Preface


The Effective Local Government Manager, originally published in 1983, was revised in 1993 and now, again, in 2004. All three editions have many commonalities—the vitality of local government, the great variety of communities, the multiple roles managers must master, the need to adapt to current socioeconomic and political trends, and the evolving nature of the structure of local governments themselves. All three editions examine the skills and abilities that local government managers need to be successful. Beginning in the first edition and continuing through the next two, the legacy of Richard Childs,1 the reformer considered to be the conceptual father of council-manager government, is evident, but the evolution of the profession beyond Childs is also apparent. Reflected too are the prescriptions found in the Model City Charter, first published in 1915 and most recently in 2003 in its eighth edition.2

Like earlier editions of The Effective Local Government Manager, this edition is designed to meet the needs of both practicing managers and graduate students who aspire to local government management careers. Some but not all of the authors from the first edition participated in the second. Similarly, some but not all of the authors from the second edition contributed to the third, thus providing continuity to the book. Throughout, the authorship of the book has reflected a mix of academic and practitioner perspectives.

But each edition is also different. The first edition took pains to define public management and to establish criteria for measuring effectiveness. ICMA in 1983 was still the International City Management Association, without the county component, so that emphasis was on successful municipal management. The individual chapters reflected fairly orthodox thinking about The Plan, that is, the council-manager form of government; emphasized traditional intergovernmental relations; and concluded with a look at the manager as a person. At the same time, it broached the thinking of ICMA about the likely future conditions under which managers would have to provide leadership.

The second edition built on the excellent foundation of the first, but acknowledged the introspective study by ICMA leading to “New Worlds of Service” and the incorporation of the county as the other unit of general government that used the model of a professional administrator. The growing consequences of heterogeneous communities were introduced, along with intrusions on the classic council-manager structure, and the entry of single-issue politics and politicians. Ways in which elected officials and the professional executive share power, the growing concern for growth management, and the manager’s need to execute the term of service effectively were other concepts that were added to the book. In addition, each chapter ended with a self-test or exercise to verify the understanding of concepts and ensure that the ideas were grounded in practice.

By the time the third edition was prepared, the work of the ICMA Task Force on Continuing Education and Professional Development was obvious. ICMA had amended the Code of Ethics to include a mandatory annual 40 hours of professional development. It had initiated not only the ICMA University as a means of structuring professional development but also the Voluntary Credentialing Program to provide a mentored and recognized variant to professional development. Part of this emphasis on professional development was identification of a list of 18 competencies and skills that collectively constituted essential management practices that the modern local executive needed to master and the parallel development of means of assessing mastery of them. ICMA’s emphasis on professional development appears in various ways in this edition of the book. The work of ICMA in the area of continuing education gave further impetus to viewing local government management as a true profession.

The third edition puts more emphasis on ethics, new-century concepts of leadership, strategic planning, and economic development. It modernizes traditional intergovernmental relations by presenting a discussion of organizational networking. E-government, assessment and evaluation, and the difficulties of modern agenda setting are included. Particularly noticeable are discussions of variations in the council-manager plan as it is practiced in specific communities and as these variants reflect the growing power of mayors even in council-manager governments as well as the broader definitions of recognized governments by the International City/County Management Association. At the same time, the third edition returns to its roots by adding a chapter on essential management skills that include human resources, finance, and technology management; also, the final chapter restores the more personal look at the human side of professional local government management and managers. The book also is more inclusive, emphasizing that executive leadership occurs not only in the top executive’s job but in the next tier as well and in individual departments of a given jurisdiction.

Whether the reader is a graduate student looking forward to the excitement of a local government management career, a relative newcomer to general management who may have risen through the technical ranks and now seeks a broader base of knowledge, or an experienced manager who wants to review concepts and test knowledge and skills against managers of similar backgrounds, The Effective Local Government Manager, third edition, should offer something of value. More than anything, each subsequent edition of the book reflects the realities of local public management at the time of its writing.

Charldean Newell
Regents Professor Emerita of Public Administration
University of North Texas
Honorary Member, ICMA

Notes

1     Richard S. Childs, Civic Victories: The Story of an Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper, 1952), and The First Fifty Years of the Council-Manager Plan of Municipal Government (New York: National Municipal League, 1965).

2     Model City Charter, 8th ed. (Denver: National Civic League, 2003).