Delaware Liberal

The Wilmington State of the City Tantrum

cassandra_m

Last night, Mayor Jim Baker of Wilmington was scheduled to deliver his annual State of the City Address to the City Council and the public.  As always, he had prepared remarks and started with an overview of the state of the city’s budget and his plan to deal with the budget shortfall.  He pretty quickly abandoned those remarks to deliver an explosive tantrum at the Wilmington City Council, castigating them (and blaming them) for the increased tensions and difficulties in getting administration initiatives passed.

It was an amazing thing to hear — you can watch video of the address at WDEL or at the City’s website.  Allen Loudell (who interviewed the Mayor shortly after the address)  has his thoughts up at his blog.

Basically, he turned from his Budget address to upbraid them for not being able to function enough to approve his initiatives.  He noted that he was tired of the “politics” coming from City Council, that — in Baker’s judgement — got in the way of the Council approving the administration’s legislation and initiatives.  Everyone knows Jim Baker to be famously testy and famously free to speak his mind, no matter the consequences, but this was something new.  This was Jim Baker demanding that City Council abandon their role as a co-equal branch of government and hunker down to rubber stamp his programs.  And revising his own history as City Council President to justify that demand.

I live in the city and work pretty closely with some of the City Councilpeople and some of the City people.  Some of these folks are even my friends.  But one thing that has always been clear to me about City Council is that they aren’t especially good at standing up for their own prerogatives as a co-equal branch of government.  This may be a function of the City Council Presidents that have come after Baker was there — who was legendarily protective of City Council prerogatives.  But Mayor Baker is not paying attention to a pretty serious dynamic in the City.

Plenty of the City’s residents are pretty unhappy with the City on a two major issues — law enforcement and neighborhood investment.   These are things that the Administration doesn’t want to hear any critique of their approach on — and I know because I’ve heard it first hand.  But people who are hearing this pretty routinely are City Council people.  And they are trying to push for some changes in police deployment — changes that have pissed off the Mayor royally.  There is a 24 hour community policing deployment that city residents want to try and have been told over and over again that we don’t know what we are asking for.  Even though when we started agitating for this, the Police Chief told us that he needed a minimum personnel strength to do that.  We supported and helped to lobby for that, but when they got close to those minimum resources, both the Mayor and the Chief backed off.  *This* is the kind of stuff that people are tired of.  And they are tired of what is looking like a real wave of unresponsiveness to legitimate issues.  Because how do you explain the fact that the downtown Market St area got 24/7 Community Policing, while the neighborhoods who lobbied for this did not.  The City Council hears this, but the Administration doesn’t.   And I don’t think that they know that people are as fervently wishing for the end of the Baker Administration as they were for the end of the Sills Administration.  That’s bad.

And as dysfunctional as I think the City Council is,  they get to sit at the table, they get to do some oversight and you don’t tell a bunch of grownups that they should sit down and do what they are told.  Because the message that the Administration should be hearing is they’ve done a pretty good job over the years and we want them to keep going, not to rest on their laurels.  Because there is plenty that can be done and can be done fairly cheaply.  For instance — stepping up enforcement of a Broken Windows policy (which generates its own revenue, gang),  freeing the WPD from the Administration’s Communications’s policy so that they can freely tell their (successful) story, looking for ways for departments to genuinely partner with neighborhood groups to focus effort and get work done.  You can’t send your Department Heads to meet with Councilmembers unprepared to deal with the data they are being asked for.  There is plenty more, but none of this stuff happens without an Administration that acts like it is defending a fortress.  And City Council needs smarter leadership — leadership who is perfectly willing to use the tools at their disposal to be heard AND leadership that can harness some of the grandstanding that is clearly done by some members of Council.

That said, the Mayor’s proposed budget actually *looks* like a shared pain budget — unlike the budgets proposed by the Governor or of NCCo Executive Paul Clark.  I’m unhappy about the tax increase, largely because I do think that the City Government needs some additional trimming.  And I think that if they can get the Unions to change some of the retention rules to give the City some flexibility in letting go its dead wood (and yes they have that.  Hang around City Hall long enough, and you know the list of people everyone wants to get rid of.), they’d be closer to being able to resolve some of their issues.  But I’ll admit that it isn’t enough to cover the shortfall.  The summary:

Exit mobile version