Joshua Paladino and his family. Courtesy | Facebook

After nearly a year acting as mayor of Hillsdale, Joshua Paladino ’18 isn’t sure anyone should want the job.

“It’s simply that the authority attached to the mayor’s office is not worth running in a citywide election, receiving more criticism, even though you have virtually no additional authority,” Paladino told The Collegian in an interview this week. 

Paladino was voted mayor pro tem by his fellow councilmen in November of last year after Adam Stockford, who had served as mayor since 2017, resigned when he moved his family out of the city. 

Paladino — who spent a decade at Hillsdale College earning bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees — was elected to the city council in 2022. While at Hillsdale, he served as the opinions editor for The Collegian his senior year. Paladino and his wife, Brigette ’18, married in 2019 and have two children.

After opening the city council meeting Monday night, Paladino returned to his seat on the far-left side of the dais, where he represents Ward 4. 

The council voted earlier this year, at the recommendation of the city’s attorney, to hold a special election for mayor this month. Former mayor Scott Sessions won the mayoral race on Nov. 4 by 67 votes, returning to the mayor’s seat Monday night.

“It feels great to be a councilman again,” Paladino said. “I guess not that I ever lost that position, but it feels great to be acting as a councilman again. The mayor is at somewhat of a disadvantage. It’s difficult to keep the meeting running and facilitate conversation and think about what agenda items are coming up next and where you are in the order of the meeting, while formulating arguments and responding to arguments from others.”

The mayor of Hillsdale is a voting member of the city council who runs the meetings, but the office has no executive authority. Instead, the city council oversees the work of the city staff, which is led by the city manager.

“The sort of natural associations that we make with ‘the mayor’ — that he’s somehow responsible for the administration and the policies of the city — that is so disconnected from the reality on the ground that I’m surprised anyone wants to run for the office,” Paladino said.

Stockford told The Collegian in April that the mayor could use his position as a “bully pulpit” from which to set an agenda and unite his peers. 

“It’s more about steering the ship than being the navigator,” he said in April. “You can chart a course, but you need everyone else rowing in the same direction. That takes the trust and support of your peers. Most of the time I was mayor, I had that.”

But while Paladino said the mayor can sometimes help set policy priorities, he does not believe the new mayor can unite the council around an agenda.

“I’m somewhat convinced that Mayor Sessions won’t take on that role,” Paladino said. “He has explicitly declined policy leadership, saying that he’ll kick things to committees or take the advice of the staff and other council members.”

Paladino said he doesn’t know Sessions’ plans for his time as mayor.

“I’m still not sure what he ran on, except opposing negativity, which apparently means asking council members and staff members tough questions, which we did,” Paladino said, referring to the Nov. 17 city council meeting. “That’s the funny thing, that’s exactly what we did, and it was perfectly cordial. Everyone was kind.”

The office’s lack of executive authority helps explain why Paladino was unable to accomplish what he called his No. 1 priority when he entered office last November: removing fluoride from the city’s water.

“I asked the city manager to research it and bring forward a resolution, to at least give the city council an opportunity to vote on whether we should continue to fluoridate the public water supply,” Paladino said in a September interview. “But nothing has come of it yet.”

City Manager David Mackie said in September he could not act without explicit direction from the council, which he did not receive.

One win Paladino counts from his time as mayor pro tem was connecting Penny Myers of the Share the Warmth homeless shelter with additional funding from private entities, including the Hillsdale Community Foundation.

“They’re not going to take any government funding from what I understand,” Paladino said. “Between the Community Foundation and local churches contributing, that’s going to be the way they raise the money and get this thing going.”

Myers told The Collegian last month that the board hopes to raise $750,000 to purchase a new building in the next three months through the Hillsdale Community Foundation’s annual Great Give. That would allow the shelter to stay open year-round.

“In a better world, the city would receive mental health money, health department money as a discretionary allotment from the state, and we would be able to choose whether we want to support something like a full-time homeless shelter,” Paladino said. “But I think that’s outside the realm of political possibility at this point.”

The state, Paladino said, is “totally committed” to a grant-writing system that doesn’t allow the county to allocate funds as it sees fit.

“We just need a full-time, regulated homeless shelter that is both transitional for those who can support themselves, but is consciously permanent for the population of people who will not be able to support themselves permanently,” Paladino said.