As one mayor said of the mayor's role, "there's no job description, you just have to do
the job as you see it". Nevertheless, there was a great deal of agreement about some aspects of being a mayor, the immense workload, the community focus and the changing nature of the role due to changes in the local government context. The workload was seen as stemming from the fact that "the job had no boundaries" and was "as big or as small as you want it to be" so that 70 to 80 hour weeks were the norm among the women interviewed. The number of meetings, functions and appointments and the need to answer correspondence or follow up complaints, usually with very limited secretarial or administrative support, meant that the job was "full time or more than full-time".
The job was described in a nutshell by one mayor as "serving the communities of the district, leading the council, managing the councillors and assisting with decision making". She pointed out that it was important that councillors had quality information before them as a basis for making decisions and she saw it as the mayor' s role to make sure that reports from council staff provided that level of information. Another mayor mentioned the need to write speeches and keep up with the flood of paper.
A community focus was very clear in the way the mayors described the role. The difference between leadership in general and being mayor was that the mayor was leader of a community - and that particular community and its needs and resources shaped the specifIcs of the mayor's role. Each of the mayors talked about the importance of the community in describing what a mayor does. They spoke about the job variously as: "a leadership role for communities", "a leadership role working at the community level", "being a figurehead that the community can feel proud of', "a glorified community worker with a fancy title", being a "hands-on leader who is aware of people's concerns and community issues", "being an advocate for your
community", "giving you the chance to really shape your community" and "being the public face of the city".
There were two strands running through the various descriptions; the figurehead or 'public face' ceremonial role and the hands-on community worker, community-shaper role. As Jenny Brash of Porirua City noted, being mayor requires a very thorough, intimate knowledge of your community, "getting to know your city or district in a way few other people get to know it". One mayor, from a district council, spoke of the enormous public expectation that mayors should be able to deliver everything, " . . . they [mayors] have to have a magic wand and it's something I keep telling my community I don't have". In a similar vein, another mayor of a district said that the role didn't have any of the power that many members of the public assumed it had, but was "a very hard-working role and sometimes tedious".
Two mayors commented on the changed and changing nature of the role. As one of the mayors serving in a rural township said, the changes had meant "a focus on becoming more socially responsive and responsible". She explained that prior to the
1 989 reforms and restructuring, local authorities were not involved in:
things much wider than roads and sewage and core services of council and tended to steer well clear of social issues and community services. But the devolution of responsibilities [from central government] down to local communities meant that local authorities had to take a leadership role.
Another mayor who mentioned the changing role of local government and its impact on the job of a mayor, said legislative changes had brought about "more and more stringent requirements for financial management". One of her challenges had been getting councillors to face up to the "uncomfortable realities" of the new law change. For example there was the need for accounting standards that included accounting for depreciation to cope with future replacement or maintenance of assets, in turn requiring large rates rises to fund. In the case of her council, the councillors had wanted to flout the law and go on as before, but their mayor had "little interest in this life or in any future life, in having presided over a blatant attempt to flout the law". She said that she and her council did not agree on the need to do long-term planning, which had been one of the policy platforms in her first mayoral election campaign and was:
what this Amendment No. 3 to the Local Government Act was all about. It was saying to the council that ' if you don't get off your butts and do some financial planning off your own bat, we're going to legislate to make you do it. ' ... We have a small district of 28,000 people, within that we run 1 6 water schemes and 1 0 sewage schemes and we are looking at millions of dollars. Because they are not obvious things, they are buried underground, everyone heaved a sigh of relief and forgot about them. So now we have a legacy of not having enough maintenance and no long-term planning coming back to bite us, because we are facing major expense to bring them back up to a reasonable standard.
A city mayor also mentioned the way the role of a mayor had changed in keeping with changes in local government. She considered that the position of mayor had once been quite remote and was mostly limited to being a ceremonial position and chairing council meetings, but it had become, "much more involved with the whole gamut of life and requires juggling several things at once".
The mayors also emphasised the importance of a team approach as mayor. loan Williamson (Taupo District) described the process as leading from the centre, not "driving from the bottom or bossing from the top" but being "up-front" and having everyone involved. In summary, the challenge of the mayor's job was that it was completely open-ended and this intrinsic hugeness was compounded by the mayors' level of commitment and their desire to do everything the community needed. The mayor' s role was a combination of the more formal ceremonial and council chair role alongside the community supporter and shaping role. The job of being mayor had changed with central government's devolution of social responsibilities to local government and central government's increasingly stringent requirements for longer term financial planning. As the participants said, being mayor had now come to need a broader skill base, a much broader view of what was happening in the community and the ability to communicate with others about what the community needed and enthuse them to work towards longer-term goals. Having established the perspective of the role of mayor, the next area to consider is the differences the mayors saw between competent, outstanding and less competent mayors.