New mayor-new day

[bornagainbiking]

Well the votes are in and a spread of about 12000 votes with a slight rise in turnout. The last gap between 1st and 2nd was approx. 400 in 2006.
The majority of the people have spoken and we have 4 yrs to weather the storm (or not).
Will they work together for the people?
I hope so and will encourage my alderman on a regular basis.
Good luck to Hamilton.

[padthai]

Dare I say that it feels like "another hometown morning"??

Ugh.

[mattgrande]

Not who I was hoping for, but I'm glad it wasn't DiIanni. Congrats to Bratina, he ran a solid campaign.

Here's hoping we see four years of prosperity.

[SteelTown]

I foresee a volatile, bitter and divided council with Bratina at the helm.

[LikeHamilton]

Actually he did not win a majority. In a federal and provincial election he would have a minority government, maybe.
Bratina only got 37.32% of the votes. Fred and Larry received 55.83% of the votes. In total, 62.68% did not vote for Mayor Bob.



They will have to stock up on pencils for council meetings.

[markbarbera]

Bratina achieved a clear plurality, but not a pure majority, that's true. Eisenberger had only received plurality in the 2006 election as well, with a total vote count not unlike that won by Bratina last night. Di Ianni did have a majority win in the 2003 election.

I don't think the legitimacy of Bratina's win could be held in question by councillors (or anyone really for that matter), considering the calibre of the other two rival candidates and the relative short campaign timeframe Bratina had to organize his campaign.

If I was Bob, I would have a lot of pens made out with his mayoral title so he can hand them out to folks instead of business cards or lapel pins. People aren't going to drop this tired little "pen thrower" label, so hey why not have fun with it?

[markbarbera]

Originally Posted by LikeHamilton

Actually he did not win a majority. In a federal and provincial election he would have a minority government, maybe.

Actually, to be more accurate in the analogy, if this was a provincial and federal election, Bratina would have cleaned up. Of all the wards in Hamilton, Bratina won all but three. Eisenberger won Ward 1, Di Ianni won Wards 8 and 10, and all the other wards were won by Bratina. So, if we were to apply the parliamentary analogy to the wards that make up Hamilton, Bratina would have netted 12 seats, Di Ianni 2 and Eisenberger 1. 12 of 15 seats would be a strong majority if Hamilton Council was a parliament.

This is also the most widespread ward-by-ward win by a mayor in recent memory. Bob's support was pretty much solid right across Hamilton's urban, suburban and rural fabric. I think this will contribute to a more stable council once the ward councillors realize his voter support is city-wide.

[Anders Knudsen]

That's pretty amazing for a candidate that has been pretty consistently on the 'urban' side of a lot of polarizing issues...area rating, AEGD, big box development. I wonder if that was widely known? Or maybe that's where the deamalgamation message came from, to play to disgruntled suburbanites.

I'm expecting we'll see some progress on the Royal Connaught now.

[c@taract_soulj@h]

Let's hope...I didn't think twice when came to voting for Bratina

[padthai]

From today's Spec: Bratina's temper, agenda worry council
Andrew Dreschel
October 29, 2010
http://bit.ly/c74W52

Some [councilors] reportedly are considering baiting him when he takes over the mayor's chair, hoping to goad him into fully exposing his angry side to the public...

Grrrrrrrreat. Because that's what this City needs right now. Very constructive, councilors. I'm not happy with the Pen-Thrower-Elect either, but let's get things done and not play petty politics. I'm not surprised those morons stay off the record for those quotes too...shows where their real priorities are at.

Edit: I'm allowed to name-call because I wasn't voted in!!

[SteelTown]

Can't wait to see Bratina throw the gavel to a councilor, preferably Merulla haha.

[SteelTown]

Question-and-answer session with mayor elect ends abruptly

http://www.thespec.com/news/municipa...-ends-abruptly

The Spectator asked mayor-elect Bob Bratina to take part in a question-and-answer session about his future role and the city. He agreed, but said he would only answer the same questions we asked Mayor Fred Eisenberger shortly after his 2006 win. This is an exact transcript of his answers.

Who will Bob Bratina be as mayor?

Who will I be? I will be Bob Bratina, the person that 53,000 people seem to be familiar enough and comfortable enough with to have put their trust in.

What’s going to be your greatest challenge stepping into this role?

Greatest challenge — remaking or rebranding the image of Hamilton, which has fallen a bit. We all need to feel better about our city, and we’ve had some unfortunate publicity with regards to the stadium and the NHL and things like that. So I would say the biggest challenge is to rebuild a positive image for the city of Hamilton.

What’s your vision for the city?

To be a happy, prosperous place. The kind of city that anybody would want to live in. We have our issues, and we have to fix those things. So my vision for Hamilton is to be a beautiful, prosperous, caring city.

What words do you have for Fred Eisenberger?

I spoke to Fred, so — what words do I have for him? Is that the question you asked Fred in 2006?

Yes, except for him it was Larry Di Ianni.

Thank you for your service to the community.

Anything else?

And hopefully, that he’ll be able to continue to contribute.

In four years, what will be the legacy of your first term as mayor?

The vision statement that you asked me to give you is the outcome that I hope will be my legacy — that Hamilton will have rejoined the ranks of great Canadian cities.

And how are we going to be able to measure that?

That’s enough.

You don’t want to answer any more questions?

No.

Why not?

Let’s not go through this again, OK? You’re asking me how I’m going to go and do this. And then, my colleagues are going to say, “Who are you to say what we’re going to do or not? You haven’t even talked to us yet.” Don’t you understand that?

[SteelTown]

Wow, off to a great start.

[Dr Awesomesauce]

In some ways, Bratina is the anti-politician. Politicians tend to me mild-mannered and fairly bland [at least in this country] and he's hot-tempered and just a little mental. I can't wait to see how things unfold...it might just be a disaster, folks.

[bornagainbiking]

I dare say sparks will fly and maybe it's about time. This city has been sliding into a huge whole for years and nobody really cares. Bob brings passion and I think a genuine concern, He appears blunt and to the point not wasting time on tiptoeing around the elephant in a room.
Yes, he may have to reassess his approach and some patience.
However, already the clowns are setting up the justification to disagree with the "boss" and blame it on him.
Well He placed 12000 ahead of second place and 14000 ahead of third. that's quite a spread.
People want change, and I voted for Bob and if my local clown sides with the three amigo alliance over the leadership this city needs I will let him know. Drop the petty schoolyard crap and get to work the last 4 yrs was a waste of time talk talk talk as this city dies.
Bob is the boss and he has to learn to lead properly. Fred was too soft.

[markbarbera]

A fair opinion on the Q&A posted here is not possible without knowing the context surrounding the interview. What transpired prior to the interview, and what was transpiring during the interview non-verbally? Who was conducting the interview?

From the final comment by Bratina during the 'abruptly ended' interview, it is pretty apparent that Bratina had set a ground rule prior to the start of the interview that he would not go into specifics about the agenda for this term prior to Bratina having the chance to consult with the members of council. It would seem the interviewer wanted to wander into that discussion through a different path of questioning, so Bob said enough. Kudos for Bob for sticking to his guns and insisting on having the opportunity to discuss the agenda with council before discussing it with the media.

It is helpful to remember that the Spec editorial board was, to put it mildly, less than friendly towards Bob in their mayoral endorsement last week, writing him off almost instantly. And they have been less than discrete with their gushing over the former mayor in the past year. Dreschel's scathing critique of Bratina in his column earlier in the week sure wasn't going to work towards improving the Spec's relationship with our new mayor (Dreschel has a habit of tearing into pooliticians not in his favour, seems to me he ran a similar rant against Eisenberger in 2006 after he defeated Dreschel's darling Di Ianni).

The way I see it (if I had to guess what was going on during that interview) Bratina was sending a clear message to the editorial board. First off, he knows the media game and is not going to allow a self-righteous editorial board with a misplaced sense of entitlement influence the city's agenda for the next four years. Bob's been in the media business for 45 years and knows the game. This agenda is going to be set by the mayor and council, not by the print media, and this mayor doesn't intend to become beholden to the Spec editorial board.

Message received, judging by the sugary piece on Bratina that ultimately landed in the Spec today.

For the first time in ages, we have a gutsy, no-nonsense mayor. And I like that.

[thistleclub]

The article doesn't allow you to contextualize the time of the interview, but given the order of the stories' appearance online, you can surmise (rightly or wrongly) that he'd already be aware of the content of the morning's "temper/agenda" article, if only because of reaction quote. And then there's that afternoon's "province says no to deamalgamation" article:

At his platform launch in September, Bratina said deamalgamation is “absolutely” better than the current system and that he already contacted the province about the study. He repeated his promise throughout the campaign and it resonated with voters in the outlying areas of the city. Six of seven suburban wards chose Bratina as their top candidate, some by a wide margin. Mayor Fred Eisenberger, who came in third in Monday's election, said the deamalgamation issue played a role in his defeat."

That doesn't make him look much like the straight-talk, get-to-the-bottom-of-this-mess man, though it remains to be said that most people should have been able to smell deamalgamation talk as a stock election ploy – just like waiting until September 3 to declare intent but using the Spec to pre-announce on the front page a week before filing – and the Spec should have pursued the facts in September, when Bratina first floated the notion. The paper and the paper-thin platform were evidently made for each other.

Note also that the Q&A is authorless. It's probably fair to assume that either Dreschel or Reilly was administering the questions, in which case you'd understand some of his snippiness. Even so, it reflects rather poorly on his ability to rise above petty irritation. And to be fair, it might sound differently than it reads. Hopefully they release audio at some point.

I'd also say that it is not particularly out of character, something that voters in the exurbs might have overlooked because downtown is a meaningless abstraction to most of them and they could care less who's repping that area. Although Bratina has urban origins and inclinations, he got his new political mojo from the folks on the fringe, and they're his new bosses. To make matters muddier still, Bratina wasn't exactly endorsed by the old city. He won 1,049 fewer Ward 2 votes than in his last council run and came within 98 votes of ceding Ward 2 to Eisenberger, losing a third of its polls – at Benetto (so much for the NEN love), Central Presbyterian, Church of the Ascension, Philpott Memorial, and, ominously, City Hall; factor out the incumbent gimmes of rest homes and Bratina actually lost half his native polls. Ward 1 was his weakest showing city-wide, and its councillor endorsed Eisenberger.

[thistleclub]

Originally Posted by markbarbera

This agenda is going to be set by the mayor and council, not by the print media, and this mayor doesn't intend to become beholden to the Spec editorial board.

For whatever reason I was reminded of the GWB administration's attitude to the MSM and insistence on taking its case straight to the American people. That strategy was good enough for two terms down there. Time will tell if it can break our knee-jerk cycle of disposable mayors.

[realcity]

Go Bob and Kick arse. this City needs a huge kick and needs to start facing reality.

It peaked in 1989 and no one wants to realize that. We compare building permits to a loser year before, we compare employment stats to a bottom of the curve, look at GDP? Anyone ever thought about comparing 2009 to 1989?

Current employment levels, exports, port activity from current to before the early 90s recession? Hotel occupancy rates in 1989, office vacancy rates, tourist numbers, face it, TWENTY YEARS (that's a generation) of decline. And some people think that we we're on a fine and dandy course because half the population that lives and works in the city works at a publicly funded enterprise, namely a hospital or a school.

Let's Go Bob Bratina and Bob Young and start this ball rolling again.

[bigguy1231]

I have no doubt that Bob's reign as mayor will be memorable. But it will be for all the wrong reasons.

He is not going to be kicking ass or setting the agenda. He is not going to be able to be able to get deamalgamation on the table. He will get nothing done with the stadium issue.

The fact of the matter is city council as a whole will decide what happens in this city. The town clown will be relegated to cerimonial duties. He will not lead this council anywhere. They didn't respect him as a councillor and they will not respect him as mayor.

As for the Q and A with the Spectator, if he is going to throw a temper tantrum and storm out over a few legitimate questions, then he deserves to be villified by them and any other media in this city. But I am sure he will find comfort with the Ticat cheerleaders at CHML. They won't be asking him anything that he might have to think about.