Photo provided | Joe Meyer via The City of Covington

Debate about the ballot question asking Covington residents if they want to convert the city’s government structure have been ramping up since the petition to get the question on the ballot first began circulating in July.

The conversion would change Covington from its current city manager form to the more common mayor-council form of government.

What’s more, the people and organizations pushing for the conversion are now known, thanks to the recent publication of the financial contributors backing the committee to get the measure on the ballot. As such, it’s worth revisiting the conversations that have sprung up around the issue.

The committee pushing for the conversion calls itself Covington Forward and is chaired by Richard Dickmann, local business owner and proprietor of the restaurant Smoke Justis. Dickmann himself has put $15,000 his own money into marketing and operations for the committee. Other top contributors to Covington Forward include Fischer Homes Chairman Greg Fischer and his wife, Amy Fischer, Marilyn Scripps of the E.W. Scripps Company, Corporex and St. Elizabeth Healthcare.

The committee’s expenditure report also shows about $53,000 in reported spending to Hazlitt Industries, a political consulting and fundraising firm the committee contracted with to help gather petition signatures.

The conversion has many advocates, including current Mayor Joe Meyer and sole mayoral candidate Ron Washington (read LINK nky's explainers to learn how Covington's city government works and the difference between the city manager and mayor-council form of governments to get an idea of underlying political mechanics at issue).

Five of the eight city commission candidates — Tim Downing, Shannon Smith, Cari Garriga, James Toebbe and Tim Acri — also have explicitly come out in favor of the conversion. Several former commissioners, former Covington City Manager and attorney Loren Wolff and several prominent business leaders, such as C-Forward (the company is not affiliated with Covington Forward) Chair Brent Cooper, have expressed support, as well. 

Proponents of the conversion have touted the mayor-council form of government as more straightforward, efficient and agreeable to economic development. Opponents, on the other hand, worry that a conversion might lead to an over-concentration of power in the office of the mayor or that it could serve as a vehicle for the municipal government to be captured by special interests.

One of the key differences between the city manager form and the mayor-council form is that under the mayor-council form, the mayor has more authority to hire and fire city workers, unlike the current system, where every personnel decision is subject to a vote from the commission.

"It's easier to influence one person than influence five people," said former Covington City Manager Larry Klein.

Klein served as city manager under Mayor Sherry Carran, whom Meyer defeated in 2016.

That election cycle was tense, and Meyer's criticism of the government as opaque and inaccessible were apparent in his campaign; Meyer has claimed publicly that Klein had instructed the city staff not to talk to him after he first took office.

Meyer has been an outsized advocate for the conversion. At the city commission meeting on Tuesday, Commissioners Washington, Downing, Smith and the mayor expressly asked Covington residents to vote in favor of the conversion. Meyer and Carran have both penned op-eds encouraging people to vote for and against the conversion, respectively.

Klein stepped down as city manager in 2017. Klein was city manager during a scandal involving former city Finance Director Bob Due, who embezzled about $80,000 from the city over a 10-year period. Meyer argued that Klein should have stepped down following the scandal.

City managers, regardless of their performance in their roles, often get swapped out between mayoral administrations. Klein continued to advocate for the city manager form when he spoke with LINK nky. Other Kentucky city managers have espoused the purported virtues of the system, as well.

"Mayors are not created equally," said Ron Scott, former city manager for Danville and senior advisor to the International City Management Association, a professional consortium of city managers.

"Having an elected board and appointed city manager came about, really, as a result of the intent to emulate or follow corporations where they would have a board of directors and an appointed CEO," Scott told LINK nky. "It's similar, very similar to your local school boards, where you've got elected board members, and they appoint a superintendent to hire and administer the affairs."

Scott argued that, in spite of proponents' positions that a mayor-council form of government would be better for economic development, the city manager would be better for business and more efficient overall.

He pointed to a 2011 study from IBM, which argues "cities with city manager forms of government are nearly 10% more efficient than cities with strong mayor forms of government. This finding appears to validate the assumption underlying city manager forms of government, notably that investing executive authority in professional management shielded from direct political interference should yield more efficiently managed cities."

On the other hand, Covington businesses tend to be less corporate and more entrepreneurial. People with direct experience in Northern Kentucky politics have argued that businesses sometimes struggle to navigate the peculiarities of the city manager form.

"Whatever form of government you have, probably the mayor-council's a little more clear because most business people, specifically, think the mayor's in charge," said attorney and former Newport City Manager Jim Parsons.

Parsons also served as Newport's city solicitor. These days he aids developers in working with cities, especially as it relates to municipal funding mechanisms like bonding. Parsons was one of three panelists at a public forum on the possibility of a conversion on Thursday, along with Erlanger Mayor Jessica Fette and Dayton City Administrator Jay Fossett, who formerly served as Covington's city manager.

From left to right: Erlanger Mayor Jessica Fette, Dayton City Admin. Jay Fossett and attorney Jim Parsons at the Cov Civic Lab public forum on Oct. 24, 2024. Photo by Nathan Granger | LINK nky

The panel discussed the pros and cons of converting the government as well as the procedural differences between the two systems. The panelists didn't come out explicitly for or against the conversion, but statements from the forum suggested that, in their experience, the mayor-council form was easier to deal with.

"In Dayton I have one boss," Fossett said. "It's the mayor, and that's who I have to work with. The council members, I involve them and engage them, but it's not like in the city [of Covington] where I have five bosses. And it's really hard to get consensus with five people about anything, especially when politics get involved."

Parsons made the case as well that state administrative agencies, like the transportation cabinet, often struggle with the city manager form.

"I will tell you that state government doesn't understand the city manager form of government," Parsons said. "State agencies, things like that, if they want a decision from Covington or a Newport person, the first person they're usually going to call is not the city manager, it's the mayor."

Proponents of the city manager form view the need to reach consensus among a group as a virtue, rather than an obstacle.

"The city manager itself, under that form of government, it requires cooperation and interaction with the entire board versus, say, just the mayor," Scott said. "So, you get a broader perspective of both the neighborhood issues [and] the objectives that the entire city wants to achieve."

Fette, on the other hand, said that even under the mayor-council from of government, there were measures and policies that could be instituted to ensure collaboration between the legislative and executive branches of the municipal government and the city's professional staff. She used the example of the city's recent hiring of a new economic development director, a position she could have hired on her own. In spite of this, she decided to institute a hiring committee to ensure that all aspects of the city government could weigh in.

"I try to be very collaborative with council," Fette said. "So in our hiring process, even though the economic development director in the city of Erlanger is not one of the positions that requires council approval, I still created a committee, a hiring committee, that had two council members of the nine. I had the executive director of [Kenton County Planning and Development Services] a part of that committee, and then our HR, finance director and then our city administrator, our city attorney and myself."

Steve Hayden, the only member of the Covington City Commission who's not running for election in November, has been comparatively quiet on the issue. He made a brief statement on the matter on Tuesday, when the mayor and other commissioners asked people to vote for the conversion.

"There is an advantage of having more eyes on a situation than one, and in 1930 they made a decision to go with the commission form of government for a reason," Hayden said. "My only comment would be -- and this is neither for nor against it -- but be careful when it comes to voting for the mayor because it's going to be his hands on the wheel."

You can read Meyer's op-ed, Carran's op-ed and the full IBM study below. You can also watch a recording of Covington Civic Lab's public forum below.

Greg Fischer, Brent Cooper and Corporex Chairman Bill Butler sit on the Managing Board of LINK nky, which oversees the business operations of LINK but has no say in editorial matters.