In his own words

Mike Houston reflects on 12 years as mayor

GOVERNMENT | Bruce Rushton

Having finished third in the Feb. 24 primary, Mayor Mike Houston is finished as mayor. But he isn’t categorical about running for elective office in the future, nor is he shy about defending his record as mayor, both this time around and for two terms from 1979 to 1987, when he failed to win a third consecutive term. Having won three terms as mayor, Houston is a rarity in a city where voters have traditionally had their fills of mayors after two terms. We sat down with him last week to talk about the past, the present and the future. The hour-long interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you consider to be your greatest accomplishment in office? Not just now. You’ve been mayor for 12 years. If I go back and think of when I served in 1979 to 1987, probably the thing that had the most impact on the city on a long-term basis was the [downtown] tax increment district which we created. It was the first tax increment district in the state of Illinois, and certainly would be considered to be one of the most successful tax increment districts in the state of Illinois. So, as you think about Springfield today, it would be hard to imagine what downtown Springfield would be like if I had not created that district in 1984. … Without the tax increment district, I don’t think the downtown would be in any way, shape or form the way it is today.

I also think, and what I often said about my first terms, whether anyone realized what I did or didn’t do was unimportant. When I walked away, I knew what wouldn’t have happened had I not been here. As we go back to going through the lawsuit that we had over the form of city government, one of the things that I looked at as most important was making sure we kept the city together. You have to keep in mind that we settled that right off the bat. I walked into a city council meeting thinking we had five votes to approve that settlement. It would have been a transition form of government that would have continued with our commissioners and then added 10 aldermen, making a 15-member city council, and we would have avoided all the lawsuits. We walked out of that meeting with myself and Commissioner (Jim) Norris having voted for it, and (Ossie) Langfelder, (Frank) Madonia and (Pat) Ward voting against it. That would have totally changed what took place afterwards. … The only difference between the form of government that we have today and what I proposed was that I initially had the city treasurer and the city clerk be appointed positions by the mayor as opposed to elected positions. When we finally came to a compromise on what form of government we were going to use, we allowed for the election of both the city clerk and the city treasurer, but everything else remained the same. And I was probably the only person in the city of Springfield who knew what was in that form of government or understood [it], and that’s what we use today, which is, in fact, the strongest mayor form of government in the state of Illinois.

The voting rights lawsuit. You didn’t win a third term. Is that what sunk you or was it something else back then? It’s hard to say. I’d also run for state treasurer in 1986. That didn’t particularly help the situation. And the lawsuit. As you look at the history of the city of Springfield, there are only three people that have served more than two terms.

Twice, you were unable to get the support of the Republican Party. I’ve never gotten the support of the Republican Party in the times that I have run.

Why not? What we’ve tried to do is run city government on a professional basis as opposed to a political operation. We hire people based on their qualifications, not who sent them.

We received a mailer at our house from your campaign, fairly late. It included what the State Journal-Register had to say about Mr. (Jim) Langfelder, what they had to say about (Paul) Palazzolo and a long excerpt about what they had to say about you. The entire thing. I included my entire comments and then I took the ending paragraphs that they had for each of the other candidates.

Why did you do that? In yours, it wasn’t entirely positive, glowing things. It mentioned Shredgate, among other things. I thought it was a fair thing to do. What the State Journal-Register did in writing about the two primary opponents in the primary election was…basically to indicate that Jim Langfelder may have vision, but they couldn’t see the vision. Paul Palazzolo had a lot of ideas, but they questioned his ability to move into a city government the size and complexity of Springfield.

You didn’t go negative on Palazzolo in a big way. I didn’t go negative on anyone.

Why not? Palazzolo was vulnerable in some spots. Certainly, I would say he went negative on me from day one.

You didn’t respond in kind. Why not? It’s just not my nature to do that.

If you’d have done that, would the result have been any different? One never knows.

Do you have any regrets about the way you ran your campaign? I am fully responsible for running my campaign. So, anything that was done that was a mistake was my fault. Anything that was done that was correct, I take credit for.

If you had won a second term, if you’d been mayor for the next four years, what would you have done? In the first term, you reduced head count by a fairly significant amount. You take credit for getting the city’s fiscal house in order. You passed a tax increase that has resulted in some infrastructure improvements in fairly short order. I believe that the percentage of hiring for minorities improved under your administration as opposed to your predecessor. What would Chapter Two have looked like? You want to go back to my accomplishments for this term?

Absolutely – it’s open-ended. Coming into this term, to say it was a trying time in city government would be an understatement. … I knew that the city was in bad shape financially. I had no idea as to how bad of shape the city was in. One of the things we found was that the average daily balance in our general fund had been in the red for the entire previous two fiscal years, that the year before I came in, the average daily balance was just a little over negative $3.5 million a day for all 220 working days. … One of the things that we have been able to do in terms of the city’s general fund is to go from that negative $3.5 million-plus to, maybe two weeks ago Friday, the average daily balance for this fiscal year was $9.1 million a day. That’s well over a $12 million turnaround in a four-year period of time. We did that as a result of reducing employment within city government. We did that by managing city government and the budget, trying to approach things in a more efficient manner. That in and of itself is a major accomplishment.

We’ve taken City Water, Light and Power to a point where I really believe that it has turned the corner. We were able to avoid a technical default this year. … We’ve had, for our purposes, a cold winter, which has allowed us to sell power on the wholesale market. But we also have had the situation where the price of natural gas is at a two-year high, which made electricity sales more attractive. … Also, interest rates have come down. … As a result of interest rates being lower, we are now in a position where we can go out and refinance that $575 million worth of electric division debt at a lower interest rate, which will then allow us to have a better cash flow coming out of the utility. At the same time, we have the opportunity to, in the very near term, renegotiate the major contract within City Water, Light and Power’s electric division, and we anticipate that we will be able to lower our cost of operation as a result of that. It’s the coal contract. … At the same time, as we look forward, we have our wind contracts coming in 2017 and 2018, and we anticipate that we will need to continue to have wind as a part of our electric production, but that we will again be able to substantially reduce the cost of buying that wind. … And when we look at improving our cash flow as a result of the refinancing, the coal contract and the wind contract, this is totally going to change the outlook of CWLP in terms of their financial situation.

I would remind you that the most critical issue facing the city of Springfield on a longterm basis is rail consolidation. As we talk about accomplishments, in 2009, although I didn’t know it at the time, the city had actually agreed to go down Third Street. I was told as a candidate, that this was a done deal, there was nothing we could do to change this. The reality is that, over the last four years, we’ve got a record of decision to use the Tenth Street corridor, we’ve received a $14.4 million…grant coupled with money from the ICC (Illinois Commerce Commission)…that is financing a $20 million underpass at 10 th and Carpenter that the city of Springfield, at this point, has $365,000 in, in total, that I would expect that we would be reimbursed for when the project is done. … And while, again, this is, in 2010 dollars, a $315 million project, and there’s no real money available to do this at either the state or the federal level, we’ve been able to move this along in useable segments with the idea that we keep the project alive. … The county’s been involved with it, the chamber’s been involved with it, but I’ve been very, very involved with it. I’ve put more of my own personal time into that because of its long-term impact than anything else I’ve done.

Do you have any concerns that what you’ve set in place, what you’ve started out, will be followed through upon by whomever is the next mayor? Had someone stepped forward to run for mayor who I’d been comfortable with in doing this, I probably would not have sought re-election.

Will you endorse? I have never endorsed anyone in a mayoral race. That’s not to say I won’t.

Has anyone asked? No response.

Fair enough. Not directly.

I want to ask you about something that happened early in your tenure. That was the Maximus study. It wasn’t a great deal of money in the scheme of things. $40,000. … I think it was a 5-5 vote. Everything was 5-5.

A, did you expect that? B, what explained that? Do you have an explanation of why that became such a controversial issue on the city council when we’re talking about that amount of money? You had to reduce employment in city government in order to have an out-year impact. … Most departments in city government, when you get beyond the public works department, are 90 percent-plus salary and benefits. So, if you’re going to have an out-year impact in the general fund, what you have to do is eliminate an expense. You can take police cars, firetrucks, public works vehicles out of the budget, but you have to buy them at some point. But if you reduce people, you don’t necessarily have impact in the year you do it, but you have 100 percent impact the following year. When I ran for office, I talked about the fact that if we’re going to get our financial house in order, we had to be able to reduce our employment. By doing the Maximus study, we eliminated – and I said this at the time – that if we did the study, that the city council wouldn’t have to make decisions, that I would go ahead and make the decisions and take the blame for reducing our employment. That’s what we did.

We had a study that said if we consolidated all our garages, we bought a new garage building, we bought the equipment we needed, we did all that, at the end of a five-year period we would save $5 million. And the city council balked at it. The city council balked at the NAPA contract. … Mike Palazzolo, the fleet manager, went ahead and asked each of our four garages to give him the 50 most common parts they used. And he made up a list of, I believe, 72 items, out of that and then looked at what we actually paid for those items and what the NAPA contract was and we saved about $200,000 off those 72 items. The city council didn’t want to do that because we had to eliminate some jobs. … (T)hey weren’t necessarily looking at what was best for the city as you move forward. … As mayor, I had to make very difficult decisions. Not an easy thing to do. But I’m not a politician. I’m a professional manager. My entire career has been spent making decisions, and a lot of those decisions are tough decisions. Sometimes they impact people’s lives.

Are you saying or suggesting at all that the opposition to the Maximus study was based on a fear that folks were going to lose jobs and the city council didn’t want to have jobs lost? We were able to take most of the people and move them. But we had managers in each of those four garages. We only needed one manager.

That was it? That was what they were worried about? I believe so.

You said when you announced last summer that you weren’t perfect. What did you mean by that? The only perfect person in the history of the world is Jesus Christ. I’ve made mistakes. One of the differences between being in the public sector and being in the private sector, people make mistakes all the time. Everybody is aware of what you do in the public sector. And everybody can second guess.

Let’s talk about Shredgate for a second. If you had to do it all over again, would you fire those guys from the get-go? We certainly would do things differently. But as we look at Shredgate…I’m really not prepared to make specific comments about Shredgate because I haven’t read the full report. … One of the impressions that I have is that, probably, Mark Cullen was treated very badly as a result of that. I think that he was relying on an assistant corporation counsel to do certain things and give certain information. And I think that that person didn’t do a very good job. May have lied. And, ultimately, he made decisions based on that.

Are you referring to Geanette Wittendorf? Again, as we look at what she did and we look at things in hindsight, she probably should never have been hired to start with. She handled this very, very poorly. The only reason why she was here for eight months was, my job was to protect the city of Springfield, and our attorneys did not want her fired until we got to a certain point in the case [a lawsuit that alleged illegal document destruction] because they felt it was better to have her employed and be on more of a friendly basis than to have someone who was let go who suddenly becomes more of a negative factor in the case. She was the person who was really involved with this.

She did have a history that was not a very good one [a judge had found Wittendorf in contempt of court for allegedly mishandling a criminal case when she was working as a prosecutor in Winnebago County]. How do people like that get hired? I make the assumption, and it’s an assumption on my part, that we simply did not do a good job of checking her background. Today, with our attorneys, we run that through the personnel department just like we would any employee that’s coming to work for the city of Springfield. At the time that she was hired, basically Mark (Cullen) was doing the hiring and the checking and that type of thing.

Who’s your favorite city council member? I don’t want to necessarily pick somebody… out. I don’t think that would be fair any more than picking out my least favorite. But the reality is, I have been criticized for not working with members of the city council. We now, every major thing we’ve done, I’ve had to have the city council to do that. I apparently have been able to work well enough to come up with the five votes, with me the sixth vote, to make things happen.

Is it more difficult than it was when you were mayor before to get the city council on board with stuff? Given the makeup of the city council, this has certainly been more difficult to work with.

What do you mean by makeup? Under the commission form of government, one of the things you had was five people who were elected on a citywide basis. So they made decisions based on the fact that they were answering to an electorate that was citywide, so that their focus was more on a basis of what was good for the city because they were going to be held accountable for what was happening on a citywide type of basis as well as what they were responsible for within their individual departments.

I’m almost hearing you say that we were better off back then with that form. No. Keep in mind I wrote this form of government.

Sure, after you were sued. Actually, I was in favor of an aldermanic form of government prior to the time I was elected to the commission form of government. There had been a vote where I had publicly stated that I was in favor of (the) aldermanic form of government.

I’ll take you on your word. The commission form of government lasted as long as it did in the city of Springfield because we had a utility – that had a tendency to really work for the commission form of government, having someone who was elected who was responsible to the people for the operation of City Water, Light and Power. But as we have gone over a period of time, operating city government had become more complicated. Union contracts have become more complicated. One of the problems you had with the commission form of government is that you had the mayor and four commissioners. Three of those commissioners had union contracts along with the mayor having a union contract. …

So we had no centralized collective bargaining unit. Everyone was doing their own thing. But when members of the city council brought their contracts to the city council for approval, they didn’t necessarily outline everything that was in the contract, all the changes. Once it was approved, then other members of other unions (said), well, they got this, we want this, too. It made it very, very difficult and expensive. As you move forward with a more unionized operation, you can’t do that today. There were a certain amount of inefficiencies within the commission form of government. People who lived under that, there are many of them that simply believe in it, think it’s a better form of government. My personal belief is, you couldn’t operate with it today.

So far as I know, you didn’t have the parties send so-and-so over and I’ll figure out a job for them. Is it possible to run it the way that you did and still have friends? I think I’ve got a lot of friends. … Again, under the previous administration, it was not uncommon, when they needed votes on the city council, they just simply passed out jobs. That was one of the reasons we ended up with a bloated labor force.

Are you ever going to run for office again? I would not anticipate that I would ever run given my age.

You’re 70, correct? Seventy years old. But, I would also say that in 1987, when I finished up my second term in office, I never anticipated that I would run again. The difference is age. I feel blessed, and I’ve had the time of my life the last four years. I enjoyed it.

Contact Bruce Rushton at [email protected]