Republican mayor in Rochester Hills pushes for bipartisan change

Bill Laitner | Detroit Free Press

Show Caption Hide Caption Oakland County mayor has national platform to preach bipartisan ideas Bryan Barnett, mayor of Rochester Hills and new president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, says local government is working well to help Americans.

Everywhere Americans look, government seems broken.

Lansing can’t fix the damn roads — still. Other state capitals are stuck too.

In Washington, the two parties are girding for a war of impeachment. The bad-news beat gets louder, day by day.

But a different kind of drummer is keeping time for the nation’s mayors. He’s a Republican who runs a leafy rural kingdom in Oakland County. Yet, he makes regular phone calls to the Democratic mayors of the nation’s biggest cities, referring to one after another as “my very good friend.”

Rochester Hills Mayor Bryan Barnett has long brimmed with good humor and charisma. He’s well-known in his own town for sporting zany socks, well-known at City Hall for wearing an outlandish red-and-white Christmas suit for the annual holiday party, and well-known in Oakland County as one of the area’s most popular politicians.

This year, Barnett gained a national platform. As he spreads his optimism as the new leader of the nation’s mayors, he insists there is good news about American government.

It’s our local units, he says — from big cities like Detroit to growing towns like his suburb of 75,000 residents — that are running well, offering fresh solutions to big problems, and picking up the slack left by gridlocked state and federal lawmakers.

“So many good things are happening in America’s cities – most of the job creation, most of the innovation,” Barnett says, adding: “I think we’re going to see, more and more, that local elected leaders are America’s best hope for real change.”

Barnett was just re-elected to a fourth term as full-time mayor of his suburb 15 miles north of Detroit, drawing 83.6% of the votes. But he also spent recent months ramping up his one-year term as president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, elected by his peers to head the nation’s most prestigious group of local government leaders.

The group — founded in 1933 by then Detroit Mayor Frank Murphy when the nation was mired in the Great Depression — has about 1,000 active mayors, all from cities of at least 30,000 residents. Barnett’s leadership has put Detroit and Oakland County at front and center in national discussions of urban problem-solving. And it has him pushing a radically positive idea to any disillusioned voter and taxpayer who’ll listen.

His mantra? Forget the big shots in Washington for a moment. Forget those in your state capital, too. Your local government is getting the job done.

On a side table in the waiting area of the Rochester Hills mayor’s office sits a stack of scholarly books on cities, including one whose title neatly echoes Barnett’s urban boosterism: “If Mayors Ruled the World – Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities,” by Benjamin Barber, founder of something called the Global Parliament of Mayors.

Waiting for Barnett, a visitor picks it up. Moments later, the mayor notices and remarks, as he offers an outstretched hand.

“A real shame – Dr. Barber passed away recently – but I’ve participated in the Global Parliament and they’re doing good work,” he says.

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In aspiring to rule the world, or at least to improve it, Barnett and other leading U.S. mayors have held recent meetings across the country but also in Europe and Africa where, Barnett says, “they have some of the same problems we have.” By that he means not just the same symptoms, like poverty and pollution, but also the same root causes, including central governments that move like molasses while cities, swept by change, need fast reaction times.

“We’re in an era where central governments are not responding at the level and speed that cities need. And that’s not partisan. That’s both parties, not acting when cities need to act,” he says.

Barnett rattles off examples like it’s a stump speech he’s given a dozen times, which he has: infrastructure, immigration, gun control, transportation and more.

On infrastructure: “The Democrats had a $750-million plan (under Obama). We never saw a penny. Trump had a trillion-dollar plan (touted during his campaign). Again, nothing. There’s been zero in terms of anything passed” by Congress, he says.

“The Democrats had a $750-million plan (under Obama). We never saw a penny. Trump had a trillion-dollar plan (touted during his campaign). Again, nothing. There’s been zero in terms of anything passed” by Congress, he says. On gun control: A banner hangs high in Rochester Hills City Hall that proclaims,“Safest City in Michigan.” Barnett’s a Republican, in a party that usually has its feet in concrete over gun control, and he knows a lot of gun owners. Still, he favors stiffer background checks. He says he sees no conflict, and not even much connection, between that and Second Amendment rights. He says he's been moved by visiting some of the communities where mass shootings took place. "This isn't an attack on gun ownership. This is 'we want to be safe.' "

On transit: It’s easy to think that big cities would get no support from this mayor, in a city of subdivisions and wide-open spaces, where the City Hall is surrounded by a 100-acre woodland and backs up to a trout stream. And where SMART buses don’t run, and daily life is impossible to envision without a car. Even so, this ex-urban mayor seeks common ground and the big picture. "From a national perspective, transportation is one of the great challenges to income disparity and equal opportunity. Many of my colleagues have pockets of their cities where people can’t get to jobs. I, personally, Mayor Barnett, am a proponent of mass transit systems. I’ve seen how they re-energize regions all over the world,” he says. But here's his qualifier, in a comment that those seeking a mass-transit millage in Oakland County ought to note. “I will also say we’ve had many groups come to us and say they want our help on transit in Oakland County but they’re not offering much to my city. I’ve heard they would send one bus up Rochester Road and have people walk to it and ride to Troy and take buses from there,” he says, casting a quizzical look, as if to say, imagine that! “These groups have to respect my city’s needs and wants,” he goes on, suggesting that “an adaptation of Uber would make more sense out here.” He points to a story in the December issue of AARP Bulletin that touts just such a system, blending bus service with Uber. It’s being tested in West Sacramento, Calif., another city whose mayor is “my very good friend,” Barnett adds earnestly.

Key urban issues such as these and others are built into the written agenda of the group Barnett now leads. That agenda is called “Mayors’ Vision for America: A 2020 Call to Action.” The 28-page document has Barnett’s name at the top. It’s goals embrace a spectrum of issues top-most in the minds of the nation’s most respected mayors, bridging both political parties. . . from “Protect and Advance Human and Civil Rights” to “Invest in America’s Water and Wastewater Systems,” from “Join with Mayors and Police Chiefs to Support Public Safety for all” to “Fix Our Broken Immigration System.” The mayors’ next move, led by Barnett, is to make waves with the “Mayors’ Vision” statement at the group’s annual winter meeting next month in Washington, D.C., Jan. 22-24.

“We want all the legislators in Washington to know, this is what we’re talking about. And we really want the candidates for president to be speaking to the problems of cities and to our platform,” Barnett says. Here’s where he preaches a creed that sounds very old-fashioned: government that works, with leaders who compromise. Bipartisan debate followed by compromise. It can happen, he insists.

In Washington, D.C., next month, “We should have 250 mayors there, from across the country. You’ll have 250 Democrats and Republicans standing side by side. We don’t focus on the 20% of stuff that we don’t agree on. We focus on the 80% that we do agree on.”

It’s hard to be bipartisan these days, and downright unfashionable in many quarters. Yet, “Barnett is holding the bipartisan flag high,” says Tom Cochran, executive director and CEO of the mayors’ group. Cochran has been with the U.S. Conference of Mayors for half a century, since 1969. He’s seen hordes of mayors come and go, including former Detroit mayor Coleman Young, during Young’s one-year stint as the Conference president.

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“Barnett empathizes very much with the big-city mayors,” Cochran says, calling him “very close” to mayors Bill de Blasio of New York City and Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles.

“He understands that they differ with him on a lot of policies but he’s always seeking common ground. He’s got a very strong, gregarious personality, and that’s a lot of what leadership is,” Cochran says.

Barnett still speaks of his “Republican principles of smaller government and fiscal responsibility." But he’s been active in the Conference for several years, working his way through various committees while clearly gaining respect for many Democrats who lead the biggest U.S. cities. Conservative talk-show hosts frequently excoriate Democrats for having run the nation’s big urban centers into a liberal rut, blaming them for crime, poverty, bad schools, joblessness and. . . rats.

Said nationally syndicated radio host Mark Levin, whose show is carried on weeknights in metro Detroit by WJR (760 AM), on a recent show: “Democrats haven't just turned Baltimore into a rat-infested place. The same goes for other big cities they run. They’re all a mess.” Others on the conservative talk-show circuit repeat the same sentiment, often. Barnett says he rejects the premise.

“If you heard a bunch of big-city mayors in my conference, they could explain how a lot of their approaches are working. The talk-show hosts have a particular point of view. But I can tell you unequivocally that neither Democrats or Republicans have a patent on good ideas,” he says.

In the elite company of mayors with household names, Barnett, 43, has hustled to make himself and Rochester Hills known. Early on, as he got active in the mayors group, some of his peers from other states and their staffs immediately mentioned having a friend at the Mayo Clinic.

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“I’d say, ‘No, no, not Rochester, Minnesota — Michigan,’” he says, chuckling. Or they’d think of New York State, where Rochester is the third-largest city. Helping to clarify things, Barnett recently hosted more than 50 mayors from across the country at a Conference of Mayors meeting in Rochester Hills.

“They got to see what I’m so proud about,” he says, including the nation’s leading city for designing and building robots for manufacturing. They also got to meet Rochester Hills’ first lady, Corinn Barnett, and take home her CD of Christmas songs. Barnett’s wife, mother of two, has her own career as leader of the Corrin Barnett Band.

All of that is raising the profile of Rochester Hills nationally, drawing praise from Wayne State University political scientist Marjorie Sarbaugh Thompson.

It's an unexpected plus to have a suburban-Detroit Republican speaking on a national stage for the progress that metro Detroit is making, Sarbaugh Thompson said.

"And it's great that mayors can reach across the aisle," to show that bipartisan consensus is attainable even on big, seemingly intractable issues, she said.

Unlike the legendary Republican L. Brooks Patterson, who led Oakland County for decades and who was vigorously partisan while often finding fault with Detroit, Barnett wears his conservative principles lightly. And he’s quick to compliment his peer south of 8 Mile.

“Mayor Duggan and his team have done some really good things for Detroit. They’ve got a long way to go, you could say. I choose to focus on how far they’ve come,” Barnett says.

Then he adds a signature upbeat note. It's a welcome thought for anyone dreading the new year's political conflict and government gridlock:

“It’s just a matter of perspective. I choose to be an optimist about America’s cities.”

Contact: blaitner@freepress.com. Todd Spangler, Washington correspondent for the Detroit Free Press, contributed to this report.