Monroe County Democratic leaders are meeting tonight, and one of the topics will almost certainly be how Rochester's next mayor will be chosen.

Memo to those Democratic leaders: take a deep breath, pull back from your conspiracy theories, your allegiance to specific mayoral hopefuls, and your love of a fight, and think about what's best for the City of Rochester - and what's not.

And what's not good for the City of Rochester is to have a knock-down, drag-out fight to choose the next mayor.

Democrats are Democrats, and trying to get them to agree on a lot of things is like, well, you know....

Assuming that Bob Duffy becomes New York's lieutenant governor in January, we'll have a new mayor soon afterward. We'll get that mayor in one of two ways:

1) City Council will appoint somebody to serve as an interim mayor, till the end of 2011, and we'll elect a new mayor in November 2011. That person will take office in January 2012, for two years.

2) City Council will call for a special election, to be held in the winter or spring of 2011. The winner will serve through 2013.

For a special election, Democratic Committee leaders would choose the candidate. There can't be a primary.

Democratic Party Chair Joe Morelle wants a special election, not an appointment followed in a few months by a general election. Some Democrats are furious. That process, they say, is undemocratic. In this heavily Democratic city, where virtually nobody but a Democrat has any chance to be elected mayor, the public would effectively be shut out of the process.

They want Council to appoint an interim so that Democrats who want to be mayor can campaign and run in a primary a few months later.

Some of them are also convinced that in a special election, Morelle will choose the candidate. "The chair of the Democratic Party has the sole authority to choose the Democratic candidate for a special election, leaving city committee people and leaders out of the process," Democratic committee leader Anthony Plonczynski said in a recent letter to other committee leaders.

That's not the case, Morelle said in an interview earlier today. He and other Democratic officials have been trying to determine the specifics of mayoral succession since Duffy announced in May that he wanted to go to Albany, Morelle said. They still aren't sure whether the party's candidate for a special election has to be selected by the full county Democratic Committee or by the executive committee. But, he said, he can't choose the candidate by himself. "It's not going to be by fiat," he said.

Democratic Committee leaders won't decide whether we get a special election or an appointment, however. That's City Council's responsibility. And so far, Council members haven't decided what they'll do.

A big problem is that two Council members - Elaine Spaull and Dana Miller - want to be mayor. And a third Council member, Carla Palumbo, is said to be solidly behind former Democratic Party chair Molly Clifford.

Until Council members reach consensus about who they want as the next mayor - one of those candidates or somebody else - they won't be able to reach consensus about how we should get that mayor.

Morelle, though, is very clear about what he wants: a special election, regardless of who the candidate is.

His reasoning: that would give the city the most continuity and stability. With an appointment, we'd have three mayors in three years: Duffy, his appointed successor, and the winner of the November 2011 general election. With a special election, we'd have only two: Duffy, and the winner of the 2011 special election.

With all due respect to Duffy, in the community's mind he's already a lame-duck mayor. And in my discussion with him today, Morelle noted that an interim appointment - no matter who it is - will be viewed as just that: an interim, a lame-duck who'll be gone at the end of the year. The city's governmental future will be unsettled for well over a year. That won't inspire confidence among developers or the public.

"If there's any degree of instability," Morelle said, "private capital doesn't like that."

Nor, said Morelle, would a chaotic Democratic primary in 2011 inspire confidence. The party's last mayoral primary, between Bob Duffy, Wade Norwood, and Tim Mains in 2005, was "relatively civil, because they're civil people," Morelle said. "But it still sucked the oxygen out of the room."

"I know a lot of people would love the excitement of a wide-open, bare-knuckled brawl," he said, but that won't be good for the party or the city.

And, Morelle noted, 2011 is a key county election year: we'll vote for county executive and district attorney. And Democrats hope to mount strong campaigns in both races.

Normally, the mayor and county executive aren't elected in the same year. For Democrats to have any chance of winning that office in the general election, Morelle said, "I can't have the party focused on what can be a bitter and divisive primary in the middle of it."

Morelle has been meeting individually with Democratic committee leaders and City Council members, hoping to develop a consensus.

"People say, ‘We need an open primary,'" said Morelle. "That works in a perfect world."

In his letter to other Democratic Committee leaders, Anthony Plonczynski insists that the special-election process "has the potential of being as open as Rochester's own version of ‘Three Men in the Room.'"

"The elimination of a free and fair election through the process of a primary," Plonczynski wrote, "will have a harmful effect on party unity. In fact, this decision will create an environment of distrust that will leave the party in shambles, with no support for the person who is chosen to replace the mayor."

"I'm interested in the health and the future of the Democratic Party," Morelle said this morning, "but I am more interested in the future and health of the City of Rochester."

"Sometimes," Morelle said, "there's a time to put the public's interest ahead of political interests."

Who should the Democrats' candidate be?

"From the party's point of view, or at least my point of view as the leader," Morelle said this morning, "I want to make sure that the next mayor will be of the caliber we need" to face the very difficult challenges the city faces.

So do I.

And as I've been saying since Bob Duffy announced his decision to run with Andrew Cuomo, I can think of only one person who meets that standard: the city's corporation counsel, Tom Richards.

Richards hasn't expressed interest in running. He certainly doesn't need the grief. And I thought for a while that our best bet might be to have Council appoint him for the one-year interim period, to provide at least a little continuity from the Duffy administration.

But I think Morelle's right. The campaigning for the general election would begin immediately, undercutting the interim's authority and the public's confidence.

What is best for the community is for Richards to agree to run in a special election and serve through 2013.

That's not what he signed on for when he joined the Duffy administration in 2006. But he has taken on more responsibility than many previous corporation counsels have. He's highly respected.

Would he get out to neighborhood groups and do the public schmoozing that Bob Duffy has done? Probably not. And while former Mayor Bill Johnson didn't do as much as Duffy has, he was out in the community a lot.

But Johnson's predecessor - the highly respected Tom Ryan - seemed to have an innate aversion to that kind of public work. And he was a terrific mayor.

It's asking a lot to ask Richards to step up as mayor. But if Duffy had stayed on as mayor, presumably Richards would have continued as corporation counsel until the end of 2013. And a special election, with no primary, would greatly reduce the politicking Richards would have to do.

As Joe Morelle noted, this is a crucial, tenuous time for the city. The last thing we need is a Democratic Party fight.

It's time for the current mayoral hopefuls to put their own ambitions on hold. And it's time for Democrats in party leadership roles to forget about their hope for a primary, unify behind a special election, and ask Tom Richards what they can do to convince him to give a few more years to his community.