The relationship between Ocean City Council and the Gillian Administration has changed markedly in the last year.
Out of last week’s two-and-a-half-hour council meeting, a few minutes illustrate that point.
It’s like there’s an election coming up next year and campaigns have been gearing up behind the scenes for months. Some of the machinations become visible in public.
It’s fascinating to watch the maneuvering among the elected officials and some of their proxies in the community, but it has been a bit jarring for anyone who has followed council meetings for the last decade.
Where once was collegiality and common purpose there now exists considerable animosity.
It’s easy to be lulled into complacency by the Kumbaya moments at the end of contentious council meetings over the past half-year, with members professing respect for each other and Mayor Jay Gillian. It’s just that those momoents have always followed bitter back-and-forth arguments that were not respectful in the least.
Covering testy exchanges at meetings provides interesting copy for the Sentinel, Ocean City’s newspaper since the late 1800s. There have been many times over the past decade when we wondered if things were too civil with the near-constant unanimity between council and the administration.
The lack of fighting and serious debate in public had been a sea change from prior periods marked by internal divisions on council and between council members and past administrations.
The past decade was at odds with that earlier reality. Democracy is supposed to be a bit messy. OK, not as messy as the national scene which looks about to fracture beyond repair, but for most of Mayor Gillian’s term, everyone in elected office adhered to the unity-in-the-community model as the administration got an overwhelming amount of 7-0 support from council’s seven members. (That includes unanimity on a whole bunch of contracts that suddenly became a sticking point – or wedge issue, if you will – starting late last fall.)
Unanimity is no longer the case.
The majority of last week’s council meeting was taken up by a long and detailed five-year capital plan presentation on $141 million of projects. There was just mild questioning during the presentation. Council members will get to review it for two weeks before it comes up for a vote at the Aug. 26 meeting. Everything else was congenial as First Ward Councilman Michael DeVlieger said his farewells and got comments of support from all of his colleagues.
But a related few-minute segment that passed with few comments reveal the undercurrents roiling beneath the surface.
Council members had to choose a new vice president to replace DeVlieger.
Short story shorter, Karen Bergman’s bid to be elected by her peers failed. She got only Pete Madden’s support. Her attempt to get the job at the July reorganization meeting also failed, with DeVlieger, Keith Hartzell, Bob Barr, Jody Levchuk and Tomaso Rotondi voting against her and supporting DeVlieger instead.
Madden and Bergman have been the two council members who continue to advocate council’s role as advice-and-consent with the administration and have taken their colleagues to task for what they consider council’s overreach into trying to micromanage the city.
That put them at odds with the other five.
When given the chance to give a council leadership position to Bergman, a supporter of the administration, the council majority declined.
Instead of a veteran member, they supported Rotondi, who with Levchuk is one of the newcomers to council with about a year in the job.
Rotondi has been the biggest critic of the administration.
Most of his criticisms involve what he believes is the administration’s foot-dragging on forming a pool of qualified engineers from which to bid out contracts, a process he believes hasn’t been handled correctly in the past. (That puts it mildly.) The pool is his idea.
At a recent meeting he went so far as to accuse the administration – in the form of Business Administrator George Savastano, an engineer – of being incompetent or coveting one engineering firm in particular. When you use the term “incompetent,” that’s serious.
A year ago, when a citizen group’s leader questioned the administration’s relationship with that engineering firm, inferring it was too close for comfort, Hartzell leapt to Savastano’s defense.
Hartzell didn’t do that this time. Instead, he nominated Rotondi for the vice president position.
When the majority on council support a critic of the administration instead of a supporter, that is a clear message. (Madden was the only one who voted against Rotondi, but that is another story.)
It has been an open secret in the community for months that Hartzell is considering a run against Gillian. As he and Barr make their regular rounds together in the neighborhoods listening to citizen concerns they are apparently using their visits to lay groundwork for Hartzell’s run.
There is nothing wrong with that. The mayor will be finishing his third term and plans to run for a fourth. He was challenged in all three prior elections. Democracy is well served when voters have choices for elected offices.
Voters should, however, understand the context of the discord they are witnessing within City Council and between council members and the administration. It is not taking place in a vacuum.