This year’s mayoral race is similar in some ways to the 1994 election, when Gwen O’Looney was opposed for re-election by the kid with no experience, Mike Hamby. The difference there was that the Republicans and the anti-progressives poured money and support into Mike’s campaign in their losing effort to unseat O’Looney.

This time around, everybody who is anybody is supporting the mayor, and the challenger—the inexperienced kid—is just out there on his own, running a shoe-leather campaign with no money.

The incumbent mayor is, of course, running on her record, and the challenger is running on issues. As is usual in such circumstances, it doesn’t matter that the mayor has no record, and issues don’t count. The Athens establishment has decided that we’re just fine with Nancy as mayor. The business community is back in control, and the Athens-Clarke County Commission is reduced to being sort of like a high school student council, with nothing more controversial to do than paint the water tower at Athens Tech and pass proclamations of commendation for various officials and community leaders.

When Nancy was elected the first time, there were predictions that the commission would rise up and take charge of the government, but that just hasn’t happened. Some of the commissioners formerly most opposed to Nancy now fawn over her and make it all but impossible to place items on the agenda that don’t have her approval. She rules by assuring that nothing gets done, that nothing even gets discussed publicly.

All that fierce controversy surrounding Mayor Gwen O’Looney came from the fact that before her, we had government behind closed doors, with a powerless city council. O’Looney kicked open those doors and brought local government out into the sunlight, where the glare made a lot of people uncomfortable. They have now succeeded in closing those doors again, with Nancy as the smiling, grandmotherly doorkeeper, who assures that nothing will come up for discussion that will make people mad.

Even though little happens in the commission these days, a lot goes on behind those closed doors. That’s how the innovative Blue Heron river district development was smothered before it even had a chance to hatch, opening the way for the Selig retail/student housing development that foundered—now to be replaced by even more student housing.

Developments like that are complicated and sometimes hard to follow, but the most recent example of possible Prince Avenue traffic calming is an easier-to-follow example of how our present government works, with the mayor tasked to head off anything her confidants don’t want to happen.

Thanks to Blake Aued’s enterprising reporting of this issue we get a glimpse of how things work behind those closed doors. The problems caused by Prince Avenue’s being both a main traffic artery and a neighborhood thoroughfare are not as significant as our community’s poverty problem, the inundation of student housing, the downtown master plan, improving the bus system and other larger issues. Prince being a smaller, more geographically confined problem, though, allows us to grasp more easily how the dynamics of political control play out.

The emails show us how these discussions about public issues go on without the public able to participate. This is the hallmark of the Nancy Denson era. Keep things away from the public. Discuss them among ourselves and come to a decision. Then prevent the issue from even coming up in the only public forum empowered to act: the Athens-Clarke County Commission.

Prince Avenue traffic is fueled by two diametrically opposed principles: speed and safety. This conundrum deserves to be debated and decided in public, but Mayor Denson and her supporters have decided that not only do they not want any debate, they don’t even want to know the facts that might inform that debate. They have effectively cut off fact-finding for now, and the bet here is that those facts will never be found.

This is, apparently, how our establishment wants things to work. If you don’t agree, your only recourse is to vote for Tim, the other Denson—the one with no experience and no money but with a proven commitment to forcing government out into the open.