Drained by year of COVID, many mayors head for exit
NEWBURYPORT, MASS. — Donna Holaday is the kind of mayor who does not say no to an invitation.
She shows up for lesser ribbon cuttings, at Radiant U Esthetics and the Angry Donut. She is there for the dinky parades, three or four blocks to the waterfront and back. Funerals, fundraisers, National Honor Society inductions — she does them all.
Over four terms as mayor of Newburyport, a coastal city of around 17,000, she learned that she could always perk herself up by getting up on a podium, reflecting back the energy of a roomful of people. Not this past year.
“There is nothing. Nothing on my calendar. It’s just the way it has been for a year,” said Holaday, 66. Through the shutdown, she made a point of spending the day in her empty City Hall, if only so people could see the light on in her office.
But they were long days she described as “whack-amole — you take care of one thing, and 15 things pop up.” And the calls she fielded were not about normal problems, like trash collection or snow removal, but matters of profound suffering: a loved one forced to die in solitude, or families running out of food.
“It was so traumatic, with people calling us crying, distressed,” said Holaday, who has announced she will not run for a fifth term. “I was sitting in my corner office feeling quite alone, there is no question about it.”
It has been an exhausting season for America’s mayors.
Mayors are hands-on offi- cials in the best of times, barraged with criticism and individual pleas for help. Over the last year, they found
themselves weighing matters of life or death — devastating local businesses by prolonging shutdowns, canceling gatherings treasured by voters, unable to provide comfort by being there in person.
And this spring, many American mayors are explaining their decision to leave office with the same reason: that the pandemic response demand e d so much that they could not both campaign and perform their duties, or that the work had become so stressful that their families had recom- mended that they step away.
“They are just spent,” said Katharine Lusk, executive director of Boston Universi- ty’s Initiative on Cities, which carries out an annual survey of mayors. Mayors surveyed last summer expressed deep anxiety about the effects of lost tax revenue on their budgets as they juggled the pandemic, economic recovery and their core respon- sibilities.
Meanwhile, Lusk said, the positive aspects of the job were stripped away.
“They will tell you it’s the most personal job in poli- tics,” she said. “If you can’t interact with the community,
all of the things that sort of fuel mayors — the inputs that build up that reservoir of energy — that aspect of the job has been taken from them.”
There is little national data on local elections, so it is impossible to say whether this year’s turnover of mayors is unusual. In Massachusetts, nearly one-fifth of the state’s mayors have announced they will not run again, as CommonWealth, a politics journal, reported, but that is not an unusual portion, according to the Massachusetts Municipal Association.
Decisions to step down are rarely made for one reason, and the year has increased pressure on leaders on many fronts, including conflicts over policing and racial justice. Among those who have offered an explanation, however, COVID fatigue comes up a lot. Michelle De La Isla, the mayor of Topeka, Kansas, told The Topeka Capital-Journal that campaigning would make her workload unmanageable, and “there was no way I was going to be able to do this at the same time” as heading coronavirus response.