Myrtle Beach residents who are sick of the bickering that plagues city government can bring it to an end by choosing Judy Rodman as their next mayor. Rodman, a 12-year member of City Council, offers residents a soft-spoken, collegial personal style and steely intellect - the right combination of assets for one who aspires to restore this small but complex city to its rightful position of regional respect. Rodman has a far better chance than her opponents of forging the council into a cohesive policy-making group whose decisions make sense.

During the incumbent mayor's eight-year tenure in office, City Council has lost prestige inside and outside the city limits. Council meetings have become must-see TV for folks who enjoy seeing certain putative grown-ups acting like children and pointlessly disrupting council proceedings. Along with most other council members, Rodman has done her best to comport herself with dignity and calm during these ordeals, helping her colleagues make generally good decisions.

But as she noted recently, the council has lost much of its luster in the bargain. If voters make her mayor, she says, she will spend her first year in office mending fences inside the city, along the Grand Strand, in Columbia and in Washington, D.C. Residents who understand how important these relationships are to a city that needs outside resources to meet its beach-restoration, economic-development and infrastructure aspirations will find that to be an admirable goal.

The other challenger in the race, John Rhodes, a retired businessman who manages the Beach Ball Classic, appears to understand how important these external relationships are to the city, but probably could not pursue the fence-mending as capably as Rodman could. Moreover, her understanding of such issues as settling the future of the city-owned Convention Center hotel and revitalizing the downtown beachside district is more thorough than his.

As for the two-term incumbent, Mark McBride, he seems to take special delight in contrarianism. In this, he is not always wrong. But rather than pursue his disagreement with the city policy directions by trying to attract a majority of council members to his point of view - the essence of leadership - he seems to prefer being on the losing end of 6-1 votes. If his service as mayor is about anything, it's about railing that Myrtle Beach can't remain the quaint seaside seasonal resort it once was, and that he, as a weak mayor in a council-manager city government, lacks the personal authority to keep it that way. Thwarted at every turn, he acts out in ways that besmirch the reputations of good people, public and private, who want to navigate city government carefully as the city morphs, at alarming speed, into the metropolitan center of a cluster of 21st century resort communities.

Rodman understands that going back to the Myrtle Beach of old cannot be an option and that the council can strike the necessary balance between the needs of residents and the imperatives of tourism, if members remain cool and thoughtful. Of the candidates available, she is the only one who understands how Myrtle Beach works as a town. For that reason especially, she garners The Sun News recommendation for election as mayor Tuesday.

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