Create a civil service that is accountable and skilled.

• Author: Bennet, James

After 20 years in office, Coleman Young announced last year that he would not run again for mayor of Detroit, where almost one in three people lives in poverty and the true unemployment rate is anybody's guess. The voters pointedly did not replace him with his anointed successor.

Instead, they elected Dennis Archer, a former Michigan Supreme Court justice who promised to revive the city's bureaucracy. "I represent the people who can't get their garbage picked up on time, their streetlights to stay on all night, their phone calls answered at City Hall," he said.

Archer spent the weeks before his inauguration painstakingly picking a new team interested in "opening the windows and letting fresh air into City Hall." After all, if he hoped to energize the city government, he couldn't waste a single appointment.

You see, out of the city's 16,023 employees, Archer was permitted to replace exactly 150.

Archer's predicament is hardly unique. In New York City, Rudolph Giuliani, taking over a government not known for its nimbleness, was allowed to appoint 1,200 people. Out of more than 216,000 city employees.

This is nuts. Mayors with good ideas need to be able to hire people committed to and accountable for enacting them. Mayors--and James Bennet, an editor of The Washington Monthly from 1989 to 1991, is the Detroit bureau chief of The New York Times. governors and presidents--with bad ideas need to be deprived of the excuse that unappointed civil servants are undercutting their efforts.

Turning a large portion of civil service positions into appointed ones remains perhaps the only lunatic-fringe Monthly reform, one that policy types still nervously edge away from. This is in part because the abuses of the old patronage systems were so spectacular. Among my personal favorites were the lifeguards of Coney Island in the thirties, documented by Robert Caro: Some were grossly overweight, some spent their days fishing from the lifesaving dories, and some were afraid to go near the water because they couldn't swim.

Reformers could prevent such abuses without dumping patronage altogether, however. Insist that latter-day patronage appointees pass civil service tests: The lifeguards should know how to swim and the accountants to add.

There is probably a deeper reason that people start fidgeting when you praise patronage. At about the same time revulsion was rising against Tammany Hall, reformers were pushing for the creation of certified professions in the...