Twelve cities in Montana, including Billings, Great Falls, Kalispell, Helena, Belgrade and Bozeman, have elected councils and hired city managers. So does Petroleum County.
Butte-Silver Bow and Anaconda-Deer Lodge are the only two consolidated city-county governments in Montana, and each has an elected council as its legislative branch and an elected chief executive in charge of day-to-day operations.
Under the proposal, the five-member council would not only hire the city manager, they could fire him or her if that person was not performing to expectations.
Dan Clark, director of the Local Government Center at Montana State University, told The Montana Standard last year that there are pros and cons to the arrangement.
A big advantage to having a city manager, he said, is that person often has college degrees in public administration and experience running cities. Elected executives sometimes lack skills to oversee hundreds of employees and budgets of $50 million or more, he said.
But even a great city manager doesn’t mean the council that hires him or her is functional, Clark said, and councils don’t always like the changes managers make. They can grow impatient quickly.
“The average tenure of a city manager nationally is about three years,” Clark said. But some city administrators in Montana, he said, have served the same city for years.
