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Mayor, council battle boosting tension level
By KELLY RYAN © St. Petersburg Times, published August 9, 1998 The tension is so thick, according to a former City Council member, "it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see it." "There's got to be a willingness of the parties to work together," said Connie Kone, who resigned after seven years on the council to run for the state Senate. "The constant contentious approach, in my view, is destructive to the city and the citizens." Call it a rift, disagreement or good, old-fashioned political debate. No matter what the name, the tension is palpable in City Hall. City employees -- from the mayor's office on down -- are frequently dressed down by council members, who often are skeptical of information they get from anyone on the mayor's staff. "There's just not that relationship of trust there," said fiscal administrator Tish Elston, adding that it would be helpful for the mayor and council to establish formal, written goals. "We would get more done, we would play a bigger leadership role in the city if there was more of a meeting of the minds of the council and the mayor." Residents have noticed, too. Some local business people, Fischer said, don't like to appear before the City Council anymore, fearing embarrasment. And lawyer Roy Harrell Jr., past chairman of the governing board of the Southwest Florida Water Management District, wrote an unsolicited five-page letter to Fischer and City Council Chairwoman Bea Griswold outlining a plan to make the administration and meetings more efficient. Among the suggestions: Harrell says the city should strengthen its committee structure, in a way that allows committees to spend time analyzing issues and making recommendations to the council. While the council has committees, meetings are poorly attended. If the committee system is improved, Harrell suggested that the council begin meeting every other Thursday, leaving the open Thursday to hold committee meetings. That would free city employees from spending almost every working day preparing for or sitting through council meetings, he said. Among the most important directives would be to make long-term strategic plans by holding a retreat for the mayor and council and creating a planning committee, he said. That might clear up the officials' roles, that the council should set policies that staff must implement under the mayor's direction. "Communication is a two-way process, both speaking and hearing, and a retreat may be the place where everyone can start to recognize their similarities and not their differences," Harrell wrote. Fischer and Griswold think Harrell's suggestions are worth exploring, adding that they are shooting for a brainstorming and goal-setting retreat in the fall. Both endorsed reducing meetings to every other Thursday. "A mayor who wants a cohesive team feeling has to work for it," Griswold said. "I think he needs to get the council in on his plan." Fischer does not often attend lengthy council meetings, sending one of his top two administrators instead. As a strong mayor, he said, he does not need to be there. Besides that, there are two other reasons to stay in his office, where he listens to the meeting through a speaker. One is that typical meetings drag into the afternoon, something that frustrates him, city staff and the five council members who also hold full-time jobs. The other is the "atmosphere." "This is a council that unfortunately has not been able to gel," Fischer said. "I care, but I am not worried about how they feel about the mayor. The worst thing the mayor could do if the mayor had a big ego would (be) go to war with the council, and everything would stop." Council members frequently criticize the mayor for delegating too many tasks and bringing issues to them too late. They say he failed to give direction to two new city employees overseeing the downtown parking plan and failed to define measurable goals for the Challenge 2001 urban renewal plan. During the city's vote on joining a regional water cooperative, Fischer was put on the defensive. The same happened with Chunky Sunday, a weekly gathering that troubled several neighborhoods with its large crowds. "Supposedly the administration is trying to handle the situation, but I'm hearing that it's not," council member Kathleen Ford said during a discussion about Chunky Sunday. Bill Foster, appointed to fill the last few months of Kone's term, said he has been surprised to find city officials more cooperative than what he and other residents outside City Hall perceived: That the mayor's office and the council are adversaries. Even so, Foster agrees with several other council members that the council should hire its own attorney -- and maybe a researcher -- to weed through the information it gets from city employees who answer to Fischer. "They're giving us what they want us to see," said Foster, who will be sworn into the District 3 council seat Aug. 20. "We can't rubber stamp." It wasn't always like this. And that could be because in the old city manager form of government, the mayor acted as a ninth council member. Then, the council made decisions and directed the manager to carry them out. A manager who wanted to keep his job catered to the council. Now the mayor has the power to hire and fire city employees and a mandate from voters. "There's a complete gap between them and the mayor," said the Rev. J.W. Cate, a former council member. "They can't fire the mayor. If they don't like what's going on they can't do anything about it." Rick Baker, a lawyer who served on the charter review commission and is a Fischer supporter, said the measure of City Hall relationships should be whether city business has ground to a halt. It clearly has not, he said, pointing to the BayWalk downtown project as an item that united the council and mayor. While the council grills administrators, more often than not the council still follows the mayor's recommendations, Baker said. Council member Larry Williams said the staff runs the city with little direction from Fischer. To force the mayor to be more responsible for the city's direction, Williams said, the city charter should be changed to give Fischer veto power. "The mayor doesn't want to get too close to the council because the council is probably the smartest it has ever been," Williams said, referring to the frequent questioning and requests for more information before making decisions. "I'm not sure the mayor and the City Council need to be a team for better government." Yet council member Ernest Fillyau said all the talk of hiring attorneys and researchers is simply creating another bureaucracy so council members have something to control. Residents made it clear five years ago that they want a city leader they can fire -- not someone that the council can fire. "It looks like some of them want to go back to the city manager form of government," Fillyau said of his council colleagues. "For us to impede the mayor's progress is micromanaging."
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T. PETERSBURG -- About five years into Mayor David Fischer's reign as the city's strong mayor, his relationship with the City Council appears to be worse then ever.
