Mayors got their cities through the pandemic. Now they're paying the price.
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TACOMA, Washington — Mayor Victoria Woodards is moving a little slower than usual. She’s getting over a cold. She tweaked her back, making standing for more than a couple of minutes uncomfortable. But she still has a full day ahead: She’ll welcome high schoolers to student government day. She’ll oversee a discussion about the city’s port. And she’ll preside over a city council meeting that will ultimately be hijacked by trolls shouting racial and antisemitic slurs.
The typical challenges of running Washington’s third largest city — one of the busiest ports on the west coast, sitting in the shadow of Mount Rainier — have been agonizingly exacerbated in recent years by two major and near-simultaneous events: the pandemic, and an uptick in racial and cultural tensions across the country.
“Those two things combined, in a very stressful time, made this job incredibly difficult,” Woodards said in an interview in her office overlooking the city’s port. “While Covid may be over, in a sense, the effects of Covid are still with us. And I don't sense they're going to go away anytime soon.”
America’s mayors are worn out — and they say the job is to blame. That’s the core finding of the final survey of POLITICO’s Mayors Club. In interviews, many of the participants trace their challenging time in office to fallout from the pandemic, including heightened animosity from their stressed out constituents.
Throughout the past year, the Mayors Club brought together city executives from across the country — one from every state — to share their perspectives on things that D.C. might be overlooking, from infrastructure challenges related to electric vehiclesto the housing crunch and crime and public safety.
In the final edition of the survey, POLITICO asked the mayors to look inward: How has their tenure in office affected them personally? The 47 mayors who responded — one of the members had resigned his mayorship due to stress — painted a picture of a tough, demanding job. The mayors told POLITICO:
That most of them are working at least 60 hours a week — with some saying they are regularly putting in over 80 hours.
One reported working 112 hours in a week, while another mayor works “almost all waking hours."
A majority said it was challenging or impossible to maintain a work-life balance while in office.
More than one-third said the job deteriorated their well-being.
Mayors across the country are still grappling with the long tail of the pandemic: Skyrocketing housing prices and a related rise in homelessness, crime spikes, fighting the scourge of the opioid epidemic and addressing other mental health challenges.
And some mayors say there has been an increased level of tension that just has not dissipated, often directed at the level of government closest to the voters: the mayors.
“The world has changed a lot and it’s not nicer,” Mary-Ann Baldwin, the mayor of Raleigh, North Carolina, said in a phone interview last month. “I think the atmosphere, the civility factor and the respect factor are different. I definitely noticed something pre-covid versus post-covid.”
Nationwide, those tensions have been heightened by the racial reckoning sparked by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers and ensuing protests across the country. Tacoma has been jolted by its own high-profile, racially-fraught incident: the 2020 death of a Black man in police custody. A trial of three police officers is still ongoing.
Here’s why some mayors say they have become less optimistic during their time in office:
Being the face of government means that moments of casual cruelty can sneak into their lives almost unexpectedly, during the banalities of running a city.
During a city council meeting later that day in November, Woodards ably navigated a scene that could have been out of “Parks and Recreation”: She successfully convinced a constituent who brought a cat into the council chamber — to show support for a proposed city ordinance to ban declawing — to return the feline to its carrier without incident, complimenting the cat while coaxing its owner to maintain decorum.
Minutes later, the scene was darker: After in-person commenting wrapped up, the council opened up to telephone comments. A half-dozen callers unleashed a vile stream of antisemitism and racist comments, with at least one seemingly directing the N-word to Woodards, who is Black. Woodards quickly cut off each caller and kept her cool, but they kept coming.
The council eventually briefly recessed, before returning and voting to cancel a second planned public comment period scheduled for later in the night.
There is a level of bitter irony to this: Those callers, who most in the chamber assumed were not actually from the city, were only afforded the opportunity to dial in because of the pandemic.
What aspect of serving as mayor is different from what you expected when initially running for office?
Like in many cities across the country, Tacoma’s meetings went virtual for a time. But even once council members returned to in-person meetings, the city opted to keep a dial-in option that they did not have before the pandemic, to give constituents who couldn’t make it in-person a chance to have their voices heard. It was the second recent council meeting where bad actors hijacked a public comment period.
“I always knew that everybody wouldn't love me, but I didn't think that people would hate me,” Woodards said. “I didn't sign up to get emails from people, or postcards from people, who called me out by name, who say things like ‘you should be hung.’”
(After the meeting, Woodards — an Army veteran who served on the city council in an at-large seat before being elected mayor — said she still wanted the dial-in option to stay, saying it was an equity issue and that she wouldn’t be deterred by trolls.)
In interviews, Mayors Club members said that incidents like this — and other more routine yet still hostile interactions — feel more personal because of how close they are to the ground, compared to those in D.C. or even state government. Woodards recalled a quote attributed to former President Lyndon B. Johnson: “When the burdens of the presidency seem unusually heavy, I always remind myself it could be worse: I could be a mayor.”
In fact, one POLITICO’s Mayor’s Club member — Newark, Delaware’s Stu Markham — was so overwhelmed by stress that he resigned halfway through his term.
“You’re on call 24/7. Everything you do is exhausting. I’m stressed out. I’m not sleeping, I’m not eating. My body’s telling me there’s something wrong,” he told the Newark Post in September. “I’m making mental mistakes, and I don’t think you can do that as mayor. It’s time to pack it up and try something different.” (Markham declined to participate in this Mayor’s Club survey.)
Woodards — who also previously served as the president of the National League of Cities — said she and other mayors regularly talk about the particular challenges that being a city leader brings. She said she is in group texts with several mayors, who offer each other words of encouragement in tough times and praise for policy wins.
“It's just such a good support system. And when we get to see each other in person, sometimes it's not what we talk about, it's just the look that we can give each other,” she said.
Even so, some said they viewed the historic upheaval of the last three years as an opportunity to push for an agenda that would have seemed unfathomable before the pandemic. In St. Paul, Minnesota, for example, the city’s most recent budget included a novel program to help residents pay off medical debt.
“The level of desperation that people have, I think, is higher than ever,” St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter said in a phone interview. “A lot of that probably does spill out toward the mayors. We try to see that as fresh opportunities to demonstrate how City Hall can be relevant in people's lives.”
Despite the pandemic and its aftermath, Woodards — and many of her colleagues — say they have no regrets about running for office. In the Mayor’s Club survey, a plurality said they have become more optimistic since taking the job.
And most mayors give high marks for their time in office – rating their experience an average of about 8 out of 10.
Woodards, who is term-limited, said she has enjoyed her time as mayor, and felt that she has been able to improve Tacoma, a city where she has spent nearly her entire life.
Her city piloted a guaranteed income program, and she expanded outreach to young people, including the introduction of a youth council. In addition, her office proudly noted that Outside Magazine named the city as one of the happiest in the country.
And she added that, while she has been able to experience unique things — like attending a state dinner at the White House and meeting the Dalai Lama — it is still the little things that matter most to her.
“The coolest things that I get to do is what I just got to do a few minutes ago: To walk into a room full of high school students and talk to them and have two young African American women say, ‘This is our second year and we just did it again, because we really love seeing you, and we really love you,’” she said. “That is what wakes me up in the morning.”
