Our communities are being asked to choose which services we can bear to lose.
The city of Des Moines’ online FY28 Budget Savings Calculator, which closed July 31, said the city “faces an estimated $12 million general fund budget gap in its Fiscal Year 2028 budget and an additional $5 million gap in its Fiscal Year 2029 budget partly due to the recent state property tax legislation.” Pointing our frustration at the Legislature is understandable, and inviting residents to share the weight of these hard choices is, politically, shrewd. But when selecting every option presented in the online calculator only adds up to $11.9 million, with the menu leaning heavily on cuts that reach into public safety staffing while leaving untouched multi-million-dollar programs of questionable public return, our shared reckoning risks feeling more like a rigged riddle.
When every choice is hard, accountability, not arithmetic, is what this moment demands.
The good news is that investing in accountability can also save the city of Des Moines over $1 million.
Des Moines currently uses a “weak mayor” governance structure. This means that executive functions are held by a city manager, not the mayor. Where Mayor Zohran Mamdani can deliver upon demands for change in New York City, and is accountable for those deliverables the next time elections come around, Des Moines’ Mayor Connie Boesen is relatively powerless. She effectively holds the same access to deliver change as anyone else on the City Council. Want a stop sign put in? She can ask. Want a summer food program expanded? She can ask. Want a change in our housing policy? She can ask.
But Boesen hasn’t been granted the power to deliver.
When times are good, that’s a great model. It keeps our communities insulated from the whims of elections. But when we actually need to move forward together on a different path, its inertia blocks us from opportunities to change. When accountability is warranted, it allows problems to persist. When hard decisions need to be made, it allows our elected leaders to remain silent.
Our $12 million fiscal year 2028 budget shortfall is significant. Yet so have been numerous financial missteps. For example, a recent court ruling now requires the city to pay a developer $5.9 million for mismanaging a development contract. As a community, we also paid $975,000 in 2026 to settle complaints around hiring and $2.4 million in 2024 to settle complaints around sexual harassment in the police department. Going forward, we pay $5 million annually to InvestDSM for rehabbing houses that end up costing more than three times the average neighborhood home price, and hundreds of thousands of dollars are paid to out-of-state consultants like czb to recommend strategies like “Whole Block” neighborhood transformation, whose efficacy has been credibly refuted since the 1960s and robustly discredited for over 20 years by researchers. Our dependence on these types of analyses marshals support for spending $7 million on programs like “Restore the Core” over the credible reservations of prominent business people, while actual grassroots community efforts like the 515 Run Club are effectively nickel-and-dimed out of existence.
Leaving out these kinds of costly future commitments, and ignoring solutions that would prevent repeating past mistakes, suggests that solving our current budget shortfall needs less math than leadership. But Boesen hasn’t been granted that power to lead.
This is where our city can close $1 million of the budget shortfall by transforming how we demand accountability. Iowa Code Chapter 372 shows how Des Moines could move to a “strong mayor” system of governance, which could turn the mayor’s job from essentially an adviser to an effective CEO. Just like the president of the United States, who is bounded by constraints set by Congress, a strong mayor can take any actions allowed by the City Council. This is the role filled by the city manager today, but the public has no recourse if we don’t like the outcomes. Don’t like the actions taken by a strong mayor? Fire them at the next election. In a city like Des Moines, where we have such a strong history of competent division directors, an elected mayor and deputy mayor could effectively lead our city in an accountable manner, just like a normal president and vice president or governor and lieutenant governor. Other cities do it every day.
When considering how this change would impact the budget, and while the City Council recently rejected pay increases due to the budget shortfall, changing the role of mayor should force reconsideration. Being a strong mayor would be a much bigger job. For comparison, the president of the United States legally earns $400,000 per year, while the governor of Iowa earns $130,000. In 2025, GovSalaries reports that the Des Moines city manager earned more than $380,000 in total compensation, and that the combined five-person city manager and assistant city manager team earned more than $1.3 million in combined salary. If we followed Iowa’s model, paying the mayor $130,000, paying the deputy mayor $106,000, and providing both with room and board appropriate for their roles, more than $1 million could be reallocated back to directly benefiting the public.
Especially in a world where AI can deliver gains in organizational management yet still has no hope of filling a pothole any time soon, every aspect of service delivery within the city must be viewed through the lens of how much value is added for the cost required. But while our community is being asked to debate cuts to police, fire, or even mosquito prevention, leadership is debating how much we should pay in management instead of rethinking how we keep management accountable. “Tone deaf” is likely the most generous way to interpret such juxtapositions, yet our community should instead consider it a cry for change. When our community is asked to cut when unaccountable leadership is asking for more, accountability could be our city’s best investment.
Chris Draper focuses on issues of organizational effectiveness and governance as CEO of morriganAI, and serves as a member of the Des Moines Plan and Zoning Commission. The views expressed in this essay are his own.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Des Moines could thrive, save with a ‘strong mayor’ system | Opinion
Reporting by Chris Draper, Guest columnist / Des Moines Register
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By Chris Draper, Guest columnist | USA TODAY Network
