer the Mayor-Council form of government. Under the Council-Manager form of government, the voters are at the top of the hierarchical structure. In this capacity, the voters elect a small City Council, including a mayor, who is the presiding officer over the City Council. Although the Mayor is symbolically the “Head of State”, he or she is not the head of government. The Mayor and City Council have the authority to appoint four of the city’s government officials: the City Manager, the City Attorney, the City Clerk and the Municipal Judge (some cities elect this position). Moreover, although weak in this form of government, the Mayor has a vote on many issues impacting the city; however, lacks any type of veto authority (except in a few cities), which means that laws are passed by on a majority-rule voting system of the total City Council Members, meaning all City Council Members must vote in order to pass a law. Most importantly, the Mayor and City Council primary role lies in the establishment of a strategic vision for the city. Once this is accomplished, the Mayor and the City Council are responsible for generating a strong mission statement that aligns with a set of clear goals, resulting in effective government policy guidance for execution by the City Manager to run the city. Collectively, the Mayor and City Council hire the City Manager who has full management authority, to execute the Mayor’s and City Council’s vision for the city. However, a City

I would never want to serve as a public servant. I thought the meeting was quite bland and long. I appreciate the people that do dedicate their time to the public and also understand that kind of position is not for me. I have strong political opinions but do not have an interest for government as a whole. I would however possibly donate my time to a campaign issue in the future, especially if it was something I felt strongly about. It’s not something I would want to do everyday, but I would want to help make a change for something I believe in. Some campaign issues I might consider helping with is abortion rights, environmental issues, death penalty, birth control, and gay rights.

The City of Bend, Oregon Government consists of approximately 500 employees across thirteen different divisions. These divisions are Police, Fire, Community Development, Public Works, etc and are all coordinated under the City Manager’s office. Bend’s government style is called a “weak mayor” form of city government, in that the citizens elect a city council, which then elects a mayor from among the council members. The city council and mayor, then hire a City Manager to run the day to day operations of the city. In doing this form of government, the City Manager is not directly accountable to the citizens and can focus on the needs of the city and its employees. At the same time, the City Council can only provide direction to the city manager and is accountable to the citizens. The city employees in this case are led by the city manager as directed by city council. The community leadership environment in this case is established by council to provide direction to the city manager.

On Monday, April 13th, 2009, I visited the Culver City city council meeting, and found that they operate using a council-manager form of government. For a city with a population of about 38,000, this type of governmental structure is fairly common, and I was not surprised to see it in action in a community where the median household income is around $56,000 a year. Culver City is also a culturally rich community with a 60 percent Caucasian population, and a quarter of the residents are either of African American or Asian decent. The mayor, D. Scott Malsin, is one of five members on the council, and his term as mayor is on a rotating basis. Having been to a Hermosa Beach city council meeting with a similar council-manager structure, I knew

The increased of industrialization in American cities brought a new social demand to public officials who were unprepared to target the existing issues of society. Administrative officers started to gaining power to conduct intervention programs or institutions. However, people started to distrust public administrators and institutions for their inefficiency and incapacity they gave to the treatment of social issues. The author

For example, Matt Rinaldi from the TribTalk writes an article saying that, “Local governments are far superior to state governments in their ability to communicate with and respond to issues raised by local constituents in areas.” This shows that local cities are normally controlled by local governments that take part in state government, since it is broken down. The government for Texas will need the help of local governments to find out how to find ways to at least have some control towards the cities, including having a limit to how much money is

Political machines and the reformers who rallied against them had incredible influence in urban politics in the 19th and early 20th century. Each, however, has been labeled as corrupt monopolies and are seen as selfish towards their own goals. While there are tactics that worked to help cities grow stronger, the value of equal voting for all citizens was compromised in each regime’s quest for power.

I feel that everything was discussed in a rush that it really did not give the commissioner’s time to really think the issues that were discussed through. The commissioner meetings have an agenda that must be followed and lets them be aware of all the subjects that need to be discussed. I know this meeting was being rushed because there was one time that they even accidently skipped one subject and had to go back to it. I was told that usually commissioner meetings are usually two hours long and this meeting was only one hour and eighteen minutes long. I must also say that not everyone in the council think alike. I felt that some agreed and some disagreed by the comments and suggestions they would give to certain issues.

The purpose of this paper is to comprehensively compare and contrast the implementation of two types of mayor-council government systems which are that of the weak-mayor type of the mayor council system and the strong-mayor type of the mayor council system. The premise of the analysis which has been conducted in this paper is based upon assessing the local governments of two cities within the United States – Sioux Falls, South Dakota and Minneapolis, Minnesota which follow the adoption of a strong-mayor system and weak-mayor system respectively.

12 years ago the senate passed a statute that ordered every educational institution to honor the history and development of the constitution by setting aside one day for reflection. I had the opportunity to be apart of California Baptist Universitie’s meeting deticated to this special day. Trinity law school Professor Myron Steeves devoted an hour of his time to inform the meeting’s audience of the history and development of the U.S. Constitution.

I went to the Carrollton City Council on Tuesday, March 7, 2017 at 1945 E. Jackson Road Carrollton, TX 75006 at 7pm. First, I thought it will be boring to go at the Council meeting but I was wrong. The reason is that everything is new for me and the people that I met they were new face to me. At the meeting, I saw a few Citizen couple, University and College Student like me, the speaker that who like to report what is happening around the city, Race trace company is requesting mayor to relocate their company around Surgeon Dr and Midway Road. This meeting does not take long because it just takes one hour.

For over a year, the Mayor did read guidelines for speakers, trying to bring some order to meetings that had become dominated by 12-15 U City residents who are intent on voicing ugliness and hate, discouraging and frightening some people from even attending the meetings. No Councilmember ever opposed those guidelines, and no member of the public spoke out against them. The Mayor stopped reading those guidelines at the request of Councilmember Glickert, who asked that the Council discuss the rules in a study session.

His willingness to listen and engage, coupled with action (doing what he said he would do) clearly set the stage for open dialog and support. He also realized that he needed to clearly communicate his goals and vision, which in-turn gained him buy-in from the department and external entities. He was also a student of “politics”, and demonstrated his prowess in the example given in the text when he was building a new precinct (Cordner, 2014). He realized there would be political and community pressure with this decision, so he made the argument by presenting facts as to why it needed to go where he wanted and left the decision in the hands of the community and city leaders. He did not “play politics”, but allowed the system work by following the principle of political

Thank you for the note. I was made aware of this by Kebby at a PTO meeting last week. I know his intentions were pure and I appreciate his enthusiasm and passion to help the students grow and become better learners. Researching the textbooks, we have an issue. The high school has told me that we do not have enough textbooks for a classroom set and take home set, they do have extra copies that students can check out from the library for home use. I am awaiting inventory lists from the schools and we will do what we have to do to take care of this issue.

Imagine a world ruled by mayors. Nation-states and federal governments become obsolete because cities are fully capable of running themselves. Benjamin Barber proposed that very idea in a Ted Talk he gave titled: “Why Mayors Should Rule the World”. However, his point of contention does not account for three potential dilemmas: It would be harder to solve global issues, ruralism would be eradicated, and laws would no longer be consistent. I disagree with the points made by Benjamin Barber in his TED Talk; mayors should not rule the world because it would lead to a plethora of conflicts and controversy.