By JAMES RICKMAN
Los Alamos

I wish to echo recent sentiments regarding the importance of hiring the “right” County Manager. As such, it’s crucial that people understand the role of a County Manager in a Council-Manager form of government—the system used here in Los Alamos.

Under this system, it is the responsibility of the County Council to establish policy and the overall vision for the community. Creation of ordinances and budget priorities all play a critical role in the Council’s policymaking and vision implementation. On the other side of the equation, it is the County Manager’s job to implement Council policy, to oversee administrative operations, and provide advice to the Council regarding the overall operation and effective use of County assets in the context of the Council’s policy initiatives.

A County Manager is not a mayor and needs not be a “visionary.” A County Manager needs only to be an excellent manager and steward, a person who is prepared to provide a high level of service to the residents of the Community, who effectively are the clients and shareholders in a Council-Manager system. (Think of the Council as our Board of Directors and the Manager as our Chief Executive Officer.)

Balancing the strategic and visionary with the tactical and pragmatic is not easy. Even in some of the healthiest examples of Council-Manager governance, a sometimes palpable tension exists between the Manager and the Council. Or at least it should. An effective Council and Manager often do not share a cozy relationship, but rather share a “professional” relationship in which egos are set aside in deference to the expertise and roles of the two entities.

Consequently, the professional life expectancy of County Managers is relatively short (or it should be). Many good community managers are essentially vagabonds moving from town to town, hopefully intersecting with a community during a time in its history when a manager’s expertise can navigate the rough seas of change or maintain a smooth course when the political and economic waters are calm.

Unfortunately, Los Alamos currently wears the scars of several unhealthy Council-Manager periods, which may help newer residents understand why our Community’s business sector is so out of whack. In short, a string of narcissistic Councils, determined to “leave their mark,” hired or retained conciliatory Managers who were content to facilitate implementation of disastrous policy.

During that period, and even in our current period, Councils here have used the short-sighted policy of acquiring and/or disposing of land assets to and from favored developers or entities in an attempt to mold our business sector. The result was the transformation of a mostly healthy downtown during the 1990s into the retail desert that has buried our community. Instead of letting The Market and entrepreneurship determine the fabric of our business sector, this series of Councils set forth on a policy of picking winners and losers. This, in turn, has poisoned our business landscape through a number of unintended consequences that could have been easily anticipated had these Councils not been so concerned with creating lasting legacies rooted in vanity and misguided hubris.

County Managers in place at the time either did not have the expertise to recognize this flawed policy and its repercussions, or they lacked the intestinal fortitude to provide useful counsel to the elected officials. For a County Manager, the ability to speak truth to power based on wide ranging experience and expertise is probably the greatest asset they can possess.

Perhaps the biggest blunder to occur during our community’s Period of Lunacy following the Cerro Grande Fire was the decision to use more than $100 million of taxpayer dollars to provide the local grocery monolith with a monopoly, and to facilitate its movement across Trinity Drive to an area where it could expand operations beyond providing mere food and liquor. Mega-Smith’s sheer size and scale, and its enviously favorable lease arrangement with the County and Schools, ensured that no local businesses could compete.

At the same time, we uprooted our County administrative building and encroached on its former footprint at Ashley Pond with a massive jail and judicial complex, with the absurd hope that housing prisoners somehow would augment Los Alamos’ economic development activities. These combined actions essentially shifted the business sector away from the downtown, creating a climate more akin to Santa Fe’s Cerrillos Road than to that city’s charming Plaza area.

Our elected and appointed officials swore that the Smith’s Movement and affiliated actions would provide the spark for an economic renaissance in our community, when, in fact, the ham-handed maneuver has had the opposite effect. The dominos from this laughably ridiculous series of amateur mistakes continue to tumble and doom our community’s once-thriving downtown.

Adding insult to injury, shifts in consumer behaviors over the years have helped reinforce the steady cavalcade of UPS, Fed-Ex, and Amazon deliveries into our community on a daily basis.

The massive new administration edifice that was erected during the County’s “economic development” mania has led to a grotesque bloat in county personnel and its motor pool. The one beautiful mesa-top area that would have made for a terrific conference center and destination hotel (remember that rhetoric?) is now occupied with a complex of County shops, warehouses, and fuel tanks that greet visitors as they drive into town with all the warmth and charm of an Eastern Bloc gulag.

Sometimes, the best County Managers and Councils are the ones who are laser focused on providing outstanding quality of life to current residents, and who operate within the parameters of a respectful, productive tension that provides a stable environment in which businesses can survive and thrive based on market forces—instead of on “grand” visions and procrustean performance metrics dictated by grant funding.

The County Council holds sole responsibility for hiring (and, if necessary, firing) a County Manager. Selecting a good one, or quickly recognizing a poor-fitting one, is arguably the Council’s most important duty.