David Michael Miller
Don’t believe every headline you read.
A proposal by Madison Common Council members to take away some of the mayor’s power isn’t as earth shattering as Mayor Paul Soglin makes it out to be.
Council members Mark Clear and David Ahrens are actually pushing a series of changes. Let’s take a closer look at the three most significant of these.
Two-year terms for council presidents. Under the current system, council presidents serve one-year terms. I always thought the council went out of its way to make itself less effective by limiting its presidents to one year. Just when I got comfortable working with a council leader, I had to start a new relationship with the next one. And just when a president got the hang of the job, she had to step aside. So, both in terms of the balance of power and continuity in the relationship between a mayor and a council, two-year terms make a lot of sense. We don’t have to look further than the back-to-back one-year terms of former alder and council president Chris Schmidt to see how well it can work.
Taking the mayor off the finance committee. First, Clear and Ahrens want to call the Board of Estimates what it is — the finance committee. The mayor currently chairs that committee and can vote to break ties among the six alders who sit on it. But chairing a city committee doesn’t bring with it the same power to control the agenda as is common in legislatures and in Congress. Most items are put on the agenda automatically under city rules. And, of course, there would be nothing to stop the mayor from attending the finance committee meetings and speaking whenever he wanted to. This won’t fundamentally change a dynamic where any mayor gets about 95% of what he wants in any budget.
Moving the power to appoint alders to committees from the mayor to the council president. This is the most significant of the Clear and Ahrens proposals, but it’s also the way most legislative bodies work. President Obama doesn’t appoint members of Congress to congressional committees. Gov. Scott Walker doesn’t appoint legislators to their committees. Those tasks are handled by the legislators elected by their peers to leadership positions. In fact, it’s an odd mixing of executive and legislative branch functions that always seemed to me to be a breach of the principle of separation of powers.
And this is only a significant change if you accept the argument that the appointing authority can buy the loyalty of alders with a plum assignment. In eight years as mayor — and despite my fervent hopes — that just never happened. No sooner would I give an alder a prime slot on the BOE or the Plan Commission than they would make it a point to vote against me on something I wanted. In fact, the culture of the Madison Common Council is for its members to demonstrate their independence from the mayor and even from one another. So, the argument that this will lead to alders trading votes for council president in exchange for the best committee assignments — even if valid — is not likely to result in those alders then slavishly following the demands of the president. And, of course, even under the current system, a mayor could dangle a great assignment in front of an alder whose support he wants in the next election.
Before these proposals were even introduced, Soglin threatened a veto and said that if his veto were overridden he would seek citizen signatures to put the question on an election ballot. Later he proposed a commission to study these proposals and others for almost two years and at a cost of a quarter million dollars. Cynics see the commission as a stall tactic and an expensive one at that.
Soglin probably does have a valid argument when he says that this is mostly about him, but it’s not about him in the way that he wants us to believe. The mayor says that the council is just trying to push back against his strong fiscal policies. But there’s just no evidence of that. After five Soglin budgets during very good economic times, the city finds itself with less cash in the bank than it had when he took over and with the deepest debt it has had in the modern era. If the mayor is pushing back against profligate council spending, it sure isn’t apparent in the numbers.
But it is fair to say that this movement wouldn’t be taking place if Soglin had a better working relationship with the council. The mayor has earned a reputation for not consulting with the council, for grandstanding, for lecturing at them, for being mercurial, for choosing odd fights, and often for just being plain unpleasant.
As a former occupant of the office, I hate to see it diminished. Moreover, these changes should be considered in light of the fundamental balance of power between branches of government, and not just in the context of the current mayor and council. But what Clear and Ahrens are proposing is not a coup. At base, it’s really just constructing stronger and perhaps appropriate walls separating two branches of government.
[This column was updated to correct the spelling of Ald. Chris Schmidt's name.]
Dave Cieslewicz is the former mayor of Madison. He blogs as Citizen Dave at Isthmus.com.
