The rhetorical and the real
January 31, 2018
In the SOTU, presidents can paint in broad strokes. In state of the village speeches, mayors must acknowledge reality.
No matter who is president, the State of the Union Address is inevitably about aspirations, ideals and values.
No matter who is mayor, a state of the village address is about worries, hopes and reality.
โIn other words, our sewers,โ said Provo, Utahโs new mayor, Michelle Kaufusi, translating the euphemistic term โwastewater treatment plantโ for her audience at the local library Jan. 18.
โI know no one wants to think about that. But we are at a crossroads,โ she added in her first state of the city address. โOur pipes arenโt big enough to hold the extra capacity that west side growth is adding. And new environmental regulations are making our existing plant difficult to support, if not obsolete.โ
As editor of Vital Speeches of the Day magazine, Iโve informally surveyed American state of the village addresses for several consecutive years. Iโve found that, taken together, they provide a more reliable (and less rhetorical) measure of the state of the nation than the presidentโs more infinitely more abstract and symbolic speech to Congress. When a mayor stands up before the workaday citizens in the town where they live together, the truth must be acknowledged.
And the truth, this year, is that despite an economy that seems to be booming nationally, mayors are worried about urgent infrastructure needs, and a dearth of tax dollars to pay for them.
A big culvert collapsed last year on Pearl Street in Wellsville, New York, taking a parked car halfway down with it. โOur infrastructure is aging,โ said Mayor Randy Shayler in a state-of-the-town interview in the Wellsview Daily Reporter. โWeโre trying to position ourselves to take some more income from outside the village to help with differing costs.โ
โCheektowagans certainly pay their fair share of [New York State] and Federal taxes,โ said Cheektowaga, New York Mayor Diane Benckowski in her state of the town speech Jan. 18. โSo why donโt we try and get some of that money back to benefit projects right here in our town?โ Sheโs applying for grant funding.
SPLOST is an inelegant term that comes up in some of these speeches. It stands for โspecial purpose local option sales tax,โ and itโs how Tyrone, Georgia is paying for โstormwater projects, improved parks, an upgraded Town Hall and an increased sewer footprint,โ said Mayor Eric Dial in his Jan. 4 state of the town speech.
Itโs not Daniel Burnham-esque big plans these mayors are rolling out and bragging on. In Show Low, Arizona, Mayor Daryl Seymore used his Jan. 19 state of the city address to thank town employees for their work on the annual Barbecue Throwdown; he also touted as progress, a new daily flight service offered by Boutique Air at the Show Low Airport. Meanwhile, Chestertown, New York is installing a new biomass boiler in town hall and removing 21 tons of Eurasian milfoil out of Loon Lake, said town supervisor Craig Leggett in his Jan. 9 state of the town address. And Cheyenne, Wyoming needs broadband internet speed to attract businesses. โAnd it must be affordable,โ said Mayor Marian Orr in her state of the city address Jan. 9. โCheyenne is failing on both counts: accessibility and affordability.โ
Things are going better in Allentown, Pennsylvania, to hear Mayor Ed Pawlowski tell it in his Jan. 5 state of the city address. The city recycled 560 tons of paper and emptied 54,000 trash cans in the previous year, he specified. And Allentown is making better-than-average headway on infrastructure, Pawlowski claimed, boasting, โWhen you go over one of our bridges you wonโt end up in the creek 50 feet below.โ
Less frequent than you might expect were references to the opioid crisisโperhaps because mayors feel powerless to solve it. โ[Opioid addiction] unfortunately is not going away anytime soon,โ said Taunton, Massachusettsโ Mayor Thomas Hoye in his Jan. 1 state of the city speech. But he cited a new Taunton Opioid Task Force, and noted that at least โour families and those addicted now have a place to turn.โ
Last January, many mayors felt compelled to address the Trump administrationโmostly promising to protect immigrant and Muslim residents from the presidentโs proposed policies. This year, Sacramento, California Mayor Darrell Steinberg was an outlier in referencing the administration, with his crack, โWe don’t care how many ‘stable geniuses’ want to tell us who does or does not belong in Sacramento. We are a proud sanctuary city.โ (Eugene, Oregon Mayor Lucy Vinis referred to a โturbulent national climateโ in her Jan. 5 speech, but urged her citizens to look within their liberal ranks: โWe have been caught in our own complacency about how people of color, varying gender identities or national origin experience life in our community. We can do better. We can listen. We can pay attention. We can question our assumptions.โ)
But mostly, these mayors stuck to pragmatic matters, as good mayors always do.
And even when a mayor does reach for inspiring, aspirational languageโin the end, itโs all about infrastructure. In the same speech in which she compared Provo to the Biblical city on a hill, Mayor Kafusi put her rhetorical muscle behind a plan to establish a new sewage treatment center at a lower elevation, where โgravity will be our friend and instead of having to pump sewage up, through dozens of pump stations, it will flow naturally down.โ
Like many mayoral utterancesโand unlike most presidential onesโyou just canโt argue with that.