Spheres of decision-making in small and isolated municipalities: the Thompson-Nicola Regional District.

Rahman, Hafizur ; Seldon, Zena

A significant literature has explored the domains of responsibility and relationship between municipal councils and chief administrative officers. There have been efforts to theorize and empirically study this relationship in different ways (Georgiou 2014, provides a summary of the seminal literature) with some relying heavily on interview data (Siegel 2010; Svara 1985) and others on survey data (Bello and Spano 2015; Demir and Reddick 2012). Despite these advances, there remains a paucity of information about municipal decision-making in Canada (but see Siegel 2014, 2015) and even less about small, isolated cities and villages, which constitute a large proportion of the Canadian setting.

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This research note reports on an exploratory survey of municipal and rural administrators in the Thompson-Nicola Regional District (TNRD) of British Columbia designed to provide the basis for a similar national study. The first part reviews the seminal literature on the mayor-chief administrative officer (CAO) relationship, which we used as a point of departure for framing our study and developing our survey instrument. The second part provides background on the TNRD and the towns that comprise it. The third part describes the design and carrying out of our survey, while the fourth part reviews our findings. We conclude by exploring the implications of our findings for the literature and further research.

Literature review

Many authors used what is commonly referred to as the dichotomy model as a point of departure for understanding the relationships and spheres of decision-making of councils and city managers. One way to describe the dichotomy approach is shown by Graph 1. (1) The top and bottom percentages show the extent to which the council and the city manager are responsible for doing each job. The simple dichotomy only looks at policy setting and its implementation: the responsibility for setting policy is the job of council, while implementation rests solely with the city manager or CAO. The dark line in Graph 1 delineates the responsibility for policy setting and implementation.

Svara (1985, 1998, 2001) rejected this approach arguing it only partially described the relations between political and administrative leadership. In a similar vein, Siegel (2010:159) argued that "The rigid politics-administration dichotomy was jettisoned long ago ... the municipal CAO's position must be separated from electoral politics, but must be operationally oriented, politically sensitive, and definitely involved in the politics of governing society." Zhang and Feicok (2010: 461) noted that the dichotomy model "simply assumes that local elected officials and appointed administrators bear separate responsibilities in the policy process: making policy and carrying out policy. [However] ... numerous studies have engaged the questions of whether and to what extent administrators participate in policy and politics and almost unanimously confirm the existence of the city manager's policy leadership role."

While the dichotomy model suggests that policy is entirely the responsibility of elected officials, it acknowledges that those who make resource allocation decisions also have power. Since much of the "nitty gritty" of administration implies some degree of resource allocation, it follows that civil servants could actually control more of the policy agenda than the dichotomy model would indicate. Further, the higher the degree of insulation and isolation between the two groups, the larger the potential power of the public administrator in small municipalities with "part-time, amateur mayors." As Siegel (2010: 143-144) notes, "... part-time amateurs usually do not have the same level of technical expertise" and thus such isolation is probably less likely to increase their power in the administrative sphere.

Svara (1985) argued that the dichotomy model, regardless of power flows to either the elected officials or civil servants, is inherently flawed. Svara interviewed elected and administrative officials in five North Carolina cities with population of greater than 100,000. He observed that "In the interviews, mayors, councilors, and administrators described their roles in traditional terms which presumed a dichotomy of function" but, when asked in more depth about the level of involvement of their counterpart, they concluded it ranged from minimal to extensive (Svara 1985: 221). Svara concluded that these decisions are, in practice, shared.

Further, Svara (1985) noted that the traditional dichotomy referred only to policy setting (the province of the elected official) and policy implementation or administration (the province of the professional administrator). He found these divisions extreme and thought it useful to break policy setting into two parts: mission and policy, where mission referred to "the organization's philosophy ... the broad goals it sets for itself, the things it chooses not to do" (p. 224). In contrast, he used policy to mean "the middle range policy decisions", which refer to more specific choices such as "how to spend government revenues" (p. 225). Similarly, he broke policy administration into the two components: administration and management. Svara used administration to refer to "specific decision, regulations and practices employed to achieve policy objectives" (p. 226). Finally, he used management to encompass "those actions taken to support the policy and administration functions" (p. 227).

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While he did not offer the specifics of the interview questions, he described local decision-making in council-manager cities based on the responses to the questions as shared in varying degrees across the four categories.

Graph 2 shows Svara's version of the actual relationships between councils and administrators. He called this approach the Dichotomy-Duality model, now more commonly called the Complementarity model. (Demir 2009; Svara 2001). As before, the area to the left of the solid line is the domain of the elected officials and the area to its right is the responsibility of the city manager. Moving from mission through policy to administration and finally to management, Svara saw the percentage of Council's responsibility declining and that of the City Manager increasing. However, at no point was either Council or the Manager completely responsible for the job nor completely absent from the decision-making--in other words, in practice all local government jobs are to some extent shared. Mouritzen and Svara (2002) extended the analysis of local government leadership, surveying leaders in fourteen countries. They modeled the resultant outcomes on four distinctive relationships between the Mayor and the CAO: separate roles (a dichotomy, shown on Graph 1); an autonomous administrator (a power wielding bureaucracy); a responsive administrator (a subordinate to a power wielding Mayor or Council); and overlapping roles. Graph 3 shows the expanded range of possibilities: the dotted line (numbered 1) to left of the solid line shows that the power wielding bureaucrat has a larger decision-making sphere at the expense of the elected officials, whereas the dashed line (numbered 3) shows that the subordinated or responsive administrator has smaller spheres of decision-making in different domains. (2)

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There has been additional research on this topic. Mouritzen and Svara (2002) looked at the relationship and spheres of decision-making between mayors and CAOs and took a broader look at leadership including the nature of the administrative norms, the distribution of influence, the level and character of networking activities and the way in which the parties handle organizational change behavior, amongst others. Using a larger data set, aggregated from small and large Michigan cities, Browne (1985) was unable to replicate Svara's outcome, suggesting that Svara's results might be context-specific. (3) Relying on interview rather than survey data, Siegel (2010) considers the leadership roles of the Canadian CAO grouping them into those with the Mayor and Council, those in the public service and those in the external community. (4) Nalbandian et al. (2013) focus on the manner in which the leadership behaviour of the mayors or CAOs work in the institutional environment to determine the specific relationship between the political and the administrative processes.

Our research moves in a different direction. Not only is there little quantitative work on council-CAO relations in Canada, very little attention has been paid to these dynamics in the large proportion of Canadian towns and municipalities that are small and at least somewhat isolated from larger cities which result from a country that is geographically large, yet has a small population and a wide variety of natural landscapes. As an initial approach to broadening our understanding of local governance in Canada, we looked at local decisionmaking in the small and relatively isolated towns and villages in the geographical area of the TNRD. Rather than focus more deeply on the leadership aspects of the administrators, we surveyed the mayors and the senior administrators in this region as to (1) how they see their roles in decision-making; (2) the extent to which these mayors and senior administrators see their roles in the same ways; and (3) the extent of the evidence of possible friction resulting from one group or the other seeking to achieve dominance.

Like Svara (1985), we initially pooled the data, but then divided the data to show the distinct perspectives of mayors and senior administrators, to see the extent to which they were congruent. Our belief was that small community institutions would favour a shared decision-making outcome. The heightened transparency of small town decision-making should reduce the ability of civil servants to be isolated and enhance shared decisions. The reduced ability of small towns to afford highly educated and/or experienced civil servants should similarly reduce the ability of such civil servants to insulate themselves from elected officials. As well, the relative transparency of public sector employees in a small town would make it more difficult to support a view contrary to that supported by the electorate. We expected to find a high degree of sharing of decision-making roles as well as fairly substantial agreement that shared decision-making should be the norm.

Secondly, we further investigated the possibility of decision-making "incursions." Svara (1990) argued and provided empirical evidence to show that frictions in the various levels of decision-making inherently flow from differing governmental structures, "particularly the form of government." Based on the notion of the apex of leadership where senior bureaucrats interact with elected officials Self (1972: 150-151), Mouritzen and Svara (2002: 7-8) noted "it is possible that the contact could produce friction with one set or the other seeking to achieve dominance." Svara (1985) reinforces the possibility, graphing a possible incursion of a council into the administrative sphere, shown by the area highlighted by the added circle on top of the dotted line in Graph 4.

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The setting

The British Columbia Ministry of Community Services (2006) describes Regional Districts as:

Regional districts are a unique feature of the British Columbia local government system which date back to the early 1960's ... Regional districts have three basic roles. First, regional districts provide regional governance and services for the region as a whole. Second, regional districts provide a political and administrative framework for inter-municipal or sub-regional service partnerships through the creation of "benefiting areas" ... Third, regional districts are, in

the absence of municipalities, the "local" government for rural areas.

These districts coordinate and provide a wide variety of services such as regional hospital financing, operating regional libraries, supplying emergency preparedness, pooling assets and reducing borrowing costs for rural municipalities and developing solid waste management (to name a few).

The location of the TNRD is shown on Maps 1 and 2. While its population is about 125,000 people, about 100,000 people of these are located in municipalities. However the TNRD is predominately rural. The geographic area covers 45,279 [km.sup.2]. However the municipal area is only 812 [km.sup.2]. As defined by the B.C. Local Government Act, (Part 2 Section 17) the eleven municipalities in the district are called villages (population 2500 or fewer), cities (population greater than 5000) and districts (municipalities with an area greater than 800 hectares (2,000 acres) and a population density of less than 5 people per hectare). These municipalities lie almost exclusively along river valleys, separated by mountains (see the Map 2) and are some 300-400 kilometers to the northeast of Vancouver and 600-700 kilometers to the west of Calgary. To reach either of these larger cities, one must drive through a series of mountain passes which are often treacherous and sometimes closed down in winter months.

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As is typical in British Columbia, most of the land in the district is owned by the crown. Because the land is used for multiple purposes, each use is allocated through a land tenure process. The TNRD area is semi-desert, with pine trees (both natural and planted in stands for future harvest) and with cattle ranching and haying operations. Outside of the larger municipalities, there are some volunteer fire forces, but there is virtually no fire protection for structures in the rest of the region.

Table 1 describes the municipalities in the TNRD and provides some information on the size of the council and the number of senior administrators. These senior administrators include the Chief Administrative Officer (CAO), sometimes called a City Manager and sometimes a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) although the latter term has only recently become common in Canada. Senior Administrators would also include the CFO (Chief Financial Officer), Corporate Administrators and Directors who report directly to the CAO or equivalent.

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The survey

To the extent possible, we developed survey questions informed by Svara (1985) and Browne (1985). Unfortunately, Svara did not provide an explanation of how he obtained his graphs from the data, nor did he offer a comprehensive list of his questions. Based on his original article and subsequent articles, we developed a set of questions about similar tasks to see whether the perceptions of elected officials and city managers in small and isolated Canadian town outcomes were similar to those of his US data set of larger municipalities.

As noted above, our intention was to ask both Mayors and CAOs questions about the operational tasks they consider to be "their domain," "shared domain" and the involvement of their counterpart group in their domain. With regard to the issue of in whose domain a particular task falls, in the case of small municipalities "politicians and public servants work so closely together on some tasks that it is impossible to categorize in such a clear fashion who does what." (5) Further, our target population was small. Rather than asking our respondents to attempt to categorize who does what in finer detail, we decided to give them only three options: "Elected Official Job," "Administrator Job" or a "Shared Job." If the answer was an elected official job, we allocated 100% to the "Council" and 0% to the "Manager." If the answer was an administrator job we did the opposite, allocating 100% to the "Manager" and 0% to the "Council." If the answer was a shared job we allocated 50% to each of the "Manager" and to the "Council."

Table 2 lays out the operational tasks we identified, which formed the basis of our survey questions, (6) and groups them according to the four dimensions of mission, policy, administration and management. We review the results below in this order.

We administered the survey through our local Community Futures organization because of their grass roots approach to community and economic development, and their close relationships with small municipalities. (7) In 2003, the Community Futures Thompson Country ran our survey from their list of mayors and senior administrators. As a result of their diligent follow-up we received eleven responses from the mayors (a 100 percent response rate) and sixteen responses from senior municipal administrators, for a total of twenty-seven responses.

Results

Because these operational tasks include more management and administration than mission and policy, we adjusted the responses so each set of questions took up equal areas to match Svara's chart. Based on the pooled data, the responses are shown in Graph 5.

The solid line represents Svara's prototypical outcome. Each of the dark squares is the pooled results of all of the respondents for one of the questions on our survey. To compare our results with the original Svara diagram, we have joined these with a smoothed, dashed line. (8) Since much of the dashed line lies to the right of the solid line, our initial assessment was that for our region, the Mayor and/or the Council is dominant.

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Note that the dashed line intersects both the upper right and lower left corners. This happens because there is complete agreement on two questions. One of those questions is whose job is it to evaluate the performance of the city manager. Everyone agreed it was the Council's job. However, the British Columbia Municipal Act clearly requires this to be the case. All Councils are required to take Board Training, where Council members are taught this information. We have included it in the mission area, since it is accepted by all participants as being 100% in the Council/Mayor sphere.

The perfect agreement also occurs in the manager's sphere. All of the respondents identified the job of managing human resources as being entirely that of the city manager's office. One suspects that the British Columbia Board Training at the time was quite clear on this issue as well.

Having observed that the pooled responses from the TNRD exhibit a tendency to Council dominance, the next question we posed was whether this perspective was shared equally by both the Mayors and the City Managers. To evaluate this situation, we disaggregated the data and plotted separate lines for the managers and for the mayors. When we did this, the rank order of some of the questions differed from that of the pooled data. In order to provide a useful comparison, we have plotted the data in the same order in which we plotted the pooled data. Graph 6 shows what we saw as a substantial difference between the perspectives of the two groups. The Mayors' line (the dotted one) is shifted considerably toward the Mayors' sphere in the areas of administration. Indeed, save for the two answers that arguably flow from training, it appears that the Mayors believe almost all operational tasks should be shared. The city manager's results are rather more like those of Svara (1985). The city administrators' line (the dashed one) saw setting the mission as primarily the job of the Mayor and Council. Policy decisions varied between those that are primarily the responsibility of the elected officials to those that are shared. Moving down through administrative toward management tasks, jobs should increasingly be left primarily to the professional administrator.

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Svara (1990) surveyed councils and department heads as to the differences between their preferred and actual levels of involvement and that of their counterparts. He asked each group to respond to twenty nine different tasks spread over the areas of mission, policy, administration and management; however, when he reported his findings, they were not broken down by individual tasks, only by area and type of governmental organization (Council-Manager, Strong Mayor-Council or Weak Mayor-Council). The differences between the responses of the elected and administrative respondents were smallest in the towns and cities with a council-manager structure, followed by those in Weak Mayor-Council and largest in the Strong Mayor-Council structure.

Unlike Svara (1990), we report our results by task rather than aggregating them to the more general areas. While the graph suggests the results of the elected officials and the chief city administrator as different, are they statistically so and at what level of significance? In order to answer this question, we ran chi-square tests to see if the responses of the elected officials were significantly different from those of the city managers. (9) The results are shown in the Table 3.

Only where the respondents truly believe the job is shared would we want to conclude that there is a high level of shared governance. Where the two parties see things differently, a task cannot be truly shared. There were some clear differences in the perspectives of the mayors and the CAOs, but these were only significant in one out of seven questions about mission and policy and that only using an alpha of 10%. Moving down through administration and management, these differences were significant more often, in five out of fourteen questions, three of those with an alpha of 10% and two with an alpha of 5%. (10)

Mayors and councils focus much of the time on decision-making and gaining re-election. Civil servants focus on doing advising on and implementing decisions that will enable them to succeed as practitioners. So even if most municipal decisions are shared, the differing goals of mayors or councils and civil servants will necessarily lead to differing rankings of projects to add or cut. Well-intentioned, technically sophisticated civil servants may find it impossible to support an array of projects that would generate re-election for their employers, leading to an increased potential for "overzealous" interference from elected officials especially into such decision-making areas as middle range policy decisions and some traditionally administrative decisions such as the techniques used to rank projects.

While we anticipated any decision-making frictions would first be apparent in the middle range policy arena, the disaggregated data shown in Table 3 suggests there is little reason to expect significant interference by either side in the domain of their counterpart except that of management tasks. Acting on their beliefs that everything should be more evenly shared than managers might, mayors will overstep their bounds in the eyes of the administrators (who see these tasks as their job) and the administrators will be seen by the mayors as overstepping their bounds (by refusing to let the mayors participate in these operations).

Based on the results shown in Table 3, the tasks for which we expect to find evidence of incursions are in the six areas listed in Table 4.

To test for such an outcome, we asked our respondents a second set of questions. After asking who should do these jobs, we asked each group whether their counterpart interfered too much, given their perspective on whose responsibility the job was in the first place. If it was a council-only job, the council could not interfere; if the job was shared, then the council could interfere by trying to do the job without listening to the city manager; and similarly, if the city manager could attempt to make the decisions in some areas rather than give advice. For incursions there were five categories of responses: often, some, seldom, never and don't know.

Three respondents chose to utilize the "don't know" box on all of these questions, diminishing the number of useable responses. Given the diminished sample size, we collapsed the data about incursions into two groups: incursions (often or some) and no incursions (seldom or never). What did we find? The responses are shown in Table 5.

The percentage of those respondents who experience regular incursions is listed in the third column. Many respondents thought their counterpart was "sticking their nose in where it has no business." We wondered if this was a universal response (which given the differences documented above it could be) or did this response that differ if the respondent was a city manager or the mayor? In the fourth column we show the calculated [chi square] statistic and the final column shows the probability that respondents gave similar responses.

Our approach to predicting incursions produced mixed results. For mission, we had anticipated a weakly significant difference between the responses of councilors and city managers where elected officials would want more administrative involvement than the administrators wished to give. This was our result. As well, we predicted no other areas of incursions in the mission area. Again, this was consistent with our findings.

Moving to the policy area, we predicted there would be no significant differences in the way in which elected and administrative officers perceived incursions. While this was true for the most part, there were significant perceptions of incursions in budget formulation by elected officials, who saw this task as shared, whereas the administrative group saw this as their job. This could reflect a difference in interpretation of the term budget formulation, as we had not included a question about the general taxing/ spending philosophy of the town or municipality.

In the area of administration, we had anticipated incursion from elected officials only in the area of service delivery where administration felt the job of actually delivering government services was predominately their jobs, while elected officials saw it as shared. This was the most significant difference in terms of incursions of all tasks.

Finally, we predicted incursions by elected officials into the jobs of the administrative staff in four areas of management: complaints from citizens, developing policies for internal management, hiring and promotion decisions about staff, and complaints from employees. But only significant difference in the perception of incursions concerned handling citizen complaints. These results do not deny that incursions occur; rather, that administrators do not see incursions where mayors also do not. Since these mayors are also council members, they will have had training where we suspect they were told not to interfere in the day to day tasks grouped in the management area. Such interference is neither hardly new (Svara 1985: 222) nor limited to the elected officials in the US (Mouritzen & Svara 2002: 62).

Discussion

Canadian towns and municipalities generally have elected mayors and most closely resemble the definition of a mayor and council system. While not a perfect fit, Canadian mayors typically have statutory powers similar to the weak mayor cities in the US. We expected the pattern of our differences between the responses of elected and administrative leaders in terms of how each group viewed their tasks and those of their counterpart to mirror Svara's weak mayor city results. However, comparing our rather muted results with Svara's (1990: 75), the data from the TNRD looked most like that for council-manager cities, rather than those of either strong- or weak-mayor and council cities.

Canadian town councils (rather than the mayor) typically select the city manager or CAO. Nelson and Svara (2010: 557) note that Council selection of the CAO is found primarily in cities under 100,000 in population and most often in cities under 25,000 in population. While all TNRD towns and municipalities may resemble the US weak mayor and council in their structure, perhaps their size causes the similarity in behaviour to US council-manager cities in the late 1980s. In smaller towns where everyone is likely to know your behaviour, Council may wish to believe they should have some input in these areas, but they do not expect intervention will be received joyfully, and they will therefore pick their battles.

While not universally accepted, Svara (2006) argued that the role of mayors differ in larger from smaller cities and under differing structural circumstances. (11) He comments that "In elected-executive forms, the mayor increasingly supplants administrators as city size increases as the most important policy initiators" (p. 1072). In smaller towns in the TNRD, the mayor often has no staff, and the job of being mayor may be a part time. If the mayor does interfere with the chief administrator, that leaves only council who might intrude on administrative decision-making. Even though all of TNRD towns and municipalities have elected mayors, they might act more like those of US council-manager towns than those found in larger towns with a bigger staff and full-time mayor.

Conclusions

This paper sought to increase understanding about the perceptions of mayors and chief administrative officers of actively unresearched question of the manner in which decisions are made in small, relatively isolated Canadian communities typical of the interior of British Columbia. It drew on conceptualizations and empirical findings of an extensive literature that typically looks at much larger communities. Because of the relative transparency of decision-making in such communities, we hypothesized that there would be more shared than dichotomized decisions.

Findings from the initial data are consistent with our expectations, but provided a much richer picture of decision-making in the small, isolated region of British Columbia known as the Thompson-Nicola Regional District. While graphs of the data identified differing perceptions on the part of administrative and elected leaders about their respective roles, these differences were generally not statistically significant. Our outcomes looked more like the results of US council-manager cities than those of weak mayor and council cities. While the council-manager structure is common across the US, mayor and council structures are most common in larger cities. Since we have a very small sample from a very narrow region, we do not know whether this tendency toward shared perceptions was an artifact of size or truly representative of the Canadian local government psyche.

To expand our understanding of the degree of shared or divergent perspectives about the tasks of local government leaders, we are extending this research in two ways. First, we are analyzing the results of a Canada-wide survey to develop a clearer picture of the way in which Canadian municipalities make decisions up from CAO to elected officials and down from Mayors and Council to public administrators. Our intention is to determine whether similar patterns hold in larger cities and municipalities and across regions. Second, we plan to extend our work on the use of graphical depictions of governmental decision-making to provide a more complete description of the differing perspectives of the decision-making by the various actors across local governments of various size and regional locations.

Notes

(1) This is a slight variation on a diagram used by Svara in his seminal paper (1985) because it is drawn showing only policy setting and implementation rather than his additional breakdowns into mission, policy, administration and management.

(2) Svara (1985) uses a solid line to show his data outcomes and a dotted line to show the expected outcome. To remain internally consistent, we have reversed that graphing technique. Our solid line, therefore, shows the expected "shared" roles and the dotted lines show deviations from that expectation.

(3) Because of the data pooling, it is unclear whether the size, the test location or both led to Browne's conclusion.

(4) Following this line of reasoning, one can construct a similar set of relationships for Canadian mayors, where leading down describes their relationship with the CAO; leading out describes the relationship with the public; and leading "within" describes the relationship between the Mayor and the Council.

(5) We would like to thank an anonymous referee for this quote.

(6) The actual survey instrument we used is available upon request.

(7) Community Futures (CF) organizations are non-profit corporations located in rural municipalities that support community and business development by offering a wide variety of services including strategic economic planning, loans, technical and advisory services to businesses, and self-employment assistance programs. Primarily funded by the federal agency Western Economic Diversification Canada, they were established in 1987 under the Western Economic Diversification Act. There are 90 CFs across Western Canada.

(8) Starting from the upper right corner, in effect, joining the dots assumes that we could have found a question describing a task that our respondents would say is a little more the job of the administration and a little less that of the council. We implicitly made that assumption because we wanted to be able to compare the shape our data suggests with that suggested by Svara's.

(9) Because of the small numbers of responses, particularly in the disaggregated data sets, we also ran Fischer's Exact Test. There were no differences in the results.

(10) Since we are discussing perceptions of human behaviour and we have small sample sizes, we recognize these associations may be weak. Accordingly, we highlighted those areas where the differences were significant for an alpha of ten percent as well as five, and take all results with a larger than usual grain of salt.

(11) In their analysis, Cheong et al. (2009: 32) did not find "the characteristics of a city such as population ... [to have a] statistically significant effect on the relationship between elected officials and city managers in the policy process."

References

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Browne, William P. 1985. "Municipal managers and policy: A partial test of the Svara dichotomy-duality model." Public Administration Review 45 (5) September/October: 620-622.

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Siegel, David. 2010 "The leadership role of the municipal chief administrative officer." Canadian Public Administration 53 (2): 139-161.

--2014. Leaders in the Shadows: The Leadership Qualities of Municipal Chief Administrative Officers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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Thompson-Nicola Regional District. TNRD Quick Facts. Available at www.tmd.ca/content/ tnrd-quick-facts. Accessed on April 5, 2013.

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Hafizur Rahman is associate professor, School of Business and Economics, Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, British Columbia. Zena Seldon is professor emerita, Thompson Rivers University. The authors would like to thank two anonymous referees and the editor of the journal for many helpful comments and suggestions. They would also like to thank Dr. Shekar Bose of Sultan Qaboos University, Oman, for helpful comments and suggestions on the empirical work.

Caption: Graph 1. The Dichotomy Model

Caption: Graph 2. Svara's Dichotomy Duality Model

Caption: Graph 3. Responsive and Autonomous Administrators

Caption: Graph 4. Svara's Council Incursion

Caption: Map 1. The TNRD.

Caption: Map 2. A Closer Look at the TNRD.

Caption: Graph 5. TNRD Pooled Response of Managers and Mayors

Caption: Graph 6. TNRD Managers Compared To Mayors

Table 1. Municipalities in the TNRD

               Population                                  Number
                 (2011                       Council     of senior
Municipality    Census)     Classification    size     administrators

Ashcroft          1628      Village             5            2
Barriere          1773      District            7            1
Cache Creek       1040      Village             5            2
Chase             2495      Village             5            1
Clearwater        2331      District            7            1
Clinton           636       Village             5            1
Kamloops         85678      City                9            7
Logan Lake        2073      District            7            1
Lytton            228       Village             5            1
Merritt           7113      City                7            2
Sun Peaks         371       Village             5            1

Table 2. Classification of Tasks

Area of question               Specific responsibility

Mission            Developing your organization's mission
                   Determine the mission of the city or equivalent
                   Evaluating the city manager's performance

Policy             Budget review & approval
                   Budget formulation
                   Making middle range policy decisions
                   Develop policies such as affirmative action

Administration     Service delivery
                   Intervening in service delivery
                   Developing legislative oversight
                   Determine techniques used to rank projects

Management         Complaints from citizens
                   Complaints from employees
                   Managing Human Resources
                   Hiring and/or promotion decisions about staff
                   Developing policies for internal management
                   Evaluating other city employees performance
                   Determining formula for allocating services
                   Managing material resources
                   Managing information
                   Make changes in management in areas such as
                     staff reorganizations

Table 3. Probability that Responses are the Same

                                                Computed
                                                  [chi     Probability
Area of                Question-listed          square]   responses are
question            by Svara rank in area        values     the same

Mission         Evaluating the city manager's    0.0000       1.000
                  performance
                Determine the mission of the     0.2329       .6294
                  city or equivalent
                Developing your organization's   3.6523       .0560
                  mission (a)
Policy          Budget review & approval         0.5483       .4590
                Making middle range policy       0.0037       .9517
                  decisions
                Develop policies such as         1.0236       .3096
                  affirmative action
                Budget Formulation               1.6000       .2059
Administration  Developing legislative           0.4388       .5077
                  oversight
                Determine techniques used to     0.4274       .5133
                  rank projects
                Intervening in Service           1.4214       .2347
                Delivery
                Service Delivery (a)             3.1439       .0762
Management      Staff Reorganizations            0.3043       .5812
                Determining formula for allo-    2.0979       .1475
                  eating services
                Complaints from Citizens (a)     2.9322       .0868
                Managing Information             1.2273       .2679
                Developing policies for          7.6770       .0415
                  internal management11
                Evaluating other city            1.5625       .2113
                  employees performance
                Hiring and/or promotion          5.2965       .0214
                  decisions about staff (b)
                Complaints from Employees3       3.1778       .0746
                Managing Material resources      0.1219       .7270
                Managing Human Resources         0.0000      1.0000

(a) Probability respondents agree less than 10%.

(b) Less than 5%.

Table 4. Predicted Areas of Incursion

Area                           Job area or task

Mission          Developing your organization's mission
Administration   Service delivery
Management       Complaints from citizens
                 Developing policies for internal management
                 Hiring and/or promotion decisions about staff
                 Complaints from employees

Table 5. Perceived Incursions

                                               % Reporting   Computed
                                               Incursions      [chi
Area of            Questions listed by          (Often or    square]
question               Svara Rank                 Some)       values

Mission      Evaluating the city manager's       52.63%       1.4185
               performance
             Determine mission of the city       63.16%       0.3818
               or equivalent
             Developing your organization's      58.82%       3.252
               mission (#)
Policy       Budget review & approval            71.43%       2.0030
             Making middle range policy          65.00%       0.5333
               decisions
             Develop policies such as            59.09%       2.4243
               affirmative action
             Budget formulation                  55.00%       3.2336
Admin.       Budget formulation (^)              57.14%       0.5403
             Determine techniques used to        70.00%       0.3540
               rank projects
             Intervening in Service Delivery     52.38%       0.5483
             Service Delivery (#)                47.62%       4.1544
Management   Make changes in management such     47.37%       0.3361
               as staff reorganizations.
             Determining formula for             62.50%       0.0167
               allocating services
             Complaints from Citizens (#)        61.90%       3.7029
             Managing Information                70.00%       0.0137
             Developing policies for             47.62%       2.4243
               internal management (#)
             Evaluating city employees           38.10%       2.2400
               performance
             Hiring and/or promotio              30.00%       0.0132
              n decisions about staff (#)
             Complaints from Employees (#)       47.62%       1.0283
             Managing Material resources         45.00%       0.0056
             Managing Human Resources            61.90%       0.0457

Area of            Questions listed by             Probability
question               Svara Rank                 same responses

Mission      Evaluating the city manager's     .2235
               performance
             Determine mission of the city     .5366
               or equivalent
             Developing your organization's    .0721 [check]
               mission (#)
Policy       Budget review & approval          .1570
             Making middle range policy        .5642
               decisions
             Develop policies such as          .1195
               affirmative action
             Budget formulation                .0721 [check]
Admin.       Budget formulation (^)            .4623
             Determine techniques used to      .5518
               rank projects
             Intervening in Service Delivery   .4590
             Service Delivery (#)              .0415 [check][check]
Management   Make changes in management such   .5621
               as staff reorganizations.
             Determining formula for           .7440
               allocating services
             Complaints from Citizens (#)      .0543 [check]
             Managing Information              .9069
             Developing policies for           .1195
               internal management (#)
             Evaluating city employees         .1345
               performance
             Hiring and/or promotio            .9069
              n decisions about staff (#)
             Complaints from Employees (#)     .3106
             Managing Material resources       .9403
             Managing Human Resources          .8307

(a) [check][check] Significant at 5%, [check] Significant at 10%,
(#) predicted to be significant, (^) unexpectedly significant.