A letter to the editor in Monday’s Monitor incorrectly stated Concord’s city manager form of government was adopted in 1993. In fact, it was part of the new city charter voted in by Concord’s citizens in 1949.

It also criticizes this form of government as giving too much power to unelected people. I disagree.

Our democratic system of government in the United States gives our elected city officials the authority to hire businesses and individuals for many levels of complex work. They hire and oversee private companies that design and build large office buildings and huge highway systems, provide health care insurance for thousands of employees and install million-dollar communication and data management systems. These are just a few of the many major roles that are played by people who are not directly elected by the voters but are directly overseen by their elected officials.

Employing a city manager is also a common decision by many medium and large cities. For small towns with local citizens willing to oversee such projects, a city manager is not that critical. But for a city as large and complex as Concord, I have observed that the city’s mayor and city council have successfully hired city managers over the years who are extremely knowledgeable, experienced with large and complex projects and staff supervision and work hard for the well-being of the residents and businesses in Concord.

I’ve also seen, over my fifty years of working in Concord, that whenever a city manager in Concord ceases to be responsive to the mayor and city council, the city hires a new one. The fact that this usually happens after a city manager is in place for a decade or more indicates that the city of Concord has done a good job of selecting and benefiting from having an experienced and sound city manager in charge of all the complex management decisions needed for a city of its size.

Finally, if Concord switched to a full-time mayor system of government, the collaborative nature of Concord’s city council would suffer. The mayor would need to be elected by the city’s voters, not the members of the city council, and he or she would inevitably be competing for the voters’ support and likely to blame the council members for the city’s problems every two years.

Why push for a change to a system of government that has worked well in Concord for so long?

David Woolpert lives in Henniker.