I should always trust my initial instincts. Eight times out of ten, my first impression turns out to be on the money. More than three years ago, when Andrew Beaujon and I made endorsements for the Richmond Mayor’s race on this site (for what damnhell it matters), we both neglected to endorse L. Douglas Wilder. This is what I wrote:
I have to admit that my standards for local politics are very very low at this point. All I’m looking for in a mayor is someone who isn’t corrupt; someone who will be as interested in doing the job as he is in winning the election. So I’ll be voting for Charles Nance… I do realize that a Mayor Nance wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining as a Mayor Wilder. But haven’t we had enough “entertainment” from City Hall of late?
Apparently not. One thing we can say about the last few years, it’s been a whale of a entertaining sideshow. Kinda expensive, though. And draining.
I briefly rescinded the above non-endorsement of Wilder’s Coronation (that’s what it seemed like at the time). I was shocked to see Richmond’s first elected mayor in 50 years begin his tenure in office by doing something that no other area politician had ever done: he dared to buck the corporate business elite that really runs things around here in River City — the same group of aging, county-dwelling millionaires and sycophants who had helped him to get into office.
Yes, for a time, Wilder was demanding serious answers from the Virginia Performing Arts Foundation, and calling the secretive public-private partnership out on the millions they wasted digging a hole where an arts center should have been; by extension, he was challenging other area pols to choose between protecting the interests of Richmond taxpayers and doing the bidding of the region’s most influential political contributors. During all of it, Wilder’s stance against the status quo looked revolutionary, quixotic, courageous.
But I should have stuck with my original instinct. When it came time for him to make a deal with the same “business community” of Richmond over their long-simmering downtown real estate deal, he opted to sell the rest of us out rather than stand for what is right. The end result is that Richmond will end up paying much more than before for an arts center, getting less in return, and will see its historic theatres held hostage and out of the immediate oversight of citizens for the next 99 years. Forgive me for thinking that, as a longterm tragedy, this is fully equal to the mayor’s epic mishandling of the Richmond Braves situation.
Hizzoner came into office with a great deal of talk about battling corruption and enhancing accountability within the ranks of our city government. Only problem was that he refused to be bound by the same rules of propriety. His $1.3 million security detail — which he always blamed on Police Chief Rodney Monroe while Monroe always had “no comment” — and the thousands of dollars he took for an illegal car allowance gave off more than a whiff of Imperial entitlement. It was a clear case of “Do as I say, not as I do.”
Moreover, his petty battles with the City Auditor’s Office — which was not allowed to look into the details of the mayor’s office the way it was the city’s other departments — and the outrageous salary increases he proposed for his administrative staff at the same time he was claiming that the city’s budget was “tight” suggested a leader out of touch with his own rhetoric, much less the will of the people.
When it is all said and done, the image of the mayor shaking his booty in Shockoe Bottom while police officers were illegally kicking school administration officials out of City Hall will be the lasting, most-damning image of his tenure in office. It will not be a flattering one.
The Richmond native and former governor even ended up contradicting the original reason he says he got involved in city politics again. He had originally fought to have Richmond’s mayor directly elected instead of appointed by City Council, promising to empower all voters. In the end, he installed himself, Dick Cheney-like, into the candidate’s seat. Once in office, he seemed to be the catalyst behind a plan endorsed by the area’s “business leaders” to take the voting rights of everyday citizens away by having Richmond school board members appointed rather than directly elected. To quote Robby the Robot, “this does not compute.”
That’s not to say that the pre-Wilder days of Rudy McCollum and Calvin Jamison were any better — imagine a Downtown Master Plan process cooked up by those two — and no one can say that the mayor has done no good during his time in office. While his war against the school board took some unfortunate and embarrassing turns, he was right to challenge, prod and even provoke school administrators into changing how they do business with the people’s money. Chief among his accomplishments was hiring Rodney Monroe to head the police force and to do something about the City of Richmond’s debilitating crime statistics. Now that Monroe has accepted the Top Cop job in Charlotte, it remains to be seen if this is a lasting achievement. I still say that Wilder’s best hire, when the dust clears, may turn out to have been Rachel Flynn, responsible for overseeing the city’s forward-thinking Downtown Plan (one wag famously called the public process behind this plan, “an outbreak of Democracy in Richmond”). But the final chapter on that one also remains to be written.
As Jeff Schapiro writes in today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch, the only reliable yardstick of a politician’s success in office is, “Are we better off now than we were before?”
In leading the charge for a return to a popularly elected mayor and becoming Richmond’s first in more than a half-century, Wilder gave voice to demands for accountability in a municipal government that, at times, seemed dysfunctional.
But, as Wilder stands down, is it less so?
History will, indeed, judge. But as we stand here today, L. Douglas Wilder’s time as mayor has been disappointing and, in many ways, counter-productive to meaningful change. Case in point: According to Friday’s Times-Dispatch, the “business community” has already chosen Mayor Wilder’s successor. Just imagine…
Yes, our richest, biggest wigs have selected the same guy who chaired the mayor’s performing arts committee and neglected to involve the views of everyday citizens, Robert Grey — one of the “Gang of 26″ who placed his name on the infamous letter that proposed disenfranchising area voters last year. My brief encounters and discussions with Mr. Grey have been polite, cordial and professional. He comes across as a nice guy (he’s got to, right?). But this is one candidate that has some explaining to do on the campaign trail.
Oh, and how nice of our most distinguished citizens to take the burden of choosing the next mayor off our hands. See — once again, it’s all been chewed for us. Same as it ever was.