The challenge for Menino
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DANIEL HOAN poses the biggest threat to Boston Mayor Thomas Menino's bid for a fifth term. And never mind that Hoan has been dead for 48 years.
Hoan served as mayor of Milwaukee from 1916 to 1940. Like Menino, he suppressed crime, managed debt, and avoided major scandals. Hoan even appears on historians' lists of America's most effective mayors. But after electing him six times, Milwaukee voters sent Hoan home for no reason other than that they tired of the status quo.
Menino fatigue could play a factor in November. But Menino doesn't appear to be tiring. "How can I get stale?" he asks. "I have a crisis every week."
Yet if Menino escapes a vigorous challenge, Boston will be poorer for it. A spirited campaign reveals important policy choices facing the city. And without such a race, City Hall slips into institutional inertia.
Menino ran unopposed for his second term and easily dispatched challengers from the City Council in 2001 and 2005. This year, he faces likely challenges from city councilors Michael Flaherty and Sam Yoon. But neither man has yet to make a good case for change, or even announce for the office.
There are signs. Like other big-city mayors, Menino is acutely sensitive to architecture and the public realm, and how it symbolizes the power of his office. But his challenge to developers to build a 1,000-foot tower on a city-owned parcel downtown has been dashed by a weak economy and a wary Federal Aviation Administration. He has failed to fill a leadership vacuum over what to make of the Rose Kennedy Greenway - 15 acres of new parkland in the heart of the city. The overall effect is diminishing.
In his State of the City address last week, Menino called for a one-year wage freeze on municipal employees to help the city face an anticipated $140 million budget deficit. It's a bold move designed to limit layoffs and maintain basic city services during the economic downturn. It's also a wily political move. Both Yoon and Flaherty faulted the measure, making them look too eager to curry union support at the expense of the city's fiscal health.
But it's not a clear win for Menino, either. He has a spotty record at the collective bargaining table. Is the city safer because Menino approved big salary boosts for police officers who earned questionable criminology degrees? And the mayor is still trying to win mandatory drug testing and other concessions from a Fire Department littered with suspicious accidental disability claims. A tough campaign might force the mayor to sharpen, or at least explain, his record on collective bargaining.
Every urban mayor is judged on the progress of the schools. Menino's commitment to the city's schoolchildren is deep and authentic. He says the one job other than mayor that intrigues him would be an opportunity to run a foundation that improves the lives of Boston's young people. But a campaign would shift the focus from the mayor's good intentions to the deficiencies in neighborhood schools. Many parents have little choice but to bus their children to schools across town, at no small expense to the taxpayer.
The 311 system is not just a better way to deliver city services. The new technology also allows residents to see what goes on inside city government. For decades in Boston, no one got to look behind the curtain. That was especially true during the four-term, imperial administration of former mayor Kevin White. While a poll last year revealed that an astounding 54 percent of Boston residents had met Menino personally, that doesn't mean that citizens have been brought into the workings of city government enough to hold his administration accountable for its performance.
Voters deserve an energetic campaign that brings out all these issues - and forces them to consider both the risks and rewards of change.
"I leave my public tasks with no rancor," said Hoan after Milwaukee voters told him they'd had enough. Menino isn't the type to let go. But if the mayor hopes to avoid Hoan's fate, he will need to offer Bostonians more than the status quo.
