For more than 40 years, Republicans have been in charge of the Oakland County Board of Commissioners, but on Wednesday evening it was a new boss banging the gavel over a newly elected Democratic majority.

The liberal-leaning leaders announced their wish for collaboration across party lines, but privately they endorsed ideas sure to spark contention with conservatives in Michigan's most affluent county: embracing mass transit, working with outsiders toward regional goals and “welcoming” diversity.

Among newcomers elected in November’s “blue wave” to tilt the board leftward was Penny Luebs, a social workers and longtime mayor of Clawson, who defeated incumbent Republican Wade Fleming of Troy.

“We will shore up Oakland County, but then we can look around and see how we can help this region improve,” Luebs said before the meeting opened.

Elected chairman in a unanimous vote, by 11 Democrats and 10 Republicans, was County Commissioner Dave Woodward, a long-serving Democrat from Royal Oak, who has headed the Democratic Party in Oakland County.

“Tonight, we begin a new era in Oakland County,” Woodward told the audience of family members and friends, campaign workers and the mayors of Ferndale, Lathrup Village and Southfield, at the commissioners’ auditorium in Pontiac.

Sure enough, it was 1972 when Democrats last had an elected majority on the board. (History buffs recall that Democrats did spring a majority in 1976 when some Republicans, disillusioned by the Watergate scandal, switched parties.)

Woodward began with a call to collaborate, getting loud applause by saying: “Washington could learn a thing or two by watching how Democrats and Republicans work together in Oakland County.” Indeed, the two sides have done so, with years of often unanimous votes.

Yet, change happened fast this week. Before the meeting, Woodward made clear his wish for a board more independent of County Executive L. Brooks Patterson, now in his 27th year as the county’s popular CEO, and insistent as recently as Wednesday afternoon that he had no plans, at age 80, to resign.

Michigan Public Act 139 clearly states that the county board is the governing body for Oakland County, Woodward told the Free Press, adding that the many years of Patterson dominating county governance needed to end, and that it was high time for "shared responsibility."

That vision translated quickly into a power shift.

“We’re already streamlining operations,” said County Commissioner Helaine Zack, a Democrat who represents Huntington Woods, Ferndale, Hazel Park and a slice of Oak Park, as well as tiny Royal Oak Township.

Until now, Patterson and his staff took the initiative in setting committee agendas, particularly those of the finance committee. Not anymore, Zack said, during an intermission in Wednesday's meeting.

“We’re taking that power back,” she said, as the newly appointed chair of the finance committee.

“I’m smiling like the Cheshire Cat — it took me 15 years on this board to get here with a majority," Zack said.

Another telling change at the get-go?

“We’re now going to have a couple of African-American women from south Oakland County on the Parks Commission. And they’re going to make different decisions” than did their predecessors, who were white men from northern communities, Zack said.

The new delegates will address a long-standing beef of Oakland County’s liberals, who cluster in the county’s south end. That is, all county residents pay property taxes to support the county’s award-winning park system but most of the facilities are far from the south end’s population centers.

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Getting the new appointees is “a good thing — no, a great thing,” said county parks chief Dan Stencil, who sat in the audience. Stencil has overseen moves to bring more parks money into the county's south end. Still, the vast majority of county spending on trails, golf courses, wheelchair-friendly fishing holes and a planned off-road-vehicle course lands at sites that are 30 to 60-minute drives from, say, Huntington Woods — where Zack lives.

Monitoring the meeting for Patterson was Chief Deputy County Executive Gerald Poissan, who said it was far more than a friendly formality that the board has a widely admired tradition of passing budget resolutions with unanimous votes. Whenever it happens, Wall Street is watching, Poissan said.

“That level of cooperation between the parties helped us get a AAA bond rating,” saving boatloads of money for taxpayers across the county, he said.

“In the next decade, this county will need to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for new infrastructure,” and keeping that AAA rating — held by just a handful of counties statewide — keeps taxes low, Poisson said. It means Wall Street bankers give a rock-bottom interest rate not only to county projects but to those financed through the county, by cities, townships, drain boards and other groups.

The outgoing vice chair of the board echoed Woodward's call for harmony. Republican Michael Spisz — representing northern townships of Brandon, Oakland and Oxford as well as Leonard, Ortonville and Oxford villages — got applause as he stepped down.

Before the meeting, Spisz said the Democrats’ razor-thin majority of one vote lets them call some but not all of the shots.

“They’re trying to position themselves while looking at Brooks and his veto power,” said Spisz, who works full-time as an automotive engineer. County commission seats are part-time jobs.

The board’s Democrats would need three more votes, achieving a 14-7 tally, to override a Patterson veto. That would require three Republicans to defect from their party’s leader — an unlikely prospect in Oakland County, Spisz said.

Contact Bill Laitner: blaitner@freepress.com