Case Study

You are the city manager of a large metropolitan city with a population of more than half a million people. This city is run by a council-manager form of government. The city council was faced with the option of enabling two executive officers, who had been selected and was supervised by the city council, to grant or refuse pay raises to their employees without the express consent of the city council. The city council had voted to allow only police officers and firefighters to receive across-the-board pay raises and to continue to receive incremental pay raises while civilian employees would only receive pay adjustments through promotions. Recently, the city attorney and the city auditorboth of whom are direct reports to the councilgranted merit pay adjustments to 14 employees in the attorney's office and 2 employees in the auditor's office. These merit pay adjustments were done without the approval of the city council. You learned of the merit pay adjustments when the human resources director, who reports directly to you, informed you that paperwork had been submitted to payroll for processing. None of these employees had been granted promotions. You contact the city auditor, who is not only a colleague but a good friend, to discuss the merit pay adjustments she granted to her two employees. You remind the city auditor of the council's directive that no civilian employees can be awarded pay adjustments except for promotions and that the auditor's request was not in compliance with council policy. However, the auditor still intended to proceed with the pay adjustments. The human resources director will not process

the pay adjustments unless directly ordered by you to proceed. You now have to decide whether to support the human resources director's decision to deny the pay adjustment requests or to authorize the pay adjustments in contradiction to the city council's policy. After giving the problem some thought, you decide to allow the pay adjustments to be processed. You inform the human resources director to draft a memorandum authorizing the adjustments and placing responsibility for the decision on you. The human resources director wrote the memo and then processed the pay adjustments.

Discussion Questions

1.What should the human resources director have done in this matter?

2.How should the city manager have handled this matter?

What was the city manager's obligation to the city council