Summary: the municipal world in Cathedral City is dying. The municipal world in Cathedral City is being born. After more than 30 years of directly elected mayors, Cathedral city passes to a rotating mayoralty. The first rotating mayor of Cathedral City will be my old friend and sometime Council colleague Greg Pettis. Much will be expected of this highly talented, richly experienced new mayor. We should all wish him well.
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Cathedral City-December 10, 2018. Tonight, as our eyes behold the vesper light, our municipal world is dying, and it is also going through its birth pangs. Three councilmembers will take their oaths of office here in Cathedral City. One, Mark Carnevale, will be sworn in for his second term on the city Council. The other two, Ray Gregory and Ernesto Gutierrez, will be taking the oath for the first time
At the same time, my old friend and former colleague Greg Pettis, will become mayor of Cathedral city. Of course, having known Greg for 20 years and having served with him as a councilmember for eight years, and having been his political ally through much of that time, I congratulate him and wish in the best of success in his mayoralty.
Of course, much has changed in Cathedral City in just the last couple of years. Two years ago, Cathedral City adopted Measure HH; after 30-plus years as a general law city, Cathedral City opted to become a Charter city, free from many of the impositions and mandates historically imposed by Sacramento on general law cities.
One of the major changes wrought by Measure HH was to adopt the system of a rotating mayoralty in which the mayor is chosen by the members of the city Council from among their number. Measure HH thus did away with the quasi- mayor-Council system, in which the mayor, though a member of the city Council, was directly elected for a two-year term. The system of rotating mayoralty, which obtains in many other Coachella Valley cities, is common among cities with a Council-manager form of government, which Cathedral city had and has.
The particular upside of a rotating mayoralty is that the mayor under such a dispensation serves a single twelve month term and then hands the mayoralty off to another member of the Council. More bluntly, by limiting the mayoralty of a single individual to twelve months, that individual has a relatively limited opportunity to do significant damage to the city he or she represents.
Had we had a rotating mayoralty system between 2004 and 2014, we would not have had to put up with the 10 dreadful winters of the mayoralty of Kathleen Joan DeRosa Olsen, whose conflicts of interest, whose disdain for the city she represented, whose vindictiveness, and whose all-around nasty behavior were a perfect prefiguring of those of Donald J. Trump.
When Ms. DeRosa’s successor, outgoing Mayor Stan Henry, took up the gavel, Cathedral city had lived through what can only be described as a period of ten winters of Brezhnev-like stagnation. DeRosa was more interested in the ego trip of the mayoralty than she was in actually getting anything done for the community. Stan Henry, the former police chief in Cathedral City, managed to get Cathedral City somewhat back on track. And kudos is due to him for his accomplishments during his two terms in office.
But now the gavel passes to our first annual, rotating mayor, my old friend and former colleague Greg Pettis. There is much work to be done in Cathedral City. I certainly believe that Greg is the right man to move that work forward. After better than two decades on the Council, with experience that includes service on the Riverside County transportation commission, and the presidency of the Southern California Association of Governments, among others, Greg brings more experience to the mayoralty than any of his predecessors since incorporation.
Of course, with such a body of experience, much will be expected from the incoming mayor, perhaps so much that some of his constituents will be disappointed if, on his watch, we do not attain utopia in a day. Certainly, followers of former mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa Olsen will be looking eagerly for any gaps or missteps the Pettis administration may stumble into. It is common knowledge that DeRosa despises Greg Pettis, and it is also common knowledge that she would very much like to stage a political comeback.
Yet Cathedral City is not what it was during the ten Brezhnev winters during which DeRosa was mayor. To the extent that Stan Henry has been a turnaround CEO for Cathedral City, all of us should perhaps thank him for his service and wish him well in his amply deserved retirement.
At the same time, we should all be aware that Greg Pettis takes the gavel with more expectation and more hope for his success than has greeted any mayor of Cathedral City since incorporation.
I wish my old friend and former colleague all the best as he jumps into the maelstrom of being the public voice and face of Cathedral City.
Knock ‘em dead, old friend.
