shan stumpf
As Madison gets ready to select a mayor for the next four years, it’s worth asking the question: What does the mayor actually do? And what skills are needed to be a good one?
The questions don’t necessarily have obvious answers. For instance, the mayor is responsible for putting together the budget each year, but works off of proposals from each of the city’s 26 departments. And there’s also a finance department with 38 full-time employees to help him or her with the finer points of budgeting.
With more than 2,700 full-time employees and an operating budget topping $283 million, the city is in some regards a well-oiled machine, capable of running just fine on its own, at least for a little while. So what do we need a mayor for, anyway?
This year’s race, which will be decided on April 7, is between an incumbent, Paul Soglin, who has held the job longer than anyone, and a challenger, Ald. Scott Resnick, who is not yet 30, but has already co-founded a successful company.
Both have similar ideas about what the job entails. Soglin says he spends an inordinate amount of time dealing with day-to-day personnel and financing issues. When it comes to setting an agenda, he says, the mayor needs to be able to marshal city staff and resources to the task and make hard choices about priorities. For instance, Soglin says, the mayor often must decide “Do we do need a police station or a street reconstruction?”
Resnick, who is chief operating officer of Hardin Design & Development and a two-term council member, echoes that sentiment.
“When you look at any major initiative, it takes a whole host of individuals [to make it happen],” he says. “So the skill sets required for that is someone who can bring multiple people to the table.”
In 2011, Soglin’s vision included two main goals: reduce borrowing and fight poverty.
He claims to have made significant progress on both goals, while his detractors say he’s fallen short.
At campaign functions, Soglin often opens by telling people that he decided to run once again for mayor when he realized how much childhood poverty had grown in the city.
Soglin says he’s done a lot to alleviate poverty, including reinstating neighborhood resource teams, which corral staff from various departments to help identify and find solutions to problems in struggling neighborhoods.
He says the teams helped bring bus service to Owl Creek, a low-income neighborhood created on the far southeast side of the city 10 years ago, and prepared the city to “deal with the food desert at Allied Drive,” when Walgreens closed.
Soglin also points to a number of jobs initiatives. The city stopped asking job applicants for information about criminal records when they applied for jobs (although the city still does background checks).
Soglin also helped create a summer jobs program for youth, named after the mayor’s longtime administrative assistant, Wanda Fullmore, who retired last year. The mayor says the city has also made efforts to open up recruitment for seasonal work with the city. “Seasonal employment is a major entry way to permanent employment,” he says.
The mayor also believes that his efforts are responsible for a reduction in the number of children receiving free or reduced lunches through the school system. According to the Madison school district, the number of students getting free or reduced lunches grew from 38.6% in 2006 to almost 50% last year. In 2015, the number fell to just under 48%.
“I think that’s a consequence of what we’ve done,” Soglin says. “If it’s improving here but not taking place in other parts of the region, obviously something is happening locally.”
If reelected, Soglin says he’ll prioritize employment issues and opportunities for youth.
But Resnick says he’s seen very little progress on poverty. He notes that homelessness has grown more than 40% during Soglin’s term. Based on the city’s January “point in time” survey of both sheltered and unsheltered people, the homeless population has grown from 573 in January 2011, three months before Soglin was elected, to 808 people as of this January.
“I’m actually trying to think of what Paul has done above and beyond his predecessor,” he says. “The jobs program was a step in the right direction; however, the United Way and Urban League deserve equal if not more credit.”
Resnick accuses the mayor of not keeping on top of the problems. “Cities that are really addressing issues of poverty collect good data regularly. They see what programs work and which ones don’t work. The mayor doesn’t collect data in that way,” he says. “Any data sets he disagrees with he rejects.”
Resnick has his own ideas for fighting poverty and has made confronting the digital divide a cornerstone of his campaign.
He also wants to fund early childcare to ensure “the students who enter the Madison school district are on equal footing.”
He would create impact fees for developers building luxury housing, and use the funds for affordable housing and improving public infrastructure.
“We’re creating a downtown Madison that is too expensive to live in,” Resnick says.
While Soglin may care most about fighting poverty, the issue that’s dominated his last four years has been the largest development project the city has ever contemplated: Judge Doyle Square.
The project includes rebuilding the Government East parking ramp, constructing another hotel to complement Monona Terrace, and developing some mix of housing, retail and office space. The city was at one time contemplating a proposal from developer Bob Dunn that called for almost $80 million in city funding. Unable to bring down the cost, the city sent the project back out to bid earlier this year.
Both Resnick and Soglin supported the project. Resnick now attacks Soglin for his leadership on it, while Soglin complains that he never supported the most controversial element of it, a full-service hotel.
In a February meeting with Isthmus, Soglin blamed Ald. Mark Clear for pushing for a luxury hotel, while saying he supported a much simpler, cheaper project.
“I repeatedly said in these discussions that we did not need a full-service hotel,” he says. “I support the project, meaning the development of the block. I’m still convinced it can be a viable project, with the kind of hotel some of us envisioned...which is not the traditional full-service, convention-oriented hotel.”
But if he was pushing back against a full-service hotel, he did so in private. Throughout the process he routinely dismissed critics of the project and set aside money for it in the city’s capital budgets.
In an interview with Isthmus on Oct. 9, 2013, Soglin was asked why the project is needed. “The key thing is the finding that was done in that study four or five years ago, that indicates we need more hotel rooms to attract conventions,” he said at the time.
The study that Soglin referred to, by Hunden Strategic Partners, called for what is by any definition a luxury hotel: 400 rooms, two ballrooms, three restaurants, an indoor pool, a fitness center, a spa and a concierge desk.
Even after a committee had selected Dunn’s proposal for the project and began negotiating with him, Soglin showed little interest in slamming on the brakes. At the Feb. 17, 2014, Board of Estimates meeting, Ald. Lisa Subeck asked why the city didn’t go back out to bid for the project after it became clear that the two main developers vying for it had proposed projects the city couldn’t afford.
Soglin answered: “You had two committed developers, both of them wanted to go forward, both of them had committed minimally, in our estimation, a quarter of a million dollars,” he said. “Given that we worked with them, they had as good an understanding as anyone as to what we wanted and what we wanted in transition. Given their commitment, we thought it was best to continue working with them.” Both developers had proposed luxury products.
Ald. David Ahrens — a longtime opponent of the project who is supporting Resnick — finds the mayor’s claims disingenuous. Last year, Ahrens calculated that the city had already spent more than $1 million in consulting fees and staff time planning for the project.
“[Soglin’s] senior staff spent months hiring consultants, negotiating what they knew would be a luxury hotel requiring a large city subsidy,” he says. “The notion that his senior staff somehow did this at a cost of more than $1 million dollars without his approval and encouragement and support is absurd.”
“This was the biggest project they worked on over the past four years,” he adds. “And the explanation now is he was not in favor of it?”
Although Resnick has criticized the project and the mayor’s handling of it, he’s also supported it with most of his votes on the Common Council.
He says was willing to let negotiations unfold, to see if an affordable deal could be reached. But when it wasn’t, he voted to pull the plug. He faults Soglin for making the project a priority.
“We’ve put most of our eggs in the Judge Doyle Square basket instead of asking ourselves, is this the right project for the city of Madison?” Resnick says.
Soglin has in turn attacked Resnick for a different luxury hotel project, the redevelopment of the Edgewater. Under former Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, the council bitterly fought over the project, finally awarding it $16 million in tax incremental financing (TIF). The project is widely seen as having played a role in Soglin’s victory over Cieslewicz in the 2011 election. Back in office, Soglin drastically cut the TIF for the project.
Resnick says simply: “I made a mistake.”
“What did I learn from that project is to avoid trying to fund luxury hotels,” he adds. “We’ve turned around and done it again with Judge Doyle Square, only for more money this time.”
When a Madison police officer shot and killed unarmed Tony Robinson on March 6, it had immediate implications for the mayoral race.
Although economic and racial disparities were already a hot topic here, the issue gained more traction in the campaign. Protesters with the Young, Gifted and Black Coalition began to noisily demonstrate at forums, demanding to know what the candidates planned to do about the killing. (The shooting remains under investigation by the state Department of Justice.)
Resnick has called for a complete review of the city’s use-of-force policies, as well as the way the city polices neighborhoods. He cautions that he’s not criticizing or attacking the police.
“This isn’t a dichotomy about whether you side with the police department or Tony and his family; it’s talking about where reforms are needed,” he says. “It’s about creating the most accessible force in the country. You get there by reviewing and holding critical the policies and procedures that are in place.”
Resnick says he’d like to see data on arrest records — with breakdowns by race, age and class of those encountering police — readily accessible to the public.
“You can find this information in other communities, but you can’t seem to find it in Madison,” he says. “If you don’t know if the programs you’re putting in place are working, how do we know if we’re going in the right direction?”
Soglin too wants the city to act, but says the problem relates to the greater criminal justice system, not the Madison police. He doesn’t question the city’s use-of-force policy, saying “use-of-force policy is fairly uniform around the country.”
However, Soglin says more sensitivity training and more conversations between youth and police would help.
“One of the things I want our officers to do is imagine they’re a 17-year-old African American teen who is undergoing a traffic stop and the kind of fear they may have,” he says.
“Our officers have extensive training, which includes understanding and controlling inherent bias,” he adds. “But anything we can do that expands their awareness of what a person is thinking and how they’re responding can only be to everyone’s benefit. And conversely, the public should understand what the officer is going through.”
He would also like to help minority youth get more help if they get in trouble by expanding the restorative court recently created in the south precinct.
“A middle-class white kid will get diversion the very first time there’s an incident, and most times it will work and the kid won’t get into trouble again,” he says. “An African American kid won’t get that support.”
People who don’t like Soglin tend to complain about the mayor’s style. Resnick has made this a centerpiece of his campaign, saying Soglin has gotten so cantankerous and rigid that he’s unable to work with others, holding the city back.
Even some supporters agree the mayor’s an odd duck.
“He’s a curmudgeon,” says former Ald. Satya Rhodes-Conway, a strong Soglin backer. “He has strong opinions and not a whole lot of patience for people he feels are not thinking well or just playing politics or don’t have the best interest of the city.”
Ahrens finds it more troublesome. “He likes to humor it and call it being grumpy, but it’s really being argumentative and conflictual. And it doesn’t work,” he says. “He feels comfortable in a relationship like that. That’s the relationship he’s fostered with the council.”
More troublesome to Ahrens is that he doesn’t see Soglin getting fired up about any particular issue. “When you think about where Soglin has taken a strong position on something, where he actually says, ‘I’m for this’ — it’s really almost nothing.”
The mayor dismisses complaints about his style. “It’s not a question of leadership,” he says. “What they’re really talking about is the way I negotiate.”
Madison has no shortage of issues to grapple with at the moment: poverty, racial disparity, homelessness, booming development, transportation planning, cuts to state and federal aid, education, economic development and food policy, among many others.
And yet, this mayor’s race has gotten scant attention. It is, by several accounts, flat-out boring.
Joe Sensenbrenner — who was Madison’s mayor for much of the 1990s — has been surprised by the lack of interest.
“Many people have concluded there’s not a great deal at stake,” says Sensenbrenner, who has not endorsed anyone. “The level of interest is not very high, by my observation. People are concerned about various things in the community, but that has not translated to close scrutiny of...the candidates.”
Rhodes-Conway believes that Soglin’s dominance in city politics simply kept tough opponents out of the race.
“There is a feeling it’s a foregone conclusion, so why even bother,” she says. “Most folks reading the tea leaves in advance thought if Soglin wants another term, it’s his. So if you’re serious about running for mayor, you’re not going to run this time; you’ll run next time.”
