Study committee hears from administrator oppponent

PLYMOUTH — The Ad-Hoc City Administrator Study Committee heard a negative viewpoint at their latest meeting Thursday.

Local attorney David Andrews, a former member of the Plymouth School Board, told the committee studying whether the city should add an administrator that he is opposed to the idea.

“My bias is in favor of reducing bureaucracy, not expanding it,” Andrews told the committee. “It seems like you’d be adding another layer of bureaucracy and complicating the administration of the city.”

Drawing on his service on the School Board in the 1980s, Andrews said bureaucrats tend to get entrenched and hard to change. “Removing a hired official is very difficult and very expensive. You’re seeing that in the city right now with certain personnel.”

Committee member Lee Gentine countered that all of the city administrators the committee has spoken to or heard from, “are hired at-will, with no contract.”

“School administrators used to be like that, but state law changed,” Andrews responded. “Efforts to do that are always afoot.

“The more I thought about this, the more I thought that you did have a city administrator and his name was Bill Kiley,” Andrews continued, referred to the former mayor who served 24 years before being defeated in 2006. “He did an excellent job because he was retired and devoted a lot of time, going beyond being (a part-time) mayor.”

“The bottom line is we are not going to have another mayor (serve) for 24 years,” Gentine replied. “We do have a volunteer City Council and none of them are full-time.”

“The problem is continuity,” added committee member Sue Kaiser. “The main thing I’m hearing is being able to have some continuity.”

“I think of this as having some sort of CEO of the city who maintains some sort of procedures and processes long-term for the city,” Gentine said of a city administrator. “There’s a lot of pros and cons, that’s what we’re trying to sort through, but it may be advantageous for us.”

Andrews suggested that many of the duties and responsibilities the city would assign to an administrator, such as the areas of human resources and safety, could be could be performed by outside consultants or firms.

“I don’t disagree we can privatize all these things, but paying somebody from outside for building inspections the city just raised all the (building) fees,” Gentine observed. “I think we need to have a better handle on how much we have spent bringing in somebody from the outside where you could have had somebody in house who could have done them.”

Andrews also stressed that having elected officials run the city gives the voters the ultimate authority. “If you have someone the electors feel is unresponsive, you can un-elect them.”

He asked whether the committee had considered recommending that Plymouth go to a full-time elected mayor. “It would be somebody from within the city and you don’t have the problem with an elected official of being held accountable.”

“The only problem is you don’t get the expertise,” of a trained administrator, committee member John Klemme answered.

Kaiser echoed him, adding that the potential would be there for a popular person becoming and remaining mayor who had no expertise and could damage the city’s long-term efforts.

“It would be very hard to find somebody who would know everything needed to be a full-time mayor,” committee member Ronald Lade agreed. “Do you have people who really want to get that involved?”

“I’m a very go-slow person when it comes to adding a position like this,” Andrews concluded.