It is now over four months since the torch has been passed.
On February 6 then-Mayor D. Michael Collins passed away, and then-Council President Paula Hicks Hudson was automatically elevated to become mayor. It was an unprecedented occurrence in modern times.
The oddity of it all was compounded by the strangeness that followed. Normally a mayor is elected in November, and then has nearly two months to build a leadership team before taking office in January.
In most recent elections an incumbent was replaced by a victorious challenger. Said winner then cleans house at the top, replacing the old with the new. For example, in twenty ten, Mayor-elect Mike Bell cleaned out the old faces from the Carty administration and brought in his own team.
Something similar happened in twenty fourteen after Collins defeated Bell, but with a twist. See, Collins pretty much had no shot at winning the election. Plus, as an independent and a curmudgeonly one at that, he had no real support team surrounding him. Then the Ds ran two viable candidates who beat each other in the primary, all the labor support swung to Collins, and thump. He landed in the mayor’s seat.
Welcome back
Having no obvious choices for leadership, Collins generally replaced the old with the older. In many cases he brought back Finkly loyalists like Herr Reinbolt and William Franklin. In other cases he worked out old vendettas built up during his days as a councilman by demoting good public servants like David Welch.
He also rewarded campaign workers like Stephen Leggett and his old city council aide Lisa Ward with plum positions. And some of his best moves, like elevating engineer Robin Whitney, backfired quickly as folks jumped ship.
Suffice it to say the Collins administration was a jury-rigged assemblage that cobbled together a few outcasts, some misfits, and a couple of has-beens into a virtual nightmare of sloppiness and inefficiency.
It was no real surprise, then, that the first year was pretty much a disaster. Collins’ micromanagement style coupled with his scattershot ideas played out through this administrative cesspool. Ick!
Yet after Collins passed, new Mayor Hicks Hudson was faced with an outcry that his leadership team must be kept intact. No incoming mayor has ever been forced to keep their predecessor’s administrative team. But there it was.
Need to reassure Toledoans that the ship is on course, mumbled the pundits. Must keep the Collins term as mayor moving ahead, even without Collins himself.
Really? Let’s take a deeper look at the Collins term, brief as it was. Two firefighters lost their lives in a tragedy, and he was justifiably concerned. The weather was really bad, and city workers did their jobs admirably. He got in a hissy match with the EPA, and they slapped back with new water testing protocols that shut down the water supply for a weekend.
He ran off the police chief. The grass didn’t get mowed for much of the summer. The roads got progressively worse. He negotiated contracts that gave away the store to his union supporters, such that the city budget now has a permanent structural deficit.
Those were the golden Collins years? Ouch!
Clean sweep
And it has continued in the months since his passing. Collins’ directors have proven to be ineffective communicators, repeatedly picking fights with city council. Purchasing procedures have been exposed as corrupt and misleading, such that the purchase of a treadmill was listed as “truck parts.”
We need to reset the clock. Collins hasn’t been mayor for over four months. Hicks Hudson was never an ally of Collins, or of Carty, for that matter. She has no obligation to keep their hand-picked cronies.
More importantly, she has a strong farm team of talent to choose from if she decides to make replacements. Instead she remains on an island, surrounded by sharks. Many of her top administrators are more loyal to her opponents in the mayoral campaign than they are to her.
It doesn’t have to be this way. It is the heart of the election season. Voters want a mayor with passion and conviction. Decisiveness at the top is a winner.
Let’s be blunt. Clean house, Paula. For the love of Toledo, clean house.
