Heather Mcteer Calls Herself the Ultimate Optimist

2631 Words

The Mayor

Heather McTeer calls herself “the ultimate optimist.”

With Photo: MCTEER Greenville Mayor Heather McTeer describes herself as "the ultimate optimist." Photo By Norman Seawright.

By NORMAN H. SEAWRIGHT, III

No one could ever accuse Mayor Heather McTeer of lacking ambition. In 2003, at the age of 27, she left a lucrative law career and got elected the first black mayor of Greenville. Now, after two terms leading the state’s eighth largest city, she is running for Congress against Bennie Thompson, 63, a powerful incumbent in a district that runs all the way from the Delta to Jackson. Thompson, who was sitting on a $1.7 million campaign treasury in early summer, has been in Congress for 18 years, the longest of Mississippi’s U.S. House delegation. Why tackle Thompson? “I think we could do a little bit better than we are doing right now. When I look at places that are in the most need, the place that needs help the most is the Second District,” said McTeer, who said she wants to “see some progress in our area.” McTeer is used to challenges. The first thing she learned in office: Politics can be harsh. After getting elected, she endured threats and slurs. She was criticized for championing an expensive project to get the brown stain out of the city’s drinking water. She was attacked for questioning why some public school teachers had their children in private schools. And she discovered that she had inherited a sizeable deficit. Along the way, she solved the deficit, secured a commitment of millions from the federal government for a system to clear up the water and began fixing neglected neighborhood streets. But it was never easy. "There was a lot of doubt among citizens and employees as to what I could do," McTeer said. “I had two employees who couldn’t work for me. Couldn’t work for a woman. One couldn’t work for a ‘little girl.’ That’s how I was viewed. I was called all types of derogatory names that you could imagine." In fact, she said, the biggest disappointment she faced was learning that people she thought highly of turned out to be completely different than she expected. But, calling herself “the ultimate optimist,” McTeer set out to tackle the city’s long list of problems. She had the city hire a CFO, who is present at every city council meeting, to try to ensure that money is used as efficiently as possible. “I’m proud today that we don’t have to do what we had to do seven years ago, which was the accounts payable clerk would come in, and sit in the chair with a box of checks and how much money was in the account, and she and I would sit there and figure out who to pay,” McTeer said. For this, McTeer, a graduate of Tulane Law School, left a promising six-figure law practice. That 2003 Mercedes didn’t come from her mayoral salary of roughly $50,000 a year. McTeer’s election helped give blacks control of city hall in addition to the courthouse for the first time, making her a symbol of change. Just how much things have changed can be seen in the photos of Greenville’s past mayors on the wall outside her office. They are all white. Sitting in her office, it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of plaques and pictures. Here she is chairing a national advisory committee for the Environmental Protection Agency. There, she is president of the National Conference of Black Mayors. There is a picture of her with President Obama and his family. Numerous civic and church awards and the prominent letters of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority leave no doubt that she takes pride in everything she is involved in. As the daughter of civil rights attorney and photographer Victor McTeer, and retired teacher Mercidees McTeer, she was schooled on civil rights and equality as a child. Her parents sent her to public school, and mandated that she be in the Girl Scouts. So important to her is family that, after she took office, she took her grandmother to meet President Barack Obama, a fellow Democrat, at the White House for a Christmas event. “My parents didn’t want us to feel like we were ‘running away,’ but that we were actually a part and could be leaders in our schools. The things I remember most are, when we came home from school, my mom and dad put a basketball goal in the front yard. So we had kids from Clay Street and everywhere else in the front yard, on Main, playing ball. It would be twenty boys out in the front yard from all over the city of Greenville. We never felt like we were above or below anyone.” She gained an interest in politics at an early age. Her father was active in political causes and took her to rally in Indianola when she was around 9 or 10. While in law school, she interned for Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Fred Banks. When she attended Spelman College, McTeer interned as a legislative aide in Georgia’s State Assembly, where she did everything from getting coffee to going to meetings on behalf of a senator. “I was a legislative aide for Sen. Donzella James. I think we were paid something like $50 a week. I thought my senator, initially, just hated me. I really did," said McTeer. "She was a kind woman, but she was very serious about what she did, and there was a reason for that. She was an adamant member of Mothers Against Drunk Driving because, the year before, she lost her son to a drunk driver. Finally, one day, she was on the floor. There was a particular piece of legislation that she had been working on. She called me down…to the floor of the Senate … When I got there, she said, ‘I’m getting ready to speak on this particular topic. Write the speech.’” McTeer wrote the speech from the back of the Senate chamber on a legal pad. She figured it would be her last day, since the senator was so hard on her. “She read what I wrote, line for line. When we got back, she said to me, ‘The reason that I did that is because I knew you could do it.’” When McTeer was first elected mayor, defeating a veteran white incumbent, she jumped into several longstanding community issues. One of the first items on her agenda was Washington Avenue, which at that was a one-way serpentine road. Despite criticism from some downtown advocates, she straightened out the road and made it a two-way street, as it was originally constructed. Now, she said, people leaving the casinos over the levee don't have to drive way up Main Street and circle back to shop on a one-way Washington Avenue. They just drive straight up Washington itself. "When I was running for office, the thing I heard over and over from people was that neighborhood streets had been neglected. Some hadn't been fixed in 50 years," she said. McTeer used $10 million in bonds to tackle neighborhood streets first, smoothing out washboard roads. Now the city is embarking on a separate project to tackle Washington Avenue, including the bumpy, pothole-laden section at the entrance to downtown. It always galled her that visitors to Greenville would check into a hotel, go to their rooms and discover brown water flowing from the faucet. It's impossible to ignore. The brown discoloration is an effect produced by water seeping through cypress roots. It isn’t harmful, and it has the added benefits of being soft and mineral-rich. But McTeer is certain that visitors may ignore the benefits and be stuck on the color. “You think about your tourists. When you go into a restaurant, and you ask for a glass of water, what would you do if they brought you a glass of brown water?” She believes that cleaning up the water will help improve the city’s image and might even make it easier to recruit business and industry. Her crusade to clear up the water eventually was featured in a story in The Washington Post. With the help of U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., she pried money out of the U.S. Corps of Engineers. Greenville has to match it with about $4.5 million and the mayor insists that it will get done. Ask her about her greatest challenge as mayor and McTeer will tell you that she can always improve communication with people. She wants to learn to listen more and to listen better. Sometimes, she said, it can be tough to deliver bad news. For example, some water meters have been misreporting the amount of water used, sometimes reporting too much, sometimes too little. The city is taking steps to fix them, but even that creates problems. "You have to be careful about how you communicate that," she said. "How do you tell the little old lady on fixed income who has been paying $25 a week for water that the meter was wrong and now she has to pay $45?" McTeer sees the lakefront casinos she inherited, for better or worse, as part of the community. They have brought some social problems, but they have also brought money into the city budget. “Since they are in the community, I think it is important that we have an effective partnership to the extent that we can," she said. "In some ways, have they hurt? Yes. I remember there being a lot of issues, especially from the faith-based community, and a lot of speakers talking about what this would do to our community, and it being a negative impact on the community. Either way, the decision was made to allow casinos. If I had to do it, I would not have formed the contracts in those fashions. I don’t think the city got the benefit out of the initial agreements with the casinos that they could have. With that said, hindsight is always 20/20.” When she entered office, she stopped the use of casino-generated revenue in the general fund. McTeer wanted the city to be in a position where, if all the casinos left, the city would survive. McTeer’s office is a busy world. Conversations with the mayor are frequently interrupted by citizens coming in to express their discontent about something in the town, or by important phone calls that require her to shoo you out of the office. She is often so busy that she forgets to eat. Her staff all but forces her to slow down long enough to gobble a quick lunch. Aside from her work in city hall, McTeer makes sure to participate in events around town. The morning of St. Patrick’s Day, she came to work wearing a green sweater. She spilled something on it, so she handed her credit card to her secretary and sent her out to go buy another one so she’d look appropriate for the day. “Being the mayor, you’re on the ground level, and so there is a very intimate communication that we have with our constituents. It has been a definite journey and experience in learning the community. I’m from Greenville, so I always thought I really knew Greenville,” she said. Knowing Greenville also entails knowing its history. Because white politicians and business leaders had dominated Greenville until the last decadeor so, some blacks still harbor negative feelings toward white people. At the same time, some white people feel marginalized or left out of critical decisions. “You have some African Americans who think you should do to white folks everything white folks did to you. I don’t agree with that,” said McTeer. She said no one group should be cut out of community decisions. "We need to set priorities and do the projects that are needed the most, first, regardless of whether they are in the white or black community," she said. Critics complain that the city pays for expensive bodyguards to protect her. She says it’s a misunderstanding, and a bigger issue than it should be. On one occasion, men who were mistaken for bodyguards were simply her brother and cousin, in town to see a movie. At other times, men from the Nation of Islam showed up at public events and stayed near her, offering protection. She said police officers trained in “executive protection” not only ensure her safety, but are also assigned to protect any high-profile official that may visit Greenville. McTeer endured more criticism when, at a school convocation, she challenged public school teachers who were sending their children to private schools. “I caught a lot of flak for this because I said two things,” she said. “I said, if you’re a teacher for Greenville public schools, it was something to the effect of, you should be able to teach your own children. Why are you a teacher for Greenville public schools and your kids go to private school? There was a whole newspaper editorial write- up, letters to the editor about how dare I trash teachers about where their kids go to school.” McTeer feels strongly about trying to build future leaders among today's youth. That's why she expanded from 12 to 60 the Mayor's Youth Council created by her predecessor, in which children from both public and private schools meet with her to discuss life in their respective schools. If children of different backgrounds get to know each other, she said, they are less likely to harbor prejudice later in life. Through Youth Council, she said, children of different races and backgrounds have the opportunity to build meaningful relationships that bring them into each other’s worlds. She has sponsored a school switch, where a child from a public school is paired with a child from a private school, and throughout the week, they each spend two days at the other’s school, attending classes and events together. McTeer gave them each a journal, and they returned with new insights about worlds that were once foreign to them. What she got back in those journals made all the struggles of office worthwhile. “They are my babies,” she said. “They wrote some of the most wonderful pieces about how, ultimately, they discovered that all of them were just alike. And it caused them to begin to question, ‘Why aren’t we just all together?’ and that’s where I say I think we have to really invest in our kids. They’re going to be the next generation of policymakers, of organizers, of people who implement these programs to take us into the future. "My public school kids were saying, ‘Mayor McTeer, I went over to the private school and they had a Spanish test and I took it, and guess what? I made an A!’ It broke the stereotype of thinking that the private schools were so much more advanced than the public schools.” Adults, who carry a lot of baggage stemming from their life experiences, are harder to change, she said. She described how some white people have come to her office “and shut the door and closed the blinds” and said they would like to send their children to public school, but fear that their child “would be the only white child, a minority. “We’ve got to get over that and have these hard conversations,” she said. “I am very perceptive. I know there are portions of the population that I am not popular with,” she said. “I know there is hurt and pain and anger from years of conflict and stress.” “You know,” she said, “being in office can sometimes be a lonely place. It’s a position where you can take a lot of criticism.” When that happens, she said, “it probably means you are doing something right.”

Produced by the Meek School of Journalism and New Media at the Univeristy of Mississippi.