Untitled Document
Tim Davlin rides a Harley. Bruce Strom sings in a
barbershop quartet. Davlin, Springfield’s incumbent mayor and
a Democrat, is easygoing and gregarious. Strom, a three-term alderman and a Republican, is
mild-mannered and quiet. Davlin always seems be having a good time at
Springfield City Council meetings, occasionally joking around — even
with the aldermen who don’t like him. Whether Strom is one of them is hard to say: Of the 10
aldermen, Strom competes with Ward 6 Ald. Mark Mahoney for the title of the
council’s coolest cucumber. Strom is cautious (if not guarded),
deliberate, and calculating.
Almost all of Strom’s sentences begin with a
pause. When it comes to his public relationship with Davlin, Strom is the
least combative of the five Republicans on the council, seldom letting his
voice climb or even becoming visibly agitated. Strom is at his most animated — and appears
most comfortable, not to mention confident — when he speaks of Lois,
his wife of 42 years, and, albeit reluctantly at first, about the effort he
led last year to make Springfield a smoke-free city. Strom is challenging Davlin in the Springfield
mayor’s race, to be decided in April — but the challenger faces
formidable obstacles.
The biggest: Davlin’s campaign fund is at least
seven times larger than Strom’s, according to the most recent
information provided by the state elections board (Strom has said that
Davlin’s financial advantage is 10-to-1). Aside from funding, Davlin has the organization and
the endorsement of U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, and he belongs to the same party
as Gov. Rod Blagojevich and every other state constitutional
officer-holder. The 64-year-old Strom has the support of Republican
leaders in Sangamon County, where Republicans control all but four seats on
the County Board, but he has yet to lock down any major endorsements and is
without other necessary campaign accoutrements: headquarters, Web site, or
paid staff. But Davlin, 49, has made his share of missteps during
his term — and Strom is banking on the fact that Springfield’s
citizens are ready for a change. The contrast between the two men involves more than
personality and party affiliation. Although they seem to share a common
vision for a better Springfield, the two have very different political
values and modi operandi. Whereas Strom holds his cards close to the vest,
Davlin — whose party also holds a majority on the council — has
a reputation among critics for playing fast and loose. Coming on the heels of last year’s brutal
gubernatorial campaign, the city election is likely to have a low turnout,
in the range of 30 to 40 percent, says Kent Redfield, a political-science
professor at the University of Illinois at Springfield. That, Redfield says, works to the advantage of
incumbency or party organization. “You’ve got a situation where the
Sangamon County Republicans aren’t as strong as they once were,
although they’re certainly better organized than the local Democratic
Party,” Redfield says. As well liked and well financed as Davlin is, his
opponent will have to do something to excite people, to catch
people’s attention, Redfield says. “Right now, you have to say [Davlin] is in
pretty good shape.”
It came as a surprise to few when Strom, who
can’t seek another term on the City Council because of term limits,
began circulating petitions in December. On Jan. 25, he formally announced
his candidacy with a press conference at City Hall. Save for Ward 5 Ald. Joe Bartolomucci, who made the
introduction, no Republican officeholders were present when Strom kicked
off his campaign. Sangamon County Circuit Clerk Tony Libri, chairman of the
Sangamon County Republican Party, says he couldn’t make it to the
announcement but that he is behind Strom. “I think he has a better grasp of the issues
— but people are going to say I’m one-sided because I’m
backing him up as opposed to the mayor,” Libri says. “We very
much need to feel good about our government, and right now we don’t
feel good about it.”
Libri, who lost to Davlin four years ago, concedes
that the mayor is affable and charismatic but says that Strom is just as
likable. “Let’s just say this: He’s more of
a thinker than a personality — and right now I think we need somebody
with brains and honesty more than we need somebody who’s a
glad-hander. Glad-handing got us into this mess that we’re in
now,” Libri says. The “mess” to which Libri refers includes
ongoing litigation and controversy surrounding the Springfield Police
Department, tax and electric-rate increases, and a still-controversial
agreement between the city and Sierra Club to implement more stringent
environmental controls on the new 200-megawatt power plant. Davlin, in an interview, says that the handling of
negotiations between the Sierra Club and City Water, Light & Power was
his biggest mistake during his first term as mayor but also says that he
has no regrets. “There’s nothing to apologize
for,” he says. “Even after that, we still debated it for six
months before we voted on it. But that was a decision that was made by the
management, and ultimately it stops here.”
Detractors also criticize Davlin for reneging on a
pledge, made during his first campaign, not to raise taxes. To balance the
budget in 2004, the City Council approved, at Davlin’s request, a
temporary half-percentage-point increase in the sales-tax rate. The
provision was to expire after two years, but Davlin persuaded the aldermen
to make the increase permanent, adding about $8 million to the city’s
coffers. This time, the mayor isn’t pledging not to
raise taxes: “If 75 tornadoes come through here, what? What are we
gonna do? That’s my question.”
Davlin boasts that the city is in the best financial
shape it’s been in years. As proof he points to the latest budget
he’s submitted, now under review by the City Council, which contains
several items long clamored for by the aldermen, including a $1.2 million
street-overlay program, 40 new police cruisers, four new fire trucks, and
beefy salary increases for several members of his staff. Some question Davlin’s timing, however. “I think it’s awful funny that
you’re doing it at election time,” says Ward 1 Ald. Frank
Edwards, a Republican. As for how the city handled a lawsuit by
African-American police officers against the city, a case that recently
ended in a mistrial, Davlin says, he can’t talk. “What would you like me to comment on,”
he asks, “to say we’re right, they’re wrong? Something
somebody in a black robe told us, ‘You don’t talk about
negotiations,’ so to me you just wait and see how it plays it out.
Those are all pending lawsuits, and right now somebody in a black robe is
telling us what we can and can’t say. “Besides that, anything I did say could come
back and harm the city — so I’m just gonna keep my mouth closed
and not cost anybody any money.”
Because of the secrecy under which Davlin’s
administration sometimes operates, Strom is making openness and
accessibility key issues in his campaign. “We see too many examples of when the current
administration is not being open, is doing things behind closed doors, is
not sharing information with the public or the aldermen to help them with
the issues that they have interest in,” Strom says. He points to the agreement reached with the Sierra
Club, with which city officials negotiated in secret for five months to
reduce air pollution from the coal-fired power plant. “Regardless of the merits of the ultimate
agreement, the responsibility of the aldermen is to make a good judgment,
and I don’t think the mayor and his staff allowed us the opportunity
to exercise the judgment that we’re supposed to be exercising on
behalf of the public,” Strom says. “The aldermen have a great enough
responsibility to the public that they should have been given more notice;
they should have been given more information so that they could make the
assessment that was needed.”
Asked whether he’d push to change any part of
the deal, Strom says, “The part that’s missing in your question
is, we’ve never been given the information to make that
judgment.”
Despite his opposition to Davlin’s sales-tax
increase, though, Strom won’t say whether he would repeal the hike. “I’m not going to address that question
that directly. I was opposed to the sales tax when it was going to be
temporary. I objected to it because most organizations get accustomed to
having a certain amount of money available — they’ll find a way
to spend to it, particularly governmental agencies — they tend to do
this,” Strom says. “If they have enough money, they find a way to
spend it, and there’s never any going back, so to speak, so I was
concerned with the temporary nature of it — it was two years, a
24-month cycle. It wasn’t very long after that [that] the mayor and
others were proposing to make it permanent, and I was opposed to
that.”
Strom also says that the police department
“will continue to be an issue” in terms of its need to increase
racial diversity and how it addresses the controversy raised by the conduct
of two former detectives, Jim Graham and Paul Carpenter. A 2,300-page
report by the Illinois State Police that reviews the conduct of the two
detectives is still being reviewed by SPD Chief Don Kliment, but Strom says
he wants the report made available to the City Council and the public. “It tells us, I suspect, what’s going on
in the police department and makes recommendations on what improvements can
be made. I think the police department, in the absence of significant
change, will continue to be a problem until we understand what’s
going on in the department and what can be done to make it better,”
he says. Strom feels that there may be unnecessary
expenditures, possibly reflecting a lack of accessibility. Although he
believes that having a mayoral assistant is “probably
reasonable” and he’s still weighing the value of the
city’s educational liaison, a position held now by Sheila
Stocks-Smith, he says that the city probably doesn’t need a
communications director.
Instead, he says, the mayor should make himself
available to the media and citizens and not answer questions through a
spokesman. “Too often you don’t get the right
answers, or you don’t get answers that are consistent with what you
find out about later,” Strom says. “In other words, the
spokesman says one thing and then there’s a public reaction to it and
then the mayor or some other spokesman says something else . . . so I
really think that to have a sort of public-relations spokesperson speaking
on behalf of the mayor is probably not appropriate.”
Where the campaign will mostly be fought, and
ultimately decided, is in Springfield’s neighborhoods, many of whose
residents, regardless of neighborhood, share concerns over garbage
collection, fly-dumping, branch and lawn-waste pickup, and improvements to
the city’s thoroughfares. “You could draw a line down Fifth Street, and,
everything to the east of it, this city has forgotten about it,” says
Polly Poskin, president of the Harvard Park Neighborhood Association. She wants candidates to address the implementation of a
comprehensive waste-management system. Such a system would include
mandatory garbage service, for which property owners would be held
responsible, as well as central billing for garbage service, the
elimination of lawn-clipping stickers, and a more efficient schedule for
limb and yard-waste collection.
Strom says he shares her concerns but isn’t
ready to talk details: “Having served on the council for 12 years, I
know that from time to time people are concerned about branch pickup,
people are concerned about trash pickup, people are concerned about whether
their neighbors or nearby property owners are taking care of their property
and cutting their grass and all sorts of things like that. “Those are ongoing types of issues. I’m
not here to start drilling down into those details today, but what we need
to do is make sure that the services that are being provided, are being
provided as effectively as they can be.”
Davlin says that he and Ward 6 Ald. Mahoney are
working on a plan that, he thinks, will end much of the trash talk: “I think you’re going to see baby steps.
One of the things that’s on the drawing board right now . . . is to
put the mandate on the property owner and not the person living in the
home. “Right now, the ambiguity is, we’re not
sure if it’s the owner of that home or the person that’s there,
so we’re going to take that ambiguity away and say it’s going
to go to that landowner.”
In Bunn Park, near Poskin’s neighborhood,
neighborhood-association president Jamie Adaire says that the city needs to
step up efforts to demolish abandoned homes and find a way to fund the
installation of more sidewalks. Currently the city has a program that splits the cost
of building sidewalks with property owners, but Adaire says that elderly
people of limited means can’t even afford to pay half. “Make the city more pedestrian-friendly,”
Adaire says. “I mean, how can a neighborhood be viable if people
can’t get around? I can’t get to know my neighbors if I
can’t get out in the streets.”
West-side neighborhoods, currently represented on the
council by Strom, have their problems, too. Mike Landess, president of the White Oaks Homeowners
Association, says he wants the candidates to address the need to stick to
the city’s long-term plan for development. He says that westward
expansion and development is occurring too rapidly and that developers too
often get their way with the aldermen. Recently Landess’ group fought unsuccessfully
to halt the construction of a shopping center at Koke Mill Road and Iles
Avenue. Strom and Ward 7 Ald. Judy Yeager sided with the homeowners. Strom is also opposed to granting a zoning
variance for a Wal-Mart Supercenter proposed for Wabash Avenue. Davlin
doesn’t think the Wal-Mart request will ever come up for a vote. Strom has proposed opening satellite offices in
various neighborhoods and holding regular office hours. Davlin calls that
idea a waste of taxpayer money that could be better spent on a sidewalk
program.
If there’s one issue that has distinguished
Strom during his career on the council, it’s his involvement with the
Smoke Free Springfield campaign and his leadership in enacting the
comprehensive ban on indoor smoking in the city. He’s now lobbying the Legislature to pass a
statewide ban, acknowledging that the next council could face an effort to
alter the ban or get rid of it altogether. Though he counts the city ban
among his legislative victories, he doesn’t want to be known simply
as the smoking-ban guy. Other achievements during his tenure as an alderman
include passing an ordinance to cap the amount of cash the city can use
from the fund set aside expressly for CWLP. Other points of pride for Strom: Under Davlin’s
predecessor, Mayor Karen Hasara, he was appointed to head a task force on
waste management, during which time the city’s collection program for
bulky items was implemented. As a co-founder of the Council of Neighborhood
Associations and president of the Downtown Springfield Rotary Club and with
his work in several local charities, Strom believes that he has a better
understanding of Springfield’s neighborhood associations and the
types of issues they face. Davlin, meanwhile, says that he wants his record to
speak for itself. “Schoolkids will ask me, ‘When
you’re done, what do you want Springfield to be, what do you want
people to remember you for?’ ” he says “I’d like to
think Springfield is cleaner and greener than the way I found it four years
ago, and, boy, I hope it’s cleaner and greener than it is now. “Sometimes you have to look at the past and say
take a look at what happened in times of controversy, in times of
tornadoes, and times of storms and all. I stand on my track record.”
Contact R.L. Nave at rnave@illinoistimes.com
This article appears in Feb 1-7, 2007.
