Providence Firefighters Lt. Chris Rondeau, left, Joe Moreino and others prepare signs Thursday for their planned picket of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The firefighters have been without a contract for eight years.

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The Providence Journal / Frieda Squires

WASHINGTON — Three weeks ago, Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline and his colleagues from around the country were celebrating the kind of coup that local politicians dream about.

For a national convention built around President Obama’s promise of jobs and money for their cities, the mayors had landed Vice President Joe Biden, more than a dozen top White House staff and Cabinet secretaries, and almost 100 of the federal bureaucrats who are dispensing a $787-billion antidote to the hardest times since the Great Depression.

The annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors was going to be an Obama “love fest,” said Tom Cochran, the organization’s longtime chief executive. “We had giant pictures of Barack Obama. We had the big flat-screen TV” to broadcast speeches by Biden, senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan and other administration brass.

But with announcements from Cicilline and the White House last Friday, the love fest was off.

Under the threat of a firefighters’ union picket line, the Obama administration sent regrets, not only from Biden, but also from members of the president’s Cabinet. On top of that was a wider “boycott,” as Cochran put it, by the officials assigned to talk shop with the mayors about how to bring home the federal bacon to their recession-plagued cities.

The collapse of the Obama administration’s program in Providence involved a falling out within the Democratic family, mixed messages from the vaunted Obama team, and the loss of an opportunity for the White House to reap goodwill from one of the rare political institutions that still functions on a bipartisan basis.

The White House has declined requests to answer specific questions about the dispute.

But Cochran — a salty veteran of the Lyndon Johnson administration who has been with the mayors since Joseph A. Doorley Jr. ruled Providence City Hall — said he believes the reversal “came out of Biden’s office.” Cochran said he understands that the vice president’s withdrawal was fueled in part by his emotional ties to the firefighters’ union, rooted in the rescue of his two young sons from a 1972 car wreck that killed his first wife and their daughter.

Cochran also concluded that the fracas created disagreement inside the administration — an assertion that the White House declined to answer. “A lot of the Barack Obama crowd would like this thing to go away,” Cochran said.

But Cochran also said he was told by Cecilia Munoz, White House chief of intergovernmental relations, that neither Biden nor Mr. Obama has ever crossed a picket line “and they’re not going to do it now.”

Providence won the coveted hosting rights for the 77th annual meeting of the mayors conference — a first for the city — about five years ago. Paul A. Doughty, president of Local 799 of the International Association of Fire Fighters, said he put Cicilline “on notice” about a year ago that “we needed to invest some time to avoid any possibility of an unresolved contract during the mayors’ conference.”

Doughty didn’t specifically tell Cicilline that the Providence local would picket the mayors meeting, he said. “I thought it was pretty clear what I meant,” said Doughty.

Doughty said he told the firefighters’ leadership in Washington in December that the dispute remained unsettled and a protest at the mayors’ conference was possible.

Cicilline said last Friday that he expected pickets at evening forums where he was scheduled to address the conference. “I didn’t expect picketing at the annual events” of the conference, he said.

Around St. Patrick’s Day, Doughty said, he notified Rhode Island’s all-Democrat congressional delegation that his local was prepared to picket the mayors’ meeting if there was no agreement with the city.

“If he was awake and breathing,” Cicilline had to know about the possible picketing, Doughty said. But he acknowledged that he did not tell the mayor about the plans to picket.

On April 27, Cicilline and the mayors’ conference reported that Mr. Obama and Biden had been invited to the meeting. At about the same time, Doughty formally sought his international union’s help in enforcing the probable picket line.

Late in the week of May 3, Cochran said the White House notified him that Biden and the other federal officials would attend. The mayors’ conference trumpeted the news May 13.

Why did Biden and the other administration officials commit themselves to a national convention that might be picketed?

An administration official, declining to be identified by name, replied by E-mail: “The administration was aware of the issue … and hoped for resolution.”After news of Biden’s acceptance broke, international union General President Harold Schaitberger and Biden spoke by phone to seal the vice president’s commitment to honor the union picket line, said Jeff Zack, spokesman for the firefighters’ international.

Cochran said he learned of the problem in a call from David Agnew, the White House mayors’ liaison, on May 14. Cochran said he — mistakenly — considered the picket scenario to be so implausible that he told Agnew not to worry. Protests and pickets are a staple of the life of a mayor — and of mayors’ conference meetings, he said.

But when they talked again later that day, Cochran recalled, Agnew told him, “We’ve got a problem with the vice president’s staff.”

Cochran said the next days brought “an avalanche of calls” between mayors’ conference and White House personnel, including conversations between White House adviser Jarrett — traveling in Europe with the president — and two mayors who were big Obama backers last year: Joseph Riley of Charleston, S.C., and Greg Nichols of Seattle.

According to a statement by White House spokeswoman Moira Mack: “The firefighters agreed not to picket any portion of the conference the mayor did not attend while administration officials were present. This would have made it possible for administration officials to participate in the conference without crossing the picket line — but the mayor did not agree.”

Zack, of the international headquarters, said the firefighters came up with the offer and had passed it on to the White House.

The mayors were emphatic in saying that Cicilline was not alone in declining the offer — which some viewed as an effort to humiliate him in his own city, Cochran said. Cochran said the leadership of the conference — including Thomas M. Menino of Boston and Richard M. Daley of Chicago — discussed the offer during a June 2 conference call, where their reaction to the offer became heated and profane.

“We stood with Cicilline” and declined the offer, Cochran said.

For his part, Cicilline said Saturday: “No suggestion was made by the White House or anybody else that I stay away.”

On June 3, Munoz and Agnew told Miami Mayor Manuel Diaz, president of the conference of mayors, and Cochran in a conference call that the visit by Biden and the other officials was off, Cochran said.

The word of the labor dispute apparently did not get out to everybody involved. The day after the official “No” reached the mayors, the advance staff for Labor Secretary Hilda Solis contacted the conference for information about her planned trip to Providence, Cochran said.

Nevertheless, efforts continued to get Cicilline and Doughty to come to agreement.

White House spokeswoman Mack said after the inconclusive meeting between the mayor and the local union leader Wednesday:

“We’re encouraging the mayor and the firefighters to resolve this issue. If they do, then we’ll certainly reevaluate the schedules of the administration officials who had been planning to attend the conference.”

jmulligan@belo-dc.com