Maitland mayor's misbehavior stirs debate

Maitland Mayor Howard Schieferdecker’s misuse of power as designated by the City Charter is churning up calls for his resignation, and rumors of decades-long wrongful delegation of power among the city’s leadership.

Last month, the mayor admitted to, he said, unknowingly violating the Charter by directly ordering city staff to do tasks – in this case, draft new financials pertaining to downtown development – without City Council approval. Directing staff – other than the city manager, clerk and attorney – is not a power given to the mayor or any individual Council member in Maitland’s “strong city manager, weak mayor” form of government, and is explicitly prohibited in the Charter.

The mayor apologized publicly in multiple meetings and said he’d correct his procedures going forward, but some city residents say that’s not enough.

“If I committed a crime I would have to pay for it and so should any member of Council who committed a crime (against the City Charter),” said resident Barry Crooks at the Aug. 25 Council meeting. “… [The Charter] is the law, and we need to abide by the law. We can not simply step aside.”

Other residents, such as Leonard Schmidt, said the city needs to take a good look at itself and its proceedings, and notice that they haven’t been functioning in the proper “weak mayor” form of government for over a decade.

“This city has deeper issues than you ever realize,” Schmidt said.

Schieferdecker said he was unaware that directing staff was beyond his breadth of power partially because that’s how he’d seen business done by previous Maitland mayors in the past. Sections within the Charter state that violations of any of its ordinances call for the violator to forfeit their office, but Assistant City Attorney Andrew Smith said the circumstances surrounding the admissions made by the mayor can be interpreted subjectively.

“We don’t need to get distracted with trying to bring the mayor down for something that is, like the attorney said, subjective,” Councilwoman Joy Goff-Marcil said. “One person is going to look at it one way and somebody else is going to look at it the another way. And the mayor, I think, now knows the boundary.”

Amongst the confusion, Councilwoman Bev Reponen said that, going forward, the city needs to make very clear the correct protocol for directing staff to avoid further blunders in the balance of power.

“I don’t want the residents to think we don’t know our role,” she said.

Councilmembers agreed that they needed a sit down with the city manager and attorney for a lesson in the City Charter do’s and don’ts. At press time an agenda item to discuss the Charter hadn’t been set.