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GREENSBORO - As any veteran sailor can attest, few things are riskier than heading into stormy seas on a ship with no captain.

Welcome to the choppy waters of Guilford County, where the two biggest ships of state recently threw their top managers overboard at a time when:

The national economy is sinking.

Demands for local, public services are increasing.

Tax revenues are dropping.

And the Triad's basic economic structure is still evolving from textiles, tobacco and furniture to something else.

Now more than ever, Guilford County and the city of Greensboro need strong, professional managers, many local leaders say.

But some worry that both governments are heading in the opposite direction as they work separately to fill the shoes of former Greensboro manager Mitchell Johnson, discharged last week, and David McNeill , Guilford's former chief executive who retired under pressure late last year.

The fear is that elected county and city officials are going to start micro-managing local government, stepping outside their traditional roles as policy makers to get directly involved in daily operations and substantially weaken their governments' chief executive offices.

"I hope we don't go too far in the direction of elected officials running the day-to-day operations of city and county government," said Ed Kitchen, Johnson's predecessor who retired four years ago after a decade as the city's chief executive.

Kitchen and others see it as a recipe for political chaos that could affect taxpayers by hindering the delivery of public services and, ultimately, making it more difficult to grow and reinvent the local economy.

But at the county level, without a permanent manager for three months, Board of Commissioners Chairman Melvin "Skip" Alston and Vice Chairman Steve Arnold already are filling the void, some of their colleagues say.

"At no time in the past have I seen the chair and vice chair as involved in the day-to-day operations as we have now," commissioner Kay Cashion said.

The two are so enmeshed in interim County Manager Brenda Jones-Fox's preparation of next year's budget that they have "hijacked" the process, commissioner Paul Gibson said.

"They are making decisions that are not theirs to make," Gibson said,

Similarly, some members of the City Council believe their board is on a slippery slope toward micro-management. Councilwoman Goldie Wells has said for months that tensions among council members are rooted in conflict over who is running the show day-to-day.

Some council members want to assume direct supervision of city offices such as the police chief and the city attorney, who now report to the manager, as do all other city employees.

Wells doesn't believe issues so basic will be resolved simply by hiring a replacement for Johnson, who was terminated, effective July 15, in a 5-4 vote, demoting him immediately to an unspecified position.

"I don't see how it's going to be any better," Wells said of eventually hiring Johnson's permanent replacement while the council remains split over who has how much authority.

Meanwhile, an unprecedented number of vacancies in permanent leadership positions have left pockmarks in both local governments' upper ranks. In Greensboro, seven top management positions are being filled by acting and interim administrators after their original occupants retired or left for other jobs. That includes the fire chief, the directors of transportation and the park system.

Similarly, Guilford's top ranks have seven positions now either filled by interim replacements or eliminated under pressure from commissioners.

Guilford is on its third interim county attorney in three months since Sharron Kurtz resigned unexpectedly in December.

Commissioner Bruce Davis has a possible explanation. "I would think attorneys are finding that it's a lot of pressure to work with 11 bosses," he said, referring to the number of commissioners.

It's a bad time for shortages in top-tier manpower because difficult budget decisions must be made in the throes of the deepening recession.

"We are in the middle of the worst budget crisis the city ever had. We are struggling to come up with a way to make the budget work," said Butch Simmons, the city inspections and engineering director.

Simmons and others said Johnson was spearheading an effort to review all city programs and determine which should be considered for necessary budget cuts.

Firing Johnson "cripples the city," Councilman Robbie Perkins said. "To make a change like this in the middle of the budget is just devastating."

Others say the city staff is capable of handling the process without a permanent manager.

"Things will run along very smoothly," said Councilwoman Mary Rakestraw, who voted to dismiss Johnson. "I don't think you are going to see hardly any missteps, if any, from now throughout the process."

Numerous staff vacancies aren't a problem, said council members Mike Barber and Sandra Anderson Groat, two others who voted for Johnson's ouster.

"We are in a time like we never have been before," said Barber, calling it "a great opportunity for leadership to rise to the top."

In county government, Alston acknowledges taking a hands-on approach to the budgeting process. It's justified by the need to contain property taxes, he said. "Anybody who says anything different, it's because they don't want all this goodness to happen," he said. "They wanted to keep on the same old treadmill."

But Gibson indicated that the unusual depth of Alston and Arnold's involvement in preparing the next budget will ignite significant division.

"They're going to bring a budget forward, and it will never see the light of day," he said.

Alston, a Democrat, and Arnold, a Republican, assumed their positions in a power-sharing agreement. One of their first moves was to arrange McNeill's departure.

The strong manager style of government was designed decades ago, experts say, to end the "ward boss" era that injected a heavy dose of politics into the delivery of most public services.

It also was designed to make the delivery of those services more efficient by giving the elected board only one employee, the top manager, who would be responsible to it for the rest of the staff.

Emerging in the early 20th century, the strong-manager system sought to separate political decisions made by elected officials from the "technical, professional aspects of government," said Carl Stenberg of the UNC School of Government in Chapel Hill.

Elected boards would set their governments' general policies, telling administrators what objectives to achieve and then reviewing and approving or modifying the manager's subsequent recommendations. Administrators would put the elected officials' policies into effect in ways fair to everyone, regardless of political allegiance.

"Nowadays, government life is far too complex to maintain that clear a distinction. There are a lot of gray areas," Stenberg said of the system as originally envisioned.

Still, Kitchen and others see value in having an administrator strong enough to speak frankly to elected officials "who typically aren't charged with knowing the details on a long-term basis."

If those officials emasculate the position, "you run the risk of not hearing that necessary and hopefully wise advice coming from the professional manager," Kitchen said.

At the local level, Guilford County had stability in its top administration from the late 1960s to 1990, when the highly regarded John Witherspoon was county manager. Since then, it's been something of a revolving door with five successors, only one of whom - Roger Cotten - lasted more than four years and left willingly.

Greensboro has had three managers during that span, including Bill Carstarphen, Kitchen and Johnson.

The profession of top manager in local government can be both stress-filled and somewhat nomadic, said Stenberg, who teaches public administration in the UNC program.

Typically, senior managers make career stops in four or five governments along the way. They need to have a thick skin because they serve literally "at the pleasure of" their board.

"It kind of goes with the turf," Stenberg said. "At any given meeting, you could be let go."

Contact Taft Wireback at 373-7100 or taft.wireback@news-record.com; Amanda Lehmert at 373-7075 or amanda.lehmert@news-record.com; and Gerald Witt at 373-7008 or gerald.witt@news-record.com