Madam Mayor: Love and Loss in an American City

Former Syracuse mayor Stephanie Miner offers a candid insider look at her trailblazing time in elected office, the pressures and pitfalls of city and state politics, and the true potential of local government.

Elected the first woman of a major city in New York State, Stephanie Miner gives readers an inside look at the complexity of public policy and how the political system favors Goliath-like insiders who amass power by giving easy answers over the David-like reformers who attempt to challenge the status quo. Madam Mayor is the story of what happens when personal values about honesty and integrity confront the hard reality of money and power.

More than a political memoir of a pathbreaking career, Miner's book is also a front-row seat to the inner workings of local elections, mayoral politics, and municipal policymaking. Miner dives deep into the key policy areas that shaped her time as mayor of Syracuse and continue to affect most local politicians across the country: education, police, infrastructure, pensions, and economic development. Among other things, she writes frankly about the ugly injustices pervading the public education system, the pressure to not ask questions about fiscal policy, the challenges of making necessary infrastructure repairs that are not as sexy as splashy building projects, and the political turmoil that came with writing a New York Times op-ed criticizing the governor. Miner shows how difficult it is to navigate such complex matters when there are so many vested interests seeking to sway those in power toward one side or another.

Miner's story sheds light on the myriad tensions between municipal and state politics, the challenges of achieving meaningful change at the local level, and the systemic obstacles to creating political change--as illustrated in her ill-fated bid to challenge the political Goliath: Governor Andrew Cuomo.

If Stephanie Miner's illuminating stories of her time as Madam Mayor reveal anything, it is that, when supported and allowed to be creative, local governments exist to solve problems.

Stephanie Miner was the fifty-third mayor of the City of Syracuse (2010-2017) and a candidate for New York State governor in 2018. She is now the Charles Evans Hughes Visiting Chair of Government and Jurisprudence in the Department of Political Science at Colgate University, an advisor to the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, and a director for the Volcker Alliance.