The Road Not Previously Taken. It's Time for Us to Put On Our Hiking Boots.

Since its inception, the Village has relied on a Commission for governance.  As far as I know, the Commission was always five members.

For decades, four of those five Commissioners literally ran the Village.  Each one headed a department (Public Works, Finance, the Police, Recreation), and the Mayor did not head a department.  The Village was even smaller and more modest before than it is now, and Commissioners did the best they could, based on interest and willingness, but no real working knowledge.  It's not hard to imagine that Village departments were inexpertly and often inefficiently and improperly run, leading to various kinds of deficiencies.  There was enough play in the system, however, and minimal enough demands, that we could survive this kind of management without much more fall-out than inept departments.  And gradual, but insidious, deterioration.

Culminating in 2005, a Charter Review Committee impaneled by the Commission issued a firm recommendation that the Village give up lay management in favor of using a professional manager.  It was recognized that municipal management requirements had gotten sufficiently far away from the capabilities of residents whose training, skills, and talents were unrelated to the needs at hand that they should no longer pretend to do what they could not do.  The Commission agreed to surrender most of its responsibilities, it symbolized the transition by further agreeing to lower its salary, and it recommended to the general residents of the Park that they accept professional management.  In a referendum in December of that year, the residents of the Park took the advice of the Charter Review Committee and the Commission, and agreed to have a professional manager.

We are now on our third manager.  The first did little for us, but the second was energetic, dedicated, and in many ways effective.  She decided that the task here was such that she needed a full time assistant, so we agreed to hire one.  The manager eventually left for a better job, and we hired our third manager.  The assistant to the second manager stayed on.

The Commission still exists, and its role is to make general policy and hire and fire the manager.  The Commission importantly sets the budget for the Village, on advice from the manager.  The Commission also makes some practical decisions for the neighborhood, but no longer on matters that represent day-to-day functioning.

Recently, the Manager had reason to consider whether it would advantageous to the Village if we outsourced the sanitation function of our Public Works Department.  Because she knew there was a lot of feeling about this possibility, she did not exercise her exclusive prerogative to make this decision, but instead, she turned the decision over to the Commission.  The Commission did whatever it considered to be its "due diligence," the rest of the Village was involved in information-gathering and providing input, and the Commission decided to outsource the function.  This decision was met with satisfaction and approval from some residents, and dissatisfaction and disapproval from a larger group.  On the surface of it, we might conclude "you can't please everyone."

The Commission certainly didn't please everyone.  In fact, it displeased a lot of people.  These people were so displeased that some of them wanted the decision reversed and the Commissioners who voted for it removed from office!  The argument from these neighbors was that if there were a lot of them, and if they stated a preference in this matter, then the Commissioners should do what they, the general residents of the Village, want.

In theory, this is not an unreasonable philosophy.  And that's what it is: a philosophy.  It's a philosophy about the primacy of the governed in a system of pure self-government.  It's hard to argue with that philosophy, too, if the collection of the governed is sufficiently small and available.  We can allow the governed to make the decisions themselves.

So what do we do with the other system upon which we agreed?  We have always had a Commission, although we did agree it was not up to the task at hand.  The Commission hired a manager, but many of us now resent and resist this level of intrusion and expense.  So if we have that small and accessible collection of interested residents, if we resent and resist professional management, if we accept the Commission only on condition that it do whatever the general residents want it to do on an issue-by-issue basis, and the Commission is susceptible to removal from office if it makes an independent decision, then maybe we no longer need anything except the general residents.  Maybe we can change the Charter again, and simply jettison the Manager and the Commission.  The only drawback is inept and inefficient management of public services, but residents weren't complaining about that.  In fact, they made a clear statement regarding sanitation: we don't care if it's inefficient and unnecessarily expensive; we just want it, and we're willing to pay for it, sort of.  There it is: a decision made without layers of scrutiny and management.

It seems now would be a good time to re-impanel a Charter Review Committee.  The Committee has one task: remove the positions of Commission and Manager from the Charter.  Instead, the Village can self-govern, as it seems to want to do anyway, by calling a gathering of its residents together whenever there are decisions to make, and having residents raise their hands, as they did at a recent Special Commission Meeting.  This governmental relic is still active in some smaller New England municipalities.  It's called "Town Meeting."  We can save a lot of money, and we no longer have to risk the consequences of elected officials who get detoured into understandings not shared by the residents at large.  We'll just cut out all the middlemen.