It has been a rough few months for new Scottsdale Mayor Lisa Borowsky. What should have been smooth sailing with a conservative majority in city council has been anything but, culminating in their attempt to take away staffers from her office (get up to speed here). Things were looking dire, but it seems as though there may be reason for hope regarding these relationships.
After a number of votes where Borowsky was outvoted and only joined in her position by the more liberal members of the dais, Maryann McAllen and Solange Whitehead, the recent battles seem to have culminated in “ParkingGate”, the recent attempt from Mayor Borowsky to champion a parking garage in Old Town, one that came with significant pushback from the conservative bloc in council.
However, it seems as though a page may have turned, at least in the short term. Recently Scottsdale city leaders reversed their decision to eliminate a staff position which has originally been dedicated to former Mayor David Ortega. Initially, the City Council voted to remove the mayor’s staff member, citing budgetary concerns and administrative restructuring. However, the outward reasons don’t reflect the considerable squabbling which happened behind closed doors and through outward innuendos in some thinly veiled public statements.
This is all the stranger since we haven’t seen this sort of intra-party fighting in the city in quite some time. Even more oddly enough, this doesn’t seem to be indicative of the sort of fight that typified Phoenix municipal politics for a while, where more pragmatic liberals sometimes clashed with the progressive hard-left. This doesn’t seem to be a wing-versus-mainstream Republican fight as much as disagreements in approaches and personal battles.
Is this kumbaya moment a one-off event or the beginning of a trend? That obviously remains to be seen. For Borowsky however, one thing is clear: she cannot spend the next three years with the conservative majority voting against her if she wants any chance of having a term that is seen as the least bit successful. If this trend persisted for years, she might be staring down a challenge from the political right for her seat in a few years.
Ostensibly, with a conservative mayor and a conservative-majority city council city leadership could be moving lockstep with each other, compile a list of priorities that are more than simply undoing anything that Mayor Ortega and the last iteration of council did, and put their own mark on the city. As it stands, this year has been typified much more by bickering and back-stabbing. Is this a step towards the former and away from the latter? Time will tell, but Mayor Borowsky desperately needs some wins, and this is a step in the right direction.