This was supposed to be David N. Cicilline’s moment in the sun, a high point of his 6-1/2 years as mayor of Providence, a display of his stature in the national firmament of mayors and with the Obama administration.

Instead, the threat of pickets from angry firefighters scuttled the mayor’s best-laid plans, prompting cancellations by Vice President Joseph Biden and some 100 top-level Obama cabinet members and advisers. The controversy has also thrust Cicilline’s leadership into the spotlight as mayors from across the country gathered in Providence for this weekend’s U.S. Conference of Mayors annual meeting. .

To some, Cicilline’s refusal to back down to firefighters who have been without a contract for nearly a decade is a sign of his resolve –– of a strong leader who will do what’s in the city’s best interest.

To others, it’s a troubling reflection of his stubbornness, a failure in leadership to resolve a long-simmering labor impasse before it flared up to overshadow Providence’s turn on the national stage.

The mayor has been buffeted by controversy before –– most notably questions over his handling of the 2007 December snowstorm that snarled the city and stranded schoolchildren, and his firing this year of a tax collector who had tried, with the knowledge of the mayor’s aides, to collect a bad check for $75,000 from the mayor’s brother.

The troubles involving his brother John Cicilline, now in federal prison for shaking down drug-dealer clients as a defense lawyer, have contributed to a dip in the mayor’s statewide approval ratings and may have factored into his decision not to run for Rhode Island governor next year. After ranking in the 60-percent range most of the time since 2005, Cicilline’s approval numbers in recent Brown University polls have fallen to 39 percent in February and 45 percent in May.

Instead, Cicilline plans to run in 2010 for a third term as mayor of Providence, where he remains a formidable and well-financed candidate, with more than $100,000 raised in the first quarter of 2009 and more than $700,000 in his campaign account as of March 31. But the events of the past week could linger in voters’ minds, says Marion Orr, director of Brown University’s Taubman Center for Public Policy.

Public opinion has seemed to surge strongly in the mayor’s favor, a sign, says Orr, of voters’ concerns about the economy and reigning in government spending. A newly formed citizens group, Citizens for a Better Providence, rallied last week in support of Cicilline. But Orr warns of a potential backlash depending on how things play out.

“This is an important moment in David Cicilline’s mayoralty,” says Orr. “I think he understands how important this particular moment may be in shaping his public leadership image . . . This is something that will follow him for quite a while.”

In an interview last week, Cicilline was resolutely on message, rattling off numbers to support his contention that the firefighters’ contract is unaffordable, echoing strongly worded radio ads that his campaign has been running. A planned meeting with the union president had failed to materialize two hours earlier. In another hour, the mayor would slip off to the law office of confidante Jack McConnell to finally meet with union leader Paul Doughty –– but the impasse would remain.

But Orr and others, including early Cicilline allies and advisers Matthew Jerzyk and Robert Walsh, say that the mayor should have anticipated that the firefighters would picket the conference and done more to resolve the situation sooner.

Walsh, executive director of the National Education Association of Rhode Island and the head of Cicilline’s 2002 transition team, said that the mayor should have settled the dispute years ago.

“I’m sure David must be wondering in his heart of hearts how it ever got to this point,” says Walsh. “I’m heartbroken that this has become a defining moment of his administration.”

The firefighter dispute also made national headlines in 2004, when vice presidential candidate John Edwards canceled a Providence fundraiser, and again in 2007, when Cicilline was forced to step aside as Hillary Clinton’s state presidential campaign chairman so that a local fundraiser could go on without him.

After the Edwards cancellation, Walsh says that he and a few other local labor leaders and Cicilline friends approached the mayor at a fundraiser and offered to help mediate the firefighters dispute –– “to get everyone in a room until it gets done.” But Cicilline declined.

Jerzyk, who organized get-out-the-vote drives in support of Cicilline’s 2002 and 2006 campaigns, wrote last week on the political blog RIFuture.org: “I am outraged because this embarrassment was entirely foreseeable . . . So forgive me if I’m not running to my checkbook when David Cicilline sends out a fundraising request . . . attempting to cash in on an embarrassment that he and his staff should have fixed a long, long time ago.”

Cicilline says it is the firefighters who have been stubborn, and that he has to look out for the taxpayers and the city’s financial health. But does he look back and wonder if he could have done anything differently?

Cicilline acknowledged that the bitterness goes back to his first campaign, in 2002, when he won the firefighters’ endorsement by pledging to resolve their contract differences within 30 days of taking office. But after taking office, he says, he discovered that “their set of expectations was based on the contracts that they had received for decades. Mine were based on economic realities.”

Doughty, the union president, counters that the mayor didn’t engage in serious negotiations upon taking office, something that firefighters understood because of the budget deficit he’d inherited. But as time passed, it “stuck in our craw” that Cicilline didn’t honor his pledge, or at least admit he was wrong, said Doughty. Asked if this could be a defining moment for him, Cicilline answered: “I hope that people would make a determination about me based on all of my work. This is one moment in the history of the city and in the middle of my second term. I don’t know if it will define me. I hope that people would see me as consistent, trying to do the right thing for the city.”

His mayoral colleagues are standing firmly behind him, says Cicilline. They confront the same problems, and recognize that any of them could find themselves in the same predicament. Just before the interview, Cicilline hung up with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, who attended Providence College and vowed to return this weekend.

“He expressed his strong support,” said Cicilline.

TO OTHERS, CICILLINE’S failure to reach agreement with the firefighters speaks to flaws in his leadership style, a desire to impose his will in violation of the law, labor agreements and political sensibilities.

Leaders of Local 799 of the International Association of Firefighters contend that the Cicilline administration has lost a dozen straight court fights and labor arbitrations, some for illegally trying to impose cuts in wages and benefits. Walsh, of the NEA, points out that those arbitrations have cost the city substantial legal fees –– in the neighborhood of $1 million, according to the firefighters’ union.

Walsh wonders if Cicilline’s stand against the firefighters was part of a political strategy to run for governor, to show suburbanites that a liberal, urban politician could be tough with unions. If so, Walsh says, it may have backfired, since an issue that plays well in a general election could have hurt Cicilline in a three- or four-way Democratic primary, where organized labor is more of a factor.

Cicilline has won praise for bringing more diversity and a larger neighborhood presence into City Hall. But he also has been criticized for relying too heavily on the East Side-Brown set, and for surrounding himself with aides who lack political savvy, which has frustrated even some supporters.

The mayor also has made it a priority to fight the patronage and no-show jobs of the past. But there have been problems in the city’s force of 6,000 workers: WPRI-Channel 12 reporter Tim White has reported on Public Works employees loafing on the job and driving a city backhoe and cement sand to a foreman’s house for personal use, and Parks Department workers goofing off on the city clock. Cicilline moved quickly to fire or discipline those implicated.

Others snipe at how a mayor who preaches frugality in a tough economy can employ a $54,000-a-year director of protocol, gave four top aides raises of 6 or 7 percent in the past year and boosted chief of staff Deborah Brayton’s salary 18 percent, to $118,000. Karen Southern, the mayor’s press secretary, defended the raises as warranted, particularly in the case of Brayton who had been promoted, and noted that the mayor’s non-union staffers have taken unpaid furlough days and will see their contribution to their health insurance rise from 10 percent to 20 percent.

LAWYER JACK MCCONNELL, a close friend, confidant and East Side neighbor of Cicilline’s, says that the mayor isn’t afraid to make tough decisions.

That’s what McConnell says the mayor did last year, after embattled school superintendent Donnie Evans resigned in the wake of the 2007 snowstorm debacle. Facing pressure to conduct an open search, Cicilline instead reached out to national education experts and quickly hired Tom Brady, a retired Army colonel who had helped overhaul schools in Philadelphia and Washington. Brady has won plaudits for energizing a moribund school system.

“He has said to me that the problems with the schools keep him up at night,” said McConnell. “He knew he needed a strong superintendent and he spoke to the best and the brightest and identified Brady and brought him into the fold. When he sees a problem, he identifies the experts, educates himself and puts forth a solution.”

A day or two before the firefighters’ plans to picket the mayors’ conference became public, McConnell says that Cicilline stopped by his house late at night.

“He said, ‘I need a gut check.’ The union was proposing he stay away from the mayors’ conference and he asked what I thought,” said McConnell. “I told him it was the craziest thing I’d ever heard. He said, ‘Whew. That’s what I thought. But I needed a reality check.’”

McConnell said that they never thought it “in the realm of possibility” that the firefighters’ threatened picket lines would so disrupt the conference. But that hasn’t changed the mayor’s view of the underlying issues.

“He’s become more resolute,” said McConnell. “But he’s also a very gracious host. And there’s a piece of him that’s very hurt that his colleagues will be coming to his home city and be confronted with such disarray.”

Despite the disappointment, City Councilman Cliff Wood of Ward 2, a Cicilline ally and former aide, says that the mayor’s actions demonstrate that he takes his responsibility to the city and the taxpayers seriously.

“He is refusing to capitulate at a time when it’s his party, when there’s this event that’s a big deal to him,” said Wood.

Others, like the NEA’s Walsh, warn that many of the people rallying to Cicilline on his firefighters stand are “temporary friends” who don’t live in Providence or won’t be around when he runs for reelection.

While Cicilline has tabled his ambitions for higher political office for now, he is 47, and has spoken of running for higher office to address problems afflicting cities on a more global scale. Ironically, that is the type of work that he had hoped to achieve this weekend by bringing the nation’s mayors together with Obama officials, with Providence as a showcase.

“This is obviously not easy,” said Cicilline. “This conference comes at a very important time in the history of our city, our state and our country. But my first responsibility is to the people who elected me.”

He ticked off some of his priorities for a third term –– schools, street cars, developing a new downtown neighborhood from the rubble of the old Interstate 195, creating “a sustainable financial system.”

“This is the best job I’ve ever had,” he says.

Even during weeks like this?

He repeats, “This is the best job I’ve ever had.”

mstanton@projo.com