12A. Council initiated item from Council Member Shaffer to reconsider Mayor and Deputy Mayor transition scheduled to take effect June 11, 2014.
2014-05-28 Item 12A - Council Member Shaffer Initiated Item
12B. Council initiated item from Council Member Kranz for reconsideration of the pending transition of Mayor and Deputy Mayor duties.
2014-05-28 Item 12B - Council Member Kranz Initiated Item
The mayor-sharing was agreed last December and heralded as an example of the council's new civility. Apparently civility (and fair play) ends as soon as your colleagues have a policy disagreement over the purchase price of Pacific View.
At the time of the deal, council members expressed concern that incumbency would be an advantage (we think this concern is way overblown; just ask Mayor Stocks and Mayor Dalager). All council members were given a chance to say whether they wanted to run for mayor. Only Teresa Barth and Kristin Gaspar expressed any interest, so the council cordially agreed to allow each of them to serve for half the year.
Now that Kranz has decided he's running for mayor, he wants to change the rules.
Anyone involved in future dealings with Kranz or Shaffer would be wise to remember exactly how far you can trust them. For that matter, so would the voters.
This naked power grab bears a striking resemblance to the tone-deaf and bull-headed move by Mayor Jerome Stocks to appoint one of his allies to fill the council seat of the late Maggie Houlihan, when the magnanimous thing to do would have been to appoint Houlihan's (and the overwhelming majority of the public's) chosen successor. That move was a catalyzing moment that marked the beginning of the end of Stocks' political career.
There's also plenty of irony in the fact that the defining issue of Teresa Barth's first several years on the council was that she was repeatedly passed over for a turn as mayor by a council majority her supporters viewed as bullies. Now Barth's majority allies want to do the same thing to Kristin Gaspar.
