Behind and beyond Mark Meadows’ resignation

Mark Meadows can cite many reasons a sane person would quit the East Lansing City Council.

“It’s a lot of work, and not just every Tuesday night from 7 to 10. There are things going on constantly that Council members must respond to. It’s getting calls from people with problems and trying to get them fixed, genuine issues like the sewer’s backed up.

“We’d joke, ‘Well, we make about 10 cents an hour.’”

But none of that is why Meadows quit the Council last month.

Rather, he said, it was a protest.

“By leaving maybe I could bring more of a light on how this should have been done, but it clearly was not done in the way that I think as professionals we should approach issues.”

The issue was the dismissal of Tom Yeadon as city attorney. Meadows and Ruth Beier resigned after the other three Council members voted to terminate Yeadon’s contract on July 14.

While his resignation was unexpected, it was not, he said, a snap decision.

“The direction of the Council seemed very disorganized” since last fall, he said. Admittedly, he said, COVID-19 disrupted personal relationships and interactions. But he found the way the Council handled the Yeadon decision “very poorly done,” both in terms of fairness to Yeadon, whom, he said, should have been given an opportunity to fix any perceived problems, and the inner workings of the Council.

Meadows’ criticism of the Council is muted compared to Beier’s exit blast: “I’m going to leave this circus to the fools that are left,” she declared. “I do not think it’s a good omen for East Lansing.”

So, where does that leave Meadows at age 73?

“I don’t know that the day will come when either one of us will say, ‘I don’t want to do this any more,’” Meadows told me in a Zoom interview that you can see on our website. (At 73 as well, I say: speak for yourself.) Meadows’ “this” is politics: “How it all interacts, what the right decision is, how that decision is reached and how you bring people together to get the support for the ideas you might have.”

Meadows traces his interest in politics to his parents, who discussed it at home, and to coming of age in the 1960s, when he got involved in the antiwar movement and volunteered for the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy.

“I got involved and stay involved when I graduated from law school. I went to work for Frank Kelley, the greatest attorney general ever — although Dana is every bit as exciting,” a reference to the current AG, Dana Nessel. “Frank encouraged his assistants to be involved locally,” which Meadows said he did by volunteering to serve on a government commission on the environment. He felt the commission needed an advocate on the Council, so he ran. He lost the first time, but was elected in 1995 and served through 2010.

In 2015, feeling there were “significant issues that weren’t being addressed,” he returned to the Council, which named him mayor, a post he held until last year.

“In the last four years,” he said, “we were able to put the city on a sound financial footing. There were people who were unhappy about how we did it. They don’t like tall buildings, or they don’t like the income tax or the franchise tax with the Board of Water & Light. Everybody had an issue of some sort, and you saw that play out. People wanted a different direction, and now they’re going to see how that functions.”

Meadows clearly likes the new skyline emerging downtown, although it has yet to achieve his vision for it. He hopes and expects even more housing and even more diversity in age groups living downtown. He also expects more office space. “If you don’t have those people there and you don’t have office workers there, then you don’t have a diverse demand for retail and small businesses in the downtown, and I expect we’ll start to see that over the next few years.”

More important than development this year, Meadows said, is racial justice. “We need to continue to work on that as the number one priority for the City Council.”

Both Meadows and Beier were replaced by African Americans, who are the first on the Council since the only other Black member served by appointment back in the 1970s.

Meadows’ thoughts on it remind me of old joke about the guy who prayed to God to let him win the lottery. When he loses, he complains that God has forsaken him and asks again to win.

Comes a blinding flash of light and then: “Meet me halfway: buy a ticket!”

Said Meadows, “I don’t recall an African American running for Council” before 2019. “If an African American ran for Council, ran a campaign, in other words knocked on doors and they had been involved in the community, probably they would have been elected.”

His answer reflects his love and respect for his chosen community (he was born in Grosse Pointe Farms). Of East Lansing, he says, “I can’t even imagine why anyone lives anywhere else.” And when told perhaps it’s because the rest of us can’t afford it, he says, “Well, there’s affordable housing in East Lansing, and we’re trying to build more.” In fact, Meadows serves on the board of the Capital Area Housing Partnership, which builds, sells and manages low- to moderate-income housing, such as Deerpath Apartments in East Lansing.

His retirement from the Council is giving him more time to work with his spouse, Pam, fixing up a new home. And they have four children and seven grandchildren to keep up with. Beyond that, Meadows is a passionate hiker. “I’m not a very religious person, but it really brings you closer to the natural world. You only have the things that you need on your back. There’s a tremendous freedom associated with it. It’s very spiritual.”

His love for East Lansing, he says, is “something that I hope everybody feels, that this is the place to be, and even though I won’t be on City Council, I’ve volunteered to serve on a couple of commissions. I don’t want to disappear into the woodwork, but I also think there’s a different role for me now. A role as one of the regular citizens of the city of East Lansing, who make a comment now and then but isn’t going to have a vote at the City Council table.”