Madeleine Meadows: My name is Madeleine Meadows, a senior at Florida Southern College. And with me today, I have Mayor William “Bill Mutz,” who’s been serving as the Lakeland Mayor since 2018, so my first question for you today is, what are the main duties of the City Council?
Mayor Bill Mutz: This is an often confused answer. So let me talk about what we do and what we don’t do. So the City Commission, we you know, there’s some that are councils and there’s some that are commissions. We’re a commission-run government, and so we do the governance side, and then we have a staff under the city manager that handles all the staffing needs.
That distinction is really important in a town that is less than a million people, in my opinion, because it allows governance to be elected from four-year-term to four-year-term without impacting the longevity staffing concerns and needs of the city manager, who you want to have continuity in and through, because they understand the union negotiations, they understand all kinds of things that have to happen for employees and benefits, and they need a longer curve and not to be politically influenced.
When you get in a city that is over a million people, you really need to be more efficient and quick in your decision making, then that structure sometimes allows so then you can have what’s called a strong mayor. That is not my recommendation, until we get closer to 750 to a million people, and we are right now at 320,000, so what we do is we work on things, on visioning, ordinances, resolutions, those are the things that help guide us in terms of policies, decisions and provisions for builders and what we might do in a park area, and the kinds of businesses we work to attract and incent.
We also work on things like comprehensive plans, so that we’re working with Community Development to build, to create a plan that builds parks in the right spots and a lot of distance, so that you have smart growth.
And in that smart growth, you pre-decide what you want to have in each of those zones. So that when someone comes along, by rights, they have the ability to have the zoning in place that lets them do that which they want to build. And you do that wisely by trying to mix where housing is located and businesses are located, and power generation is located, and do the things that need to be done to make it so that what as we go and grow, we don’t have deep regrets about what we should have done and didn’t do.
And we’ve learned a lot from other cities as we go about doing city visits and getting nuggets from them in terms of some of the things that they have done. We work certainly on deciding with Lakeland Electric what we do on the utilities basis, and we can talk about that a little later, but utilities add as much contribution as property taxes to our city’s budget, and so it’s really important to understand the power of owning your own utility, instead of it being an investor-owned utility, like many have, when you own your own it’s called a muni.
And so Lakeland Electric will, for example, contribute about $43 million in dividends, which is really profits after its operations, that investors would have taken if it were a privately held utility and shareholders. And we contribute that right back to the city, so that we have some of the lowest millage rates in the state, with some of the highest benefits that our citizens enjoy with those low millage rates.
Reality is, however, that when you have traffic problems and people want to see things fixed, you don’t fix it without money, and so raising taxes is an inevitability for all cities as we go along or just learn to become more accustomed to what we have and recognize that’s the way it’s going to be. You can’t do both. So if you want more benefits, you have to pay more funds.
And what we aren’t is equally important. We aren’t the school board, so we don’t do the educational lane. We aren’t HUD so we don’t do Lakeland Housing Authority. That is a federal lane. We don’t do a lot of things that a lot of people would assume that is our responsibility at the county level. Those are county responsibilities.
There are so many times we answer the question when someone asks why some services are being provided, we ask them the color of their trash cans, because the gray trash cans will be in the county and green trash cans are in the city, and that’s one of the ways we can tell. But we do work on the things that citizens have as needs, and we work on policies that honor everyone. And that has been a big mantra of our commission, which is, what can we do to make sure across all sectors of our cities, city, we are doing the things that need to be done in every area, uniquely to those needs.
Madeleine Meadows: So my next question is: It’s obviously important for voters to participate in every election that happens, but how do these local elections impact the daily lives of the community compared to national elections?
Mayor Bill Mutz: That’s a great question, and if you look at the numbers, it’s just the inverse of what it ought to be, because there’s no greater impact on your daily life than the local politics that you are electing. And by the way, I hate thinking of being political because I really think of myself as a public servant, but because everyone understands the word is politics, I’ll use it. There’s no greater impact than the local level, and there’s probably the most distant impact at the federal level and at the state level, you’re somewhere in the land in between. And we find ourselves even competing at some level between city initiatives and state initiatives, increasingly, because of the shortage of funding and money. So what we want to make sure people do is where we’ll have a 12 to 15% turnout on a city election, because we have them in off years, so that they’re not the same year as a presidential or senatorial election, so there can be more focus. It should be at least a 20, 25% participation. So we’re very, very short, and it makes the biggest difference. So I would highly encourage people to get involved and try and to align themselves with the representatives that they think best represent their interests.
Madeleine Meadows: So how have decisions you’ve made as mayor, or even looking at the city commissioners around you, how have they been impacted by your city’s voters, needs and wants?
Mayor Bill Mutz: We are driven by them. And so the things that are the big issues for our voters, the things that are the big issues for citizens, we want to respond to.
When the George Floyd era happened, we did really hearing sessions where we didn’t talk at all. We listened to our minority community give us reports about things that were important to them. And we created an initiative called Lift Lakeland, which is to address came up with 137 different things that we worked on trying to improve so that people have, recognize, they’re honored. Some of that, sometimes is even street lights or sidewalks, I mean, so some of it is immediately fixable. Some of it is relational.
You can do a lot of infrastructure changes in any city working on how you treat people and honor everyone is an initiative that takes years to pattern and years to implement, and we worked. So we started by moving our monument, which was the Confederate monument, from the center of Munn Park, over to the Veterans Park, which is where war memorials go. So if you thought of it for a war memorial, then that’s where it is. If you thought about it for some other reason, which there were really two stories on why those monuments were put up during the Jim Crow era and in high-lynching cities across the Southeast, then when you knew that story, you wouldn’t put it in the center of your city. And so we got it out. We didn’t erase the history of it so that it can be properly observed. But, and that’s part of America’s story, but we certainly didn’t put it where it made a statement in the center of our downtown.
We’ve worked to make health care more affordable in by keeping our LRH (Lakeland Regional Health) costs lower, by terminating an exorbitant lease that was created without understanding how expensive it was going to ultimately be, because it was based on sales instead of net revenues. And so when the expenses in health care went up like this, the lease increased as well. We were the highest lease-paying hospital in the United States at one time to a city revenue because the city owns the ground and made that affordable, which helped to keep Lakeland Regional Health in a position where they could reinvest their funds back into the hospital.
We worked to lower and keep low our electrical rates by taking away our coal plant and putting in six RICE engines that help us start quickly. Instead of over three days – it takes three days to bring a coal plant up to speed to create enough heat to be able to create electricity – our RICE engines are active in two minutes, and so that’s a big difference, and so you can respond to peak needs up and down as you go along. That makes a difference because we are one of the lowest utility rates in Florida and that and still have that great contribution to the city we talked about earlier.
And the other thing we have worked to do is make sure that we are bringing schools in on an incentive basis that are private schools that are really designed for the at-risk kids in our city, and to help to facilitate that, and then to create opportunities for small businesses by having a center called Catapult, which is downtown and allows business incubation to take place.
So you have to lots of what you do are in different arenas. And then further need we have done is that when one of the most unrepresented needs is affordable housing. So homelessness first, then affordable housing, then workforce housing, and then kind of market-rate housing, that’s the steps that people have to walk through. So we have not-for-profits that work with our homeless. We have affordable housing. We’ve done 780 some units, and we have 1200 on the books to get done. We hadn’t done 200 units in 10 years prior to the last eight years where we’ve done this and we added a lot of multi-family apartments at different pricing rates, some of it with affordable housing occupants as well. And we then have built workforce housing so that there are places for people, people to be able to buy their first house and have it. And those streets tend to be a little you know, there’s a lot of cars on the streets. The driveways are shorter, but it lets you own your house, and that’s the key, so that you can get started and so all those are steps that have to be taken, and they have to be taken all over the city as you do so.
Madeleine Meadows: So you talked about obviously adapting and doing what you need for your voters and what and when they want to be heard. But what are some other ways outside of voting that voters can make sure their voice is heard year round, and they are still participating in local government?
Mayor Bill Mutz: So to answer this question, which is a good question, I think I want to start with a zoomed-out premise. Most decisions are very complicated. They are not binary, and we tend to want to do a one line of ‘here’s what the issue is,’ and ‘these are the two choices,’ and they’re rarely the two choices. Decisions are made at five, six, seven levels, many times. And it’s when you understand this particular level that you go, ‘Oh, wait, if we do that, that’s going to create a very unintended consequence.’ So we live not in a democracy, but in a republic. And the reason that we live in a republic is because you want to elect officials who will dive in, dig, understand and do the depth of that kind of problem solving ahead of time.
So most of what gets to the dais should have been resolved and worked on a long time beforehand. If something gets to the dais that doesn’t, isn’t voted on supportively, that passes, we didn’t do our work ahead of time. Our job ahead of time is to understand what those issues are, to figure out and listen to people and talk to the constituencies that are affected ahead of time, so that by the time that it gets there, it’s the kind of bill that incorporates all the things that people want. And if we’ve missed something, that’s when the public sector can go, ‘Oh, woah, woah, what about me, and on this section,’ and you can say, ‘That’s great. Didn’t recognize that was an issue. We can add that in as we go along.’
So the job that I spend most of my time doing is not in public. It’s not doing the ribbon cuttings. It’s not doing all the things that are very fun and where you get to see a lot of citizens. It’s the work of preventing wrong decisions and wrong direction and thinking about ways we can amplify opportunities for others.
Madeleine Meadows: So my last question I have for you is more towards you and your own thoughts over the past eight years. You’ve obviously been in the seat for eight years, and you’re about to say goodbye, but what has been your favorite part of it, and if you had four more years, what would you like to do or see the city of Lakeland continue to do?
Mayor Bill Mutz: It’s the reason it was hard for me not to do the next four years because I would have had the opportunity to do it uniquely, just because of the timing of the way we changed our charter. But I need to spend time with my grandkids, so in order to do that, I decided not to run.
But I think the thing that is most gratifying is when you know you have helped people with an opportunity to do something that they wouldn’t have gotten to do otherwise. That can be solving a neighbor problem, that can be pointing their their child to some kind of an opportunity or internship that they might not have known about otherwise, that can be solving just an infrastructure issue that we have that something that’s broken. But it’s the confidence that people have that it isn’t going to be lip service, that you’re just talking to someone who doesn’t really care, and nothing else is going to change and happen to versus somebody saying, the next day, ‘Wow, I can’t believe that they fixed that hole in the front of my yard,’ and you know, it’s been done, and you just go, thank you.
I just was with our chief of police minutes ago on a problem that happened to a family last night, and to work on vetting what happened and what the background was, and all those kinds of things. And I work and our LPD is fabulous in terms of taking care of people and being careful about what they do and being very deliberate and his concern for anything being wrong is as high as mine. And so I love that.
We have a staff in this city that’s fabulous. And I think that’s one of the biggest surprises I had is you kind of think, when you come from the private sector, that all government is not going to be very effective, and there’s going to be a lot of waste money. Our staff is so frugal, and they figure out ways to try not to spend money, but to create benefits with what they save. And that makes such a difference.
So I think the gratification of walking away and knowing that you’ve made a difference in people’s lives, and know you’ve been able to serve because it starts really with wanting to be a public servant, and that’s what, that’s who you want to elect. You want to put people in a position that love to serve others and to see people’s needs are met. And for me, that’s been the most gratifying part.
Madeleine Meadows: What would you like to see your successor do?
Mayor Bill Mutz: I am so excited to see the next chapter of continuing the legacy that I was able to be able to get on the shoulders of. Our city has the ability to be unique because of its philanthropy and its concern for people. We care about people in a disproportionate way. And like lots of people think, well, our city is unique. And you know, you realize it’s a lot like other cities. This is not something that you can assign. It has to be part of a culture that’s created. And so I think making certain that we look at how we continue to honor everyone as one of the fundamental goals of every decision we make every day is important.
And the other thing I would love to see my successor have a contributing impact on is that we raise enough money for roads. And we have to figure out how to do that, not only in our city and state and federal level because we don’t have a mechanism to pay for the road work that needs to be done today, as we increase traffic. Something has to be created as a tax. We either, now this is at the federal level, which we don’t impact, but like you know, you would tax per mile driven of a car instead of a gas tax. So that as mileage is created, it’s creating a vehicle to be able to pay for that.
We probably would need about $2 billion in our county in the next 20 years to do roads in an aggressively appropriate way. We have no ability to connect that to collect that money, either at the city level or at the county level today, unless we would institute some kind of a transportation tax, like a half cent on a sales tax. And sales taxes are the best possible way to raise taxes because they are helping you pay those taxes from people who don’t necessarily live here. And so about a third of our sales taxes are somebody coming through. And so whenever you can share a third of your burden on with somebody else who’s using the road in the first place, that’s a great way to do that. But transportation has to be addressed in a way that’s currently unaffordable. So how we can have an influence as a city, with our county and at the county at the state level, that’s an important part of what we do.
And then to be able to continue the educational opportunities by making sure we’re providing opportunities and incentives to bring businesses here in apartments and homes that we have available for people to live in, so that we can grow it in a responsible way and keep the comprehensive plan in place that we’re already growing.
Madeleine Meadows: Well, I will say I’m not a Lakeland native, but the past three years here with Florida Southern you have a very beautiful town, very beautiful campus, and I have enjoyed it. I think my fellow colleagues have enjoyed it, and thank you for your time today.
Mayor Bill Mutz: You’re very welcome. Thanks.
Return to Voter Guide
LkldNow’s Voter Guide is made possible, in part, by support from Citrus Connection and readers like you. All editorial decisions are made independently by LkldNow.
latest news
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
First on the agenda – giant pay raise.