Mayor Fiacco recalls his fighting spirit
Leader has fierce pride in his city
REGINA — Sir, I explained to Mayor Pat Fiacco as we sat in his office atop Regina’s City Hall, I am the guy who writes most of the obituaries here at the Leader-Post.
So am I writing your, ah, political obituary?
The mayor guffaws loudly. “I’m only 50, “says Pat Fiacco quickly. “So the door certainly isn’t closed.”
The mayor won’t say any more than that, so it’s time to look backward, instead of forward, onto his 12 years as mayor — and how he got there.
As a young person, though, he didn’t follow politics terribly closely and, if anything, paid more attention to the provincial legislature.
An important educational experience came in 1995, when he was one of five partners seeking to open a pub-pool hall called Brews and Cues on northwest Regina’s Rochdale Boulevard. They had to go through the usual city approval process: Zoning, meeting with the community association and going before various committees and then city council. He also did a fair bit of travelling in those days, “and I was always wondering why certain things were happening in other communities, but not in ours.”
That is an important part of understanding Fiacco: A fierce pride in the city of Regina and a desire to see the proverbial glass as way, way more than half full. From his pre-mayor existence, he recalls hearing new residents praise the city, its short commutes and its relative safety — yet hear locals, in their hangdog way, ask visitors, “Why would you come here?”
He compares this to a business owner who asks a customer, “Why would you come into my store? You know there are other stores out there that you should be visiting instead of us!” Civic slurs rankled him and still do.
Back in the early part of 2000, the 12th year of Doug Archer’s stint as mayor, Fiacco approached his city councillor, Darlene Hincks — whose political values he “supported” — with an idea: When she decided to step down, he’d like to run for council to replace her.
Fiacco — who was wellknown in amateur boxing and Kinsman Club circles, but not so well-known outside of them — learned that Hincks was still considering her options. But she had an idea for him: Why didn’t he run for mayor instead?
Once Hincks “planted that seed,” other folks — Fiacco says they’re sitting in the Legislature and House of Commons, though he won’t name names — offered additional advice. Sure, Fiacco might not knock off the savvy, earnest Archer (who by that point had been mayor for 12 years and councillor for three more before that), but at least Fiacco would gain name recognition for another bid in 2003.
But Fiacco kept talking to people and became convinced that Archer was politically vulnerable. One top-of-mind issue was crime, particularly car thefts. Voters and the news media were discussing this, but not municipal politicians, he said.
People, particularly young ones, were leaving the city and the city’s downtown was in what he calls “dire straits” because of a flight to the suburbs. “Economic development was an issue,” Fiacco said in an interview earlier this month in his 15th-floor office in City Hall. “Every one was leaving; young people were leaving. We weren’t seeing an increase in population at all. It was stagnant and then, of course, there was an issue that people believed they weren’t getting value for the property taxes they were paying.”
Reginans, he figured, “were ready for something different.”
Strategic plan
Fiacco and Co. developed what he figures was a “very solid and strategic plan.” Archer — who had been heavi-
Pat Fiacco was well-known in the amateur boxing and Kinsman Club circles. ly courted to run for the provincial NDP in a byelection — did not announce he’d seek re-election until Sept. 18, 2000. Fiacco waited two more days, announcing his candidacy in a high-energy news conference at what’s now the Ramada, in a room deliberately small in order to give TV cameras the impressions of barely contain- able enthusiasm, complete with balloons and the music from a movie about another underdog boxer: Rocky. His platform was economic development, controlling tax hikes, fighting crime and improving housing conditions. Fiacco, who came with the marketing skills picked up as manager of strategic business development with Direct West, deliberately kept his political message simple and understandable; as a yardstick, “I needed to speak in terms that my mother and father could understand.”
Fiacco got a big break when the union for rankand-file officers sought a meeting with him. “Bitterly disappointed” ( as union president Troy Hagen put it) with a recent contract settlement, its executive heard him out, then publicly endorsed him — the first such political endorsement that anybody could remember. The officers felt that nobody was listening to them; in particular, they felt the ratio of police officers doing desk jobs was “out of whack,” said Fiacco, adding “they felt that they weren’t getting the support of the board (of police commissioners) as well.” Archer protested the officers’ endorsement, but it was already out there.
One city councillor from those days says Archer’s political goose was cooked when the incumbent mayor had his volunteers roll out large political lawn signs from four campaigns earlier — with the unfortunate result of reminding voters how long Archer had been in office.
When the election results were tallied, Fiacco had beaten Archer by 24,000 votes to 18,000. It was the biggest upset in municipal politics since another articulate political rookie (Larry Schneider) upended another NDP-linked veteran (Henry Baker) in 1979.
Cool council
Fiacco already knew councillors Hincks, Bill Hutchinson and Michael Fougere. But from the others, there was a certain coolness. After all, he was only 38, a rookie on city council and had just defeated their old friend and colleague.
Fiacco said he decided to reach out to these councillors, meeting with them “on their turf” in order to learn about their backgrounds and priorities, and vice-versa, “and expressed to all of them that I’m going to need their help and that we’re going to have to do this together”. (There was also, he notes, a “lot of tension” between Fougere and Fred Clipsham — though Fiacco credits Clipsham with finding a solution to the first big challenge facing the new council: The matter of holding the 2001 budget increase to zero. The budget theme would dominate city council’s deliberations through Fiacco’s first two terms. Fiacco also noted, without comment, that after councillors Rob Deglau and Bill Wells left council in 2003, there “started to be a shift, so it was much easier for me.”
That illustrates Fiacco’s view of what one would call either collegiality or groupthink, depending on your perspective. “For me, it was all about team building,” he said, sipping a coffee. “This wasn’t about everyone agreeing on everything; that just doesn’t happen. It was about doing it in a respectful manner …
“It was really all about ‘Why are we here?’ ‘Are we here for our own personal agendas — or are we here for the better good of this community?’ There was lots of discussion, lots of talk about how we need to be strategic in our thinking and our planning. ‘Yes, you represent your ward, but your decisions not only should be for your ward, but for the greater good of this community.’ And when I think back about all that this council has accomplished, it’s been the result of us working together — as opposed to being in opposition all the time.
“I shake my head when I hear current candidates say, ‘There needs to be opposition!’ Well, of course, there needs to be opposition; we all have different ideas. But you also have to come together and respect each others’ points of view.”
A lot of Reginans incorrectly think the mayor’s office is all-powerful. Not so, says Fiacco, who notes that, constitutionally, the mayor is merely one vote among 11 on council. The city’s constitution (The Cities Act, which was passed by the provincial legislature) contains no job description for a mayor beyond having him or her to chair city council meetings and sit, ex-officio, on a number of committees.
Major figures
Fiacco is old enough to remember predecessors Henry Baker and Larry Schneider as “huge, huge figures,” while Doug Archer, was “in my opinion, more of an administrator than a public figure — that was his style.”
So instead of using the language of an adversarial parliament — government, loyal opposition — Fiacco figures a better description of the mayor’s job is this: The chair of the board of directors of the corporation that is the City of Regina; councillors are the other board members. The city manager, like a corporate CEO, works for the boardalias-council, adds Fiacco, who saluted Bob Linner, longtime city manager, for orienting him.
Fiacco quickly launched two initiatives. The first was a series of visits to schools to talk about the city and how its government works. The second was his famous “I Love Regina” to counter the corrosive negativism he’d heard from some residents. “It ticked me off when people would say something bad about our community,” he said. “I took it personally — and this was before I was mayor. We all should take it personally. We’re all one big family here in our city. We need to brag about what we have, and if a mayor can’t stand up and do it and be the leader of this journey, then who else is going to?”
Some might find this corny — but not many. A poll done a year after Fiacco’s 2000 election gave him a stunning 93 per cent approval rating. Recently retired University of Regina history professor William Brennan, who’s written about Regina’s politics going back to 1882, says turning around the city’s self-image might go down as Fiacco’s great legacy. But it might be eclipsed if the Revitalization Regina package of a stadium and a housing development materialize.
Talking to Saskatoon
Given that Saskatoon also had a brand new mayor (former police Chief Jim Maddin) and Fiacco had been told the province’s two largest cities did not talk, much less co-operate, “Regina very badly needed to take a lead role in Saskatchewan, among the mayors.” He organized and led the Saskatchewan Cities Caucus in the provincial urban municipalities association. And it was while in Ottawa (on Boxing Canada business) that he took up the invitation of Coun. Mike Badham to drop in to a meeting of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities to introduce himself. Pretty soon, Fiacco was attending meetings of the FCM’s big-city caucus.
That’s where Fiacco began learning about what became a preoccupation of his third and fourth terms: The country’s infrastructure of roads, water systems and the like — and how it was being ignored by federal and provincial governments.
Some progress on this issue was made with former federal Finance Minister Paul Martin — just before he left Jean Chretien’s cabinet. But Martin soon re-emerged as prime minister, and even invited FCM leaders to 24 Sussex Drive — as far as Fiacco knows, the first time a prime minister had taken the country’s cities seriously. That led to a decision to allocate a portion of the federal gasoline tax to cities for their infrastructure needs.
Next came the federal Conservatives’ Canada Builds program. Fiacco takes considerable pride that the first project under the latter was $60 million of upgrades and construction at Evraz Place. “And that didn’t go to a plebiscite,” purred Fiacco.
By the time the second National Infrastructure Summit was held in Regina last month, Fiacco and other FCM leaders were talking optimistically about the federal government’s plan to have a long-term infrastructure program in place by 2014.
Other highlights for him have been a new revenuesharing agreement with the provincial government (“Huge for us!”) and, further back, completion of “the Big Dig” (the deepening of Wascana Lake, and other upgrades to Wascana Centre) in preparation for the Canada Summer Games. The very same part of mid-2005 brought a strike by three large city unions: The inside and outside workers, represented by different locals of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, and the work- ers of Regina Transit. (Now is as good a time as any to address the rumours that Fiacco’s home was burglarized around that time by somebody with a political axe to grind. Fiacco shrugs. “We were targeted, but whether it was coincidental, or not, we’re not sure … in public life, it’s going to happen.”)
That strike set the stage for the 2006 city election. Fiacco’s interpretation was that the unions’ leadership was determined “that this mayor and council wasn’t going to get elected”.
Under the aegis of the Coalition for a Citizen-Friendly Regina (CCFR), a group of left-leaning candidates ran for council, public school board and mayor. The latter candidate was longtime CUPE activist Jim Holmes, who was badly defeated even in the most heavily union- ized parts of the city. Fiacco’s analysis: “The union executive had an agenda that was different from the membership. The membership was affected by quality of life and what was happening in the city. Not every union member listens to propaganda.”
Regina revitalization
Work undone? Fiacco says he couldn’t think of anything and added he is particularly proud of how the city has built up its financial reserves. When he took office, “they were around, if I remember correctly, $25 million — and we’re at $130 million, I think, in reserve funds. We only had about five different funds; I think we’re now at about 18 different funds because we started focusing on specific areas, like proper planning. The waste water treatment plant is an example; we knew that it had to be replaced, we knew that it was coming, so we started putting money away and now we’ve got $50 million in that account, which is important.
“We’re far more ‘strategic’ than we have ever been, so our credit rating is AA+. Our debt load is one of the lowest in the country — contrary to some candidates,” he said pointedly.
“In general, we have a strategic plan where we didn’t have one before. With strategies, they are going to ‘lead’ us so when you say ‘unfinished business,’ any elected official could come in now and look at the plan — which we never had before.
“It’s allowed us to move this city forward in so many ways. Or the managing of our assets: We have a strategy of which streets are going to be fixed at what time based on their age and the infrastructure under the ground. We’ve never had that before. Everything was ad hoc — and it’s not ad hoc any more. We now put a budget together based on a plan rather than having a budget that determines the plan.”
And speaking of building things, no interview with Fiacco can escape the subject of a new stadium and Revitalization Regina, the plan to get a new stadium built, then develop housing and offices on the land where Mosaic Stadium now sits, working eastward from there along the north side of the CPR main line through the city.
Fiacco’s take is that it’s coming at a time when the city’s finances are in relatively good shape and the provincial government is willing to share some of the cost. He is disdainful of the idea that the private sector, which doesn’t build and operate arenas anywhere else, would somehow agree to do so in Regina. And even if it did, a private buyer would be run as a business, not a charity, with community groups and amateur sports frozen out unless they could raise money to use it.
“Right now, the stars have lined up,” he said. “We’ll never find a better opportunity.”