She has chilly relations with the mayor and her blunt speech has left her distant from City Council colleagues.
She can be charming and polite but has opened herself to accusations of racism.

She is disillusioned with city politics and considered resigning.

And she’s trying to represent some of Madison’s most troubled streets — a 17-year-old youth was shot and killed in the area Tuesday night — in a district with growing poverty and crime.

Ald. Thuy Pham-Remmele, 61, a war-time immigrant from Vietnam and Fulbright scholar who retired after 28 years as a teacher in the Madison schools, is in a spot rarely experienced by a city leader.

In the southwest side’s 20th District, which has seen growing friction as more minorities and poor families move in, many see her as a sincere, straight-talking champion, shaking a city government she believes is in “denial” about serious problems.

“She is standing up for the people,” said Tom McKenna, president of the Orchard Ridge Neighborhood Association.
Others see her as fanning flames and ineffective.

Asked how Pham-Remmele is doing, Mayor Dave Cieslewicz said, “Not particularly well.”

“In the first term, I was more naive and way more hopeful,” Pham-Remmele said. “In the second term, it’s just disappointing.”

Since 2000, the number of low-income students jumped from 14 percent to 57 percent at Orchard Ridge Elementary and from 28 percent to 48 percent at Toki Middle School.

Residents and business owners say children need more after-school options. Some complain about noise and foul language. Seniors feel intimidated at the Meadowood Shopping Center on Raymond Road.

Violence has wracked the neighborhood. On Tuesday, Memorial High School student Karamee Collins Jr. was killed in a shooting on Leland Drive. Another man was killed in the area in 2007. Bullets flew on Raymond Road last month, and there was an armed robbery on May 27.

In five years, in three police sectors in the district, service calls rose 27 percent to 6,495 in 2008. Police got 2,657 calls through May this year, and summer is looming.

“The neighborhood is probably seeing more change in the last three years than any neighborhood in the city,” West District Police Capt. Jay Lengfeld said. “We’ve stabilized it, (but) it certainly requires a lot of our attention.”

In that mosaic operates Pham-Remmele, who ran to succeed retiring Ald. Cindy Thomas and beat liberal Gary Poulson by 10 votes in April 2007. One of the council’s most conservative members, she ran unopposed this spring.

Although Pham-Remmele (her full name is pronounced Twee Fahm REM-mully) had no political experience, Thomas was convinced she could speak to the district’s urgent needs and encouraged her to run.

But Pham-Remmele’s speech — which can seem especially blunt because English isn’t her first language — sometimes brings puzzlement or a backlash, and attacks and mockery on blogs and Internet forums.

During debate on the redevelopment of Allied Drive, for example, she said some parents cared more about hair braids than their children and made other comments some felt were insensitive or racist.

Last fall, as budget debate bogged down on amendments by liberal former Ald. Brenda Konkel, Pham-Remmele said, “Please stop. Don’t waste people’s time. Don’t hog the microphone.”

After clashing with Cieslewicz on the budget and other issues, she is left serving on only the Vending Oversight Committee. She is often tuned out by colleagues.

“Ald. Thuy is incredibly isolated from the mayor’s office and different factions of the council,” said council President Tim Bruer, who respects her and sees in her some of the same eclectic and unpredictable qualities that have characterized his own council tenure. She “says what people are thinking and she has the guts to say it.”

Pham-Remmele says she has a duty to constituents — she speaks passionately about elderly who fear intimidation, crime and eroding property values — and isn’t backing off.

The city, she said, spends too much time on things like recycling of plastic bags and “sustainability” while “real families, good citizens” see trouble in the schools and crime on the street and “are making decisions about moving away.
After the killing, she said, “I want people who are in power to take responsibility and open their eyes and open their hearts. I want a change of mentality.

“I’m trying to be as independent as I could be,” she said. “I don’t sell my soul to anybody. Where the chips fall, they will fall.”

In a relaxed setting, Pham-Remmele is polite, thoughtful, funny, charming and smart. At home, she shows rare Vietnamese books, offers flowers from her garden, and pokes fun at herself and her husband, David Remmele, a retired UW-Whitewater professor.

She has a bachelor’s degree in teaching English as a second language from Saigon University, was a Fulbright scholar at UW-Madison, and has vast experience working with children and families teaching English as a second language in Madison schools.

But she has little feel for the language or ways of city politics. Instead, she disdains it.

“People play it safe, see nothing, say nothing,” she said. “It’s too political. I am not made for that.”

Politicians who disguise true sentiments border on “fraud,” she explained.

So she takes stands.

Months after taking office, she made an indelible mark with a listening session on crime in her district that drew 800 people. The meeting, attended by Cieslewicz and Police Chief Noble Wray, inspired others elsewhere, and that fall the council added 30 new police officers.

McKenna said the meeting embarrassed Cieslewicz and that Pham-Remmele “has been paying the political price ever since.”

“Not true,” Cieslewicz said, claiming her problems come from her own speech and unpredictably.

Pham-Remmele said her comments are misunderstood or used out of context.

Allied Drive residents, she said, have been exploited by outsiders and children she has seen in the schools have been shuffled around without an adult in their life who cares enough to demand better services. The city, instead of building expensive housing with amenities residents can’t afford, should be support basic services in walking distance, like a school, branch library or grocery.

Ald. Judy Compton, 16th District, who is closest to Pham-Remmele on the council and advises more forethought before speaking, said her colleague isn’t racist but “believes people should be held accountable regardless of their ethnic background or race.”

“If I say something, it gets twisted,” Pham-Remmele said. “To be labeled a racist is beyond me.”

For her second term, Pham-Remmele sought to advocate for her district by staying on the Community Development Block Grant Commission and getting named to the Public Safety Review Board and city-schools liaison committee.

The mayor gave her vending oversight and the Commission on People with Disabilities. She turned down the latter.

Cieslewicz said Pham-Remmele isn’t a positive force, missing too many CDBG meetings, pandering to people’s worst instincts, fueling controversies and blaming others. Despite her bluster, she opposed city budgets that helped her district, he said.

On her blog, Konkel wrote, “No one wants to listen to what comes out of her mouth, except that it might be mildly entertaining and have a certain incredibility/horror factor.”

Pham-Remmele is seen differently in her district, where she pushed for the opening of a pilot neighborhood center in the Meadowood Shopping Center and for public safety improvements, like the new neighborhood police officer on the streets. Many residents and the police liked her support of an unsuccessful bid to extend the youth curfew. She’s met with hugs at the neighborhood center.

“I think she’s doing a fantastic job,” Lengfeld said. “I think she’s a very, very good person. She takes her job very seriously and works very hard for people who live in the district.”

Pham-Remmele intends to press ahead — her way.

“Lip service doesn’t fool anyone anymore,” she said. “Random shooting and criminal activities affect everyone, and responsible people won’t compromise their safety for lofty, far out ideals.

“(But) my current work gives me more pains and frustrations than anyone can imagine. My task is more difficult than that of a tightrope walker.”