Is it the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning for the city of Pueblo’s experiment with a strong mayor form of government? Voters will make that decision on November 4th when they vote on the city’s Ballot Question 2C. Will it be staying the course with a strong mayor or revert to what it had for years?
Until 2019, Pueblo, like a majority of Colorado cities, was run under a city manager form of government. The position is not an elected office, but one selected by a majority of the city council. The position is essentially a non-political chief administrative officer.
With a city manager, the mayor is usually the president of the city council and serves mainly in a ceremonial and informal capacity for things like ribbon cuttings or making non-political proclamations.
A city manager’s role is administrative with duties that include working with department heads and ensuring efficiency in city government. The city manager also interacts with city council to enact council directives.
A strong mayor form of government, as Denver has, gives the mayor the responsibility for setting policy and legislative agendas, drafting budgets, overseeing public safety, exercising veto power over city council, appointing directors and staff positions and serving as the face of city government.
Current Pueblo Mayor Heather Graham, who also once served on Pueblo’s city council, favors retaining the current system. A request for comments from Graham went unanswered but in a recent debate with city councilman Dennis Flores, the mayor said Pueblo should stay the course, that it has benefitted from the current system.
Graham pointed to housing growth, rising applications for building permits and a cleaner city. Having a strong mayor, she said, also minimizes what she called ‘dysfunction’ on city council.
Flores, who is term limited and also ran unsuccessfully for mayor when the city was deciding on shelving the city manager model, wants the old system back. He labels the experiment a failure. “I’ve worked under both forms of government,” he said. Pueblo’s population is simply too small to have a single person deciding policy. It needs a city manager that answers to council.
Flores thinks the years under a strong mayor have actually been detrimental to the city’s growth and image. “We would be a lot better off in a lot of areas, especially in the area of economic development.”
Flores, a Pueblo native, said with two strong mayors—Nick Gradisar served as mayor before Graham—the city has floundered. “The last five years,” he believes, “everything has been slow walked” and it is giving outside investors a wrong impression of the city. Too many developers with an eye on the city, he said, have become “frustrated and walked away.” I was told when we went to this form of government seven years ago,” he said, “that it was a big mistake and that we would live to regret it.” It was, he says, a prescient prediction.
Nonetheless, it is what voters wanted in 2018. On November 4th, they will once again decide what is best for the city. While Pueblo is the largest city and economic hub of southern Colorado, its population of 110,000, Flores believes, is just too small to continue with a single person calling the shots.
“There are 271 cities in Colorado that have a city manager form of government,” Flores said. Only three—Denver, Colorado Springs and Aurora—are large enough to justify a strong mayor form of government.
Strong mayors have dominated for decades across the country with many attaining almost mythical status. But they have all been in huge population centers. The best examples are New York, with mayors like LaGuardia, Bloomberg and Guiliani and Chicago with bombastic figures like Richard Daley who ran the city with an iron hand for five consecutive terms.
