Friday morning I had coffee for about 90 minutes with Leona Plaugh, the former Columbia city manager who is running for the 4th district council seat that Kirkman Finlay III is vacating to run for mayor. (Other candidates for the seat include Tony Mizzell, Kevin Fisher, Mary Waters and Walter Powell Jr.) Although I had run into her a couple of times since the campaign began, this meeting at the Woodhill Starbucks was our first chance to talk at any length.

She spoke of being excited by the opportunity to have a new city council, one with “a sense of business” that she believes has been lacking. She said Columbia has “lost our competitive edge” — compared to Cayce and West Columbia, not Charlotte or Savannah. She said business goes elsewhere because it can take 90 days to open in the city, but only 30 to open in Cayce. Starting a business in Columbia is “a cumbersome process… not business-friendly,” and “That kind of thing comes from the top.”

As an example of the kind of leadership she believes Columbia needs, she cited the late Mayor Kirkman Finlay, the councilman’s father. In an anecdote she had told me before (but evidently forgot having done so) she spoke of the early days of her tenure as a city employee, when council members routinely met at the Elite Epicurean to make the real decisions. At one such gathering, the council members had arrived before the mayor, and they kicked around a certain issue that all of them agreed was just nothing but trouble, and wasn’t worth the political price. They had pretty much dismissed the idea when the mayor strolled in, sat down, and shared with the group that he had been thinking about something. It turned out to be the issue they had just dispensed with. He said he had thought long and hard about it, and even though his first instinct was that it would not be politically wise or expedient, he had become convinced that it was in the long-term best interest of the city. He then went around the table asking the council members what they thought. Each admitted having been inclined against the move, but confessed to having been persuaded by what he’d said that they should do it for the sake of the future.

“I’m no Mayor Kirkman Finlay,” she concluded. “But I know it when I see it. And that’s the kind of city government I want to be a part of.”

She said the city needs “a common vision,” and leaders who can help that vision become reality.

At this point I said I had to ask her about the circumstances under which she had been fired as city manager in 2003. Y’all may recall that the council booted her from the job when some notes she had compiled came to light referring to other people in city government as “alligators” and “enemies” whom she intended to “destroy.” “Moats” were also mentioned. She said it all came from a management exercise she had learned from Harvard, and that you could find all those terms in the Harvard Business Review. Harvard or no, the terminology, as applied to her subordinates in the city administration, didn’t sit well with the council.

To me, this incident had always been a perfect illustration of how the council-manager system doesn’t work in Columbia. What she was doing, as I saw it, was trying desperately to cope with a situation in which the people she was trying to manage had direct recourse to her seven bosses.

Here’s how she remembers it:

“I knew it was going to be a volatile ride” when she was first offered the job of manager. She knew that the position was “a lightning rod… unless they are well-positioned politically — like a Gray Olive.” So even though she had years of experience in Columbia city government and knew it inside and out, she gave herself a year of settling in before trying to make significant changes.

Then she had each department head put together a business plan for operating that department, including criteria for evaluating that manager.

She then tried to apply training from Harvard (the JFK School) to bring about a restructuring of the government. In hindsight, she now says, she should have hired a consultant. “But I had 28 years experience,” and she thought she could handle it.

She drafted her restructuring plan. “I then sat down with each council member to brief them,” and incorporated their comments into the plan.

It was after she turned and started telling her department managers what their new roles would be that “it became political.” I asked her whether she meant by that that they started going over her head to the council, and she said yes.

She said among her recommendations had been hiring a CFO for the city — which she says would have helped prevent some of the financial blunders of recent years. One of the council members, taking an interest in what she was trying to do, consulted a top financial officer with SCANA, who reacted by saying “That’s exactly where I’m trying to take SCANA.” She notes that the position is back in the city’s budget now, and it mystifies her that the position hasn’t yet been filled.

In summing up our discussion, she asserted that she is a leader who knows the budget inside out, and how to fix it — and has “the intestinal fortitude” to do it.

“We are in a critical, critical time,” she said, and the only way to work through it is to reduce the cost of providing services — because her conversations with voters as she goes house-to-house campaigning persuades her it would be wrong to raise taxes now. The key for the long term is to grow the tax base; and to start that process the city must first stop “driving people away” (both businesses and residents).

Before  we parted, we spoke a little about annexation and consolidation. She said she thinks consolidation of city and county into one government is the direction to go in. And while incumbent officeholders are generally the biggest impediment to that — because they don’t want to give up their power — she said she’d gladly give up her seat to make consolidation happen.