Near the cherished gazebo of Ely Square Park, just outside Donna's Diner, the mayor of Elyria waits with patient grace to perform a wedding already running late. She wears a blue blazer, white pants, a red-white-and-blue scarf and an American flag lapel pin that dazzles when caught by the midday June sun. It is Flag Day.
Finally, to the soft aahs of the park's jubilant fountain, the bride arrives in her white finery to take the hand of her buzz-cut fiancé, whose oversize gray suit ends at his feet in crumpled surprise. The dozen or so guests, some in dresses and holding cameras, others in T-shirts and holding cigarettes, rise from park benches as the mayor prepares to speak.
Whenever Mayor Holly Brinda smiles, dimples appear, and here they are again, as she studies the scene of promise before her. Who knows what the future holds, but these newlyweds enter into their compact with hope, just as Ms. Brinda did when she became the mayor of Elyria on New Year's Day a few months before.
Challenges were to be expected, of course. But the mayor has discovered that her to-do list grows anytime she steps out into her city — a city a generation past prosperity.
Where to begin?
The cutbacks that have cost city jobs and reduced city services. The pall settling over downtown. The lack of money to address blight, including the burned-out General Industries factory that a neighboring Fortune 500 company is complaining about — and you never, ever want to give any business a reason to leave.
Don't misunderstand. Elyria has a lot to offer: several global companies that use cutting-edge technology, one of the country's very best hospitals, a park system that includes not one but two waterfalls, a historic high school that recently underwent a $70 million overhaul; summer concerts in Ely Square. ...
Then again, foreclosed properties pepper the city. The recently renovated train station serves no passenger trains and little purpose, with no connection to the tiny Amtrak depot a quarter of a mile away. Oh, and feral cats: on top of everything else, Elyria has 14,000 feral cats.
Ms. Brinda, 54, plans to address all these problems, cats included. But every day presents a new obstacle, taking up time, eating up momentum. She'll get there, she vows. This is her home. And if any comfort can be found in her city's travails, it is in knowing that Elyria is not alone.
"We're a small window into the opportunities and struggles of all people across the country," she says.
But first things first. Here is a hopeful couple standing before her in the gazebo, in a park that holds romantic resonance for her as well. With radiant pride in her role, Mayor Brinda begins the wedding ceremony:
"On behalf of the City of Elyria. ... "
Elyria's Challenges
On behalf of the City of Elyria, on another fine day, the mayor takes a leisurely drive through her 20-square-mile workplace: a city with 455 public employees, 55,000 residents and about $30 million in its general fund. She climbs into her black S.U.V. and buckles up, her city identification dangling from a lanyard around her neck.
A toy cat, not feral, and photographs of her four grown children rest on the dashboard of her "official" — that is, personal — car. During her successful challenge last year against an incumbent and fellow Democrat, Ms. Brinda vowed to save precious resources by eliminating a city car for the mayor.
The official Web site for Elyria celebrates the city as the home of the padded bicycle seat, the colored golf ball, the Easter Seal Society, the Heisman Trophy winner Vic Janowicz. "Founded at the fork of the scenic Black River in 1817 by Heman Ely," it says, "Elyria is a city of 'firsts' and has all the right ingredients to put Elyrians first again."
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