Ocean City mayor, city council president want to see nation healed post election
Editor’s note: Ocean City’s form of government is nonpartisan. Candidates are not elected based on party affiliation.
By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
OCEAN CITY – Ocean City’s mayor and city council president want this nation to heal.
Partisan divisions have been growing in recent years and have been exacerbated by the presidential election season.
As voters wait to find out who will take office after the Nov. 3 election, with many results delayed because of mail-in ballots, Mayor Jay Gillian and Council President Bob Barr were clear about one thing: enough with the partisan fighting.
“I think number one the first thing we have to do is get the nation healed and get past all this partisanship and come together as a country,” Barr said Friday, adding that’s what happened after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“When that happened, it was a moment when the country came together. It didn’t matter if you were Democrat, or Republican, black, white, green, purple, whatever,” he said. Post-election, “I think the number one priority is just to get past the hard partisan stuff. We’re dealing with the virus, we’re dealing with the pandemic, we’re dealing with people out of work. We have to set that aside. Not just political leaders, but folks, regularly everyday folks.
“We have to have honest discussions and we need our leaders to lead and get us to the table and get us back going,” Barr said.
“It starts local,” Gillian said Friday. “When you look at a nonpartisan town like Ocean City, our success is because we’ve been able to work together with both sides of the aisle. I think it’s that simple. We need to get back to working together.”
Acknowledging that choosing sides is part of politics, Gillian said “this isn’t about winning the Super Bowl. We somehow have to figure out how to get in a room and work together.
I just hope and pray we get some serious people in there (national office) that can do that. I can only look at our success in Ocean City being a nonpartisan town. Yes, there’s politics, but at the end of the day, our success in what we’ve gotten done over the last 10, 11 years is because we’ve been able to work with both Democrats and Republicans. We know it works.”
Gillian said he grew up watching how his father, former Mayor Roy Gillian, was friends with the late Congressman William Hughes. They were in opposite parties, Gillian a Republican and Hughes a Democrat, but they worked together.
Jay Gillian has followed that, including working with Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration. “That’s where we’re at our best, when we’re working together, not fighting with each other,” the mayor said.
The rifts in the country are substantial, but Barr believes they can be healed.
“But in order for that to happen each side needs to recognize that you’re not going to get everything you want. In a good negotiation, neither side gets everything they want. They have to accept that going in. They have to do what’s best for the country and not just necessarily what’s best for the party or your political future or your political opinion or some certain hard belief you might have.
“Everybody needs to recognize, and it goes from the president all the way down to everyday people … they may not get everything they want, but that comes with hard, honest discussions and being willing to accept another viewpoint,” Barr said.
“Right now in our country many, many, many people are just not willing to sit down and even listen to the other side, regardless of what the subject is. It can’t be that way.
“Ronald Reagan wasn’t that way. Abraham Lincoln wasn’t that way. John F. Kennedy wasn’t that way. Bill Clinton wasn’t that way. He worked with a Republican Congress to get things done. And that’s what we need. We need leaders who are wiling to step up and accept some differences.”
Gillian said coming together starts with facts, not with the entertainment-style news shows that are all opinions. “I don’t think you can even call it news anymore. I can’t watch it anymore. For me, I love to get facts. When I come to our taxpayers, we have professionals and we dig the facts out.” He said the problem, not just with the opinions but also on social media, is that people don’t get fact-checked.
“Anybody can say whatever they want, whether it’s true or not. Until we can figure out how to solve that, it’s troublesome,” Gillian said. “In a day when you can say anything you want, and have no ramifications for saying it, to me is a very scary thing and it should scare everybody. I don’t know what the answer is.”