Bill Miranda, mayor of Santa Clarita, recently self-published his second book, “A New Kind of Mayor,” about his life’s journey from growing up in the inner city of New York to becoming the first Latino mayor of his city. His Puerto Rican heritage land experience as a business consultant prepared him for a career of servant leadership, he said, and set him apart from traditional political figures. He worked as an executive at IBM and Xerox Corp. before starting his consulting firm in Santa Clarita. He also founded Bill Miranda Leadership Forum to develop Latino entrepreneurs.
Question: What kinds of COVID policies do you favor related to businesses and stimulating the economy recovery?
Answer: If we start with restaurants, because that seems to be the most talked about issue during COVID and in our town, we have to allow them to have the ability to sustain themselves. And if you’re not going to allow indoor dining, you have to allow outdoor dining. A lot of the restaurants have lost a ton of money. They’re in debt up to their necks. We help them by letting them have those tents out for a longer period of time, even when indoor dining is allowed.
How about non-restaurants?
What about things like office work and City Hall? City Hall employs hundreds of people. And so there was the ability to work from home, not having to come into the office but still being able to work and keep the city functioning. And so we asked major companies to do something similar: have people work from home if they can, and do Zoom meetings instead of conference meetings. And so, that has worked out very well for almost everybody. And need to do more of that to keep the economy going. I’m a fiscal conservative and when it comes to money I’m conservative with my own finances and I’m certainly conservative with the people’s money. But we have to help sustain the economy. And so if that means, you know, we have to get money from the federal government, the state government or county government or even the city government, then we have to do whatever it takes to sustain our businesses.
Like what?
If I may, let me give you an example that I had in my book. Our skating rink basically went out of business. They basically shut down. So here we have a skating rink that’s used by a huge amount of people in our community, and we answered the grassroots movement of the members of the skating society that said to us, save the rink. And in the middle of a pandemic when everybody’s super conservative with every penny they spent, we were able to buy the skating rink. We were able to renovate it, and we were able to open it under a new name (the Cube) and now we have a tremendous facility in our community. We would have lost that if we weren’t willing to step up and spend a little bit of money to make that happen.
What makes you ‘A New Kind of Mayor’?
Look at a photo of all the mayors and you’ll see one is a little darker than all the others. So I’m a man of color, that makes me different. I’m Latino – first Latino mayor in the city of Santa Clarita. I grew up during the civil rights years and I was involved in the civil rights movement. All the other mayors could have viewed it on television, or seen it from afar or read about it, I was involved in it. I went face-to-face with George Wallace, the biggest racist in the country, and we were 5 feet apart. You know, when I talk about working for IBM and working for Xerox Corp., what people don’t understand is, I worked for IBM when they weren’t hiring Latinos, blacks or Jews or women to leadership positions. I’m a guy who broke the mold, and that, by the way, is the subtitle of the book, “Breaking the Mold.”
How does your heritage inform
your work?
It has been a blessing. When you’re a community leader or a council member, or a mayor, you serve the community and in that the blessings are incredible. The blessings of helping other people are incredible. I have had people hug me, cry on my shoulder, thank me. I didn’t do anything. All I did was help them a little bit, but they are so grateful and so happy to have someone who can reach out to them, who can advocate for them and help them in their time of need. That’s a blessing I can’t describe any more than that, other than to say I’m grateful.
What does good leadership look like
to you?
Leadership starts with you. I tell my clients, the most important thing a leader does when he leads organizations is to know and understand that he or she has to get things done through other people. That’s what leadership is because you can’t do everything yourself. It’s empowering other people. And for a lot of “leaders,” quote unquote, that have big egos, they’re not sure they want to do that. They’re not sure they want to empower other people. They just want to be the boss. Well, leadership is not about being the boss, leadership is about empowering other people, motivating other people, inspiring other people. And also at the same time, holding other people accountable.
Can it be trained?
Absolutely. Believe it or not, leaders are made, not born. I know there are people who believe it’s the opposite, but that’s not true. You give me anyone and you give me enough time to work with them – the only thing I ask is that they have a passion to be a good leader. But leadership is something that you learn and relearn – and the learning never stops. The leadership skills of the 1960s were invalid in the 1970s, the 70s weren’t valid in the 80s and the 90s and so on and so forth. Leadership keeps changing, societies keep changing. And now, in 2020 and 2021 especially after COVID, leadership has to adapt to a new style with minimum resources with minimum impact on your ability to hold people accountable.
How has the consulting business shaped the way you view politics and public service?
Well, one of the things about being a consultant is that it’s all about service. It’s all about you trying to help the other person, the other organization, the other company. It’s not about you. When you’re in the corporate world, when you have your own business, it’s pretty much all about you and being successful. When you’re a consultant, it’s about the other person. And so you develop a sense of servant leadership, if you will, in being a consultant because, if you do consulting right, it’s all about the other person.
It sounds like a natural segue into
public service.
It is because public service is a continuation, in the sense that, that you’re giving of yourself to help others. Now here’s the difference between consulting and public service: Consulting, if you’re good at it, you’re going to make a decent income and probably a good one. Public service, whether you’re good or not, you’re going to make a little income and I mean little in size. Unless you’re violating the rules of public service, you’re not going to be a very wealthy man, you are not going to be about a lot of material things. And if those things are important to you, if you’re going into public service to make money, you’re going in for the wrong reasons and most likely you’re going to end up very disappointed.
What made you decide to run for Santa Clarita City Council?
I got to the point where my consulting business was focused on mostly Latino-owned businesses. I just felt that Latino-owned businesses needed a voice and advocacy, not only locally but at the state level and even at the national level. The highest percentage of new businesses are Latino-owned businesses. And so working with them really, really helped me focus on the underdog, focus on the smaller guys, focus on the most needy. Also, a lot of people don’t realize that many Latino business owers speak English and they speak English very well, but most of their education has come in Spanish. So when we have leadership training or when we have business training, it’s always good to include some Spanish in that because it makes it easier for Latino business people to understand what you’re trying to get across to them.
What have you learned since
becoming mayor?
As the saying goes, you’ve got to shake a lot of hands and kiss a lot of babies. Well, yeah, you have to do all of that, but you have to do a lot more. You have to raise a lot of money, you have to put up a lot of signs, you have to do a lot of interviews. You have to be able to go on social media in this modern time and be a proponent for why you want to be on the council, the things you have done, the things you will do. But you also have to defend yourself against attacks, unfortunately. It’s very easy with social media to be attacked for anything and everything. It’s a lot of hard work, and it’s not for the timid, and it’s not for the thin skinned. But if you’re willing to put in the work, do your homework and be an honest person, OK. Be honest and open and transparent. When you make a mistake, admit you made a mistake and don’t be combative. Just promote yourself, tell us what you’ve done and how you’ve done it and why you’ve done it and what you hope to do in the future. And that’s it – kind of forget about your opponent, unless they really drive an attack home and you have to defend yourself.