We Need a Mayor

I know, we just saw the Indicted Occupant of Trenton’s Mayor’s Office poke his head out of his secure undisclosed location on Berkeley Avenue the other night. He gave his third State of the City address to a much-less-than-packed Council Chambers, a speech that was as meaningless and as quickly sent to the dustbin as his first two. And on the front page of the city’s website this morning, you can see his trademark vacant smile on half a dozen snapshots. He’s still drawing his paycheck, and his name is still pasted on his office and as many pieces of City real estate and rolling stock as he can get away with.

But it’s not the same. We don’t have anyone to actually perform the duties of a mayor. To provide day-to-day leadership to the City of Trenton’s various departments; manage its employees and its tenuous finances; devise  policies and actions that meet the needs of its citizens and taxpayers and that are possible given fiscal and political realities; and to articulate a future path for the city and collaborate on devising strategies and tactics for getting there.

Or failing all that, just be there to crack heads together to resolve disputes, provide accountability (a fancy way of accepting responsibility, blame or credit for the way things turn out), learn from mistakes and move forward.

We don’t have any of that right now. We haven’t for a long, long time under this Administration, and the cracks that have been showing in our city’s government for three years now have busted wide open and we’re taking on water by the gusherful. We are facing several serious, simultaneous problems in Trenton, and the vacuum of leadership at the top only serves to make a very bad situation much, much worse.

Let’s start with Public Safety. We just saw the other evening a troubling display of how badly this City is responding to the worsening crime situation inside its borders, during a presentation by Police Director Ralph Rivera to City Council. Mr. Rivera was by all accounts poorly prepared for a substantive presentation, and struggled to defend his recent actions and policies. In the light of reports this week that crime has over the last several months significantly spiked at the same time police arrests have tumbled, Director Rivera avoided any admission that these developments were due to decisions he had made and changes in his department’s scheduling and unit structure. He chose to blame the massive reductions in force implemented in 2011 with the layoffs of more than 100 officers, provisions in the current (but expired) collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with the police union, as well as personal resistance among the police rank-and-file to his decisions. His presentation ended with nasty personal insults lobbed back and forth between Mr. Rivera and several members of Council, mainly South Ward Councilman and former Trenton police officer George Muschal.

Although neither Mr. Rivera nor Council represented themselves professionally on Tuesday, I must fault the Police Director as being more responsible. He was prickly and defensive, and I believe must admit that many of his decisions and policies are largely responsible for the results on the streets. The significant rise in violent crime at the beginning of 2013 reported this week is in comparison to the same months one year ago, after the 105-cop layoff took effect. Last winter was also much milder than 2013’s, and that must factor in as well.

So, what changed between last year and this year? Changes implemented under Mr. Rivera’s direction. Namely shifting the Trenton Police Department to an entirely reactive force, dissolving elements such as the PD’s Tactical Anti-Crime (TAC) unit which worked on pro-active actions and gaining street intelligence, and putting those officers on beat duty. Seems to me there really is a correlation here. We have basically the same size force as one year ago, but they are being deployed very differently. Cause, effect. There surely is a connection here, and Mr. Rivera is being evasive not to acknowledge this.

And Mr. Rivera has problems with the union contract, claiming it is tying his hands in such matters as paying too much overtime for officers assigned to units like the TAC? Well, without going here into the truthfulness of this claim – and there are differing opinions on this matter – one obvious solution would be to negotiate a new contract!

The police have been working since January 2011 under an expired CBA. If management, in the person of the Police Director, have problems with terms of the contract, the best way to work those problems out of the CBA is to negotiate in good faith a new one!A lot has changed in the city and the department in the last two – now going on three! – years since the CBA expired. The union should surely recognize this and agree to realistic terms, including updating or dropping provisions that are just not practical any more. And if they don’t agree, then Mr. Rivera and the City will have a stronger basis on which to point to union intransigence and non-cooperation than they do now.

But, under the system we have now, an appointed Police Director is not an independent actor. He is appointed by, and responsible to, the City’s mayor; as well as, lately, being vetted and approved by the State Department of Community Affairs. Over the last close to three full years, all of the many, many, many Police Directors and “Acting” Police Directors have been the responsibility of the Indicted Occupant. He has hired all of them, and fired most of them. He has totally fucked up this responsibility.

His many Plans and Announcements, from NEST to “All Hands on Deck” to a “Comprehensive” initiative that was anything but, to a “Clergy Citizen’s Police Academy” (I don’t have any clue what this is either) and “Enough is Enough”, have all contributed to worsen the muddle we see this week in Trenton’s Public Safety. The chief blame for the current failures of  the leadership of the Trenton Police Department, as with so many other things in this town, lies with him.

Would things be better with another mayor? I can’t say for sure. For one thing, I can’t say that we would not have faced the layoffs of 2011 under another guy. The finances of the city would not have been that much better under anyone else. But it does seem entirely reasonable to suggest that we would not have had the same pace of rotation in and out, and out, and out, of the Director’s spot as we have seen. Hey, another mayor might have decided that Irving Bradley had been doing a good job, and kept him on! And another mayor may have thought that eliminating TAC and re-opening small, expensive inefficient substations were bad ideas.

And a stronger, more engaged mayor would be able to sit his Director down and tell him, “What we have been doing doesn’t work. What’s Plan B?”

But we don’t have a mayor like that. We don’t have a mayor to engage and direct the ongoing rush to disaster that is shaping up for the City’s Hotel. The newspaper this week describes a “rush” to put plans in place to continue operations at Lafayette Yard under a new brand and new management. Plans that will cost this city at least $3 Million Dollars to renovate the place, and who knows how much more for operations in the future. The hotel’s board and Council are madly pushing this process along, on the basis of using nothing more than Magical Thinking to convince themselves  the future of this place will look anything different than its past. And both the outgoing and incoming management are using the same financial projections that claim that revenues for rooms will miraculously increase 25 percent in one year just because we will renovate!

The IO has not figured in to this discussion. At all. Would another mayor do better? Perhaps, perhaps not. The last one got us into this mess in the first place, after all, and the current one is Missing in Action. But the proverbial Buck would Stop with him, and not the seven members of council who as a body have proved serially incapable of responsible decision-making.

Oh, I wish we had a real mayor! I know the crises over public safety, and the hotel, and the schools, and the Water Works, and Recreation, and Purchasing, and so on, wouldn’t all magically improve over night.

But the reason this job was invented, and the reason Trenton still has one, is that we believe that things will be better managed with a mayor than without one. We hope that every four years we can pick a person with the experience, ability, intelligence, and compassion to leave the city a little better at the end of his or her term than when they found it. That has certainly been the intent and hope in other cities and towns. Their record, of course, is mixed but generally positive. And I suppose that’s why there are so many mayors.

But we haven’t had one of those in three years. I sure wish we did. I hope we do a better job next year. Because We Need a Mayor!