Gordon wrestles with growth, immigration
Casey Newton
The Arizona Republic
May. 15, 2008 12:00 PM

On Feb. 15, moments before he unveiled a new police policy on illegal immigrants, Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon welcomed a reporter into his office with a characteristic grin.

"It's the chief's last day," Gordon joked, nodding toward sullen police Chief Jack Harris, who was slouched in a nearby chair.

Harris, who like the mayor has faced withering criticism about the city's handling of the immigration problem, didn't blink at the suggestion he would leave his job due to the controversy. advertisement




"Don't get my hopes up," Harris said.

Behind the gallows humor that Friday lay real concern. Over the past several months, Gordon had watched as Phoenix's long-simmering immigration problems boiled over into crisis. Convinced that Phoenix had become a sanctuary for criminals, some called for Gordon's job, or the chief's job, or both. This month, a group called American Citizens United began collecting signatures in hopes of recalling the mayor.

Immigration was the first wave in a series of tough problems that combined to make the time since his re-election in November the hardest of Gordon's political career.

As the immigration debate caught fire, Phoenix's budget team began reporting details of an economic downturn that would force Phoenix to make its biggest budget cuts in history. Next year is expected to be as bad or worse. And in January, Gordon separated from his wife of 14 years, with aides citing the mayor's nearly round-the-clock schedule as a factor in the split.

Faced with a steady stream of bad news, the 57-year-old Gordon has held fast in his familiar role as the city's cheerleader in chief. Pointing to the host of projects set to open in downtown Phoenix over the next year, Gordon displays the steady optimism that has marked his political career.

He has big dreams for downtown Phoenix and has begun new efforts to lure international development to the city. Inspired by a recent trip to Dubai, Gordon says Phoenix needs to expand its sense of what's possible for a modern metropolis.

Friends say Gordon would like eventually to become governor. To get there, he needs a record he can run on - and the successes of his first term alone might not be enough.

Gordon has about 3½ years left as mayor, and any run for office he makes in the future will be judged, in part, by how he responds to the tough times Phoenix faces.

In recent weeks he has taken the offensive, calling for the Justice Department to investigate Sheriff Joe Arpaio for potential civil-rights violations stemming from the sheriff's "saturation patrols" of heavily Latino neighborhoods in Phoenix and beyond.

"That's what leadership is about, is facing the good with the bad," Gordon says. "You have to take both, and you have to work through these things. Good opportunities and bad situations."


In the spotlight's glare


In September, things were looking up for Gordon. After a generally well-regarded first term, the mayor easily won re-election against businessman and attorney Steve Lory. Gordon raised more than $1 million for his campaign. Lory raised less than $20,000.

It was an upbeat campaign, with Gordon spending most of his time touting the success of his downtown redevelopment efforts. In the next year, the mayor told audience after audience, downtown would get a greatly expanded convention center, a brand-new light-rail system and a new city-financed hotel.

Meanwhile, Arizona State University would continue its push into downtown, with three schools moved in and a fourth, the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, scheduled to open in August.

"We've made a real difference in a short period of time," Gordon said at the campaign's lone debate.

His first term focused on public safety, jobs and education. And as much as he focused on policy issues, he remained a man about town, spotted at everything from opening day at Little League to neighborhood meetings. The second term, he said, would feature more of the same, with a few additions.

Gordon pledged to spend more time on environmental issues in his next four years, for example, and to be a better ambassador for Phoenix. He promised to travel around the country in an effort to boost Phoenix's national profile.

Sure enough, Phoenix soon found itself in the national spotlight. But it wasn't for reasons Gordon planned. One week after his landslide victory, Phoenix police Officer Nick Erfle was shot to death by Erik Jovani Martinez, an illegal immigrant who had previously been deported.

The killing outraged the community and drew renewed attention to Operations Order 1.4, which prevented police in most cases from asking about a person's citizenship. The policy became a lightning rod for local and national criticism.

While that debate raged, protests erupted at M.D. Pruitt's Home Furnishings, a venerable furniture store where owner Roger Sensing complained that day laborers were using his parking lot as an operations base.

When Sensing hired off-duty sheriff's deputies to patrol the lot, day-labor advocates mounted weekly protests at the site, accusing the owners of racism. Counterprotesters quickly followed, creating concerns that the protests would become violent.

Past mayors have been wary of getting involved too deeply in broader social issues, worrying the debate would distract them from their goals.

"As you get into more and more partisan issues, and get out of your core business, it's dangerous," says Skip Rimsza, who was mayor from 1994 to 2004 and who hired Gordon as his deputy chief of staff. "I really tried to stay out of things I couldn't directly control that would take away my energy from the things I was trying to make a difference on."

But to Gordon, immigration was more than a partisan distraction. He felt the city had reached a crisis point and needed intervention.

"The buck stops here," he says. "We're here, so we have to deal with it. We have to manage through it."


Style all his own


For Gordon, "managing through" a conflict typically means gathering the interested parties and letting them hash it out. The mayor can be slow to offer opinions of his own, preferring to let the majority opinion carry the day.

"What works for him is he's so neutral," says Jarrett B. Maupin II, a frequent Gordon critic. "He can just be in anybody's camp at any given time."

Take the 2006 bond election, where the mayor assembled an enormous committee to discuss which bond issues should go before voters.

"Only Phil Gordon could come up with the idea of putting 900 people on a bond committee," says Deb Gullett, his former chief of staff. "Only in the world of Phil Gordon would somebody think that's a good idea. Let's bring 900 people together and see if we could achieve consensus."

Getting that group to agree was a challenge even his staff balked at. But it paid off, Gullett says, in wider community support for the program.

"From an administrative standpoint, it was a nightmare," she says. "But the fact of the matter is, there wasn't an interest, constituency or special group within the entire community who could say, 'I didn't have an opportunity to weigh in on the bond program.' It was $875 million, and it passed overwhelmingly."

But Gordon's signature style - what one colleague describes as the "sit around the table, have a cup of coffee with everybody" approach - has proven less adept at managing problems related to immigration and the economy, which are driven by forces outside the city's control.

"These other issues, most recently, they couldn't be handled with that style," says Councilman Greg Stanton, who has known the mayor since he volunteered on Gordon's first campaign for City Council. "I think it has been his most challenging time."


Playing both sides


Questions about Gordon's leadership style have persisted, particularly on his handling of the Operations Order 1.4 controversy.

As mayor, Gordon doesn't have much control over city departments. Phoenix's council-manager form of government gives Gordon a bigger bully pulpit than his fellow council members but no direct way to hire, fire or set policy.

To change policy, he has to build consensus. So in December, he appointed a panel of four prominent attorneys to recommend changing the order in ways that would result in more criminals being deported without leading to racial profiling. The panel recommended that anyone who commits a misdemeanor or felony be asked about his citizenship. The police chief supported their suggestions, saying they echoed the work of an internal panel he appointed on his own.

"I'm proud of how we as a city worked through the immigration problem," Gordon says. "Something that can't be solved by sound bites, something that hasn't been solved by the federal government for decades - we at least managed through something we can't control, with an outcome that 90 percent of the public supports.

"Through a very stressful, negative challenge, a good result came."

But hours after the press conference that had Harris fantasizing about retirement, critics pointed out that anyone who commits a felony is already asked about citizenship when booked into jail. The revised plan would add those who commit misdemeanors to be questioned, too.

"He didn't offer leadership there," complained Jeff Fine, a community activist who has worked with Gordon. "He stood back and said, 'Maybe it's a situation that needs to be looked at again,' and appointed a committee. When the committee finally made their pronouncements and the policy was announced as being different . . . it's not! It is what it always was. It's politics again."

Rodolfo Espino, professor of political science at ASU, characterizesthe mayor's move as an artful dodge.

"I think he's handled it quite well, by embracing obfuscation," Espino says. "He can go to the anti-immigrant crowd and say, 'Look, I've been doing something. Don't accuse me of not having done something. Don't accuse me of being mayor of a sanctuary city, because I'm not that.' Yet he can go to the Hispanic constituency and the likes of Michael Nowakowski, Ed Pastor, Mary Rose Wilcox, your typical Latino politicos in town, and show that he hasn't pushed it too far. That he's been stemming the tide.

"All in all, if you're going to handle such a thorny issue like this, where passions are inflamed on both sides . . . I can't think of a better way to actually handle it than he did."




International inspiration


Despite the turbulence that has marked the start of his second term, Gordon has made progress on initiatives that could come to define his second term.

In March, Gordon made his first international trip on city business, traveling to the United Arab Emirates to pursue an economic development agreement with Dubai.

The mayor has clearly been inspired by Dubai, a wealthy desert city-state between Saudi Arabia and Oman on the Persian Gulf.

Touring the 162-story Burj Dubai, which will be the world's tallest building when finished in 2009, Gordon marveled at the emirate's rapid growth and came back determined to make Phoenicians think bigger about their own city.

"What is going on there . . . is beyond words," Gordon says. "Where I was thinking we were doing a lot in four years, they work three shifts a day, six days a week."

Phoenix's short-term goals with Dubai include securing regular flights to Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and luring investments from Dubai firms in aviation and sustainability businesses.

Gordon hopes to capture some of the anything-is-possible spirit of the place and put it to work at home.

"I'd like to see at least the nation's tallest building in downtown Phoenix," Gordon says. "There's no reason why we can't be developing a new city leading the world in sustainability and technology."

It's the kind of big-picture thinking that would look nice on the resume of a gubernatorial candidate. And it meshes well with Gordon's dream of a world-class downtown.

Ask him what he wants Phoenix to look like four years from now, and he describes visiting downtown on a Wednesday night and having a hard time getting a reservation at any of the restaurants. Cranes will still be dotting the sky.

"And there's somebody coming up behind me saying we're not moving fast enough," Gordon says. "That we have to move faster now, without sacrificing our quality of life."


An uncertain future


Effusive on the subject of Phoenix, Gordon's guarded about his personal life. Ask him about his separation from wife Christa Severns, and he recoils, declining to discuss the topic.

What he will speak to, in a roundabout way, is how exhausting it is to be the mayor - to maintain his personal relationships, to keep up with a hectic schedule, to answer the daily criticism.

"It's challenging, whether you're a state legislator, a president, a council person, a mayor," Gordon says. "You are in the public eye. And your actions are judged without your ability to explain why or why not or that you weren't, you are or aren't even involved in something."

He's quick to add that he loves his job, would love to do it forever, and that for all its challenges, "it's still fun." Still, it takes its toll, even for a workaholic like Gordon.

The mayor thinks of all the times he finds himself in a room full of hands to shake. He has trouble focusing on the person he's speaking to, he says, because he worries he might be snubbing someone else.

All the double-tall non-fat lattes in the world can't solve that one. So many competing interests, so many unknowns. He has been up since 3:30 a.m., and God knows what's coming up behind him.

"You're always looking over your shoulder," he says.

Looking over your shoulder, and looking to the next election.

Gordon says he hasn't made up his mind what he'll do when he leaves the mayor's office, and his friends and co-workers tend to believe him. He will say that he's not interested in Congress ("forget it"), citing the constant travel and the difficulties of being just one vote of 435.

If he doesn't seek higher office, though, he will be an anomaly. His three immediate predecessors to be elected mayor - Terry Goddard, Paul Johnson and Rimsza - have sought statewide office.

Goddard and Johnson each ran for governor twice before and lost. Goddard is expected to run again in 2010.

The last Phoenix mayor to be elected governor was Jack Williams in 1966.

Beyond history, Gordon could face resistance from his own party.

He has rankled many Democrats by endorsing high-profile Republican candidates for office. In the presidential election, he's supporting his friend, Sen. John McCain. He has also backed Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas and Sheriff Arpaio, both Republicans, although he broke ranks with Arpaio in March after accusing the sheriff of racial profiling in his immigration-enforcement sweeps.

In criticizing Arpaio, Gordon became the most prominent Arizona official to take on the popular sheriff. It's the sort of thing that could endear him to Democratic primary voters. But his aides dismiss a political motive behind Gordon's stance, saying the mayor is genuinely concerned about the potential for civil-rights violations. (For his part, Arpaio denies all charges of racial profiling and has called the mayor's criticisms "outrageous.")

But for now, Gordon is focused on his work at City Hall.

"And as long as I enjoy what I'm doing, I'll do that," Gordon says. "At the time when that's over, (I'll) look at my options. If I can serve in public service and enjoy it and make a difference, I will. If not, then there's the private sector or teaching sector.

"Or maybe the old-person's home," he adds with a chuckle. "We'll see if all these guys who have now prospered remember me."

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