Imagine if Pam Iorio had ran for higher office this past fall, and been successful, at say, CFO. She would obviously have to leave office before her mayoral term ended, and an interim mayor would need to be named to lead the city over the remaining months of her term.
But who should decide who that interim mayor would be? It's an academic question here in Tampa (where the only place Mayor Iorio is going is to a new condo), but it's very much a story in the city I just spent the past 10 days in – my hometown of San Francisco, where the current Mayor, Gavin Newsom, is slated to soon leave office to take over his new duties as Lieutenant Governor (In California, unlike Florida, it's an elected position).
In SF, the outgoing Board of Supervisors (equivalent to the city council) are scheduled to decide on who should lead them over the next year, before voters there elect a new mayor in November. But because the current Board of Supervisors, who will transition out of office in the first week of January, are considered to be somewhat more liberal (debatable, but probably true) than the incoming board, Newsom doesn't want that current board naming an interim mayor, and by cleverly parsing the law, is considering to delay his exit from the mayor's office to become Lieutenant governor until after the new board comes into power.
He's not making many friends in pulling off this power play, as the SF Weekly wrote about in early December:
In order for Newsom to claim he has the right and ability to alter the course of mayoral selection by not resigning, he'd have to claim a distinction between his term as mayor being automatically "vacated" when his state office begins on Jan. 3 and the "resignation" from office demanded by San Francisco's city charter prior to a successor mayor being named. San Francisco rules forbid Newsom from holding two jobs simultaneously, so he's finished as mayor as soon as his lieutenant governor term commences. Does Newsom really want to parse the distinction between his position being "vacated" and "resigning" — and claim he's doing it for the greater good? At the very best, this is a duplicitous thing to do. At worst, it's actionable.
It is an interesting transition, whomever the next mayor will be, for at least the next 11 months in SF. Gavin Newsom, along with Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, are the last vestiges of the famed "Brown-Burton" machine in San Francisco politics (named after former Mayor Willie Brown and current California Democratic party chair John Burton, whose brother Phil represented San Francisco in Congress from 1964-1983) . That machine included the late George Moscone, and now ends with Newsom, who at one time in the 1990's was the only straight white male on the Board of Supervisors. And it's the powerful group of Democrats that more progressive activists have tried to oust from power for decades (A form of that existed in the city's gay community, as shown in the film Milk where Harvey Milk was told to bide his time to run for office).
Other items of note I can relate from my time in the Bay Area is that, even with the loss of Prop. 19 last month that would have legalized marijuana, I saw on two different occasions people firing up on busy streets in San Francisco & Oakland – in one case an elderly (and hilarious) waiter who served a group of us in North Beach, the other time some yuppies off of College Avenue in Oakland's Rockridge section – with no fear of recriminations, and why should there be? In early October, outgoing Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a law that that makes possession of less than an ounce of pot to be an infraction, on par with traffic and littering tickets.
And speaking of the "Governator", his seven year term in office ends in a number of days as well. And he's not going out on top. In that respect, he's a lot like the guy he replaced in the Golden State's special recall election in 2003, Democrat Gray Davis. The state had a lot of issues in '03, mainly energy problems led by the morally bankrupt Enron corporation that led to a series of rolling black outs, as well as a serious budget deficit (over $10 billion at the time).
Gray Davis's poll numbers were bad when he left, and so are Arnold's as he exits the limelight (In July, only 22% of Californians approved of his performance, while 70% disapproved). Then again, Schwarzenegger learned what all politicians learn sooner or later – that wanting to be loved and doing the right thing aren't usually synonymous.
On his first day in office, the "Governator" repealed Davis' move to increase the state's vehicle license fee (known simply as the "car tax"). The voters loved it. But it's cost the state $4 billion annually.
In this respect, new Governor Jerry Brown is very much like Barack Obama was two years ago- inheriting an incredibly challenging situation. California's current budget deficit? $25.4 billion.
Sort of makes Florida's $3.5 billion shortfall that Rick Scott will inherit next week not so horrible, doesn't it?
This article appears in Dec 23-29, 2010.