Members of a Public Body Serve Citizens, Not Themselves
Every year, a familiar story repeats itself somewhere in American local government. Qualified administrators are hired with fanfare, and within months find the relationship with the boards or councils that hired them deteriorating for reasons rarely made public.
This year alone, Michigan offered two clear examples of the pattern.
Chelsea's city council terminated its city manager six months into her tenure, the second such disruption to that office in just over a year. Michigan State University's board of trustees produced a sixth president in six years and drew a vote of no confidence from its own faculty.
Although the details differ, the underlying failure is the same in both cases. A governing body hired someone capable, then declined to do the harder and more consequential work of supporting that person once the hiring was finished.
Hiring is the part of a board's job that earns public attention. It comes with a press release, sometimes applause, and the sense that a problem has been solved. But supporting the person hired is an even greater obligation, and it is the one that governing bodies most often neglect.
Administrators who cannot rely on stable relationships with the people who oversee them soon discover they’ve fallen prey to a bait-and-switch. Rather than managing budgets, staff, and services, they find themselves managing moods, egos, and shifting factions among the very people meant to support them. Energy that should go toward the public's business gets diverted into political survival, and administrators grow confused about what is truly expected of them, since those expectations seem to change depending on which wheel is squeaking the loudest that week.
None of this needs to happen, and it shouldn't. A board or council has real power to create the conditions under which an administrator can succeed. That means clear expectations, genuine collaboration, consistent communication, and a shared understanding of roles and values. It also requires something harder to legislate, which is the discipline to stay out of the way.
Supporting an administrator often means resisting the urge to micromanage, to relitigate settled decisions, or to use disagreements as an excuse to undermine someone doing the job correctly. This takes a kind of strength that has little to do with winning votes and everything to do with restraint.
The taller hurdle, of course, is confusion common among newly elected or appointed officials about what they are actually supposed to do and whom they are actually supposed to please. Most arrive in these roles well qualified and full of high hopes, only to find that neither their duties nor their loyalties were ever clearly defined by the public body they joined. Too many treat the position as a prize earned through a contest rather than a duty accepted on behalf of the public. A prize implies entitlement, a sense that having won an election gives an officeholder a license to act and decide according to personal preference or grievance, regardless of the outcome for the institution.
A duty, on the other hand, implies something different, an obligation to collaborate with other people who carry equal responsibility to the public and to defer to processes larger than any single opinion.
This confusion is usually a sign of immaturity rather than bad intent, a failure to grasp what public service actually asks of a person. Authority granted through election or appointment does not excuse anyone from working in supportive partnership with colleagues who carry their own public responsibilities. A board member who treats disagreement as disrespect, or a capable administrator as a threat rather than an asset, has mistaken the nature of the office.
Chelsea's council offered only vague references to unspecified concerns when it ended its city manager's employment, even as residents rose in the same meeting to praise her work. Michigan State's trustees spent years locked in disputes that outside observers, and eventually the university's own faculty, attributed to the board rather than to the presidents who kept leaving. In both cases, the public was left to wonder whether the people removed were the actual problem, or whether the problem sat with the people who removed them.
Serving well on a public board or council requires maturity, thoughtfulness, and a genuine willingness to collaborate. These qualities are difficult to campaign on and harder still for voters to assess from a lawn sign or a short candidate forum. Competence and character rarely announce themselves in an election, which means the cost of getting this wrong falls squarely on the public that these institutions exist to serve.
Government is a quality-of-life business. When boards and councils forget they are stewards of public trust rather than contest winners, the people who pay the price are citizens whose water, safety, and daily governance depend on institutions functioning as they should.
