Last week, I attended the Southern Municipal Conference at Oglebay Resort in Wheeling. The meeting, which was put on by the West Virginia Municipal League, brought together mayors and city officials from a half dozen southern states.
I spent Wednesday evening and part of the next day with them, listening and learning about the challenges they face in their communities. Some of the problems are the same, but others are different.
A couple of the mayors were trying to build enough infrastructure to accommodate rapid growth, but others were desperate to have more economic development in their communities. Each mayor I talked with said they have trouble filling vacancies in their police departments. All the mayors heard the most complaints from citizens about potholes and trash service.
Of course, there were also stories about the mundane or the comical. One mayor from Alabama said his office called him out of an important meeting to tell him about a problem with a duck. Another mayor said his community is divided over what to do about a cat colony. Another is getting the most citizen complaints about coyotes.
But to a person, these mayors had taken on the largely thankless (and low paying) responsibilities because they care deeply about their communities. Many grew up in the town and they just wanted to make it better. One said he decided, rather than just complaining about problems in his community, he would get involved.
Interestingly, not one mayor or town official I talked with mentioned their political party affiliation. I don’t think they were purposely avoiding it, nor was I, but it just never came up. The only reference came from a mayor who said while campaigning door-to-door, a lot of citizens asked him if he supported Donald Trump.
That is indicative of the nationalization of our politics, which is tragic. Potholes don’t have political parties, Democrats and Republicans all need their trash collected and water pressure is not subject to political pressure.
The best mayors are problem solvers and fixers. They take citizen complaints, not only at city hall, but also at the grocery store, at church, at the diner, just walking down the street, on phone calls to their home. One mayor told me many of his conversations with folks begin, “You’re doing a wonderful job, but…”
Mayors of small and midsize communities do not have the luxury of hiding behind a press secretary. They are the point of contact when a waterline breaks, when the police are slow to respond, when an abandoned building needs to be torn down, when the city park needs cleaned up, when a street or sidewalk is crumbling and, yes, when there is a duck problem.
Polls consistently show the public’s growing dissatisfaction with the government, and I suspect they are thinking of Washington, or maybe the statehouse. I told the mayors in Wheeling that they are our best hope for repairing the government’s image. They are the ones on the front lines, dealing with citizens face to face, and fulfilling the expectations citizens have of their government.
And they are judged accordingly… by their results.