By Susan Motander
Monrovia Mayor Tom Adams used the State of the City address (which he referred to as the “State of the Community”) to put forward the idea of returning to a rotationally selected mayor from the members of the council.
Monrovia shifted to electing the mayor directly in 1978 with the election of Patricia Ostrye, followed by Bob Bartlett in 1980. Bartlett held the office for more than two decades. The term of office for the mayor is two years with the other council members elected to four-year terms.
Adams said he was not doing this because he did not want to be mayor, a position to which he was just elected in April of last year, but rather because he thought it would “remove a distraction from taking care of your business.” He noted that the vote of each member of the council had the same weight.
The mayor pointed out that other cities the size of Monrovia do not have directly elected mayors and that the city was only one of six among the 31 cities in the San Gabriel valley that had direct mayoral elections (the others being Azusa, Baldwin Park, La Verne, San Dimas, and South El Monte).
He called for the creation of a committee to study this issue and urged the rest of the city to support him in this matter. “You can do more if you don’t care who sits in the middle seat,” he said.
From the beginning, the State of the City address had a different feeling, from the city manager helping the youth commissioners in handing out bottles of water, to the serving of popcorn to those in attendance, the tone was a far cry from previous “State of” addresses.
This became even more obvious when, rather than giving the entire address himself, the mayor called upon the other members of the council to report of different aspects of the state of the city. It made for a more diverse meeting, especially when Councilmember Alex Blackburn deviated from the prepared script.
