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City Councilmember Linda Nadolski is on her way out, but before she leaves, she wants to do something mildly quixotic.
She wants, she says, to do the right thing: an antidiscrimination amendment that would extend protection to gays, the disabled, unmarried couples living together and people in the military. Currently, the city code proscribes discrimination in public accommodations or employment on the basis of sex, race, religion, color, national origin or ancestry.
The issue was expected to face the council this week.
“It’s really an equal-rights amendment,” Nadolski says, “something everyone ought to be able to support.”
But she says there has been one real problem: Mayor Paul Johnson is uncomfortable with vigorous, controversial, public debate. That’s why, says Nadolski, he has done everything in his power to delay bringing the amendment to a vote, hoping to avoid or forestall any unpleasantness for as long as possible.
That might be difficult. One of the mayor’s aides told Ty Waymire, an activist for disabled veterans, that “it had turned into a speeding bullet heading right for them and they’re having to step out of the way.”
The way Nadolski sees it, the timing is right. She unexpectedly lost her bid for reelection in District 6 last fall to Kathy Dubs and will leave office on December 31. After Nadolski has receded into private life, she says, an equal-rights amendment might simply fade away. In a conservative city like Phoenix, it would be difficult for any other member of the council to resurrect the proposal without political consequences.
Nadolski herself was dissuaded from proposing the idea two years ago by members of the gay community who apparently felt having an ally on the council was preferable to whatever moral victory might be gained by trying to revise the law.
Liberated by her political defeat last October, Nadolski submitted her proposed amendment to the council’s family and youth subcommittee on December 9. After hearing brief testimony from members of the gay community, a disabled newspaper vendor and a Navy veteran, the committee–comprising councilmembers Mary Rose Wilcox, Calvin Goode and Nadolski–approved the proposal.
In recent years, approval by a council subcommittee has routinely meant acceptance by the full council. Proposals accepted by the subcommittees are often placed on a “consent agenda,” and rubber-stamped en masse by the council–with no debate. More difficult items are placed on the regular agenda for debate, with the council generally following the recommendations of subcommittees.
Simply put, whoever controls the agenda also controls the flow of city governance.
And the mayor controls the agenda.
Tall and imperially slim, Paul Johnson zips through public life like a razor through velvet. He readily acknowledges his preference of consensus to debate, and unanimous votes have become commonplace on his watch. Agenda-setting power is one of the subtle devices that make the mayor first among equals on the council, and Johnson uses it like a rudder to steer the council–and his own political career–safely down the middle of the stream.
He concedes the city has a duty to ensure that all citizens enjoy equal protection under the law, even those citizens who might co-habitate without benefit of clergy or sleep with friends of the same sex. He has, he says, no problem with the principles espoused by Nadolski’s amendment, but . . . “There are some legitimate questions that need to be addressed,” he says. “It shouldn’t look like we’re doing this just to appease an outgoing councilman. It ought to go through the normal channels, the council ought to have time to look at it and the city attorney ought to have time to review it.”
Johnson admits Nadolski asked him to place the proposal on the consent agenda and that he refused. “I told her I couldn’t do that, that there were legitimate concerns of employers and others that need to be debated,” he says. “Even if I had done that,” he adds, “it would only take one councilman to take it off [the consent agenda].”
Nadolski counters by saying she asked the mayor to place the proposal on the regular agenda, where it would be subject to public comment and debate by the council, and that Johnson refused. She says four of the nine councilmembers–Mary Rose Wilcox, Craig Tribken, Calvin Goode and Nadolski–then filed memos requesting the proposal be placed on the agenda, a seldom-used procedural maneuver that overcomes mayoral reluctance.
Sources say that, after learning that the memos were to be filed, Johnson approached Wilcox and offered to place the proposal on the agenda if the memos were withdrawn. Wilcox refused. (Johnson insists he’s “happy” to put it on the agenda.)
Johnson says he was aware of the memos but had not seen them. “If four of them want it on the agenda, then I’ll put it on the agenda,” he says. “But I’m real uncomfortable with it–I think they rushed one of those issues that is very difficult.”
The issue is one that’s well-known to municipal officials across the country, but Johnson says there just isn’t enough time to consider it properly.
“I understand that Linda wants to do this before she leaves the council, but normally we have more than just a few days to look at something,” he said. “Three or four days is not enough time for the councilmembers to decide, for the legal department to clear it.”
Others, however, ascribed another, more political, motive to the mayor’s wariness. On December 9, a flier was distributed in 27 gay clubs in Phoenix asking gays and lesbians to call their councilmembers in support of the amendment. Johnson’s reluctance to publicly champion gay issues is no secret in the gay community, an important constituency that had supported his bid to succeed Terry Goddard as mayor. Though Wilcox–long an ally of gay activists–wanted the job, many gay leaders thought Johnson was more electable.
“It was between Johnson and Howard Adams, and we didn’t know Johnson but we sure didn’t want Howard Adams,” gay activist Charlie Harrison said. “Even though Mary Rose had been a friend, we supported Johnson because we thought if we didn’t, Adams would be mayor. Now we wish we had Adams.”
Disabled veteran Ty Waymire, who has lobbied for the amendment, says, “My uneducated assumption is that the mayor’s just trying to avoid [the proposal] because of the sexual orientation aspect of it. Just think of it: Anyone can end up disabled; tomorrow you could be in a car accident or something. The only controversial thing is the gay issue.”
Nadolski says the mayor is right when he points out that the amendment was being rushed through, but she notes that a similar proposal had been discussed by the council’s human relations subcommittee and was therefore familiar to councilmembers. And she says the pushing of the amendment was necessary because of “foot-dragging” by city staff.
“I think there was an attitude that if they ignored it for a few weeks, then I’d be gone,” she says. “To be fair to them, no one had ever really ordered them to pursue my request, so it’s possible it was just a misunderstanding.”
“That’s a general complaint about the staff,” Johnson replies. “Since they work for all of us [the council and the mayor], they try very hard to avoid the appearance of being too close to any one of us. And the one they try hardest to avoid that appearance with is me.”
On December 5, in a last-ditch effort to rescue the proposal, Nadolski called a meeting of the staff and members of the gay and disabled communities to “hammer out some language” for the proposal. The next day, she submitted a brief, simple document to the subcommittee. The amendment had originally asked that the suspect groups also be accorded equal access to housing, but that clause was dropped when the City Attorney’s Office indicated that changes to the city’s Fair Housing Ordinances would require enabling legislation from the state. The subcommittee then added a clause that would extend protection to active duty and retired military personnel.
Three days later, the subcommittee approved the proposal and asked the staff to draft an amended ordinance to be considered in the council’s December 18 meeting. Nadolski says she hopes to count on her vote and four others: Tribken, Wilcox, Goode and Thelda Williams.
“Really, I don’t know if anyone will vote against it,” she says. “Skip Rimsza, Alan Kennedy and John Nelson–I don’t know, it might be difficult for them since they’ve got such conservative constituencies, but I don’t think anyone is really against it.”
Not even Paul Johnson. At least, that’s what the mayor says.
“It will be very difficult to vote against it,” he says. “And that’s a shame, because there are some questions. The City Attorney’s Office has surfaced a memo with some of their concerns, and though I think most of them are answerable, we really ought to have more time to consider all the consequences. There’s very little time for public input: The Chamber of Commerce called me today–they said they’re not against it, but they don’t know what it says. They’d like to know.”
And, Johnson adds, there is some question as to whether the ordinance will actually have any effect on the daily lives of Phoenicians.
“I think Linda wants it for the symbolism,” he says. “There’s no question that all of this is coming, even the sexual orientation part. If not at the city level, then at the state and federal levels. And that’s the way it ought to be–discrimination is wrong.” But to the impatient, what Johnson says is prudence seems like backpedaling.
“There’s just some issues that you can’t dance around, and I think this is one of them,” Ty Waymire says.
And though Nadolski’s end-run around the mayor might seem like so much fancy footwork, there are real lives involved.
On the day of the subcommittee hearing, Jon O’Brien, a wheelchair-bound man who sells newspapers in the area around City Hall, was hustled into the council chambers by gay activists to give an account of the routine difficulties he faced while wrestling with buses and scraping along on $700 a month. Though O’Brien made quite an impression on the subcommittee, he says he won’t return to talk to the whole council.
“I didn’t clear it with my supervisor,” he says. “I might lose my job.”
He says he has another reason: “I’m straight, and I don’t like to ride in a car with no faggots.”
“I think there was an attitude that if they ignored it for a few weeks, then I’d be gone,” Nadolski says.
