Happily divided?

There
was a moment during last Tuesday’s City Council meeting when longtime
Councilmember Tim Mains’ face said it all. It happened shortly before Council
passed legislation that bars Mains — and anyone else employed by the
Rochester City School District — from serving on Council.

            As two councilmembers abstained from
voting on another piece of legislation, Mains, a new Rochester school-district
principal, just sat there shaking his head. “It was like, ‘Haven’t I been
trying to say all along that I could do what you guys are doing?'” he said a
few days later.

And this gets
to the core of what has become the Great Tim Mains Debate. What makes
someone who works for the school district so different from someone whose
livelihood might be impacted by City Council legislation? Why should the
roughly 6,600 people employed by the district — as teachers, custodians, or
principals — be excluded from holding a seat on City Council?

            For Councilmember Brian Curran, the
answer comes down to “a structural relationship between the City School
District and the City Government that’s embedded in the law.” (Curran and
Councilmember Nancy Griswold co-sponsored the conflict-of-interest amendment to
the city charter. It passed by a 6-3 vote.)

            The relationship Council has with
the district is so unique, Curran says, “I am still flabbergasted that anyone
with a straight face would claim this is not a conflict of interest.”

            Even though City Council has
approval power only over the bottom line of the district’s budget, those
bottom-line decisions, Curran says, impact every district employee.

            During the 2002 fiscal year, City
Council voted on legislation affecting the school district in nine of its 12
regularly scheduled meetings. “Included in that was a request for a loan of
about $53 million to allow the school district meet its current expenses,”
Curran says. “The decision to make that loan was crucial to the school district
avoiding crisis budget cuts in the middle of the year. If we had decided not to
do it, it would have affected the employees of the school district —
potentially all the employees — not just the managers.”

            People focusing on the inability of
rank-and-file district employees to affect district policy “have completely
misunderstood the conflict-of-interest issue,” Curran says.

            “The point is not the authority of
the school district employee. The point is the authority of the City Council
over the school district,” Curran says. “The decisions you make as a
councilmember can affect the school district and the employees of the school
district. It doesn’t matter whether that employee is the superintendent or a
clerk.”

            Twelve days after Curran and
Griswold filed their legislation, Mains filed two proposed amendments geared to
show just how far the conflict-of-interest concept can be taken. Family members
of city employees, suppliers of goods or services to the city, anyone who owns
more than $1 million worth of city real estate, or any registered lobbyists
could all be prohibited from serving on Council due to potential conflicts,
Mains reasoned.

            Mains’ proposals were never
seconded, and thus never discussed, during a meeting of the Council’s committee
of the whole. But Curran draws a distinction between district employees and
everyone else.

            “The contacts we have with other
organizations, like non-profit groups or contractors, are one-time contractual
relationships,” Curran says. “They may continue over years, but they are one
issue that someone can abstain on and resolve the conflict that way.”

Tim Mains was
chairing Council’s finance committee when he first started shopping around for a
district position last April. This fact has become a source of consternation
for his Council colleagues, many of whom say they had no idea of Mains’ plans.

            In June, when Mains was an applicant
for the principal position he now holds at School 50, he actively participated
in negotiating the details of that year’s city budget, including amendments to
the Mayor’s proposed budget that had an impact on school funding.

            This is a fact Mains readily admits.
But he adds that he notified Council President Lois Giess and Mayor Bill
Johnson that he was an applicant for the position as soon as he filed his
resume.

            “I was not anxious to broadcast that
I was looking for work,” Mains says when explaining why he didn’t notify the
entire Council. “Some people were personally offended that I didn’t tell them.
In the best of all possible worlds, my intention was to let my colleagues
know.”

            Mains did make a point of seeking
the legal opinion of the city’s corporation counsel, Linda Kingsley, last April
on any conflict-of-interest potential.

            In an inter-departmental memo sent
to Mains on April 15, Kingsley wrote: “We see no legal prohibition to a member
of City Council also holding a position of employment within the Rochester City
School District.” Kingsley’s opinion was based on the fact that City Council
has no line-item power when approving the district’s budget.

Mains’
supporters have raised the fact that Canandaigua Mayor Ellen Polimeni is principal
of the middle school in the Canandaigua City School District. But, according to
Canandaigua City Manager Stephen Cole, there’s simply no comparison. “There is
no formal relationship between our city government and the school district,”
Cole says. “We do not approve the district’s budget. We have no formal
authority over what they do and don’t do.”

            As far as Rochester City Council is
concerned, Curran downplays the broad impact of the conflict-of-interest
legislation. He interprets the city’s ethics law as already prohibiting
district employees from serving on City Council.

            According to the city charter, “No
city officer or employee shall have any employment… as a result of which,
directly or indirectly, he would have an interest that would impair his
independence of judgment or action in the performance of his official duties…”

Asked if he
feels the conflict-of-interest legislation has become a personal issue between
himself and Council, Mains says: “I will confess that it repeatedly feels
personal. I don’t want to believe that it is. Still, I can’t help but take it
personally.”

            But he thinks the issue speaks to
general problems in the relationship between City Hall and the school district.

            “Endemic at City Hall is a strong
desire to have greater control over the school district than exists,” he says.
“Some elements within City Hall are actually hostile to the school district.
They view the school district as though it is some sort of sick or perverted
organization. And so all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve become the
enemy among them.'”

This article appears in Mar 19-25, 2003.