Six-time mayor Mike Rotkin says Santa Cruz residents shouldn’t elect their top official. Photo by Chip Scheuer.
There’s a good chance Hilary Bryant got home from work last night around 10 or 11pm, started writing emails before going to sleep, and woke up this morning at 5am to write more emails before the onslaught of daily messages poured in. All this for a mayoral post that is officially described as “part-time.”
But anyone who thinks Bryant works less than full-time as mayor of Santa Cruz is wrong. The meetings, events, commissions, staff reports and dozens of daily emails—each of which Bryant tries to respond to—add up.
“That alone makes it almost impossible to think it of the job as part-time,” says Bryant, who works 40 to 60 hour weeks for the city. “Then you lay on any type of crisis. After [SCPD officers] Butch and Elizabeth died, I had to call my mom to ask her to move in with the kids to watch them because I was at work 11 or 12 hours a day.”
Bryant’s term comes in the midst of community chatter that the mayor’s job should be restructured—though it’s not a charge Bryant is leading.
Richelle Noroyan, for one, suggested switching the mayor to a full-time, better-paying post last year during her city council bid. Instead of rotating through one-year terms, mayors could serve full-time terms for two or four years to look deeper into city issues. County Treasurer Fred Keeley supports that kind of restructuring too, and a few former mayors are intrigued by the idea. Ryan Coonerty, who announced his run for the county board of supervisors last week, is fully on board.
“Having a single voice for four years that can set a vision, communicate with consultants and companies and institutions is increasingly important,” former mayor Coonerty says. “The city is a $200-million-a-year organization, and it needs someone speaking for it full-time. You can only set goals in one year. And most meaningful goals take many years to move forward.”
The idea isn’t selling itself to everyone, though. Former mayor Mike Rotkin says it would just lead to divisiveness between the mayor and the staff or the mayor and the council.
“A separately elected mayor is a guarantee for a massive amount of energy thrown into a fight between the mayor and the council,” Rotkin says. “It happens in every city that has [that system].”
Rotkin, a now-retired UCSC professor, says the council should attract people who are committed to a high level of service, but acknowledges the job comes with a heavy workload.
“The mayor’s job is 40 hours a week, and I had another full-time job, so I was working 80 hours a week, and that’s doable,” says Rotkin. Then again, Rotkin is an admitted workaholic, who served six terms as mayor and set the bar high for everyone else—every town’s got one.
Bryant, a mother of two whose husband owns Cruzn Pedicabs, says if she had another full-time job this year, she would have had to walk away from one of them.
Nowhere does city code specify how many hours the mayor is supposed to work. But the mayorship, notes city councilmember Don Lane, is “not compensated very well if you consider it a full-time job.”
Lane, whose most recent term as mayor ended last December, prefers the current council set-up, but does see the benefits of a full-time, directly elected mayor. He says that it’s confusing how the mayor doesn’t have a different specified role on the council, other than acting as the chair and performing a few ceremonial acts.
“And yet we have all this informal expectation,” Lane says, “about what we’re supposed to do as mayor, which I think is what people are trying to get at. Shouldn’t we recognize that this is a bigger job than chairing the city council meeting? On paper, that’s the only difference. The city charter doesn’t describe a whole lot of extra duties for the mayor, other than running the city council meeting. But in fact there’s a tremendous expectation about being the spokesperson for the city. Obviously, this year that’s been huge.”
Currently, the city has a city manager form of government. One thing Lane doesn’t want to do is take the day-to-day duties from the city manager, currently Martín Bernal, and give too much to a mayor, who may not have all the expertise needed to run a city.
“You really need a professional administrator to manage 10 department directors working under them and to manage a city budget,” Lane says. “You don’t just want an experienced amateur like me. I have some knowledge of management, but it’s not a substitute for professional training in budgeting, fiscal management and personnel administration.”
Coonerty, who supports mayoral restructuring, doesn’t want an independent “strong mayor” system that takes power away from Bernal, either. He says there are advantages, though, to a directly elected mayor. It would be easier to keep long-term projects going because people wouldn’t have to re-establish contacts with each new mayor. Santa Cruz would have a figurehead, who could take the time to sell its accomplishments to an international audience. Plus the city can continue setting the bar high for its mayors and expect a lot during times of crisis.
And if the city does amend its city charter amendment by a vote of the people to make for a directly elected mayor, the city would likely need to increase the mayor’s compensation, as well. Otherwise, former mayors say, it would be hard to find qualified people willing to put their lives on hold for more than one year at a time for a small salary.
Whether a change ever happens or not, Coonerty and Lane both say a lot of people don’t fully grasp how the one-year terms and city manager system work at the moment.
“When I was mayor, I was always surprised at how many people were surprised our mayor wasn’t elected directly,” Coonerty says. “Many people assume this is how it is, and would be surprised to hear how different it is.”
