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Virginia's
Mayors: Beyond Street Lights and Parking Meters
L. Douglas Wilder is a man of firsts. He
was the first elected black governor in the nation
and now he is the first popularly elected mayor of
Richmond. His success – both in getting elected and reinventing local politics,
in the capital, got us thinking about
Virginia’s mayors in
general.
The Old Dominion has big city mayors with
national reputations like Wilder and
Virginia Beach’s Meyera E. Oberndorf. In fact, Oberndorf was named one of the
nation’s top 25 mayors to watch by Newsweek
in 1996. Right now, you can see her in streaming
video on the
U.S. Conference of Mayors website, answering a
question on how public-private partnerships and
initiatives have improved the services and quality
of life in her city.
We also have mayors of smaller
municipalities, such as Grottoes chief, Doug
Shifflett, who updates his 2,000-plus Shenandoah Valley
constituents regularly with an online “Mayor’s Corner” column. Last
summer, he used his online platform to report that
plans for bathrooms in the town park had been
completed and to ask for comments on paving the road
into the new baseball field.
Virginia
has an odd patchwork of municipal governments. According to Mary Jo
Fields, director of research at the Virginia
Municipal League, there were 39 city and 190 town
mayors throughout the state as of
May 1, 2004. The largest city with a mayor is
Virginia Beach, with a
population of more than 440,000. The smallest city,
at close to 4,000, is Norton. Blacksburg, population 41,000, is the largest town with a mayor and
Columbia
(pop. 58) and Duffield (pop. 54) are the smallest.
The city/town distinction is a unique in
Virginia. Size is not always what separates one from the other. We're the only
state in the nation that treats cities as political
entities completely separate from counties.
Residents of towns, such as Farmville or Tazewell,
vote for both town and county officials (and pay
both town and county taxes). Residents of cities
such as
Charlottesville in Albemarle
County and Manassas in Prince
William
County
are not able to vote
for their respective county boards, despite being
surrounded by those jurisdictions.
This has made for some odd
reconfigurations, depending on whether
municipalities are trying to fight annexation or get
services from larger jurisdictions. According to
Charlie Grymes, who teaches the geography of
Virginia
at
George
Mason
University, five counties
have merged with their cities since World War II,
while two have given up their charters and become
towns.
For example,
Warwick
County became Warwick
City
in 1952. Six years
later it merged with the City of Newport News. On the other hand,
South Boston
reverted to a town in Halifax
County in 1995, and Clifton
Forge gave up its city status, joining
Alleghany
County in 2001.
According to the VML, slightly fewer than
half of
Virginia’s cities select their mayors by direct election. In the remainder, the
mayor is chosen from among council members.
Three-quarters of the Commonwealth’s towns
directly elect their mayors.
Virginia’s mayors preside over city or town councils, which are the governing
bodies of their municipalities. In their roles in
cities and towns, mayors act as the official,
ceremonial and military head of their localities. In
small towns, they also may have administrative
duties. Many, however, have city manager forms of
government, limiting the mayor’s authority.
Rob Bennett is the mayor of Covington, which has such a
form of municipal government. "The biggest
drawback," he says, "is that sometimes
people forget that I do not run the city the city manager does. I cannot hire and fire people
that work for the city, but only hire and fire our
city manager and city attorney.”
But there are some positive aspects to
his role. He runs the city council meetings. “I
can basically direct how I want the conversations to
go,” Bennett says. He also adds that he enjoys
some of the ceremonial duties, as well as
shepherding other dignitaries around the city.
“Interacting with the people is the best part of
the job."
Virginia’s mayors represent an array of backgrounds. Portsmouth’s Dr. James W.
Holley III, a World War II veteran, has been a
dental surgeon for 45 years. He was a civil rights
activist in the early 1960s, instrumental in
desegregating the local library, hospital, city golf
course and area restaurants.
Staunton’s John Avoli was a high school principal before becoming mayor. His
family moved from Italy
to the
U.S.
in 1960; he is now executive director of the
Staunton’s
Frontier
Culture
Museum, while still serving
as mayor.
In addition to the distinction of leading
Virginia’s largest city for
almost 20 years, Oberndorf was also the first woman mayor in
Virginia Beach’s history. In fact, back in 1976, when she was first elected to the
city council, she was the first woman elected to
public office in the city. But it's her style that
gained her national attention. In 1996, Newsweek dubbed her one of 25 mayors to watch because she went
public with a diagnosis of breast cancer during her
campaign for a third term in office. This, in turn,
led her to establishing an initiative, “Adopt-A-M.O.M.M--
Making Opportunities for Mammograms a Must” --to
help indigent women get mammograms.
At the other end of the spectrum,
Norton’s B. Robert Raines started his career in
the Marines maintaining aircraft for Pentagon staff.
The mayor of our smallest city went on to get an
undergraduate degree in mathematics and a graduate
degree in industrial education, and served as
principal of a local vocational-technical center
when first elected mayor in 1990.
And then there is Mayor Wilder. We all
know his credentials: The grandson of slaves, the
new
Richmond
mayor won a Bronze Star in the Korean War. He served as a state senator
and lieutenant governor before he became the
nation’s first black elected governor. A teacher
at Virginia
Commonwealth
University in his post-governor years, he initiated a campaign to change the
Richmond City Charter and became the city’s first
directly elected mayor in more than 50 years. Some
political scientists consider it a watershed change
in both Richmond and
Virginia politics.
A
California state legislator,
according to Newsweek, once referred to
mayoring as “street lights, dog-doo and parking
meters.” We suspect Wilder, Oberndorf and the
Commonwealth’s other 227 municipal CEOs would
disagree.
NEXT: Virginia’s Stargazers.
--
March 14, 2005
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