Summary: The rotation of the mayoralty in the cities in West Hollywood and Rancho Mirage reminds us that here in Cathedral City, we have been ill served during the last nine winters by a system that has enabled a divisive and arrogant mayor with no real talent for governing to indulge her monarchical conceit of herself and her office. The time has come for Cathedral City to look very seriously at rotating the mayoral office. Cathedral City’s incumbent mayor has managed to embody the worst aspects of Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism with none of the redeeming qualities that left even many of Baroness Thatcher’s critics compelled to recognize that the Iron Lady had been one of Great Britain’s most consequential prime ministers. A year as mayor is all the time a good mayor needs to get a city on the right track, even if that same 12 month is usually too short a period for a bad mayor to screw things up the way Kathleen Joan DeRosa has done in Cathedral city.
By: Paul S. Marchand
Over the last couple of days, my Facebook newsfeed has contained updates about the changing of the mayoral guard in both West Hollywood and Rancho Mirage.
In West Hollywood, Mayor Jeffrey Prang passed his mayoral gavel to Abbe Land, whom I first met the better part of 30 years ago.
Next door, in Rancho Mirage, the mayoralty has rotated from Scott Hines to Richard Kite.
Here in Cathedral city, where we directly elect a mayor for two-year terms, we are now into the fifth term of a mayor who in the nine long winters of her reign has managed to embody all of the worst aspects of the late Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism and not a single one of Baroness Thatcher’s redeeming qualities, qualities which made the late Iron Lady one of the most consequential British prime ministers of the latter half of the 20th century.
Kathleen Joan DeRosa has become a living, breathing, argument for rotating mayoralty. Cathedral City should consider changing its council structure and abolishing its current mayoral system, a system by which we have been horribly ill served for the last nine years.
The practice of having a directly elected mayor makes little sense in most council-manager cities. In a council manager city, the day-to-day running of the municipality lies not in the hands of the mayor, as it does in a traditional strong-mayor system, but in the hands of an appointed city manager.
The advantage of the Council-manager system is that it allows for a greater degree of professionalism in the running of what is, to all intents and purposes, a multimillion dollar corporate operation.
Here in Cathedral city, the current mayor has displayed a remarkably monarchical conceit of herself and a disturbing willingness to do whatever it takes to hold on to her power, including using public safety as her “muscle.” The current mayor certainly seems to be a devotee of the maxim that “politics is about rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies.” Our politics has been cheapened and degraded during the nine winters of the incumbent mayor’s tenure, and she has thoroughly discredited the very concept of a directly elected mayor.
A rotating mayoralty could potentially spare us the unseemly spectacle of an incumbent mayor who, as this one has done, seems more interested in rewarding friends, punishing enemies, pursuing power, and building a cult of personality than in actually governing in the interests of the community. Indeed, given the large amounts of time this mayor has spent at vacation homes or other residences outside the city, it is questionable whether the incumbent mayor has any commitment at all to Cathedral City, or whether being mayor is just an ego trip.
A city can survive one year of a bad mayor, but nine winters of bad governance and divisive politics is simply too much. What we do know is that Kathleen DeRosa is no Margaret Thatcher, and indeed I almost feel constrained to apologize to Baroness Thatcher’s family for being so gauche as to link the two women. Margaret Thatcher got things done, even if untidily. Kathleen Joan DeRosa can point to at best an appallingly thin record of achievement for Cathedral City. Where is the influx of business and development we were promised for our now barren downdown? Where? Bueller? Bueller?
Isn’t it time we set in train the steps necessary to ensure that the mayoralty rotates among council members, and that no single individual gets more than a 12 month window of opportunity to screw things up as badly as Kathleen DeRosa has done?
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in practices in Cathedral City, where he served eight years as a member the city Council. During six of those years, he had to deal with the misgovernment of the incumbent mayor, and is more than ever convinced that Cathedral city needs a rotating mayoralty. The views contained herein are his own, and not anybody else’s. They are not intended to constitute legal advice. To the extent that the mayor or any of her supporters may seek to institute any form of proceedings against him for daring to say that the empress has no clothes, just remember that for every SLAPP suit, there may well be a SLAPPback.
