My World,
Your Adventure

It's 7 p.m. The roll is called, and the vote to hire the new municipal manager comes back four to one. For Bradley Gotshall, that one "nay" started a story he would live through twice. Both times, the lone dissenter later became chair of a newly elected board and brought in the stubborn amateurism that can undo years of progress.

 

For the Love of Local Government is a tough-love letter to the most personal and overlooked level of American government. Gotshall's career began when he was elected to his hometown borough council at eighteen. It has since taken him through borough, township, and county management in Pennsylvania and Virginia. Here, he pairs frank stories from inside city hall with the history of the reform built to keep chaos out of it: the council-manager form of government.

 

The story runs from the Gilded Age, when graft and machine politics were simply how business got done, through the muckraking of Lincoln Steffens and Jacob Riis and the reform work of Theodore Roosevelt. It arrives in Staunton, Virginia, where in 1908, a city facing growing debt and muddy streets hired the nation's first general manager. Five years later, Richard S. Childs's "pure" plan took shape in Sumter, South Carolina. Along the way, Gotshall argues that this form, like Churchill's democracy, is the worst system except for all the others, because it combines democratic accountability with professional skill.

 

But structure alone can't save city hall. Six days after Staunton hired its first manager, a council member publicly suggested he had been "under the influence of liquor." More than a century later, social media, misinformation, and the confidence of the uninformed make the job harder than ever. Gotshall's answer is not a technocracy beyond question. It is a renewed "civic patriotism": earnest, informed involvement from elected officials, staff, and residents alike.

 

Witty, frank, and grounded in history, this book is for anyone who serves in, works for, or simply depends on local government, which is to say, everyone.