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St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer was elected this month on a campaign that stressed competent delivery of city services — something that has been visibly absent from the city’s leadership in recent years. As such, a proposal to create the position of city manager, to be filled by an apolitical professional who would run day-to-day city operations, deserves consideration.

The idea should be viewed not as a threat to the power of this or any mayor, but as, potentially, a tool to help carry out what the voters have made clear they want: effective and efficient management of their city. Amid the technical and legal complexities of running a modern city, more than half of them in the U.S. today use some form of professional management, according to the .

Spencer has expressed support for the idea in concept, though she has also expressed reservations about how it would be instituted. One fair question is whether it would too broadly empower the Board of Aldermen to meddle in management issues currently handled by the mayor. That could complicate rather than streamline delivery of services, thus defeating the whole point.

The devil, as they say, will be in the details.

Alderwoman Daniela Velazquez’s pending version of the legislation, she says, would empower a chief administrative officer to conduct regular city functions such as garbage collection, snow removal and street repair, including the hiring and management of department heads to oversee those functions.

As any St. Louisan who has endured the city’s Keystone Kops handling snowstorms, 911 calls, garbage delivery and more knows, the current system of the mayor hiring any pal he or she pleases too often just hasn’t worked.

Further, say proponents, the mayor and aldermen should be freed up to focus on big-picture issues — economic development, Downtown revival, tourism — instead of arguing over which potholes to fill.

As the Post-Dispatch’s Austin Huguelet reports, candidates for this theoretical position would need at least five years experience in city management. Just as importantly, they would have to have not held any Missouri elective office in the previous five years. Candidates would be nominated by the mayor and confirmed by the Board of Aldermen.

Velazquez has stressed that her proposal isn’t aimed at undercutting the current mayor; indeed, Velazquez first proposed it when former Mayor Tishaura Jones was still in office.

The idea would be to remove politics (as much as possible, anyway) from daily city operations. That’s a tall order in St. Louis, where patronage is as much a local flavor as gooey butter cake or toasted ravioli.

The mayor would have primary power to decide who to hire as city manager, with the consent of the Board of Aldermen. If that sounds like a heavy lift in terms of cooperation among fractious city leaders, it is — and that element alone brings some value to the table. Is anyone who isn’t vested in City Hall intrigue not tired of it?

With the central stress point in City Hall shaping up to be between Spencer and Board of Aldermen President Megan Green, it’s significant that both are on record as supporting the concept of a city manager.

It’s interesting, to say the least, that Green’s previous ambivalence toward creating a city-manager system (in January, she said she viewed the proposal as merely a way to “start a conversation�) has suddenly become a priority to her now that an adversary rather than an ally is in the mayor’s office.

That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. But if the whole point of it is to remove political gamesmanship from city services, then an overly powerful role by the Board of Aldermen would seem to be a problem.

For example, requiring professional qualifications and Board approval to hire the mayor’s nominee for manager is reasonable. But requiring a Board vote for the mayor to fire that person, as the current proposal would mandate, strikes us as a recipe for the kind of protracted mess the city recently went through with its position of personnel director. If a president can fire Senate-confirmed cabinet members at will, why shouldn’t the mayor — who, after all, is the one who ultimately answers to the voters if city management fails — not have the same power?

That’s one issue. Others will certainly arise as this debate moves forward. But given the city’s struggle in recent years to get even the small stuff right, it’s a debate worth having.