It comes around every few years, not as frequently as El Niño, but almost.

It’s the strong-mayor debate, as in: Should a large city like Tacoma move to the so-called strong-mayor system under which an elected mayor – not an appointed city manager – is the chief executive.

The last time it had much momentum was in 2003 after Police Chief David Brame killed his wife, Crystal, and after longtime City Manager Ray Corpuz was fired after 13 years in the job. The relative stability in city government and city politics brought by Corpuz’s successors Jim Walton and Eric Anderson has quelled the movement. But Tuesday’s apparent change of government in Federal Way, from council-manager to strong mayor, might trigger another look in the state’s third-largest city.

If the majority holds in Federal Way, three of the state’s 100,000-people-plus cities will have strong mayor and three will have council-manager.

Federal Way will join Seattle and Spokane with mayors who run the city while Tacoma, Bellevue and Vancouver will have mayors who chair the city council. In the next rung down – cities with populations between 50,000 and 100,000 – six are strong-mayor cities and six are council-manager cities.

Surprisingly, the relatively even split in the form of government doesn’t dissolve until you reach the smallest cities, where strong mayors dominate.

Tacoma moved to a council-manager form in 1952. Corruption in the police department and televised organized crime hearings might have convinced voters to make Tacoma the first larger city in the state to make the change. Having a professional city manager was seen by advocates as a way of making government more businesslike.

Voters have made several changes that make Tacoma not quite a council-manager city but not nearly a strong mayor city. The mayor is directly elected rather than selected by the City Council from its ranks.

The result is that many think Mayor Bill Baarsma runs things, that he hires and fires other managers, that he directs the daily workings of the city. In fact, all those tasks are assigned to Anderson, who serves at the pleasure of a majority of the council.

While it is frequently talked about and debated, Tacoma hasn’t voted on the issue since 1970. Nationally, however, there have been two seemingly conflicting trends. While the number of council-manager cities has grown from one-third in 1985 to nearly half now, larger cities have moved the other way.

In the past decade, San Diego and Oakland, Calif.; Cincinnati; Hartford, Conn.; St. Petersburg, Fla.; Richmond, Va.; Sioux Falls, S.D.; and Spokane have all voted to give administrative control to an elected mayor. Only El Paso, Texas, switched to council-manager.

Other cities have become hybrids, giving more power to mayors to set policy while retaining a professional manager to run the daily operations.

So does it really matter? Wrote Governing Magazine editor Alan Ehrenhalt: “In a great many cities, ‘reform’ is always going to consist of whatever system hasn’t been tried there lately.”

So if political accountability is in short supply, voters tend to think a directly elected mayor will be the cure. If inefficiency and corruption are the issue, a professional manager might be seen as the remedy.

In 2005, in the wake of the Brame scandal and the Corpuz dismissal, I asked Cary Bozeman, now the director of the Port of Bremerton, which form was best. He had been both the “weak” mayor of Bellevue and the “strong” mayor of Bremerton.

Strong leaders are the key. But because it is more likely that a city can hire a strong leader from around the nation than find one to elect in town, he said he thinks a council-manager system is best for most cities.

But that manager has to follow the first rule of the profession – steer completely clear of local politics.

“The problem with having a city manager stay too long in the position is they become very powerful without having to answer to the public,” Bozeman wrote at the time. “In effect, Tacoma.”

Peter Callaghan: 253-597-8657

peter.callaghan@thenewstribune.com

blog.thenewstribune.com/politics