Editorial: The job of city manager

The city council has set out to find a permanent replacement for Mr. Copeland with Mr. Ahl managing the transitional time. Identifying the desired qualifications and working style of city manager candidates will become a significant part of the council's workload. While doing that, Mr. Ahl and the council will also need to attend to healing community and staff rifts that have developed during the last two divisive years.

To obtain an indicator of what has gone on during those years, Maplewood Voices submitted a data practices request for the phone call logs both to and from Mr. Copeland's city telephone. Data for each call since June 20, 2006 was available. Here is a summary of those calls:

CouncilPerson	Calls	Calls > 5 min	Total Minutes
Rossbach	31	10	145
Juenemann	49	14	355
Cave*	413	140	3213
Longrie	535	187	3935
Hjelle	823	233	4354

* Lacking the number, Ms. Cave's cellphone is not included. Other councilmember's known cell and office numbers are included.



This chart of course does not include Mr. Copeland's cell phone, or any use of email. But it is clear enough that Mr. Copeland viewed his job as paying attention to Ms. Cave, Ms. Longrie, and Mr. Hjelle, while effectively ignoring Mr. Rossbach and Ms. Juenemann.

Let Copeland's departure be symbolic of rejecting this divisive approach to management, and may his replacement attend to all councilpersons equally, and thereby all constituencies in the city.

Stephan