Was he as competent a city dweller as an urban fox?
Although an English parliament is out of the question, the government could proceed piecemeal, allowing competent, successful cities like London and Manchester to take greater control over money and policy.
Every city needs competent police and alert intelligence – that is not diverted into the reckless surveillance of all and sundry.
And on Staten Island or in brownstone Brooklyn, Mr. Weprin and Mr. Yassky have projected images as competent, wonky guardians of the city's finances.
While Marino's resignation will delight his critics – and there are many who believed that he was essentially not competent to manage the Eternal City – it also comes at a difficult time for Rome.
"A growing number of our constituents believe that this whole notion of changing the game may be in part that some people feel that a person of color, such as Freddy Ferrer, would not be competent enough to run this city during a period of crisis," Assemblyman Roger L. Green, the leader of the Black, Puerto Rican and Hispanic Legislative Conference, said.
Strabo showed himself equally competent in selecting useful information giving distances from city to city and mentioning the frontiers between countries or provinces as well as the main agricultural and industrial activities, political statutes, ethnographic peculiarities, and religious practices.
His demeanor — calm, frank, patient, tender, egoless, competent — was, as carried to the city and the world through the intimacy of television, profoundly reassuring.
The Nets really should move to the Prudential Center in Newark to receive an energy boost from a city that finally has competent leadership.
In the campaign, Mr. Koch attacked Mayor Beame's "clubhouse politics" and proclaimed himself a "liberal with sanity" — a competent manager who would see the city right.
