It wasn’t meant to be a pep talk for current Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland. But given that each of them had gone through similar trials, the six former mayors who gathered for a TV interview Wednesday couldn’t help themselves.
“You did a great job last night,” former Mayor Bill Baarsma (2002-09) told Strickland before the taping began at the Hilltop studios of TV Tacoma.
“Last night” referred to Tuesday’s Tacoma City Council meeting that included hours of testimony against proposed city cuts to police, fire and other services.
Even so, this collection of all-but-one of the city’s living mayors (Mike Parker was not in attendance) was not ready to concede anything to the current office holder.
All had their own war stories to tell.
Former Mayor Doug Sutherland (1982-89) said he was in office during the 1981-82 recession that, until this one, was the worst since the Great Depression.
Former Mayor Harold Moss (1994-95) said the downtown was filled with derelict buildings when he first joined the council.
Baarsma’s first two years in office included the notorious crimes of the Beltway Sniper, who had committed his first murder in Tacoma and Police Chief David Brame, who killed his wife Crystal Brame and then himself.
The timing of the interview by TV Tacoma’s Carol Mitchell, coming in the midst of a city budget crisis and the end-game of a search for a new city manager, was coincidental. But it did provide fodder for a debate about the city’s form of government and perhaps surprising advocacy for ending the council-city manager form and moving to a strong mayor.
“It is not ‘small-d’ democratic to have the top person to be an appointed person instead of an elected person,” said former Mayor Brian Ebersole (1996-2000). “If you are not satisfied, you can vote them out of office.”
The city’s first female mayor, Karen Vialle (1990-93), confessed to being conflicted about the issue but said it should be put before voters to let them decide.
And Moss said the current system is flawed because city managers now insist on an employment agreement that makes it more difficult and more expensive to fire them. He said councils need “that brick” that allows them to make a change immediately.
Sutherland noted that the city’s longest-serving city manager, the late Erling Mork, had no contract at all.
“He served on a week-by-week basis, sometimes day-by-day,” Sutherland said.
But Baarsma said it would be impossible to hire a manager now without a contract that includes severance provisions because all other council-manager cities in the country offer them.
Still, despite the city charter that places all executive authority in the manager, all of the assembled mayors said most residents think the mayor is the boss.
“It wasn’t the city manager being interviewed on The Today Show,” Baarsma said of the days after the former Tacoma resident John Allen Muhammad was identified as the sniper. “It was me.”
Added Strickland: “Regardless of who makes the decision, I get the phone call.”
Ironically, most agreed that the city’s advantage – having continuity of vision that allows for the completion of long-gestation projects like the Foss Waterway, the University of Washington Tacoma and the city convention center – might suffer in a strong mayor system.
“In a lot of big cities, one person gets elected and you go in one direction and then another person gets elected and you go in another direction,” Ebersole said.
But don’t think that any of the former mayors will allow Strickland to feel sorry for herself. To a person they said they loved the job despite the stress and the hours.
Mike Crowley (2001), who served just one year as an appointed mayor after being on the council for seven, said the difference in title from one day to the next was striking.
“I was treated with a different attitude when they put ‘mayor’ before my name,” Crowley said.
Baarsma joked that on one visit to Asia he was called “Your Worship.”
Quipped Moss: “Once a mayor, always a mayor. It is a delight.”
Peter Callaghan: 253-597-8657 peter.callaghan@ thenewstribune.com blog:thenewstribune.com/politics Twitter: @CallaghanPeter
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