Over the years I’ve been asked what a City Council is and what it does. I will try to explain that here.
Under our city charter, the seven members of City Council are the elected officials in charge of city government. Ours is a “council-manager” form of government in which the city is led by an elected city council and an appointed professional city manager. In this arrangement, the council is a legislative body — a bit like the U.S. Congress or the state legislature, but on a much smaller scale. A better comparison might be a corporate board of directors that makes policy and sets budgets, but employs a CEO to run the organization. The professional city manager is our city’s CEO.
Council’s responsibilities include city ordinances (enacting new ones or revising existing ones), enacting the annual city budget, decisions about major projects, approving contracts, employing the city manager and city attorney, and generally monitoring operations and projects through the year. As the city’s elected government, we listen to citizens who are having problems with the city or its services, and we try to “fix things” — either by advising the citizens on who to talk to and what to say (that’s my preference for most items because I want to encourage our staff to do their best job without having elected officials run interference with their bosses), or by asking the city staff leadership to address the situation.
Council members are elected at large (there are no district representatives) to serve a four-year term. It’s a nonpartisan election (no political party candidates) as provided by the city charter. The Council elects one of its members to serve as mayor (essentially the chairperson of the Council, with other duties as Oak Ridge’s chief elected official).
And in case you were wondering, this is basically a volunteer job, but we do get $150 a month for our trouble (and the mayor gets an additional $150 for being mayor).