The quiet but kind of haughty rollout of a new brand mark for the city of Charleston by the new Cogswell administration caught many by surprise, including city council members. We hope this isn’t an example of how the city will be run for the next three and a half years.
But the somewhat ugly new brand mark with its simplistic sans serif type is the second instance of what may be a leadership trend — an administration doing what it wants without including people, assuming that forgiveness is easier to get than permission.
This week in a story uncovered by reporter Skyler Baldwin, city spokesperson Deja Knight McMillan said the city’s new logo won’t replace its official seal that goes back to 1790. But she said the updated logo by a new outside brand creator that is handling photography, videography and digital design is part of a larger “content creation” contract. The City Paper asked July 16 in a Freedom of Information Act request for details of current lobbying and social media/communications contracts but has not received any information yet from the city.
“This new logo is just being used as a kind of placeholder,” McMillan said. “We derived it from the seal, because obviously, it’s beautiful, and we didn’t want to just rebrand the city entirely overnight. … It’s just being used for unofficial documents.”
OK, but the whole rebranding thing was done quietly, without input from council or the public. Seems wrong.
And while all of this might not be all that off-putting, it raises another question: Is the Cogswell administration trying to quietly move away from the city’s historical strong-mayor form of government toward a structure administered by a manager?
Just look at a new organizational chart that Cogswell announced in May. Before then, the city’s 26 departments and mayor’s office operated independently, the administration claimed — even though departments ultimately reported directly to the mayor.
But that changed with the reorganization. Now, only three people are direct reports to Cogswell — a scheduler, special assistant and his chief of staff. That chief of staff, who is paid $250,000 a year, or about $30,000 more than the mayor — is the focus of the chain of command. As the city’s organization now stands, 12 department heads report directly to the chief of staff and several managers of other departments report to the department heads. It’s a top-down structure centralized with an employee, not the mayor. Maybe it creates efficiencies. Maybe not. But either way, it takes the mayor out of the day-to-day running of the city.
No one voted for that.
So does it really matter? Some would argue that it doesn’t because the city’s functions continue as usual. But others say putting a bureaucratic layer between the city’s elected leader and his department heads creates accountability and transparency issues. And the mayor, now with less direct responsibility, continues to earn the same six-figure salary, even though his job has substantially changed to more style than substance.
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