By BILL CHAISSON
Our report (“Claremont city manager search comes with price tag”; Mar. 23) on last week’s special Claremont City Council meeting left me disturbed. The council decided to fire their last city manager on Jan. 2 instead of getting to the end of his contract and then not renewing it. Consequently, the city is now on the hook for Ryan McNutt’s severance package as well as the cost of finding a new manager. There isn’t anything they can do about the former, so they are doing their level best to skimp on the latter. They want to pitch in and help with the search. All you professional tradespeople out there who have had homeowners pitch in on a remodeling project can guess how this might go.
Assistant Mayor Allen Damren proposed copying a Lebanon approach that had a governance committee working with a consultant. A possible problem with this idea is that the City of Claremont does not have a governance committee. The assistant mayor also offered an upside: Claremont created a profile of the city manager they want only two years ago, so all the details in it are still relevant and they don’t have to start from scratch. Somehow feeling good about not having to write a new job description because you fired the guy you hired with it so soon after you hired him seems a little off.
The overview of the history of city managers in Claremont, written by Wayne McElreavy of the historical society for our March 19 issue, included some sobering information. For one thing, it can be said of the current city council that they aren’t that different from Claremont City Councils of the last 70 years, during which the average tenure of a city manager has been a little over four years. If you subtract Guy Santagate’s 15-year era, which completely skews the curve, as no one else has stayed on the job remotely that long, the average drops to under four years.
McElreavy’s account notes repeatedly that managers quit or were fired over communication difficulties with the city council. The very first city manager, Phillip White, resigned over a disagreement with the city council regarding the assessment of the Joy Manufacturing facility. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Robert Jackson, who was hired in 1986, lasted nearly nine years before he suddenly stopped coming to work. It was later learned that the council planned to terminate him, but in the end did not do so. He resigned instead and became a town manager in Connecticut. At the other end of the spectrum David Barker was hired as an interim manager for six months and resigned after just 18 days.
One of the disturbing intervals in last week’s meeting came from Councilor Claire Lessard. She did not endorse the view, but dutifully reported that a constituent called her to suggest that a local business professional be considered for the job. There are two problems with this. First, government is not a business and should not be run like one, and second, Claremont desperately needs new ideas for how to remake itself.
On the first point, it has always puzzled me when people — Ross Perot was one memorable example — claim that the problem with government is that it isn’t run with the efficiency of a business. Lately I have decided that most people view business and the most serious of all undertakings, apparently because it is about making money. Their saying that government should be “run like a business” really means, “we should take government as seriously as we take business.”
Most businesses fail, so I have never understood why business should be a model for much of anything. Several of the tasks undertaken by government have become public because the business sector has botched them so badly in the past. Drinking water is a good example. Privately-held drinking water systems ended in tears again and again in the 19th century because efforts to make a profit led to the taking of shortcuts, which led to sharp declines in the quality or even quantity of water available.
On the second point, if a local person is to be made city manager, they had better be someone who has gone off into the world, seen some fresh approaches to urban life, and returned. Early on in my tenure I attended a city council meeting during which a brewer successfully convinced the council to allow him to go forward with a “nano-brewery” in an old factory building on the Sugar River. He first, however, had to carefully explain the details of his business model to the council members because none them apparently had visited an artisan beer-making establishment. This brewer had grown up in Claremont and returned to town bearing this delightful business idea with him.
Of the 16 people who have been city manager of Claremont, exactly none of them have been from Claremont. A minority of them have even been from New Hampshire. The brevity of their average tenure here suggests this is a tough job. The cause?
If I may offer an analogy: if you knew a man who had been married and divorced eight times, would you suspect that the eight women all had the same shortcoming, or would you suspect the man had one?
Bill Chaisson is the editor of the Eagle Times.
Editor’s note: The text has been corrected to show that Robert Jackson was hired as manager in 1986, not Robert Price. The council did meet and Jackson was told he would be placed on leave.
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