Philly’s mayor: CEO of the City of Philadelphia

The mayor sets the tone, hires department heads, drafts the city budget and keeps the ship on course.

Like a chief executive officer of a corporation, a mayor is the CEO of a city. And as Philly’s about to elect its next one, it’s a good idea to have a sense of what you’re voting for.

They’re the person that develops strategies to be implemented city-wide, delegates and appoints leadership positions to critical departments and manages the overall operations of a company — or in this case, Philadelphia.

According to the current Philadelphia mayor, Jim Kenney, the position isn’t a top-down authority but making changes through consensus among city leadership and the public.

“City council is the mayor’s board of directors,” Kenney said. “As I’ve served on boards of directors before, you need the board’s go-ahead in order to move forward with programs your company (or in this case a city) wants to implement. You’re also responsible for hiring the department heads that run each operating department, and you work with your cabinet to coordinate that as best you can.”

It’s a tall order with around 26,000 employees and a five billion dollar-plus budget to oversee, but with the right leadership, it is manageable, said the current mayor.

What are the Mayor’s primary functions?

1. Developing strategies for the city
2. Tracking the performance of city strategies and making changes when needed
3. Collaborating and fostering relationships with other elected officials to make sure city leaders are working together toward the same goal
4. Drafting the city’s overall budget (which is then amended and approved by City Council)
5. Signing City Council bills into law or vetoing bills from becoming law
6. Hiring executive leadership for the several dozen city agencies

Lauren Cristella, the interim president and chief operating officer for the nonpartisan nonprofit election watchdog organization Committee of Seventy, said the mayor’s job is so impactful to the life of Philadelphians because their strategy trickles down into all departments in the city.

“The hiring is probably the first and most important job of any new mayor,” said Cristella. “Everything from the managing director, city representative and the police chief and fire commissioner. All of those executive department heads, and there are tons of them throughout the city, cover almost every facet of life — that’s all in the mayor’s purview.”

The leaders hired for these city departments implement the mayor’s strategy in a variety of ways, like proposing roadway solutions like the Washington Avenue Repavement and Improvement project or implementing a tax on sugary drinks to fund free Pre-K and improvements to parks and playgrounds. In the case of the Washington Ave. improvement project, those proposals come from leadership in the Office of Transportation, Infrastructure and Sustainability. In contrast, proposals like Philly’s soda tax came directly down from Mayor Kenney. Either way, the strategies and leadership the mayor employs shape the way our city looks.

“You need to hire people that are smarter than you,” said Kenney about delegating leadership. “Then you need to listen to their points of view and come to some mutual group decision that you’re all now responsible for.”

Here’s just a small sample of the departments the mayor sets the agenda for and oversees: