As normal life returns and Americans look back at the past year with clear eyes, it’s almost difficult to believe the actions that some local officials took to undermine their constituents’ recovery efforts.
Bill de Blasio at the gym. Muriel Bowser at a Delaware campaign event. Eric Garcetti’s threat to shut off water to families who invite private guests into their own homes. We remember these names. Throughout the country, though, local mayors outside of the spotlight followed similar paths, privately dismissing the gravity of COVID-19 while publicly leveraging ‘pandemic porn’ in order to advance political goals—and nowhere was that mismanagement (and personal exploitation) more prevalent, or less covered, than in the U.S.’s fifth-largest city.
There is a reason Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, who presided over a coronavirus hotspot in 2020, glossed over the pandemic during her second inaugural speech last Monday.
Gallego—née Widland, prior to her marriage to her now ex-husband, Congressman Ruben Gallego—always had her eyes on this prize. After working for the state party in her 20s, the Democrat’s career followed the trajectory of Peter’s Principle, by which people inadvertently are promoted to their level of incompetence. Gallego’s allies ushered her into various political positions for which she was little-qualified until finding a sweet spot: a safe-blue district on the Phoenix City Council, set to the backdrop of a low-turnout, odd-numbered-year election.
Finally occupying a safe Democratic seat, Gallego became the outspoken pet-project of the progressive left, a coalition of liberal activists and public-sector labor unions that soon would push her to campaign in a special election for mayor, an unexpected turn of events only made possible by the dominos of then-Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema running for the U.S. Senate, at which point Phoenix’s then-mayor, Greg Stanton, resigned in order to run for Sinema’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, thereby vacating his own at City Hall.
In 2019, despite failing to garner even 45 percent in the first round of voting, Gallego took advantage of the anti-Trump sentiment in Phoenix’s dense Democratic downtown, squeaked through the special election’s run-off, and was sworn-in as mayor.
But a once-in-a-generation pandemic was brewing around the corner—and, the city’s residents suddenly realized that Gallego, like the dog that caught the car, wasn’t sure what to do once the prize was in her hands.
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It was clear early on that Arizona would be impacted by this virus. Our state health agency confirmed the first case of COVID-19 in Maricopa County, encompassing the city of Phoenix, on January 26, 2020, and immediately activated the Health Emergency Operations Center. The White House formed its Coronavirus Task Force two days after that, at which point the administration was providing ongoing briefings to Arizona Governor Doug Ducey—for whom I have worked, as a disclosure—and other officials.
Gallego herself was late to the game.
For months, the mayor continued to lobby the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to host an in-person presidential primary debate in Phoenix. She hosted promotional events with DNC Chairman Tom Perez and urged tourists to purchase tickets and travel, and her office insisted as late as mid-March that “the debate is moving forward as planned,” dismissing concerns from health experts. (Despite her pleas, the DNC canceled the debate.)
The Democrat spent the rest of the month haplessly attending crowded events with celebrities like rapper Pitbull, oblivious to the pandemic’s growing intensity (and the actions of other officials) around her. Then, without warning on March 17, perhaps realizing the optics of her neglect amid rising case numbers, Gallego decided to overcorrect by issuing a “Great Emergency” declaration—a vast and unchecked executive authority (compared to a “Local Emergency”) that would have allowed the mayor to unilaterally place Phoenix in a state of perpetual lockdown with little to no input.
The problem for her was: No one trusted Gallego’s judgment, especially not the Phoenix City Council. They never did—and the fact that she even attempted to grant herself such a broad power confirmed everything that the council members felt about her in the first place.
Councilman Sal DiCiccio, an outspoken conservative on the Democrat-heavy council, said that granting Gallego “unlimited power” for “however so long she chooses, with no recourse” for accountability was “nothing short of martial law.” And it wasn’t just conservatives who felt that way. The local alt-weekly wrote that the proposal would “represent an unprecedented step” for municipal government, and four liberal members of the council issued a joint statement deeming her “irresponsible to not consider the consequences to working people.”
Her proposal had been dead on arrival, and now it was formally so.
