The Mayor’s Office
Tuesday, August 6, 2013 at 2:37PM Every city has a mayor. Some are quite admirable. Others are jerks. As we’ve been visiting different US cities here in the Back Road Café this summer, I’ve been noticing mayors. What do they do exactly? So let’s stop by a few cities today – Minneapolis, New York, San Diego, Carmel, and at the end, my favorite mayor - and say Hi! to the mayors.
Mayors try to make a city work, to be both livable and lovable. Mayors also do ceremonial things; they welcome conventioneers, cut ribbons, perform weddings. Some do this well. Others screw up. A city can bask in its mayor’s success, or survive in spite of them. For example:
* R. T Rybak, Mayor of Minneapolis, officiated at 46 weddings on August 1, starting at midnight, for 7 hours straight, after the law went into effect making Minnesota the 13th state to legalize gay marriage. Earlier this summer, when the bill passed, he had shouted into the euphoric crowd that he’d marry any and all who came to City Hall August 1. All night, each couple walked, or ran, down the five flights of the neoclassical City Hall, serenaded by the Gay Men’s Chorus, for their ceremony, the mayor beaming. Right next to the large nude sculpture of a giant water god symbolizing the Mississippi. Photos well worth looking at. Later that day a sleepy mayor was interviewed by National Public Radio while riding his bike home from work – so Minneapolis.
* When New Yorkers elect a new mayor in November, it might be the guy who goes by the on-line alias “Carlos Danger.” Candidate Anthony Weiner, for our purposes only a mayor-wannabee, has twice in the last couple years been caught sexting with much younger women, posting sexually suggestive photos of himself on line, and having phone sex with women other than his wife (who happens to be Hillary Rodham Clinton’s close aide and friend). Each time he has denied it, delayed, and then admitted, apologized. Refusing to bow out of the race, he said this week, “Quitting is not how we roll in New York.” If that’s a 9-11 reference (“Let’s roll”) he has even worse taste than I thought.
Bruce Gilden/Magnum, for The New York TimesNew York always has colorful mayors. Think Fiorello LaGuardia or Ed Koch (“How’m I doin’?”) Its two most recent mayors are likewise larger than life, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. For a progressive city, it’s remarkable that both these men are Republicans; New York hasn’t had a Democratic mayor since 1989. This year voters have 12 candidates to choose from. Their photos paint a New York picture:
* San Diego Mayor Bob Filner has been accused of sexual harassment in recent weeks by numerous local women, including a San Diego State University dean, a school psychologist, a retired Navy rear-admiral and his own communications director. The women gave detailed descriptions of groping, slobbering, propositioning, and what is called “the now infamous Filner Headlock.” The mayor has ignored the widespread calls by local and state officials to resign, admitting only that he has some “problems” and will take a two-week leave to get “intensive therapy” and then return to office.
* Here in my hometown on California’s Central Coast, a new young mayor of Carmel, Jason Burnett, formed an alliance with the mayors of five other Monterey Peninsula cities and solved a 50 year old water supply challenge - how to get, store and divide up fairly enough water from the short Carmel River for a growing population, tourists and farmers. He got a diverse group of stakeholders to agree, including the for-profit Cal-Am water company, local business coalitions, small and big farmers and the Sierra Club. Burnett is new to politics and his style is both collaborative and goal driven. Where 5 decades of in-fighting and dysfunction have paralyzed the area, Burnett thought regionally, built trust, persisted, and won deep concessions from the German owned water corporation.
“I want to be mayor” is how Thomas Friedman titled a recent New York Times column about the new book The Metropolitan Revolution. He writes,
“If you want to be an optimist about America today, stand on your head. The country looks so much better from the bottom up — from its major metropolitan areas — than from the top down. Washington is tied in knots by Republican-led hyperpartisanship, lobbyists and budget constraints. Ditto most state legislatures. So the great laboratories and engines of our economy are now our cities. This is the conclusion of an important new book by the Brookings Institution scholars Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley, entitled: “The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy.”
For generations, they write, we held the view that “the feds and states are the adults in the system, setting direction; the cities and the metropolitan areas are the children, waiting for their allowance. The metropolitan revolution is exploding this tired construct. Cities and metropolitan areas are becoming the leaders in the nation: experimenting, taking risks, making hard choices.” We are seeing “the inversion of the hierarchy of power in the United States.”
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Munchinland MayorCan you name the mayor of your city? Is he or she a scoundrel, a champion, a cipher? I leave you with one of my favorite mayors:
“As mayor of the Munchkin City, in the County of the Land of Oz, I welcome you most regally….”
Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter
Reader Comments (1)
Hooray for the new mayor of Carmel! Fantastic to hear about his collabortive work. And how about our Minnesota mayor of MPLS....marrying those happy couples all night long. Thanks, Deborah, for this delightful and informative piece!