Login | April 24, 2024
The legacy behind Mayor Plusquelic’s reign
SCOTT PIEPHO
Cases and Controversies
Published: May 22, 2015
Two weeks ago, Akron Mayor Don Plusquellic dropped a bomb into the Friday afternoon news hole when he announced that he was resigning as mayor. As of today, we have a little over a week left in the Plusquellic era.
My journalist friends had been speculating on whether or not Plusquellic would run for an eighth term. He not only answered that, he chose to justify the decision with a taking-my-ball-home rant against the Akron Beacon Journal over its coverage and editorials regarding his decision to exclude Councilman Bob Hoch from the State of the City address.
Plusquellic’s exit carries a number of lessons – the first being that the Friday news hole isn’t such a news hole anymore. Time was if someone wanted a story to appear and then die, they released or acknowledged or leaked it on Friday afternoon. The Saturday paper is the least read of the week and once the story has been published there, it won’t reappear the following Monday without some new development.
But that news hole depended on a news cycle defined by print media. Today the length of the news cycle depends far more on how long people want to talk about a story than on a newspaper’s production schedule. I learned of the mayor’s resignation when the story blew up my social media accounts. It was not a thing relatively few people noticed. It was the thing everyone talked about all weekend.
Meanwhile the mayor’s exit exemplifies everything that has been simultaneously excellent and exasperating about him. My guess in the will-he-run-again debates had been that he would want more than anything to control the succession question. He did his best by resigning so that City Council President Garry Moneypenny can succeed him and run in the fall as incumbent mayor.
Plusquellic genuinely believes in service to the city and in leaving the field open for Moneypenny he arguably provides the best chance for a smooth transition to a new administration.
On the other hand, there is that rant against the Beacon Journal. Throughout his years at the helm, the mayor’s sentinel weakness has been his inability to perceive disagreement as something other than a personal attack. Excluding Councilman Hoch from the State of the City address had all the marks of a Plusquellic retaliation against a policy adversary. (Full disclosure: I sit on the board of the Akron Press Club which cosponsored the address.)
The rationale that Hoch posed a threat to the mayor was bizarre, and when Chief of Police Jim Nice spoke to the councilman and determined that he did not pose a threat, that should have been the end of it. Instead the controversy is now unfortunately enshrined as part of the mayor’s legacy.
Twenty-two years ago – so only a year into his second term – I returned to this area, having been away for college, a few years of working, then law school. It was not my plan to return to Akron and make a life here, but as often happens in your 20s, things changed. I met the woman who became my wife, found the first in a succession of jobs and looked around. A new Akron was emerging from the bombed out rust belt city I had left 10 years before.
Since then I’ve seen downtown cleaned up, the university evolve from a commuter college to a full service institution and a new set of high-tech industries grow in place of king rubber. I saw a new baseball stadium, a new art museum building, a rebuilt county library system and soon a rebuilt city school system. And as he noted in his resignation statement, his administration has never seen a cabinet member indicted for corruption.
Plusquellic did not make all those things happen, but he maintained a climate where they could. Sometimes when people accused him of being a bombastic bully they pointed at how he treated employees of city departments. Often it turned out that the bombastic bullying happened in the service of getting something done for city residents.
But it is important to remember that the mayor’s thin skin and short fuse were personal attributes, not part of his philosophy of governance. Given the mayor’s prickly personality, it is ironic that his philosophy was built on balance – between creating a business-friendly climate and serving the needs of residents, between protecting city interests and cooperating with other governments, between husbanding resources and investing in infrastructure.
As we look to the future we should remember how that philosophy has served us. That part of the mayor’s legacy will endure long after the memory of his abrasiveness has faded.