Mesa mayor reaches out to residents

Mesa Mayor Scott Smith was ready for his close-up Thursday night at the Mesa Arts Center.

It was billed as the Mayor's Summer Series, an hour with the chief executive of the city.

"This is simply a town hall," Smith said before his first in a series of such meetings. "We want to give people an opportunity to have a discussion with the mayor."

Thursday evening, the lobby of the arts center was staffed with red-coated ushers; a refreshment spread of water, juice and cookies was displayed; the mayor chatted among the respectable crowd gathered in a 200-or-so-capacity theater.

Mary Ellen Albrecht, a city resident of nine years, sat with her husband before the town hall. "We're hear to listen; we have no axes to grind," she said. Her husband said he agreed.

Resident Hal Goldfarb said over the eight years he has lived off and on in the city, this administration has made strides over previous, unnamed city mayors and councils.

He believes the answer to further improvements lies in more representation.

"The council is too small for a city of half a million," Goldfarb said. "When the city was chartered, we had six City Council members and a mayor, and now we still have six council members and a mayor despite some of the most significant growth in the country."

Once the town hall started, the mayor worked the audience like a confident, funny front man for a celebrity act. But he was a one-man show, warming the audience up for himself.

Standing alone on stage, he coughed loudly.

"I've been fighting bronchitis," he said, facetiously apologizing to all whose hands he might have shook earlier.

Two sets of microphones made it around the nearly filled, intimate amphitheater.

The questions were both pragmatic and philosophical.

Up top a woman asked for a stiffer noise ordinance. Another complained about a definite lack of community in a "drive-through society."

One resident mentioned a neighborhood block watch was one way of fostering community.

Smith focused mostly on the theme of community during the first in a series he said he has rough plans to repeat Aug. 20, with the hope of establishing future dates, as well. None have been set, but the mayor said he was committed to more in an effort to allow as many residents as possible to attend.

He said it was more than about getting the word out to the community, it was about hearing from them, too.

"Where we have come from has a fascinating history of community; we've grown fast, and the first thing to go because of growth is community," Smith explained. "It has created some challenges for us as a city."

Goldfarb raised his hand and was offered a microphone, like the others who asked questions and got direct answers from the mayor.

"There's too much competition in this country; that's an impediment to creating a sense of community," Goldfarb said, stressing that Mesa was behind other cities in things like mass transportation and preserving public green spaces, which are ways of building communities.

"We need less competition and more cooperation," Goldfarb said. "How do you reconcile competition with cooperation?"

Smith countered that Mesa wasn't in competition with its neighbors like Scottsdale or Tempe. "I'm over that; we're in this together; one city can't succeed if the whole region doesn't," he said.

His affirmation came with a condition, though.

"Mesa as a community is underachieving," Smith said. "We're not creating jobs; we don't have enough health care institutions; we don't have enough educational institutions; we don't have enough tourism."

The city's chief executive said filling that need was the task the current council has been trying to turn around.

To illustrate his priorities, he used it as an acronym: H.E.A.T.

Appropriately so, regionally speaking, it stands for health, education, aerospace and tourism.

All in all, perhaps one of his most prevalent themes during the town hall was optimism.

"We have an aerospace industry second to almost none," the mayor noted.