Flying Oskar: Hopes for Spartanburg's Next Mayor

City politics was never exactly my field of expertise. In fact, it’s only in the last couple of years that I cared to pay attention to city government at all. I grew up out in the county, and while politics has been a passion of mine since my teen years, the ins and outs of city government seemed pretty unimportant to a kid whose main goal in life was to get as far away from Spartanburg as possible, as soon as possible.

In the last couple of years though, that’s all changed for me. Since moving into the city and noticing some of the positive things happening around town, I’ve started to pay attention to our city’s government. One of the first things I noticed once I started paying attention was that no conversation about the new “up and coming” Spartanburg was ever complete until someone heaped a big helping of praise on Mayor Bill Barnett.

Mayor Barnett’s non-campaigning, write-in campaign had become the stuff of legend—or at least as much a legend as something that happened less than a decade ago can become. His leadership was credited for practically everything positive that had happened in Spartanburg since his election. Admittedly, I didn’t really see what all the fuss was about at first. Because of the way Spartanburg’s city government is structured, the mayor doesn’t really have very much power. He or she gets a vote on city council, but no veto power. The mayor also presides over city council meetings, but that position doesn’t come with any special privileges either. Practically speaking, the Mayor of Spartanburg is pretty much a city council member elected by the city at-large.

As far as I could tell, the area where Mayor Barnett stood out, the reason why all of the city’s movers and shakers seemed to like him so much, was that Mayor Barnett was the best PR guy the city ever had. He seemingly never missed an opportunity to promote the city in one way or another. His ties to the business community helped tremendously with the downtown revitalization effort.

More than that though, people just plain seemed to like the guy.  He was able to bridge divides between various factions in the city with an uncanny sort of ease. The city’s well-off white business class supported Barnett because he was one of them, and its downtown-boosting new urbanites respected him because he supported their interests. Even the city’s black population seemed to come to respect Barnett even though he’d won his first term by defeating Spartanburg’s first black mayor James Talley

Now, after two terms in office, Mayor Barnett has decided not to run for another term. In a little better than two months, city residents will have to pick a new mayor to be the ambassador and spokesperson for Spartanburg.

Since Mayor Barnett’s announcement, I’ve been asking myself a question that just a few years ago I would’ve never bothered with: What do I want to see from the next mayor of Spartanburg?

To be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure at first. As I wrote before, the mayoral position is as much symbolic as anything else. Everyone I talked to on the topic seemed mostly concerned about downtown and continuing the positive momentum in making the area a destination for people to live, work, and hang out. That’s a very important goal for a lot of reasons, but Spartanburg is more than the few square blocks that make up the city center, and the problems facing the city won’t be fixed by bringing in another corporate office or a major retailer on Morgan Square.

Statistically, Spartanburg is a majority-black city with a poverty rate more than double the national average. Driving through the tree-lined streets of Converse Heights or walking the sidewalks of downtown may make it look otherwise, but take a drive through Park Hills or down Howard Street sometime. Though we don’t hear about it a lot, that is what the majority of Spartanburg looks like, and as a city-wide elected official, the mayor of Spartanburg must represent the interests of the people living on Howard Street just as much as those living on Dupre Drive.

What’s more important to me than anything else is that our next mayor be an advocate for the concerns of those who, in my estimation, have been ignored.  As important as it is to make downtown a thriving cultural hub for city and county residents, it’s even more important to make sure that the children living in the city’s poor areas can walk their own streets. As impressive as it is that some of our city’s schools are ranked so highly, that fact should always come with the realization that other schools in our city are horrendous and are failing in every measurable way.

While it will obviously be necessary for our next mayor to be able to bridge the gap between the different factions in Spartanburg, it’s even more important for that mayor to recognize that those gaps don’t come from nowhere. In many ways Spartanburg is more like two cities than one, and too many influential people seem perfectly content to talk about one city while completely ignoring the other.

I’d like to see our next mayor address the issue of neighborhood gentrification that’s sure to become more prevalent as our city tries to attract more creative-class new urbanites to live and work in and around our downtown area. I’d like to hear our next mayor say, in no uncertain terms, that open bigotry and homophobia have no place in our city. I’d like to see a mayor who at least had the courage to mention a living wage campaign in Spartanburg.

There are so many progressive issues that could be raised by our next mayor, I could write an entire column where I do nothing but start sentences with the phrase, “the next mayor should”. I’m not stupid though. I know it’s highly doubtful that I’ll get any of those things out of a mayoral candidate, and if I did it’d probably be a sure-fire sign that that candidate was destined to lose. Still, it’s important that these issues are brought up, even if only by a lowly blogger.

Right now it’s way too early now to know anything about what’s going to happen in November. So far, there’s only one announced candidate for mayor, and I’m sure that in the next few weeks we’ll have a couple more throw their hats into the ring. I hope I’m just being overly pessimistic, but I’m already going over in my head what compromises I’m going to have to make with whomever it is I end up supporting. Still, I’m holding out hope that I’ll be able to hold my head high when I pull the curtain behind me this year.

Otto Von Bismark once famously said that “politics is the art of the possible”.  Decades later, economist John Kenneth Galbraith responded to Bismark’s quote saying, “Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”  Deep down, I think Galbraith was right, but just this once I’d like to side with Bismark.