Earlier this summer, Mike Kadas, who had succeeded me as mayor of Missoula back in 1996, asked me if I would join him and his successor, Mayor John Engen in supporting a major capital campaign for Home ReSource, a local nonprofit now preparing to move beyond its successful recycling of building materials to become a true community sustainability center.  We decided to start with an open letter from the three of us.  After we had worked out the wording, Mayor Engen signed the letter, and Mike and I then added our signatures.

Then, before the letter could be mailed to anyone, we learned that Mayor Engen had died from the pancreatic cancer with which he had been diagnosed a few months earlier.  We’re still going to use the letter, as John intended, accompanied now by a photo of him serving as auctioneer at a 2019 Home ReSource fundraising event.  Nothing can capture more eloquently the memory so many Missoulians will always carry of Mayor Engen than his often-repeated role as auctioneer for yet another of Missoula’s outstanding nonprofit organizations.

To me, John wringing a little more money out of people than they had expected to contribute to their favorite cause is a near-perfect metaphor for his relationship with the citizens who elected him five times to be their mayor.  On the one hand stood the larger-than-life (literally – he was chronically overweight), hilariously entertaining, self-deprecating auctioneer-mayor, and on the other the nonprofit supporter-citizens on the verge of contributing more to the common good than they had quite intended.  The result, repeatedly, was one more fine nonprofit enabled to do its work more effectively than ever, while those organizations and their citizen-supporters contributed in countless ways to the vibrancy of their community’s civic culture.

It happened that the Saturday on which John’s memorial service had been scheduled at the riverfront ballpark and civic stadium was the same day I had arranged to give Boise’s planning director, Tim Keane a tour of our downtown and riverfront.  I wanted to accommodate Tim, not least because his boss, Boise Mayor Lauren McLean, had been a friend of mine for many years before her election to that challenging office.  So Tim and I walked the riverfront together, and he left me on the doorstep of Mayor Engen’s memorial service.

Earlier in his career, Tim had served another mayor I had long admired: Joe Riley, the 10-term mayor of Charleston, South Carolina.  Mayor Riley had been instrumental in launching the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, which brings eminent design professionals together with small groups of thoughtful mayors for intense workshops “to find solutions to the most critical planning and design challenges facing their cities.”

John Engen was an alumnus of the MICD (as were Mike Kadas and I.)  I mention the program here, not to focus on city design so much as to emphasize the institute’s goal of helping mayors find solutions to challenging problems.                                                                Solving problems and realizing promising opportunities is what mayors do, pretty much all day, every day.  John Engen (and Joe Riley) were kept in office so long by their constituents because they were so adept at getting good things done in their communities.  Good mayors bring all kinds of skills to bear on that work, but the most important of those skills may be their ability to draw out of their constituents those citizens’ own (often quite remarkable) problem-solving skills.

This was what my old friend Benjamin Barber had in mind when he wrote his last book, If Mayors Ruled the World.  Barber, always a fierce democrat, argued that the mayors he interviewed around the world could contribute like no one else to saving that world precisely because of their skill in mobilizing the creative capacity of their citizens.  Barber wrote:

Cities are habitats for common life.  They are where people live and hence where they learn and love, work and sleep, pray and play, grow and eat, and finally die. … Cities have little choice: to survive and flourish they must remain hospitable to pragmatism and problem solving, to cooperation and networking, to creativity and innovation.

Susan Hay Patrick, the CEO of Missoula’s United Way, put her finger on this dynamic in her eulogy for Mayor Engen:

Now, it’s our turn. Over the last week, so many of you have asked me, “What now?” Meaning, what do we do now, without our mayor, our fearless leader, Missoula’s favorite son? And my answer is, we fight on. We fight on for open space. We fight on for parks and trails. We fight on for healthy, vibrant neighborhoods and a diverse and thriving arts and culture scene. We fight on for the voiceless and the vulnerable; the unheard, the unhoused, the disparaged and demeaned; those struggling with addiction and depression.

We fight on to protect and advance John Engen’s vision for our community: a Missoula that offers the promise of equity, opportunity, and hope for all. That was John Engen’s vision. That is the vision that illuminates our path. That is a vision worth fighting for.

Yes, it is that, but it is even more.  At a time when so many people have become deeply, sometimes hopelessly pessimistic about the prospects for democracy itself, it has become more important than ever to get clear about the unshakeable foundations on which democracy rests, upon which it has always and will always rest.  That foundation is the one that John Engen spent his career in building: the solid bedrock of democratic citizenship that had accompanied him throughout his long tenure in the mayor’s office and that will, as Susan so eloquently urged, be there for John’s successor.

It was the blessing of having experienced the power of that civic energy that led me to dedicate Citizens Uniting to Restore Our Democracy to Missoula’s citizens.  My hope now is that, in the shadow of John Engen’s passing, we will draw even more deeply and deliberately on the democratic roots of our citizenship, putting those skills to work, not only in continuing to nurture our community, but in partnership with good citizens everywhere, in healing our democracy.

Daniel Kemmis, a former mayor of Missoula, is the author of The Good City and the Good Life and, most recently, of Citizens Uniting to Restore Our Democracy.