Civic Journalist Turns Civic Mayor

As editor of the Bradenton Herald, Wayne Poston launched a community-wide debate over the need to build a new municipal building on prime waterfront real estate.

Now, as mayor of the city of Bradenton, Poston sits in that spanking new municipal building overlooking the waterfront. The irony is not lost on him.

“It shouldn’t be here,” he said in a recent telephone interview, still feisty on the subject. “And I’ve told my downtown development director the final piece [in developing the waterfront] will be when we lease this out and move.”

The civic journalism project Poston launched in 1996 not only ignited public debate about the building’s location – it also awoke a long-dormant civic activism that, one could argue, led ultimately to Poston’s election last year as mayor.

Not that Poston was planning to enter politics when he spearheaded the project, “Decision Downtown.” By all accounts, he fully expected to be a newspaper editor for the rest of his career. A long road led from “Decision Downtown” to the mayor’s office, a road full of unexpected turns.

By Poston’s own appraisal, though, that civic journalism project inspired his civic approach to municipal governance, what he calls his Public Mayor Program. A feature of both his campaign and his tenure, it involves continuous consultation with citizens in their own neighborhoods.

“It did come from that,” Poston said. “I was so intrigued by the concept of civic journalism. It made a difference in this community. It got people energized and interested in the community and thinking about the community.

“I came away from my newspaper experience, my whole life’s work, believing stronger than ever in neighborhood government. Decisions are not made in City Hall. They’re made out there where people live and newspapers need to get out there and government does, too.”

True to his word, since taking office in January Poston has held a community meeting in each of the city’s five wards and he’s getting ready to begin round two of the community meetings this fall. He brings along the city council and department heads so that, as citizens have questions, he can turn to the appropriate official for answers. He uses words like engagement, connectedness, civic-mindedness.

Joanne Mamenta, Poston’s managing editor at the Herald, says he borrowed a lot of the language and techniques of the civic journalism he practiced at the paper, but she’s not sure the Public Mayor Program is such a new form of governing.

“He’s going into the community and having these conversations,” Mamenta says, “but politicians have been doing that for a long time. Wayne was able to use some of the language that (civic) journalism has been getting out there – community connectedness, civic involvement. It’s not new. He gave it a different spin.”

Poston doesn’t necessarily disagree. He’s heard a similar appraisal of civic journalism as just good, old-fashioned journalism dressed up in fancy terms.

“It may be old-fashioned,” he said, “but we haven’t been doing it. We might have better newspaper circulation and greater trust in our institutions if we continued to do it but we got away from it.”

Poston led the Herald’s civic journalism efforts in 1995 with a project to get public input into the search for a new schools superintendent. Then in July 1996, five-term Mayor Bill Evers, announced plans for a new city hall/police and fire headquarters on the waterfront. Evers sought no public debate even though there was some sentiment that the land should be sold to a business that might help revitalize the waterfront.

As part of the “Decision Downtown” series, the Herald commissioned a poll. Among the results, the paper reported, were signs of “grassroots cynicism:” 42 percent of those polled said they didn’t care where the new building went.

The paper continued to give front-page coverage to the controversy that was building over the new city hall proposal and a sizeable number of people began to care.

When the mayor and city council held a town meeting on the subject, 1,000 people showed up. Marianne Barnebey, who is now a city councilwoman and vice-mayor, recalls that meeting as a turning point. “That meeting opened a lot of people’s eyes,” she said recently.

For over four hours, more than 100 people spoke, mostly in opposition to the mayor’s plan. The mayor refused to budge. Two days later, though, he appointed a citizens committee to make recommendations for alternate sites. Three months later, he approved a contract for a municipal building – on the waterfront – but without a fire station.

The change was small but Poston believed it was significant because it was in response to citizen input. “The Mayor thought this was his city, not our city,” said Poston. “This was a cataclysmic event.”

Poston never dreamed he’d take Evers on at the voting booth. He was proud of “Decision Downtown,” which won a Batten Award. It was something of
a surprise to everyone – even Poston, reporters said – when, in the spring of 1998, the Herald’s owner, Knight Ridder, appointed Joan Krauter to be the paper’s new executive editor. Poston retired at the end of the year and began reading books and catching up with old friends.

Then in 1999, an election year, a group of Bradenton voters approached Poston about running for mayor. Poston declined.

“He had to be convinced he was going to win,” says Mamenta. Community leaders conducted a poll, asking voters to choose between five or six possible candidates and Poston fared very well. He reconsidered.

“The trick was getting elected,” he said. He raised $130,000 and previewed his Public Mayor Program by basing his campaign on the same tenets.

“I went through two pairs of running shoes going through neighborhoods,” said Poston. “I went through neighborhoods so many times, some people will open their doors and say ‘Hello, Mr. Mayor.’ They know me. But you have to do that.

“What we knew that we didn’t know before is where people make decisions: At flea markets on Saturdays, at PTO meetings, Wednesday night at church meetings. So that’s where I went because that’s where decisions are being made. And at the Herald, we wouldn’t have known that unless we did civic journalism projects. We learned that from doing civic journalism projects.”

Poston got 54% of the vote to Evers’ 46% in what a Herald reporter described as a high-turnout election last November. The Herald endorsed him but has taken great pains, reporters and Poston say, not to show him any favoritism. “I may have to be twice as good,” said Poston, though he also said he sympathizes. “They’re in a tough spot. They don’t ever want anyone saying they’re biased.”

Reviews of his first eight months, though, are generally favorable. One of his first acts as mayor was to raise the salaries of police and firefighters, which had fallen far behind those of neighboring cities. He appointed a troubleshooter to respond instantly to constituent complaints about city services, such as missed trash collections. He’s working on an ethics manual for his administration and he’s held the first sexual harassment seminar for city employees.

In addition to holding his own meetings in the community, Poston has changed city council meetings from two mornings a month to one morning and one evening so more people can attend. And Poston says he wants to “map” Bradenton’s neighborhoods to help guide development projects, so that a neighborhood that needs a shoe store or a drug store is targeted for a development that includes a shoe store or a drug store. “We wouldn’t know that unless we’re out talking to people,” Poston said.

Poston has had one serious controversy so far and ironically it’s over a waterfront development project that some residents say they didn’t have enough of a voice in. This is not a public development project, though. A private company plans to build high-rise condominiums on land it purchased from another private owner. Poston has publicly supported the project as an important source of tax revenue but a group of residents has filed suit to try to stop construction and has included the city as a defendant.

Poston said the dispute is partly the outcome of the success he’s had getting people involved in the local government. “We want to engage them,” he said. “My mind can be changed so we have to go in there and really have a conversation. So we say, ‘Here’s what we’re thinking. Does this make sense?’ “

Another outcome of Poston’s Public Mayor Program is that he still gets to encourage civic journalism. “Reporters who cover me have to go to the Public Mayor Programs if they are to have the foundation to understand the decisions we’re making,” said Poston. “They can report what we’re doing but, to understand, they have too be out there, too.”