MADISON, WIS. ? When the nation’s mayors gathered here last weekend, many of them felt out of place. The U.S. Conference of Mayors has been dominated by its big-city members and usually has chosen a metropolis for its annual summer meeting.

This time, they came to a secondary city in a non-urban state a city many of the visitors said they had never seen before. Many of the stars stayed home. New York City’s Michael Bloomberg and Los Angeles’ James Hahn, the two newcomers who would have pulled in major media attention had they come, found other things to do. Chicago’s Richard Daley, who has been active in the conference, was missing over the weekend preoccupied, friends said, by his wife’s recently diagnosed breast cancer.

Mayors long ago gave up on warning the country of an “urban crisis.” Most big cities grew during the 1990s, and some prospered. But now they feel they are very much on their own. The state capitals are consumed with budget problems, and Washington is busy fighting a war on terrorism.

Boston’s Thomas Menino, the new president of the group, put affordable housing at the top of the agenda, but the formal speech by Housing and Urban Development Secretary Mel Martinez was perfunctory and his appearance was over almost before it began. Tom Ridge and Tommy Thompson were the other administration drop-bys; no congressional leaders appeared.

Aside from Menino, the activists in the group are people little-known outside their home cities. Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman and Salt Lake City’s Ross “Rocky” Anderson led the fight on the resolution questioning the administration plan for transporting high-level nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Veteran Mayor Joseph Riley of Charleston, S.C., stirred his colleagues with a passionate defense of architectural distinction in public buildings. “Don’t let the security experts persuade you to build windowless structures facing away from the street,” Riley said. Sacrificing beauty to the call for super-safe office bunkers, he said, would give the terrorists a victory they do not deserve.

The setting of the meeting underscored Riley’s message. The mayors’ sessions were in Monona Terrace, a gleaming, glass-encased white convention center whose balconies look out on Lake Monona, which is filled with sailboats these summer days.

The building was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, but it took three decades and infinite negotiations by city, county and state officials to get it built a few years ago. It has sparked a commercial boom and construction of lakeside condominiums, one of which will soon be the home of Madison Mayor Susan Bauman. Although it was sealed off by police and security personnel during the meeting, it provides a great front porch for people who work four blocks uphill in the state capitol and the surrounding commercial district.

The heroine of the gathering was another woman mayor, Beverly O’Neill of Long Beach, Calif. O’Neill, a lifelong educator who in 31 years rose from music instructor to president of Long Beach City College, was elected mayor in 1994. In her first term, she confronted the loss of 50,000 jobs, when the Navy moved out of the port and McDonnell-Douglas, the largest civilian employer, was absorbed by Boeing.

O’Neill responded with a blueprint for converting the city’s economy to a combination of tourism, foreign trade and emerging technologies, and was re-elected in 1998 with 80 percent of the votes. But a decade ago, Long Beach voters approved a two-term limit for its mayors with a proviso that allowed additional terms, but only by write-in.

With her “strategic plan” still incomplete, O’Neill polled her constituents and found that, even though one in five believed there should be no deviation from term limits, she still had a shot at winning.

So she ran again.

She led the field in the April primary and won the June runoff by 10 percentage points over the vice mayor, the only name on the ballot. As far as anyone knows, no city of anything approaching Long Beach’s size (470,000 people) had ever elected a write-in mayoral candidate.

But O’Neill was widely known, had the support of top California Democrats, a Republican county supervisor and the Long Beach Press-Telegram, and raised more than $400,000 for the race.

Term limits were less an issue, she says, than her plans for the city and her record of leadership. But the result has been “very exciting. People feel a sense of empowerment from what they did,” O’Neill says.

Her colleagues who would love to feel that same degree of support from their constituents kept coming by her seat to offer congratulations and, perhaps, soak up some good O’Neill karma.

They will need it. Nobody else is going to offer them much help.

David Broder is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.