It's amazing to me how many people in this city have an opinion on city manager Judy Rogers, when few of them have any idea who she is since she truly hates talking to reporters and has avoided the spotlight with a diligence usually associated with Secret Service agents.

That's in part because she's just uncomfortable talking to reporters, but in part because she really does believe that a good civil servant stays in the background.

At any rate, I'm not going to get into whether or not Vision Vancouver had valid reasons for replacing her (I've written elsewhere about some of the reasons the Visionistas had) but the whole business of new councils wanting to install their own new city managers.

It's not as uncommon as people think and it's been getting more prevalent in recent years, according to Isabell Hadford, the head of the B.C. administrators association.

I interviewed Isabell during the summer, when I was doing a profile of Judy for Vancouver magazine and there was already a lot of talk then about her uncertain future.

Isabell said it's become more common to see city managers getting "replaced" or canned or fired or whatever term you want to use, since B.C. switched to three-year elections in 1990 for city councils. Before then, half of councils were elected every two years, which meant that cities didn't see huge political swings like we have seen in recent years.

Even if voters were furious and wanted to throw all the bums out, they could only throw half the bums out at a time and moods often shifted by the time the next election came around.

But once the province shifted to electing whole councils, that meant that if voters were particularly unhappy with something that had happened in the past three years, they could express that more powerfully by unelecting pretty much the whole council and choosing a brand-new one.

That's certainly what we've seen in Vancouver in the last three elections.

When a new group sweeps into power, they generally believe it's because the voters want them, the political leaders and not the bureaucrats, to carry out a radically different agenda from what was unrolling previously.

Isabell noted that within six months of the last election in 2005, about half a dozen city managers got their marching orders or were eased out the door. (Surrey was the most high-profile example.) Lois Jackson out in Delta probably had the most thorough house-cleaning ever, back in 1999, when she became mayor. In all, 19 people ended up leaving their positions at Delta city hall over a couple of years, as she either called them in to talk about their lack of fit or as they saw the writing on the wall and decided to leave on their own.

"I did it because I knew we had to have a change," Lois told me. "But the whole building shook."

Sometimes mayors do it because they feel like there's an entrenched culture that resists anything new or resists the community. Sometimes it's for other reasons. No matter how neutral city managers try to be, they always run the risk of being seen as inextricably linked to a particular mayor or administration. The new council comes in thinking, as Isabell put it, "You were loyal to that person and I need someone to be loyal to be, so you're gone."

Some of you readers are probably thinking right now, So what's the big deal? A new team comes in and they want their people there.

That certainly happens at the provincial and federal level. New parties get elected and they frequently do considerable house-cleaning to put in bureaucrats that they think are more attuned to their philosophies.

But the thing is that cities have a long culture of trying not to be like that.

Even since big municipal reform movements in the early 20th century swept through the United States and Canada, many many cities moved to what they called a strong city manager/weak mayor system. That was precisely to try to avoid wild swings and a city run by first one team of political hacks and then another.

So city bureaucrats, especially in Canada, have a super-strong culture of believing that it's their job to run the city with a steady hand, no matter what political winds are blowing.

They see themselves as completely neutral, there to warn councils when they are over-stepping their jurisdiction or when something can't be done because it would result in a bad policy.

The problem is, it's always hard for anyone to come across as completely neutral. And when you get into a tussle about something a council wants to do and not do, it's very tempting to think, "This isn't just about good or bad policy advice. It's about this person having a different political slant from me."

Judy Rogers believed deeply that she always carried out the will of the council of the day, but that she wouldn't hesitate to tell them when they were taking a wrong turn. Ultimately, the majority of decision-makers on the new team decided they didn't have faith in either the neutrality or the advice.

They also believe that it's the job of council to set the direction, not to pick among different policy options that the bureaucracy puts forward.

That makes the city more like a provincial or federal government system. Now the voters will have to judge for the next three years whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.