Tallahassee's Commission-Manager Government

Tallahassee splits the job of running the city between elected policy makers and a hired professional. The five-member City Commission sets policies and tax rates and appoints four officers to administer the city, and of those four, the city manager oversees most city departments and administers the daily operation of the city, according to the City of Tallahassee. The mayor holds one of the five commission seats, has no veto, and is described by the city as a leadership mayor rather than a strong mayor.

The current manager is Karen Jumonville, who began the job on October 1, 2026. Her city biography says she reports directly to the City Commission, leads a workforce of nearly 4,000 employees, oversees the commission meeting agenda process, and is responsible for an annual budget of approximately $1 billion covering police, fire, public transportation, utilities and parks. She started with the city as a Senior Planner, worked there more than 27 years, and helped advance projects such as turning a polluted brownfield into Cascades Park. Last verified: October 9, 2026, on the City of Tallahassee website.

That scope reflects what kind of city Tallahassee is. The city government is the seat of and only incorporated municipality within Leon County, and its departments run from StarMetro to Tallahassee International Airport and the city's own electric, gas and water utilities, as the city's Treasurer-Clerk pages list them. A manager here runs a utility company and a transit system as well as a police and fire department. The same archived pages from 2017 listed the capital work then under the manager's departments, from Gaines Street and the FAMU Way Extension to downtown sidewalks, all carried out by departments that answer to the manager rather than to the mayor.

The change came by charter. Tallahassee's City Commission first met on February 20, 1920, following a change to the city charter, when the old city council adjourned out of existence, according to Gerald Ensley's history column, first published in 2010 and republished by the Tallahassee Democrat in August 2024. The first three commissioners were A.P. McCaskill, Guyte P. McCord and J. Stuart Lewis. McCord, who had led the charter revision, was the last mayor under the old system and the first under the new one, and later served nine years as city attorney.

The commission's first hire set the tone. It brought in J.W. Greer from Bryan, Texas, where he had been that city's first city manager in 1917; Greer was an engineer, hired for his experience dealing with utilities. Ensley ties the model to the Progressive Era push to purge political machines and bosses: an appointed manager and appointed officials such as a city clerk-auditor, under a small elected commission, would run the city more professionally than a crowd of elected officials. It replaced the arrangement Tallahassee had used since its earliest years, an elected mayor and eight city council members plus other elected officials.

Not everyone in Tallahassee accepted it. One resident called the new government a monarchy handled by a dictator in 1920, and Tallahassee Democrat publisher Milton Smith greeted the first meeting grudgingly. In 1922 critics stacked a town hall meeting to overturn the system, but McCord laid out two years of progress, three civic leaders stood to back him, and the commission-manager form prevailed.

Ensley credits the new government with an era of growth. In 1920 Tallahassee was a village of 5,637 people with rudimentary city lights and gas service, three police officers on foot, three firemen, no paved sidewalks and three miles of paved streets. By 1940, when the city marked the 20th anniversary of commission-manager government, the population had reached 16,276, and the city had added a sewage system, a water system and an airport, standardized property tax rates, and paved 22 miles of sidewalks and 25 miles of streets. In 1950 the commission expanded from three to five members.

The longest-serving modern manager was Dan Kleman, city manager from 1974 to 1994, according to the Tallahassee Democrat's 2025 obituary report. Under him the city built a new City Hall, financed parking garages and developed parks, and spent about a decade assembling the block behind City Hall, once a collection of buildings and parking lots called Capital Commons, which became Kleman Plaza. Florida State University eminent scholar Frank Sherwood said in 1994 that Kleman went heavily into utilities, that the utilities led to annexation, and that this is why Tallahassee was still the only city in Leon County. Kleman was pushed out by a slim majority of commissioners.

The manager is not the only hire at Tallahassee City Hall. The charter gives the City Commission three more appointees, a treasurer-clerk, a city attorney and an inspector general, so that legal advice, money and records, and internal oversight do not all run through the manager's office. That echoes the 1920 design Ensley describes, in which appointed officials such as a city clerk-auditor worked alongside the manager under a small elected board. The inspector general is the newest of the four, having taken the place of a City Auditor the commission first created in 1979.

As of October 9, 2026, the city leadership page lists Karen Jumonville as City Manager, Amy M. Toman as City Attorney, Dennis R. Sutton as Inspector General and James Cooke IV as Treasurer-Clerk. Among them the manager is the highest paid, a ranking the Tallahassee Democrat found spelled out in city agenda materials in May 2025.

Because the commission hires and fires the manager, a split commission splits over the manager too. Ensley notes that Anita Favors became Tallahassee's first female city manager in 1997, and she was still serving as City Manager Anita Favors Thompson in 2014, the Democrat reported. Reese Goad was hired in September 2018 at a starting salary of $194,361. His 2021 performance reviews, obtained by the Tallahassee Democrat, showed the board's divide: straight 5s from Mayor John Dailey and Commissioners Dianne Williams-Cox and Curtis Richardson, a 1 from Commissioner Jeremy Matlow and a 1.4 from Commissioner Jack Porter, the paper reported.

The 2026 succession followed the same line. On September 2, 2026, the commission voted 3 to 2 to offer the job to Jumonville, then an assistant city manager, with Porter and Matlow opposed; both supported a failed motion to appoint her for a year instead, WFSU reported. The contract the commission then ratified runs five years at a $317,000 salary and requires a supermajority vote to terminate the manager, WTXL reported. Porter argued that the manager serves at the pleasure of the City Commission that Tallahassee voters elect; Dailey said it was awkward for one of the four appointed officials to be removable only by a supermajority while the other three could be removed by a simple majority.

Nobody on the dais has proposed abandoning the system itself. In August 2023, during the run-up to the charter review, Dailey said council-management serves the city well and that a strong mayor form of government would not serve the community, the Democrat reported. WCTV summed up the arrangement in 2017: although Tallahassee has an elected mayor, the day to day operations are run by the City Manager.