How the city council might shut West down

Imagine a friendly city near a state line where the mayor refuses to resign after being caught doing something wrong. The city council, backed by the business community, delivers a unanimous no-confidence vote.

But the city charter doesn’t give the council removal power. So weeks drag into months as the mayor, often speaking through an attorney, insists on staying in office.

I’m referring, of course, to Albert Lea, Minn.

Mayor Jean Eaton was arrested last December for stealing more than $800 worth of fancy duds from several department stores. On June 6, she avoided prosecution by agreeing to enter a diversion program, pay restitution and perform community service, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported. In a statement (read, naturally, by her attorney), Eaton promised to “move the Albert Lea community forward” as mayor.

Sound familiar?

But here’s where Albert Lea’s mayoral melodrama diverges from Spokane’s: The Minnesotans actually forced their mayor to resign. After Eaton’s last pledge to continue in office, Jeff Fjelstad sprang into action.

Like Cherie Rodgers here, Fjelstad was an early voice of reason on his city council and helped rally Albert Lea against its bad-apple mayor. Last week, he came up with a last-ditch plan: If Eaton insisted on staying, the council would boycott its own weekly meetings and shut the city down.

With the full backing of his fellow members, he approached the city attorney to see if such an ultimatum would fly. The attorney “ended up dictating the letter and the city clerk wrote it,” Fjelstad told me before this week’s council session. “They were fed up with her, too.”

The letter promised the Albert Lea council would “shut down city government by boycotting the June 13 council meeting and every Monday thereafter” if Eaton refused to step down. But the mayor announced her resignation June 9, immediately after hearing about the plan. This past Monday, the council was ready to accept her belated offer and call a special election.

“We were going to keep doing it until she quit,” Fjelstad said of the boycott. Instead, the threat of a shutdown was enough to resolve the crisis. “I’m very happy it happened this way,” he added.

Eaton has been cheap-shotting the council in the Minnesota press, calling it a “lynch mob.” So perhaps Fjelstad can be excused a bit of gloating.

Looking forward to Monday night’s meeting, the council member said he planned to ask administrative staffers, “Did you get her keys to city hall? I want to make sure nothing else goes missing.”

With any luck, Albert Lea’s citizens will elect a new mayor by September. Their long local nightmare is over.

But ours just keeps dragging on.

After I explained Spokane’s predicament to Fjelstad, he said our city council should consider a similar boycott resolution. “There’d be enough outcry once the city shut down that the mayor would quit,” he predicted.

Seeing how stubbornly Jim West clings to power, I’m not so sure.

But if this political paralysis continues through summer, it might be smart for the council to threaten a shutdown. It’s about time to take the initiative back from West’s public relations – whoops, I mean legal – team.

Before I let Fjelstad go, I asked if he would run for mayor of Albert Lea. “No,” he said with a chuckle. “Any idiot can do that job.”

Maybe so.

But it helps to have a gigantic ego and live in a state of denial, too.