by James Leonard

In early September, mayor Christopher Taylor has a scruffy beard grown on vacation. A month later, he’s clean-shaven and dressed in his usual khakis and a blue blazer.

The mayor has asked me back because he’s unhappy with his first interview. “I didn’t respond to your questions, generally speaking, because you framed it as [an article about] ‘leadership style.’ What I think you’re getting at is ‘how do you approach the job, how do you view the job?'”

Sitting in a conference room of Hooper Hathaway, the Main St. firm where he practices business and estate law, Taylor then offers an example of how he approaches the job of being mayor: “At city council meetings I make it a point to greet the councilmembers individually who are there at the opening bell. I always greet Jack [Eaton], shake his hand, and talk a little bit.

“That’s something that I did consciously,” Taylor explains. “It’s a little formalistic, but it’s important. If you’re going to work together, there should be some personal connection that exists, some warm conversation beforehand, particularly and most importantly for people who don’t always agree.”

Taylor and Eaton disagree often enough that Eaton backed one of Taylor’s opponents for mayor last year–and this year, Taylor backed Eaton’s council opponent. But that’s the new mayor in a nutshell: highly articulate and deeply concerned with civility–while still determined to get the results he wants.

One way to understand the very tall Taylor is to put him in the context of his predecessor, seven-term mayor John Hieftje. Taylor ran last year as the popular mayor’s heir apparent, and his message–Ann Arbor’s going in the right direction–clearly worked. He won a four-way race with almost half the total votes.

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was his mentor,” Hieftje says. “I didn’t know him before he ran [for council in 2008]. I would say he’s a very astute observer.”

When he was mayor, Hieftje says, he “had a vision of where to go. We had a good group of councilmembers. They were very supportive, so I got to be more forceful and engaged. I became the spokesperson of some initiatives, the greenbelt, for instance, and the train station.”

Hieftje “found religion in environmental causes,” affirms two-term Ward 2 councilmember and former planning commission chair Kirk Westphal. “If you can point to a single issue, it would be transportation and especially rail.”

“He was trying to build a model city,” says new Ward 3 rep Zach Ackerman, who’s been attending council meetings since 2009, when he was still a teenager, “from a sustainable system of city government to an environmental policy that was a leader in the state. And he started the conversation about a changing downtown.”

“John did not see that [maintaining] a status quo was possible,” says four-term Ward 1 rep Sabra Briere, who also ran for mayor last year. “John had as a goal that there would be broad-strokes consensus on the direction we were going, and consensus would continue year after year, and we would get to the goal.”

Taylor calls Hieftje “the right mayor at the right time. He had a vision for a train station and a greenbelt and made the case for why it would be good for the city–economically, environmentally, and in terms of quality of life–that was persuasive.”

Until it wasn’t any more–and Taylor inherited that part of Hieftje’s legacy too.

“When anyone is a leader for fourteen years, resentments build,” says Ackerman. “A lot of those resentments came to the surface at the end of the Hieftje administration.” Ackerman sees a council voting bloc “that existed to counter everything that he said: Jack Eaton, Steve Kunselman, Mike Anglin, Sumi Kailasapathy, and more often than not Jane Lumm.” The Observer calls that alliance the “back-to-basics caucus” as opposed to the mayor’s “activist coalition.”

Only Lumm would talk about Taylor. Eaton, Kailasapathy, and Kunselman declined to comment, while Anglin, who lost an August primary to Taylor-endorsed Chip Smith, did not reply to inquiries for this article.

Briere agrees the council fractured in Hieftje’s final years–and “as council became more confrontational, John became more withdrawn. If someone was strident and aggressive, it made negotiating difficult for him. And there were members of council who felt that negotiating was giving in. That would be completely foreign to John, who is a nice accommodating guy who knows you give and take to find a balance. To deal with people who weren’t looking for balance must have been very frustrating for him.”

It was. “I had fourteen years of patience, and the last year or two that patience frayed,” Hieftje says. “There is a lot of BS at the council meetings, a lot of posturing, and a lot of grandstanding. It’s frustrating, and I lost patience.”

Asked if he thought Hieftje was burned out by the end of his last term, Taylor pauses to weigh his words. “I agree. John was the recipient of criticisms that he did not deserve.” Asked which criticisms those were, Taylor smiles but says no more.

“I don’t read books on leadership,” Taylor says. “I don’t have a coach. I try to tell people what I think and treat people with courtesy.

“I’m fairly simple,” he continues. “I’m a warm person, I’m a cheerful person, and it’s important to me to have good relations with people that I disagree with. I don’t have a lot of patience for nastiness.” And that’s all he’ll say on the subject of his leadership style.

“Christopher has his own style,” says Hieftje. “Very cool, very balanced.”

“He’s nice,” says Jane Lumm, who survived a challenge from a Taylor-endorsed candidate in November. “He’s a gentleman. He’s more inclusive [than Hieftje]. He reaches out to people.”

“John would avoid talking to councilmembers if he found them unwilling to bend,” says Briere. “That didn’t mean on an issue. That meant period. He would avoid dealing with someone who was angry because anger was difficult for him to deal with–period.

“But Christopher’s style is engagement rather than withdrawal,” Briere continues. “I don’t mean that he gets angry. I mean he doesn’t let it ruffle him. Christopher engages people who are difficult to engage, which is a very positive thing. He doesn’t try to stop dissent. He doesn’t try to control outcomes. Those were all things people accused John of doing.”

“So far [Taylor] has really emphasized civil discussion,” says Westphal. “He does not shy away from correcting misinformation that is shared at the council table. But he does it in a very factual manner.”

“He operates in logic and reason”, Ackerman says. “When you listen to him speak at the table, it’s clear what his leadership style is: what are the facts, what are our values as a city, how do we apply those facts to those values, and what is the end result?”

That approach was on display in November’s deer cull debate, when Taylor cast a lone vote against using lethal means to thin the herd. “When we spoke before the deer vote, he told me how he was going to vote,” Briere says. “He’d listened to the public comment. He’d listened to the community. And his observation is 100 percent accurate. We don’t have community consensus on the solution, and we clearly didn’t have a community-approved plan. He said in public exactly what he has said to me.”

Taylor was just as frank about opposing the reelection of councilmembers who don’t share his vision of the city. “When I made the decision, I felt it was very important to do so with courtesy,” he says, “and have it be a positive statement about one candidate rather than a negative statement about another candidate.”

“He called to tell me he was endorsing Sally [Petersen],” says Lumm. “He was making the calls. He was very nice. He said this was the hardest one of these conversations. And at the end he said, ‘You know, Jane, it’s all about the votes.’ I said ‘I understand that.'”

“My relationship with Jane Lumm is a very warm one,” says Taylor. “Where there are issues on council where votes diverge, I’m more likely to diverge from her. But we’re still pals. We get along very well together.”

“Christopher’s method to make sure he gets what he wants is to overtly try to make sure people get elected who agree with him,” says Briere. “His decision to endorse in primaries was not something John ever did–except he sort of did. Everybody knew when John went door-to-door with Sandy Smith or Margie Teall. He was endorsing, he just wasn’t endorsing on paper.”

Once out of office, Hieftje also endorsed candidates–the same ones Taylor backed. “He’s very good at it,” says Hieftje admiringly. “I don’t think there’ll be any repercussions for him endorsing.”

After a year as mayor, “the [council] meetings feel more positive to me,” Taylor says. “We are getting along well as a council. We don’t agree on everything, but, where we do disagree, we are able to do so in a constructive manner.”

“In the couple of minor tiffs I’ve seen at the table so far, Taylor will lay the facts out with a smile and won’t swing back,” Westphal says. “It becomes a lot less mean if the person you’re fighting doesn’t fight back.”

“It’s gotten less abrasive,” agrees Briere. “It hasn’t gotten shorter.”

Meetings grew longer at the end of the Hieftje years in office as his activist coalition lost its grip on council. For the last several years, they’ve often lasted past midnight.

“It’s difficult as the mayor to try and shorten them, to say, ‘You’ve said that three times. Why do you need to say it again?'” says Hieftje. “‘Do you think we weren’t listening?'”

“The meetings are extraordinarily long,” says Westphal. “I don’t envy the position of chairing these meetings. There are a lot of ideas that get discussed too long, including some of mine. I need to be cracked down on, and so does everybody else.”

Taylor says there can be good reasons for long meetings. “Sometimes they last long because we have extensive public meetings. In those circumstances it is appropriate that we listen to members of the public who care deeply about the subjects that we are working on. I don’t begrudge that time at all. And the political culture does value full hearing, full process, and full engagement.”

The closest Taylor will come to criticism is to say “we have a tendency to work through issues at the table that might best be dealt with by prior engagement with staff.” But he has done something to increase efficiency. With the election of Ackerman and Smith, there are fewer members of the back-to-basics caucus on council to disagree with his initiatives.

Told Lumm spoke warmly of him, Taylor smiles. Told Eaton, Kunselman, Kailasapathy, and Anglin all had no comment, he smiles more broadly.

“Our policy goals often diverge, so we do not often work on matters together. That’s OK. At the same time, there are no cross words between us. In the ramp-up to election season, during election season, and after election season, we are collegial and warm with each other. That’s entirely as it should be.”

Asked about his future plans, the new mayor says, “I have no reason to think I won’t run again” for mayor next year.

Then Taylor smiles again–and why not? He defeated all his most likely challengers last year, so, unless something goes wrong, he’s probably got the job as long as he wants it.

With his two new council allies, the mayor enters his second year with a majority not seen since the peak of Hieftje’s administration. What will he do with it? “It will not surprise you to learn that my goal is what I talked about during the course of the campaign,” he says with yet another broad smile, “and that’s to broadly improve basic services and enhance quality of life.”

During his mayoral campaign last summer, Taylor signed on to a pledge to end chronic homelessness by 2018. As an intermediate step, he notes, “the city is working with county and other agencies to end [veterans’ homelessness] by 2016.”

At a Rotary Club meeting this past spring, he also spoke passionately about the need for more affordable housing. Since then, the council approved the county affordable housing needs assessment by a vote of 10-1, with Eaton as the lone dissenter. And Taylor notes that McKinley CEO Albert Berriz has spoken “very plainly” about the company’s desire to build affordable housing.

Taylor also recently called for an overhaul of the city’s storm-water infrastructure. “We are undertaking a storm-water rate study to determine what sort of funding we need to have the storm-water system we need,” he says. He anticipates that study will result in a proposal to raise storm-water rates in the 2017 budget–and says he’ll fight to get it passed. “Insuring that there is the political will to fund the city’s needs is part of the mayor’s job.”

Under Hieftje, council’s deepest divisions were over new public buildings–the justice center and the Library Lane parking structure. For Taylor, the equivalents may be the upcoming decisions about whether to build a high-rise over Library Lane and construct a new train station.

Taylor says he doesn’t have a favorite plan for Library Lane “at this time. I’m looking forward to seeing the final-final plans.” But he describes the train station as “a game changer.”

Funding for a station remains to be determined, and the project won’t go forward without a public vote. But the mayor is committed to seeing it through: “At some point the train station will need a leader,” Taylor says. “And if I’m still around, I will lead.”