Mayors important, but not to make happy people

Published 12:00 am Monday, May 25, 2009

A relevant question as Vicksburg voters prepare to go to the polls and elect a mayor is what, reasonably, should be expected of a team chosen to administer a city.

If the answer is to make each of us, as individuals, happy and content in our personal lives, then we ought to admit we’re living in a dream world.

On a national scale, that’s how politicians campaign. Barack Obama was not the first to nurture the notion that with him at the helm, we could feel warm and secure — that someone was looking out for us and would protect us from harmful events such as high taxes, health care that costs more than we can afford and such. President Obama is expanding the notion of a parental government. In the minds of most, he is our shield against unfortunate events, things that make us sad.

Email newsletter signup

Sign up for The Vicksburg Post's free newsletters

Check which newsletters you would like to receive
  • Vicksburg News: Sent daily at 5 am
  • Vicksburg Sports: Sent daily at 10 am
  • Vicksburg Living: Sent on 15th of each month

To a large degree — far larger than a local government — the federal system is designed to help individuals through personal adversity. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, disability, food stamps, welfare, unemployment, farm subsidies, disaster grants and loans — even the just-passed legislation that is supposed to keep credit card companies from taking unfair advantage of their customers — is direct aid. The federal system does all that in addition to funding vast military services.

Local governments don’t do any of that. It’s not part of their purpose or design.

Instead, the purpose of a local government is to provide for the overall well-being of a community.

Local officials can steer towns toward prosperity through effective zoning and recruiting employers. They can assist quality of life by making sure streets are lighted and marked and have a decent riding surface, by creating parks and recreation areas.

This is being written because letters to the editor and conversations I’ve heard leading to June 2 have had some misinformation, as well as misconceptions.

Factually, it was former Mayor Joe Loviza who employed the first landscape architect in the city’s history that led to garden areas at Confederate and Indiana Avenue, the Halls Ferry overpass and Monroe Street Boulevard. This has been continued and expanded since, but the incumbent mayor, Laurence Leyens, didn’t bring the notion of beautification to the city.

It was also Loviza who obtained the MV Mississippi from the Corps of Engineers. The boat is to be a key element in a revitalized City Front and downtown, an effort Leyens has pushed, with great success, to return people to a downtown area that had been overtaken by hobos and thugs.

Cedar Hill Cemetery has not been in the news as it once was. When it was in complete disrepair and disarray, former Mayor Robert Walker took it out of the news by contracting out mowing, freeing employees to perform maintenance.

The Vicksburg Fire Department is without parallel in terms of training and equipment and its ambulance service is a national model — again, built over time and sustained by a series of administrations.

As for the police department, it’s not perfect. But it has had stability under a chief who has near-constantly been recruited by larger departments during the almost eight years he’s been here. Compare that to six or more chiefs appointed during the preceding eight years.

Leyens faces Paul Winfield on June 2 and it’s not clear who will win. Winfield is a solid candidate — a young, activist attorney with a friendly, helpful personality. Leyens, who ran as an outsider, is now running for a third term with “results” as his key claim.

Regardless of how things turn out, a key question those casting ballots should ask themselves is, “What is reasonable to expect?”