Badin vs. Fredericktown
Miamisburg graduation 2012
Valley View vs. Greenville
Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.
Scott Elliott is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He writes about education, city and suburban issues, politics, business, workforce and consumer issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2010 > August > 25
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Editorial: ‘Under-the-radar’ mayor having little impact so far
Dayton Mayor Gary Leitzell is not trying to impress you with how hard he works at City Hall. His decision to spend September pretty much away from his job symbolizes that.
He says he’ll go to city commission and other meetings, but basically he’ll be re-roofing his house. Pretty independent for a guy in his first year.
As mayor, he gets $45,000 a year, plus a few thousand dollars in expenses. That sounds like a full-time job to a lot of Daytonians, given that $30,000 is the round figure most often used about average pay among city residents.
But a lot of people at City Hall make much more.
After all, the mayor’s job is not supposed to be full time under the city charter, no matter that some mayors have treated it that way.
Former Mayor Rhine McLin was the commission’s public face and the city’s cheerleader. Predecessors Mike Turner and Paul Leonard — ambitious, young politicians — mastered policy details and projects and made themselves the center of the action. Clay Dixon, though, was not as out-front, and he worked full time for Dayton Public Schools.
Mayor Leitzell deserves credit for being honest about his time commitment. But what’s most striking about his low-key approach is that, so far, at least, it carries over into how he does the job when he is actually doing it.
Now into the second half of his first year, he has yet to make much of an impact. One possible explanation is a mayor really doesn’t have much formal power, just one vote on the city commission. And a new mayor who’s the only member of the city commission who isn’t a Democrat has a special problem having impact.
But let’s be honest: The job can be what you make it. It comes with a powerful bully pulpit, access to important people and the option of parlaying the role into being the region’s political and civic leader. Mayor Leitzell hasn’t shown the aptitude for that. Mayor McLin also struggled in that role. Mayors Turner and Leonard were more gifted, and they relished that profile and responsibility.
Mayor Leitzell’s decision to hang back isn’t all bad. Sometimes a new person can make trouble with personal attacks, divisive rhetoric or unrealistic proposals that tie up the professionals who are responsible for making the city work.
Mayor Leitzell has been collegial. There’s little of the tension that existed when Mr. Turner, the only Republican among Democrats, took office. And he works well with an able city manager.
Still, it’s reasonable to expect that he might, by now, be a leader of a specific project or cause.
But, describing his role, he says, “I fly under the radar.” He’s been working with community groups on proposals that have not yet surfaced, and his advisory council is exploring economic development initiatives, he adds. And he says he has inspired others to get involved.
He says he has made specific suggestions, such as looking inside the city government for a new airport director, rather than automatically going outside. He enjoys throwing out ideas — free RTA bus rides to downtown; an end to the practice of subsidizing the decisions of businesses to relocate from one spot in Dayton to another — without having done much spade work.
He relishes being seen as somebody who speaks his mind at the moment, rather than as “a politician” who has measured every word. Concretely, he has successfully pushed for the posting online of city commission schedules and for taking fewer actions through expedited “emergency” procedures.
In the absence of a major agenda, the mayor’s biggest role this year may be on the budget: what to do about the city’s ongoing, dramatic loss of revenue, even as the city is already near the high end in income tax rates. He has approached that issue carefully, having heard both City Manager Tim Riordan and residents.
Whether he does his own house repairs — and how long he takes — is the kind of issue that can shape a politician’s image. It’s a statement that people will remember, and it provides grist for humor.
Seriously, though, there are different interpretations of what the mayor’s role under the Dayton charter should be. Mayor Leitzell is so far putting himself unabashedly and unapologetically in the “this is not my only responsibility” camp.
He’s taking a political risk at the same time he’s trying to stay out of political trouble.
Permalink | | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics
TweetMartin Gottlieb: ‘Buy Tea Party’ a sign of times, even if it failed
The Tea Party fellow who tried to encourage Tea Party members to do business with Tea Party members found that some businesses backed out when they came upon a down side: Some consumers will go out of their way not to spend money in a way that helps the Tea Party.
Whether that problem puts a long-term kibosh on the whole idea remains to be seen. Things happened awfully fast in this go-round.
Some merchants who withdrew might have been under wrong impressions. Maybe some of the people they heard from weren’t really customers, but were atypically political people who had seen the list of merchants someplace and were calling all of them.
Meanwhile, there were other problems with the specific project. For now, the identity of Dayton as the place where this bad idea died quickly is comforting, even if this is also the place where the idea arose. Somehow, so far, the death seems to say more about the state of the society than the birth. We’ll see.
Even the death isn’t all that comforting. The opposition to the idea seemed to have come from the left, from Democrats and liberals who didn’t want to be subsidizing conservative causes. Better if it had come from the center or the apolitical. Better if it had been a rejection of the whole idea of mixing business and politics. How political, after all, do we want things to get?
The whole episode is of a piece with the ongoing story about General Motors and the Volt and Rush Limbaugh and his like. He is trashing the Volt, the car that will run for 40 miles using no gasoline, then switch to an internal-combustion engine. He complains that it is subsidized by a tax credit of $7,500 (for gas-efficient cars). He says the reason for the subsidy is that nobody wants the car. He says he turned down sponsorship by GM — Government Motors, as he says — because he saw the Volt issue coming.
One might get the impression that Limbaugh worries that if the Volt is a success and/or GM goes on to live happily ever after, he and his ideology are undermined, because the government role has been so central.
At any rate, some people have an interest in politicizing everything, whether it’s what kind of car you buy, who does your dry cleaning or where you get your news and “information.” That’s partly because they take politics too seriously themselves, and partly because if politics is inflated, they are inflated, being political people. Things are moving their way.
The “Buy Tea Party” effort, as it might be called, certainly wasn’t the first of its kind. Some years ago the idea surfaced of business phone directories that list only companies committed to the goals of the religious right. Such notions pop up from time to time.
It’s easy to imagine that, next time around, some businesses might try to stick with the “Buy Tea Party” idea despite any backlash. It’s also easy to imagine some similar effort — perhaps run by an organization less strident than the Tea Party — gaining a foothold in, for example, places where there aren’t many Democrats or liberals. And the principle could stretch, in reverse form, to liberal places. Then, who knows.
Lots of liberals already like to frequent business they see as “socially responsible,” whether on environmental issues or food issues or even charity issues. That’s not far from choosing businesses according to their politics.
The spread — or further spread — of politics into everyday life is the prospect worth pondering here, not the prospect that your money might go where you don’t want it to. You’re already supporting business owners who have different political agendas than your own. You just don’t always know exactly when.
Contrary to those who want to put politics front and center all the time, you’re better off not knowing. And this diverse society — so dependent on tolerance for the survival of social peace — is better off not being confronted at absolutely every turn by all the things that divide us.
Permalink | Comments (9) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, Miami Valley Politics
Tweet
