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A charter review committee, appointed every two years, will begin meeting Tuesday. City Councilman David Ruiz said he will recommend to the committee changes to give more authority to the council.
“I think it should stay like it is,” said Edge, who is on the Charter Review Committee. “If you go by the charter and let the charter do its job, there is a balance. Neither the city manager nor the city council has too much power. It works.”
Edge served on the city council for 14 years, the last eight as mayor.
“When you have the city council running the city, you lose that balance. You lose that ability to give everyone a say, especially under the strong mayor-council form of government. Then it becomes more like a dictatorship. I thought it worked well for us the way it is now,” he said.
Another former mayor agreed.
“I have no problem with the city manager form of government,” said Ben Prause, Cuero’s mayor from 1977-1986 and DeWitt County judge for more than two decades.
City management professionals are seeing an increase in the number of towns considering doing without a city manager.
“There seems to be a big push to get rid of the council-manager form of government,” said Gary Broz, Port Lavaca city manager for almost eight years and regional director of the Texas City Managers Association. “But we are a useful ‘organism.’ The city manager is a central place for duties to be brought in and taken out. The city manager’s office is a clearing house.”
“I can see it in smaller cities, maybe with 4,000 people or less,” Broz said. “It’s a dollars thing. If a city is going to look at changing, it really needs to be done responsibly. A lot of city council members like to be in charge individually. There has to be a consensus. Cuero has an electric system, a water supply system, someone has to oversee it.”
The council-manager form of government came to Cuero more than 45 years ago. After operating without a city manager since 1944 under the Home Rule Charter, J. T. Newman, the Cuero mayor in 1962, thought a change was needed.
“We can’t continue to operate efficiently the way we are now,” Newman told the Advocate in a 1962 article. “City government is just too big a business now to be taken care of by the council on a part-time basis. We feel we will get better coordination among our departments and overall increased efficiency in city government under the management system.”
The voters at the time agreed, approving the change in Cuero’s form of government from mayor-council to council-manager.
The council appoints the city manager, who “may be removed at the will and pleasure of the city council by a vote of the majority of the entire council,” according to the charter.
Also under the current charter, the city manager selects department heads with the approval of the city council. Council approval of department head selection was an amendment to the charter in 2001.
The last town to successfully abandon the council-manager form of government in Texas was Athens in 1963.
The council-manager form of government is used by 94 percent of the home-rule cities in the state, including Victoria, according to “City Government That Works” by Terrell Blodgett.
In the Texas Municipal League’s Region 11, which includes Cuero and 14 other home-rule cities, only Robstown has a mayor-council form of government. All the others are council-manager.