News-Sentinel.com

Tuesday, 12/26/2000

SON OF A SON OF A POLITICIAN

CHAPTER 6

I fought the City Council, and we both won



Photo by Staff photographer
Swearing inCity Clerk Sandra Kennedy swears in the City Council in 1996, the last that Paul Helmke would witness during his term. As mayor for a dozen years, Helmke had to find common ground with three sets of councils. Standing, from left: Archie Lunsey, D-1st District; Don Schmidt, R-2nd District; Tom Henry, D-3rd District; Tom Hayhurst, D-4th District; Dede Hall, R-5th District; and at-large Republicans Marty Bender, John Crawford and Rebecca Ravine. Not pictured is the late 6th District Democratic Councilman Cletus Edmonds. Standing behind Hall is Paul Helmke's father, Walter P. Helmke.

Relations with City Council were always interesting.

It really is a challenging structure; sometimes you look at the council as the board of directors for a company, with the mayor as CEO. Other times, it clearly is a separate branch of government with its own agenda, quirks and adversary positions.

I ended up with a good relationship. When I ran in 1987, council was 8-1 Democrat; afterward, it was 7-2 Democrat. Starting out, I wasn't sure what the relationship was going to be. Because of the partisan split, and because they'd all been there so long with a lot of experience, I clearly was the new kid on the block from a different party who had beaten somebody -- Win Moses Jr. -- they had supported and worked with.

It made things tense and tricky. I came to the council meeting the first time after being elected to extend an offer of conciliation. I wanted to work with them. They were all different types of personalities.

Schisms and rifts

Part of what helped me early on was the fact Democrats had such domination for so long they had developed their own schisms and rifts within the dynamic of council. For example, Mark GiaQuinta would argue with Janet Bradbury; others would argue with each other. Council developed into two or three groups. Don Schmidt and David Long as the two Republicans; Tom Henry who would try to work with Schmidt and develop coalitions with others; Paul "Mike" Burns, the former mayor, always taking his own iconoclastic position; Jimmy Stier, along with GiaQuinta, taking the strong Democratic Party line on issues.

GiaQuinta saw himself as the person who had to take up the flag as the leader of the deposed Moses administration, and Stier was his ally.

It was a group that had a lot of reasons not to like me, but it also had a lot of reasons not to like each other. So putting together a coalition with these shifting groups turned out to be a challenge.

Also, I had to establish my credibility and that of my administration. A big plus was having David Silletto as controller; he was well-known and respected in the community. A bit older, he had some of that gravitas and sense of wisdom. Through some marriages, he was related to the GiaQuintas. It helped develop some personal connections. It helped, since an early focus with council was on financial issues. If I was talking numbers, I was attacked as not knowing what I was talking about. It was sort of the spin Moses put on occasionally when he'd speak out about city finances.

It was like fighting the 1987 election all over again, dealing with similar issues a year later. One of the most amazing stories was how the Democrats had a retreat early on after I took office and brought in a facilitator to help them all get along better. I'm not sure how successful it turned out.

But I didn't want to approach issues with a partisan attitude, especially with seven Democrats against you. I needed to do a good job for the city, and to break down the sense Democrats should be against me because I was a Republican who had beaten Moses.

The fact council members were there for a while probably helped me; they were independent and had their own priorities. Stier, for example, might be Mr. Democrat and out to get me on every level on the partisan side. But he also was Mr. Neighborhood, and anything we were doing to strengthen neighborhoods and public safety would help him be our ally.

With each we could find something we could work with.

Alliances

I would try to meet with each of them separately; each was different. For some, Silletto would be better working them; for others, my chief planner John Stafford. We tried to do it on an individual basis; each had their individual quirks.

I remember Burns meeting me early on and getting his perspective. It was interesting. Here was somebody who had run in every election since 1947, either for the council or mayor, and he gave me some of his insights from how things were when he was mayor. Things had changed but he was still helpful. One of his suggestions was to see a copy of everything that went out from every department. Maybe it was easier in the 1960s when you didn't have copy machines and things weren't as big. But the basic point was to keep your eye on the little stuff, and the advice was good. Those little details could end up biting you. I wanted my folks to be able to have the same attitude, to look carefully at the details.

It was battle stages the first 18 months, until we had gotten through two income tax votes and started the St. Joe Township annexation. And council members were quick to let me know when they weren't going to give in on things that I had wanted. In mid-1988, I wanted deputy mayors and they shot it down before the notion had gotten very far. Council perceived it as a threat to its position; they didn't want anybody other than the mayor with a title of mayor. They could accept a chief of staff, but not the concept of a deputy mayor.

Workings

I believed I learned a lot about how council worked, and so did my staff. We ended up working better together. We developed a different way of working with council. When Moses was there, for example, budgets were pretty much decided behind closed-door settings largely because he was a Democrat with a Democratic council majority. Democrats would support Win; Republicans would be ignored in the equation and most issues were settled before they became public.

By the time I came in, the biggest challenge was to get it out of a confrontational mode of Republican vs. Democrat. It took us about 18 months, but we established ourselves as people who wouldn't pull the wool over their eyes. Police Chief Neil Moore and Dave Silletto had a lot of credibility with the council. By the time of the second income tax vote, it was the start of a new era in my administration's relationship with council. It switched from an adversary role to "what can we do" with income tax money to help neighborhoods in the six council districts.

The council even sat in on budget discussions, and it helped make the relationship less adversary. While over time the political mix changed, from Democrat majority to Republican, my relations with council remained very good.

A good setup

We've got a pretty good setup here. I would talk with other mayors in the country who couldn't get anything done because of their relationship with their councils. The best thing we got going here is the strong mayor system of government, where people elect the mayor and the mayor has some power. He's seen as the person in charge. When things go well, he gets the credit; when things go poorly, he gets blamed.

The mayor here has enough power to effect change and take care of any problems that develop. In cities with city managers, a council selects the manager. He does most of the hiring and runs the operation, and theoretically, he doesn't set policy but carries out policy from the mayor. But it's so hard to separate policy from implementation because the way you do things sometimes defines what the policy is.

Most people here don't appreciate how well the system works. For example, when the mayor sends down the budget, the council can subtract from it, but not add to it. As a result, there's no line-item veto; if the mayor doesn't want it, he doesn't put it in the budget. Council members can't add it. If the mayor decides not to spend it, the council can't either. That's not the way it is on the federal level.

Council also has a lot of power it doesn't use. Often, its greatest power wasn't from ordinances that were introduced but comments they would make. It would define an agenda for government. It's the same when conducting hearings on issues, like with the police chief to address the crime rate.

While checks and balances are great, as chief executive I'd get frustrated at times with council. So we figured out ways to perhaps get things through easier. And the council often would help by not asking the appropriate questions, even though we had the answers.

If there were controversial items in the budget -- and those were hard to hide -- I wanted arguments to be over major ones, not hour-long arguments over pennies, like should this person get a new car or should there be a new desk for somebody. You have to watch every penny, but in a $100 million-plus budget, the extra $2,000 here or there -- while it adds up -- wasn't worth the scrutiny if paying attention to little details meant you missed the big budgetary picture.

Council sometimes made bad decisions by eliminating things that were really needed, like a desk. We'd get to the stage where the council would approve the extra personnel but not the desks or equipment for them. It didn't make much sense. Often, it was political posturing to show they were cutting the budget by whatever percentage possible.

Battles on our turf

Some of the things we did were calculated to make it clear battles would be fought where we wanted the battles fought. We did it in ways that were dictated by screwy state law. Normally, the salary ordinance came down a month before the budget came down. And the salary ordinance determines the job slots and what they would get paid. This would come down to council, and it didn't determine how many people would be in those job slots. And we'd have arguments with council about these job slots before we had to show them the entire budget. Sometimes, when we wanted to add somebody, we determined it by having cuts elsewhere, but until you saw them in the budget, you didn't see them in the salary ordinance to get the full impact of what we were trying to do.

Eventually, state law was changed so both the salary ordinance and budget could be looked at together. And it helped quite a bit.

One of the easiest way to sidetrack an attack, when someone's arguing, "What about such and such?" is to tell them to turn to Page 350 in the budget books we put together and that would shut them up. The more information, even if controversial, the better. What brings down mayors and administrations more than anything is trying to hide things. When you try to hide something, it's going to come out sooner or later, and then you won't have an answer and wind up embarrassed. Folks will be a lot more skeptical the next time you want something.

Complete disclosure works a lot better than playing games. It's one of the reasons why, over the years, the budget process went smoothly.

Vetoes

When it came to vetoes, I had a few. A strong mayor has the power, but it isn't great. You need 5 of 9 on council to pass an ordinance. A mayor can then veto an ordinance, but it takes only six votes to override it. Actually, the only time a veto carries a threat is when a council vote is 5-4. Overwhelming majorities, otherwise, will overrule a mayor's veto. As a result, I didn't use a veto very often.

Also, most business sent down to council were ordinances we initiated, not those crafted by the council. If anything, it would be council-crafted ordinances we might object to that could lead to a mayoral veto. Why would I veto an ordinance I had sent down?

Council is weaker this way as well. We would send down ordinances that council didn't like. And if council didn't like it, council should have amended it. Instead, council would say it didn't like an ordinance and then send it back to the administration for rewriting. This was done often because members of council knew an amendment couldn't get five votes for passage. So it was sent back to the administration to clean up or change, and we had to figure out a way to make everybody happy.

I'd rather see council fight some of these issues in public. It's good for the system instead of having city officials doing two or three rewrites of ordinances to make council members happy.

Smoking ban

Most of the vetoes were symbolic, often because I didn't like a position the council was taking. But not on a smoking ban in restaurants. It wasn't symbolic. It was challenging, and an ordinance that passed council by a 5-4 vote.

The smoking debate had been an issue for some time; it came from several council members. My attitude was a bit ambivalent on the issue. I hate smoking and have never smoked. I can't stand cigarette smoke. I don't like it in a restaurant, and it has an effect on where I dine. I'm very sympathetic to that side of the issue.

However, I'm always leery of government telling business what it should and shouldn't do. It's a tricky issue because it concerns public health and safety, while it also interferes with the private sector.

I was concerned whether the ban was just going to be in the city, or countywide. There's a lot of legislation on the local level that has an anti-urban bias; it only applies within city limits, not the suburbs. It puts city residents at a disadvantage, like storm water regulations that apply to homes within the city but not outside. This issue was coming down that way. I felt it should be done more broadly, countywide.

Early on, I told anti-smoking folks what I was thinking and if a ban was made countywide, I'd be inclined to go ahead with it. Early indication was council was going to go along. But, they couldn't get the county to come along. I wanted to witness a news conference, for example, with at least two of the three county commissioners and anti-smoking advocates supporting a ban. Apparently, the support from the county wasn't forthcoming. It changed the equation and I told them that. It's one of the reasons I vetoed the ordinance.

Balancing act

It also came down during a tricky time as I'm running for the Senate, and this was an issue that could get statewide focus. I was perceived as being not conservative and Republican enough on issues. I tried to do what's best and the chips would fall wherever with the politics of the whole thing. I ended up deciding the bill was poorly written, with too many exemptions and it wasn't countywide. It would have been an enforcement nightmare. I signed the ordinance banning smoking in businesses. At least there, the argument of competing sides tipped to a ban in the work place, because at least you have a choice where you eat, not as much where you work.

Here's a 5-4 vote in favor of a ban, so I believed my veto would be held up. I believed I had written a convincing argument in my veto against a ban on smoking in restaurants, and believed it would at least support the four who had voted against it. Instead, it drove two of the council members who had voted against the smoking ordinance to vote for it and for the veto override, giving the council six votes to carry the day. I'm still not sure of the logic. I guess Councilman Archie Lunsey was persuaded with concerns about children. With Councilman Tom Henry, I'm still not sure what went on.

It showed the limitation of a veto. Here, I believed a veto would make a difference. Instead it drove the vote the other way. It makes you wonder.

Not smart politically

A lot of the things I did were not the smartest politically. My attitude has always been, you run for office and when in, you do the right thing. The challenge is to determine what is the right thing. There are legitimate disagreements about what is the right thing. It has to be best for the folks as a whole, and you don't let it affect aspirations about running for office in the future. On every issue, I tried to do what I believed was the right thing. At the same time, I was aware of the political ramifications of my decisions.

With smoking, it was more why does this issue have to come up now? Why not earlier or later? But council was driving it, and that's when it was decided.

The annexation issue, overall, has hurt me politically over the years. In terms of running for future office, one of the local GOP's strengths are the Republican suburbs around Fort Wayne. Annexations have not made me popular in those areas. It's something I've heard being talked about statewide, and it slopped over into the Senate race and elsewhere.

While I'd spoken about the issue in the past, what fooled people was their belief, "He's talking about annexation, but he's really not going to push it." Or, "Even if he's going to push it, it's not going to happen." Politicians throw around issues but often either don't believe in them or don't try hard enough. Even when they do, there are so many built-in barriers to major change it isn't going to happen here.

What fooled people here is I not only talked about annexation, I did it. And I continued to push it aggressively. People aren't used to it from politicians, especially politicians realize there's political cost. It played a role in my popularity, in the Jill Long-Dan Heath campaign for U.S. Congress, and the Linda Buskirk-Graham Richard mayoral election. It also played a role in some of the support behind former Sheriff Joe Squadrito, not only in the GOP primary election he lost to Buskirk, but in disputes over the years.

The income tax and tax reform measures also keep getting thrown back at me. The winner in the Senate race, Evan Bayh, had print media attacks on taxes; the GOP's Peter Rusthoven and others mentioned it in the Republican Senate primary race. Any politician with a connection to a tax hike, even if it's balanced with a tax cut, is going to have danger. Folks will dig out the tax hike but not mention what it paid for, like police, or that it was balanced out the next year with a tax cut. It's almost radioactive in recent years politically to have any connection with a tax hike. It means people get afraid to make any changes, even if cutting one person's taxes means raising another's.

It didn't hurt me so much in local elections; the issue of the income tax here is not controversial. But it's sitting there in the files and I'm sure if I ever decide to run again for public office, someone's going to dig out "Helmke's had 12 tax increases."

But they won't remember all the tax decreases that balanced them out.

Cast of characters:

Mark GiaQuinta -- A 5th District Democratic City Councilman, he served four terms before stepping down in 1995; a local attorney

David Silletto -- Former Lincoln National Corp. executive, Silletto served as Helmke's controller, responsible for city finances