The council-manager vs. strong-mayor debate is heating up. We received a pro council-manager flyer in the mail not long ago, urging a vote for that form of government. The flyer stated, among other things, that “we have discovered… that there is a fundamental flaw in accountability with the strong-mayor form of government for a city of our size.”

But nowhere, not even on their website, do the proponents describe or characterize this “fundamental flaw.”

This could be THE major argument in their favor; otherwise, I remain very skeptical of the claim that merely changing the form of government is somehow going to magically make all the city’s problems, which they enumerate at the beginning of their flyer, go away.

Both the mayor and the council are elected by we, the people, and are therefore fully accountable to us. Their claim begs the question, how is the council-manager system going to be more accountable, and further, how is it going to work around or eliminate these perceived problems?

These so-called problems are not unusual for any city, let alone Bainbridge Island, especially in these times of diminished income and increased expectations.

Rather than jumping at this change-of-government structure as a panacea, we should be looking very carefully at the advantages and disadvantages of each, and asking ourselves: “Is this needed, and is it really the way we want to go?”

Mark Follett

Kallgren Road