Citing "credible threats" to her safety and increasingly personal attacks on her character, Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway has changed her mind and will not run for a third term.

In a statement emailed on Friday afternoon, Rhodes-Conway said the job had been a "tremendous honor," but that she "did not expect the level of threats to myself, council members, my staff, and my family," nor did she expect the "implicit and explicit sexism to which I have been subjected to from the very beginning of my first campaign."

First elected mayor in 2019, Rhodes-Conway announced in July that she would run for a third term. Her decision to drop out makes it an open race for Madison’s next mayor, and many candidates have already declared. Rhodes-Conway hasn’t endorsed anyone yet, and says she wants to see how the field develops first.

The mayor sat down with Isthmus on Thursday to explain her decision, what she plans to do with the six months left in her term, her thoughts on independent police oversight, and what lies ahead next spring. The two-term mayor calls it the “best job I’ve ever had,” but says she is ready for a different kind of work, where she can serve her community without being its public face. 

 This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Isthmus: Why did you decide not to run for re-election?

Mayor Rhodes Conway: There are a lot of reasons. Everyone who's in public service pays a price. For me, the price has gotten too high.

Can you expand on that?

Everybody who's an elected official — and even some folks that are not, but work for government — expect people to disagree with you. You expect things to be hard.

But over the time that I have been in office, it has gotten increasingly personal. I would say mean, cruel, even. The number of credible threats to my safety, my family's safety, my staff's safety has risen dramatically. There's a lot of roots to that, but at the end of the day, that's a pretty high toll, and that's one set of reasons.

Another thing that makes it easier for me to make this decision is that I feel like we've done an incredible amount of good work in seven and a half years. I'm really proud of the work that “Team City” has done, whether that's bus rapid transit or the incredible amount of housing that we've catalyzed through changes to our zoning and through our affordable housing fund. We've done some really good work on climate and particularly the intersection of affordability and climate that we don't maybe talk about as much as we should. But I think we have some great programs running that I'm really proud of. We've built a really strong team at the city. We have some incredible public servants.

I feel like I'm ready for a different type of work. I'm ready for a different challenge where I'm not necessarily the face of all of it, where I can do good work for my community — whatever level of community that is — and not get personally attacked on a daily basis.

Earlier this week, at the end of a 12-hour city council meeting, alders voted to fire Madison's independent monitor. That position was created by the council to be a watchdog on the police department during your [mayoral] tenure, along with the Police Civilian Oversight Board. That meeting was the longest and most contentious council meeting I've covered. You were the target of some of the comments. What do you make of the meeting and the council's decision?

A little bit of a side note, but we actually looked it up today. The meeting on the [redevelopment of the] Edgewater Hotel under Mayor Dave Cieslewicz was actually longer. Not as controversial or loud, but longer, which I thought was very interesting.

[The Oct. 20 meeting] was an incredibly tough meeting. From the very beginning, I think the question of police oversight in Madison has been complicated.

[Our office was] actively working on what the best structure for police oversight would be when members of the city council, for whatever reason, decided they didn't want the mayor's office involved and they wanted to create a committee and do it themselves. They're the legislative branch of the city. They have every right to do that. I'm not complaining about that. But I do think that if there had been somebody from the executive branch involved in that conversation, we would have been able to point out some of the structural issues that we are now seeing play out. But the council made it very clear that was their thing. They wanted to do it. They didn't want the mayor's office involved, and we have stayed not involved.

I think city staff have really struggled. [The independent police monitor office doesn’t report to the mayor] but HR has to help them, right? IT has to support them. There's been a lot of lack of clarity.

I hope that going forward we can have a more collaborative process, not just with the executive branch, but with the community, and most importantly, with national experts, to make whatever changes are necessary to our ordinances and the system that the council set up, so that we can have more successful civilian oversight in the future because we've had different versions of unsuccessful.

I don't want us to have just a third version of unsuccessful. Madison deserves this. We need it, but we need it to function. I think there's a lot of work to do.

One more question on this, and then I want to talk more about you. So that council meeting, you could feel the heartbreak and the, I think, justified anger in the room…

Absolutely, yeah.

…over Corey Ruiz, who was killed three months ago today by Madison police. You have been frequently criticized for not visiting the Willy Street vigil and encampment which sprung up at the intersection where he was killed, before making the decision to clear it. Why did you stay away?

I didn't want it to be about me, and I knew that if I went, it would be.

I watched other politicians go down, and it was 100% about them. I don't think that's right. It was about Corey. It was about the community. It was about the grief and anger that people were feeling. I did not think that it would lead us anywhere positive for me to interrupt that.

I think the feeling behind that is, and I think we saw it in the council chambers as well, is that people deeply want to feel like somebody cares about them, and that the physical presence somehow is a stand-in for “you care about me.” You can care about somebody and not be present physically. I think there are portions of our community that are in deep pain, and this is one of the things that I struggle with every day.

I've been thinking about the role of city government in bringing a community together, to wrestle with hard issues in a way that recognizes everybody's humanity, since the pandemic. I don't have any answers. It's something that I struggle with regularly, and I look to other communities. What are other governments doing? What are non-governmental organizations doing?

What I see is us drifting farther and farther apart from each other. Whether that's because of our media bubbles, or the time we spend on the screen, or the deep fear rooted out in the pandemic, or the impact of our federal government. I think there's a lot of things going on. Even here in Madison, we have forgotten how to productively talk to each other, and across differences, and I think that I just see that showing up again and again.

Have you seen that nature of discourse change in the time that you've been mayor?

Absolutely. 

At the council meeting, there were all sorts of insults and rumors thrown at you.

I've never seen anything that bad, but yes. Even from the time I served on the city council, it has gotten exponentially worse, and it is not about a position on an issue. It is not about Democrat versus Republican or progressive versus conservative. Everybody is behaving poorly.

I see roots in our current president, in his behavior and what he's normalized. I see roots in the pandemic. The pandemic made everybody afraid. People don't like to feel afraid, and many people transmuted that into anger.

But also, we forgot how to be around other human beings during the pandemic. I really do blame social media for a lot of this, for misinformation and disinformation and the creation of a bubble via algorithm that makes you think that everybody agrees with you. That encourages tribalism. 

All of that is playing out in Madison. It doesn't follow national political divides but it's all happening here, too.

Let's talk more about what comes next? You have six months left in your term. Are there final projects that you want to accomplish before leaving office?

We have a whole spreadsheet [laughs].

There are things we're working on that I want to finish. There are things I want to move a step forward, even if we don't get to finish them. It spans the gamut from moving the Amtrak project another step forward, at least. I won't see that through, but would like to get everything set up for success.

There's some administrative procedure memoranda that I think need to be updated. Geeky inside-government stuff that I think would make processes work better or make staff more efficient. We've still got a few things on housing that we want to try and move forward.

Those geeky government things are a lot of being a mayor or a public official. You literally studied how to be a mayor while serving as managing director at the Mayor's Innovation Project. You also served as an alder before running for mayor. After spending nearly eight years in this position, how is the idea or perception of being mayor different from actually doing it?

That's an excellent question. It is so different.

I probably had the best preparation that you could have to be mayor, having studied city governments for over a decade and working directly with mayors, watching them work.

I came into office, and I mean, I'm a policy wonk, right? So I was really excited about all this good policy stuff.

I remember in literally my first week in office, I had two “Aha!” moments. When I was on the city council, I probably saw 30% of what goes on in city government, and there's this whole other 70% that I just had no idea about. Not that anybody's hiding anything, but just that if you're not doing it every day, you don't see everything that happens or all of this work that goes on every single day.

The other realization I had was, oh, my job is not policy. My job is managing people and creating a budget, and that was a big wake-up call for me. I have gotten to do some policy. But mostly, I have gotten to do it by talking with experts on staff or outside experts in coming up with the idea, and staff are actually doing the policy writing. When I was at university, I got to do the policy research and writing.

I do think that the primary job of a mayor in Madison — and I don't think the public sees this — is that you are the CEO of a 3,000-person corporation. It is your job to get the work done, take care of your employees, make sure they have the resources to do the work that they need to do for the community.

Yes, you set the direction. You steer the ship. But your job is not kissing babies and cutting ribbons. Your job is managing people.

The other huge piece is there is so much work that goes into the budget before it even hits the finance committee. There are big decisions to be made about what the city budget is going to look like every year.

There's quite a wide field of people running for mayor. Probably more after this.

It probably will get wider, yeah.

Is there anyone you're supporting?

No. I don't, at the moment, plan to endorse anyone. Certainly not right away. I do think it's a wide field. It may get wider. I think I'd want to let that settle out before I made any decision.

What advice do you have for the next mayor?

I am keeping a list.

I do think the first and most obvious question, and this is really for the candidates, not for the next mayor, is: Are you sure you want to do this?

It is a 24-hour job, and there are parts about it that are amazing, and very rewarding, and at least for me, very interesting. I've learned a tremendous amount.

But it is a very hard job, and anybody who's running has to ask themselves, and maybe more importantly, their family, if they're up for it. For the next mayor, I think my advice would be very much along the lines of what we just talked about — your job, primarily, is to manage people, and to give them the resources they need to get the job done, so that's what you should be focused on. You should be focused on building a strong team, hiring good people if you have the opportunity to, and supporting them to do a good job.

I mean, that's a very sort of internal aspect of it. There is obviously the external aspect of it. For that, setting a vision that’s realistic but aspirational and communicating that to the city, and working with partners to help bring people on board.

One of the things that I've really enjoyed is discovering the other leaders in town that can be good partners. Whether that's the school superintendent or the head of the United Way, or the UW-Madison chancellor, or the president of Madison College.

There’s a lot of folks, a lot of institutions in this town that work together, sometimes publicly, but often quietly behind the scenes, to make the community a better place. That is another aspect of the job that I think is really important: to have good relationships. It’s one of the things that I'm really proud of.

I don't know if it's small or not, but former County Executive [Joe] Parisi and I broke the “curse of the fourth floor,” and actually created a relationship where the mayor and county exec not only talked to each other and met regularly, but actually worked together. And County Executive [Melissa] Agard and I have continued that. I really hope that the next person who sits in this office will keep that going, because the city and county are both better when we're working together.

I obviously have a lot of advice. I don't know if the person who comes next will want to hear any of it, and I certainly will not force it on them. But I've always liked the supposed tradition of leaving a letter for whoever comes next, and I think I'll do that.

I'll also be available. I'll tell you one thing I'm not going to do, though, apologies to Isthmus: I'm not going to write a blog.

Fair enough. Where would you like to work next? Will you run for another elected office or take another public-facing role?

I don't know. I don't have any firm plans.

I don't think I will run for office anytime soon. I wouldn't rule it out for the rest of my life, but I don't have any plans to. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't be interested in serving in government in some role. I think that's certainly a possibility.

I think academia is also a possibility, but I'm not ruling anything out. I am hopeful that I'll get to take a little break, and then, who knows?

It's mid-April 2027, you wake up and don’t have to go to the City-County Building. What are you going to do? How are you going to spend that time?

There is the super prosaic stuff, like I'm going to actually pull my weight around the house. I'm going to go through the stacks of boxes of stuff that [my partner] Amy would really like me to get rid of. I'm hoping to spend more time with my family and travel with them. I have four nephews and one niece, who I don't see enough of. My parents are aging. I don't see enough of them either.

I would really like to spend more time traveling. I'm not going to have any trouble filling my days, but I'm also really excited about the possibility of using my brain in a different way.

When I was at the Mayor's Innovation Project, I enjoyed researching and writing about policy. Even way back before that, I really enjoyed teaching.

So yeah. I'm gonna try and find something that's at least as fun as being mayor.