What it means
Council-manager government is the arrangement that puts two kinds of people in charge of Scottsdale. Seven elected officials, the mayor and six council members, decide what the city should do: the budget, the tax rates, the zoning, the rules. One hired professional, the city manager, decides how it gets done, and runs the police, fire, water, streets, parks and the rest of the payroll.
You meet it in the language of City Hall. Council members talk about “giving direction to staff.” Residents complain that “the manager’s office” sat on something. A council candidate promises to “hold the city manager accountable,” which is the main lever any of them has, since the manager, not the council, hires and supervises the staff.
The structure, the six charter officers and the 1961 vote that created them are laid out in the site’s charter guide. This page is about the phrase and what it does and does not mean.
Where you’ll meet it
On every council agenda, in staff reports signed “City Manager’s Office,” in council debates about hiring or firing a manager, and in the round chamber called the Kiva, where the manager sits at the dais beside the elected officials but does not vote.
Where the word came from
The idea is older than Scottsdale. In 1908 Staunton, Virginia, hired a “general manager” to run the town’s business, the first appointment that looks like today’s job, according to ICMA, the city managers’ professional association. Sumter, South Carolina, adopted the plan formally in 1912, and in 1914 Dayton, Ohio, became the first city of any size to use it. The managers held their first meeting that same year, when only 32 governments had the plan. By 1930 there were about 400.
The pitch was Progressive Era good government: take the patronage out of city hall by putting a trained administrator in charge of hiring, and leave politics to the elected council. The name describes the split exactly. The council is the board; the manager is the chief executive.
It spread fastest in growing cities that wanted to look businesslike, which describes postwar Scottsdale. The town that incorporated in 1951 was run by its boosters, with cafe owner Malcolm White as its first mayor. Ten years and a population boom later, voters approved a home-rule charter on October 31, 1961, and council-manager government came with it. The manager runs the departments, the council keeps the purse and the zoning map, and the charter keeps the initiative and referendum within reach of voters.
What it is not
It is not a strong-mayor system. Scottsdale’s mayor is the city’s public face and chairs the meetings, but the charter gives the office no regular administrative duties and one vote, the same as each council member. Nor is the city manager a politician: he is hired, not elected, and can be let go by a council majority. And council-manager is a different idea from charter city, though Scottsdale is both: the charter is the local constitution, and council-manager is the form of government that constitution chose.
The fine print
The charter is specific about the line between the two halves. It vests the city’s powers in the elected council, which appoints the manager and the other charter officers. The manager is the chief executive and, under Article 3, appoints and removes city employees and can delegate that power to department heads. The officers serve at the council’s pleasure, so hiring or firing a manager takes four votes of seven.
That makes the hiring vote one of the most consequential a council casts, and it is often a fight. In April 2025 the council voted 5 to 2 to skip a national search and make interim manager Greg Caton permanent. Caton had run Grand Junction, Colorado, for eight years before joining Scottsdale as an assistant city manager in 2024, and took over after the previous manager, Jim Thompson, left for Loveland, Colorado. His contract set pay at $369,000 a year, overseeing a budget of about $2.3 billion and more than 2,600 employees.
The design has a known weakness, which the mayor and council guide touches on: when a council majority and the manager disagree, the manager loses, and turnover follows elections. Its known strength is continuity. The people who fix water mains and write the budget do not change when the voters do, and the taking part guide explains how residents reach both halves.