For people upset about the city manager ignoring the council, you're *really* not going to like how much an elected mayor ignores them. #CambMA

The "responsiveness problem," whereby the executive ignores the legislature's wishes, is emphatically not a Plan E problem. It's a separation of powers problem. The manager has charter prerogatives, as does the council. If the manager were a mayor, the conflict would persist.

City Managers are, from a political science perspective, more modern and more progressive than strong mayor systems. City Manager systems were invented to solve problems inherent in mayoral systems. I'm not sure we need to scrap Plan E.

But we can reform it...

A patch for the "responsiveness problem" might be a legislative override to executive decisions or a legislative mandate system, whereby a supermajority council vote could require certain actions of the manager. The problem and the solution would need to be carefully studied...

...but it's not necessary to throw the whole system out to solve what boils down to a checks and balances problem.