AMY STOCKLEIN
Let’s call her SRC. Satya Rhodes-Conway is too long. And anyway, all the cool politicians — AOC, for example — go by their initials.
SRC ran a pretty much flawless campaign. In the February primary I was impressed at how she won my own ward when nobody I talked with in my neighborhood seemed to even know much about her. That told me that she and her team had done an excellent job of the nuts and bolts of politics. She identified her voters, closed the deal with them and got them to the polls. No wasted effort.
And in the general election she introduced herself to new voters in a way that came off as calm, competent and, well, mayoral. She clearly had a strategy from the beginning to run for mayor and not against Paul Soglin. While I thought that that was probably the right tack, I wasn’t sure. There was an argument to be made that Soglin was not just the incumbent but the de facto choice. A challenger needed to take the job away from him, not just offer herself as a credible alternative.
But in the end, her strategy to run past Soglin rather than through him worked spectacularly well. She won by an incredible 24 points. For the record, my friend, former Ald. Mark Clear, predicted on Facebook that SRC would get 62 percent. He was much derided and he was wrong. She got 61.9 percent.
Enough people, especially younger people, were ready for a change and all SRC had to do was prove herself able to do the job. She did that easily, able to tout three terms on the council, including as a member of the powerful Finance Committee, and her work with the Mayors Innovation Project where she rubbed shoulders with progressive mayors from around the nation. She is probably the most qualified person to serve as mayor (without having had the job before) as any new mayor in recent history.
The conventional wisdom has been that SRC and Soglin had pretty much the same positions on the issues and that the choice was really over governing style. I’m not so sure. I think it’s likely that SRC will bring a change in direction in at least a handful of important city policies and projects.
She is less enthusiastic about the public market than Soglin. I would expect her to focus more on the fresh food deserts and on neighborhood food security. She has said the public market must pay for itself, which could mean that it doesn’t happen or that it happens in a different location or in a different manner. I think she’s right about that. It was a mistake to confuse the public market (which is basically a downtown and visitor kind of amenity) with broader issues of access to good food (which is not so much about bricks and mortar and more like a human service issue). Separating them makes it more likely that both will happen.
Judge Doyle Square has deteriorated into open squabbling between the city and the Chicago developer, J. Paul Beitler. In January the city felt forced to pay Beitler $700,000 to essentially walk away from half the project. Basically, it was money for nothing. Then last month in an exchange of angry letters the City Attorney’s office, not known for its spirited language, said that recent allegations made by Beitler about the city’s zoning requirements were, “false, senseless, insulting and unprofessional.” SRC does not have the personal stake in JDS that Soglin, who was apparently negotiating directly with Beitler, had. She’s likely to take a fresh look at the whole thing and that’s something that is badly needed.
Both candidates talked about adapting to climate change, specifically to what are likely to be increased flooding events on the isthmus and in other spots around the city. But SRC’s election opens up a whole new set of possibilities of collaboration with the county, which controls the flow of water through the Yahara chain. For the better part of eight years Soglin hasn’t talked to Dane County Executive Joe Parisi and Parisi endorsed SRC during the campaign. So we can expect that cooperation between the city and the county may undergo a renaissance. This is especially important on issues related to flooding, but a closer relationship with the county also bodes well for transportation and human services.
SRC is in for a challenging couple of weeks as she needs to shut down her old job and transition into the new one. In only two weeks she needs to hire a personal staff, get to know each of about two dozen city managers who will report directly to her, appoint the alders to their committees and get up to speed on issues that only the mayor is in a position to know about, probably including sensitive details of the JDS negotiations. The only thing worse than the two-week transition into the job is the two-week transition out of it. I can attest to that.
But she’s also going to find that being mayor of Madison is the best job anywhere. Every day you feel like you’re leaving all of it out there, using every ounce of intellectual ability, physical stamina and good judgment that you have. And in a place like Madison with manageable problems, some resources and a progressive constituency, you have the freedom to try new things. It will be exciting to see just which new things our new mayor tries.
