An elected mayor? (continued)

So, continuing the analogy, shouldn’t there be an elected executive?

"I don’t believe so," Cohen says. Meehan’s proposal "gives the people less control over what their council looks like. I think it upsets that delicate balance between district interests and interests of the city as a whole, and replaces that with one person, a weak mayor with the same vote as every other district councilor."

Under Meehan’s proposal, eight of the nine city councilors would be elected from districts (and what a redistricting battle we could all look forward to!); the ninth — the mayor — would be the only at-large elected official in the city, and would serve a three-year term. "You’d have mayoral campaigns where major issues of the city would be debated," Meehan says. "People could get elected based on their stand on them, which means that there could be some direction going from the voter through to policy, which doesn’t happen now because there’s no real validation of a vision. Policies aren’t really debated during the election cycle."

The all-district makeup of the council "would make it easier for people to get elected who are just neighborhood-based," Meehan goes on, and would also make it easier for the council to stand up against the mayor when mayoral proposals fell more heavily on particular neighborhoods. At-large councilors, with no district loyalty, would be less likely to take up these causes.

In short, Meehan is proposing a standard arrangement of representative democracy: local representatives and an at-large executive.

Like the rest of the council (Jim Cloutier and Donna Carr have voiced support for an elected mayor in the past, but neither favors Meehan’s idea), Cohen is skeptical. "We’d be taking away the regular opportunity for the voters of Portland to have a direct say in who represents them," he insists — ironically, in that this is the exact rationale for the 1923 move to a council-manager system.

Cohen and fellow councilor Peter O’Donnell don’t see much popular support for an elected mayor. "Not once did the elected mayor come up" during the campaign, O’Donnell says. "I don’t see people clamoring for it." He agrees with Cohen that "the present form of government is working fine," and adds, "I don’t think there’s enough people that think that’s an issue we should be spending time on right now." O’Donnell lists tax reform, Ocean Gateway, and housing issues as more pressing than tinkering with the city charter.

What about the idea that a directly elected mayor, the only city official voted on by the entire Portland electorate, could be more likely to spearhead important issues and get things done? "I don’t agree," O’Donnell says without elaborating. In general, he and the other councilors contacted for this article had a long list of problems with elected-mayor setups (most outlined in the Yepsen and Guardian pieces quoted above), but not one of them could come up with a single flaw in the council-manager structure.

One of the primary arguments against the elected-mayor arrangement is that it increases the likelihood of cronyism, corruption, partisanship, and all those other unseemly byproducts of electoral politics. But how much more partisan can the city council get? Despite the council’s nominal nonpartisan makeup, eight of its members are registered Democrats; all are active in party politics; all gang up on Cheryl Leeman, the lone Republican. And one of the easiest tasks in Portland is finding a losing city council candidate to mutter darkly about the "party machine" that mobilizes for certain candidates; Don Meehan says that the current system is "designed for an insiders’ game."

Leeman herself, by far the council’s longest-serving member with 20 years of experience, says that the partisan atmosphere on the council is "as bad as it’s ever been." The nonpartisan veneer of the city council is thin, if it exists at all beyond the lack of Ds or Rs after councilors’ names on the city Web site.

Even so, count Leeman as a staunch opponent of electing Portland’s mayor. "I’ve been around this issue now for a number of years," she says, "and there’s a couple of compelling reasons why I haven’t supported it: politics and more politics. With an elected mayor, you tend to have a much more partisan environment."

More partisan than the councils of the past few years?

Leeman laughs. "Clearly there’s been a move toward more partisanship since the elections were moved from May to November," she admits, with the attendant increase in interest from activist groups, but when she began her council service, "it was probably the purest form of nonpartisan politics. People quite simply acted in the best interests of the city, and I maintain that’s the way it should be."

If the council is no longer nonpartisan, though, what difference would an elected mayor make? "It would make it even more partisan than it is now," Leeman says. Portland is "working well now with the city-manager form of government, and I don’t feel we need the intervention of an elected mayor to run the largest city in the state of Maine."

Typically the strong-mayor or elected-mayor crowd includes regional business leaders who like the idea of a single powerful voice advocating growth (also, they like to know where they should concentrate their campaign contributions). Locally, the Portland Regional Chamber of Commerce has "actually never taken a position on it, or frankly even discussed it that I’m aware of at any of our board levels," says president Godfrey Wood.

Ron Ward of the Portland Community Chamber city affairs committee says that the Portland-area chambers have a slightly different relationship with city government than is usual. "Portland has an interesting personality when it comes to looping in what I would loosely refer to as the business community," he says. "First of all, it’s hard to identify what the business community is in this city" because so many of Portland’s large employers are owned by out-of-state interests. This wasn’t always true, and Ward says that when the banks were locally owned and UNUM Provident was Union Mutual, city officials made more of an effort to build bridges with local chambers. In Portland — at least in recent years — "that doesn’t seem to be the case," Ward says. "Politicians in this city tend not to go to them" because they don’t see the chambers as voting bases.

Would an elected mayor more likely to work with chambers? "Interesting question," Ward says. He touches on all the standard objections, partisanship especially, before unpacking what’s really behind them. "Implicit in all that" hand-wringing over partisanship is that the mayor — elected out of a city as dyed-in-the-wool liberal as Portland — would likely be a liberal Democrat, Ward says, "but I’m not sure that’s going to be any different that what we’ve got now."

Would this theoretical elected liberal Democrat interact more fruitfully with local businesses than the current council does? "I expect that they would," Ward says. "I would expect they would perceive assets there that could be brought to bear.

"I’ve watched this issue over time, and eight years ago I agreed that the best thing for the city of Portland was to keep local offices as nonpartisan as possible, and I think that’s a legitimate position to take," Ward goes on, but he’s starting to change his mind. "The problem with the system we have now is that there’s nobody who is responsible for anything. If you have a mayor who is responsible for his own programs and his own initiatives, then I think the prospects of running the city in a more efficient manner probably improve."

Is that a declaration of support for an elected mayor? "On balance, would I be inclined to go in an elected mayor direction?" Ward rephrases the question. "I would," although he would want to see details of any proposal. The accountability and direct authority of an elected executive, he says, is a "system I think works better, and I would be in favor of that."

For his part, Meehan is content to build support slowly and gear up for an election year, when more people are likely to show up and vote. "We’re trying to get the word out, stir the waters, see who wants to join us," he says. "Progress is made slowly."

Electing a mayor to lead Portland may or may not be progress, but if history is any judge, it won’t be another eight years before we have a chance to vote on it again.

Alex Irvine can be reached at airvine@phx.com