Olive branches were distributed Monday at Portland City Hall, and if the recipients didn’t get the point, Mayor Ethan Strimling drove it home in his remarks.
It was a peace offering of sorts. The mayor promised to consider whatever role he may have played in creating some of the “unneeded tension” on the City Council during the past year, which has been marked by his fairly public power struggle with City Manager Jon Jennings, a fight that Strimling appears to be losing.
But he’s not taking all of the blame.
“I am convinced that some of the tension of this past year is rooted in the new city charter the people created and ratified (six) years ago,” Strimling said. Nearly complete turnover on the council since then is “strong evidence that there are unresolved issues in operationalizing what the people wanted when they called for and created this new form of government.”
The mayor is right. What’s happening at City Hall is not what voters had in mind when they approved a charter calling for an elected mayor.
But he also was right, and more elegant, when he recently quoted Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” lamenting that “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves” as the council was debating a matter of “unneeded tension” that Strimling himself had served up.
In Portland, the fault is not in the charter, but Strimling himself. And if he wants to resolve the issues that he feels need to be worked out, he has the tool he needs. It’s called politics.
Portland’s charter doesn’t put all of the power in any one person’s hands. The city manager is in charge of day-to-day operations and hires most of the staff, from the police chief to the janitors. The manager answers to the nine-member council, which includes the mayor.
The mayor is supposed to be the leader on policy. He or she is supposed to articulate a vision and bring others on board. With a four-year term and a full-time salary, mayors are supposed to be around long enough to assemble coalitions and lead projects.
But as the pointless showdown with Jennings has shown, Strimling can’t do anything all on his own except make himself less important. The Nov. 20 council meeting offered the perfect illustration.
The council was scheduled to approve a routine sale of a quarter-acre triangle of land adjacent to the former Portland Co. site on the eastern waterfront. The deal was negotiated by city staff under the supervision of the council’s Economic Development Committee (whose members had been appointed by Strimling).
This is the kind of mind-numbingly boring, technical subject that takes hours to discuss in committee meetings, and this one was no exception, having been on an agenda seven times since April.
Strimling was convinced that the staff had negotiated a poor deal, and the committee members had not pushed them hard enough. He tried to convince the council to reject the agreement and demand more.
The eight other councilors looked at their leader and marched the other way. And one by one, they stood up and complained that the mayor didn’t know what he was talking about.
Strimling lost the vote, but he did succeed in one thing: He painted the other councilors as a bunch of suckers or worse, making it that much harder for them to convince their constituents that someone is looking out for their interests.
Sometimes, you admire people willing to be the lone “no” vote on an issue. Other times, you have to wonder what they were thinking.
The charter doesn’t give the mayor the authority to renegotiate a land sale, but a mayor and four councilors can do just about anything. Strimling doesn’t have direct control over councilors, but if he can get at least four of them to agree with him on a regular basis, they would have tremendous authority.
How would he do that? Politics.
By selling his ideas to the public and his colleagues, incorporating others’ ideas and forging compromises, he might be able to put together a durable coalition that would give him the kind of clout he is seeking.
If Strimling wants to lead, he is going to have to get at least half of the other councilors on his side.
If he can’t do that, he won’t have to read much farther into “Julius Caesar” to see what happens when a leader goes off on his own.
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