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O P I N I O N

THE SOAPBOX

Stand up. Speak up. It’s your turn.

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They don’t write poems about municipal government –  for good reason.

The granular details of tax increment financing proposals, sewer separation initiatives, and open records compliance are hardly the stuff to inspire the muses or rhapsodic waxing.  To this point, the late Mario Cuomo once famously observed that politicians may campaign in poetry, but they govern in prose.

The list of mundane tasks –  like collecting the garbage, plowing the streets, and keeping taxes low – a mayor is responsible for attending to is legion, and it does not lend itself to soaring rhetoric in the manner that issues confronting national politicians do –  like solving world hunger or ensuring global peace.  

Bob Baines’s greatest skill as mayor was to transform the daily details of running a city into something if not poetic then at least into something that transcended the smoke-filled backroom dealing city government is often associated with.

After years of neglect of school facilities, he asked his fellow citizens to invest over $100 million in a school facilities improvement plan that he called “an educational crusade.”   The gritty details of the plan involved HVAC systems and myriad boring details, but he sold it to the aldermen as a moral obligation to provide Manchester kids with “facilities that were worthy of the teachers and students who work and learn in our schools each day,” a regular refrain that elevated the debate above disputes over individual  line items to a discussion about what Manchester’s sons and daughters deserved when it came to their schools.  This was not a debate about dollars.  It was a debate about what was best for kids.

He used the same tactics when the cost of being a refugee resettlement city (a designation sought, by the way, by his Republican predecessor) became the subject of considerable debate. He was content to let others quantify the alleged costs of refugee resettlement in the city while he spread a message of inclusion and economic opportunity.  

I recall that he returned one day from an event in Cambridge, Mass., with sheet music to a hymn that included the phrase “all are welcome in this place.”  Not a week went by for the remainder of my time in the mayor’s office that I did not hear him utter that phrase in some public setting. The question of who belonged in Manchester would not be resolved by a discussion about monetary costs while Bob Baines was mayor; rather, the discussion would be framed in loftier terms about Manchester’s historic identity as a safe place for the world’s tempest tossed.

He also transcended the political pettiness – for the most part, for he was only human – that often passes as debate today.  He constantly urged aldermen and school board members to avoid speculation about their opponents’ motives and to confine debate to the facts at hand, and he was genuinely troubled by his inability to rein in the antics of certain elected officials – antics that were finally repudiated in the last municipal election that returned him to the school board.  I am glad he was around to see that.

Finally, he embodied the phrase “what you see is what you get.” A man of little pretense, he rejected the Manchester Country Club’s offer of an honorary membership (something once offered to all mayors) because “that’s just not me,” and he was actually glad when the city-owned car designated for the mayor’s use konked out and he had to drive his own car for the remainder of his time in office. What Manchester’s citizens saw and got was a guy who spent his entire life living in the same ward in which he was raised and serving the people who knew him as a boy and their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

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In 2001, as a reward for spending many hours (not on city time, I hasten to add) on his re-election campaign in which he trounced his opponent, he asked me to accompany him to a Kennedy School seminar on local government and emergency preparedness.  Mayors from all across the country attended, including the mayor of Meridian, Miss., who regaled the assembled crowd one night over dinner with a verbatim recitation of…wait for it:  a poem about municipal government, Vachel Lindsay’s “On the Building of Springfield.”  It is a piece of doggerel, to be sure, but it is also a heartfelt summary of a citizen’s responsibility to the place he calls home.

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