Will 'mayor' title get the ax?

Confused about the role of the mayor in your city's form of government? Maybe it's time to take away that title and replace it with something that better reflects his or her duties.

Instead of Syracuse Mayor Fred Panucci, how does City Council Chairman Fred Panucci sound?

"The public thinks they have a king, when in fact they don't," says Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper.

State legislators who participate in the Local Issues Task Force are touting the merits of doing away in most cases with the title of mayor, which is largely ceremonial in most Utah cities and towns.

They argue that confusion about the powers and duties of a mayor among candidates who run for the office and among the public who votes them into the position leads to problems like those that have sprung up in the past year in Syracuse, Bluffdale and Lehi.

Stephenson said he has attended various city and town meetings in recent months and has made it a point to ask residents who they believe is the chief executive of their city.

"Where does the buck stop? Who really runs the city? Who has the final say? They will all say 'the mayor,'" he said, "and that's a problem."

Only six Utah cities have a mayor/council form of government in which the mayor is the chief executive and administrative officer — Salt Lake City, Sandy, Murray, Logan, Ogden and Provo. The form of government in all other cities and towns is some variation of the five- and six-member council forms, where in most cases the mayor is chairperson and a nonvoting member of the city council.

"I think we've got to cut the apron strings and say, 'Sorry, you don't have a mayor. Let's stop pretending that you do,'" Stephenson said.

The task force stopped short of including the mayor-title issue in a draft bill the panel approved, but several task force members said they would like to meet again and discuss the issue as separate proposed legislation.

The draft bill that earned approval of the task force amends sections of state law that pertain to forms of government, reducing the number of options from six to four. The draft bill also requires that voters approve any change to the form of government.

The proposed legislation stems from controversy in Syracuse, Bluffdale and Lehi, where city councils either stripped mayors of their administrative powers by ordinance or threatened to do so.

Last year, city councils in Bluffdale and Syracuse created manager-by-ordinance forms of government, in which an administrative services director in Bluffdale and a city administrator in Syracuse became city managers and began reporting to the mayor and council and not just the mayor.