Mayors: Takin' Care of Business
Mayors are on the frontline of putting public policy into action. While (many of) the inhabitants of Washington, D.C. bloviate, local elected officials confront the real issues that affect people on a daily basis. So when mayors, or rather the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM), talk, I listen.
The USCM recently released their annual report on hunger and homelessness in American cities; the results are not good.
The 23 cities surveyed across the country reported that they were generally not meeting the need for emergency food assistance. Last year, 17 percent of all people in need of food assistance and 15 percent of households with children were not receiving it; in 2008, 19 cities expect the demand for food assistance to increase.
The need for providing shelter for homeless persons is also not being met. More than half of the cities surveyed reported that they had to turn people away some or all of the time from homeless shelters.
The USCM report cited high housing costs and the lack of affordable housing as a major cause of homelessness in households with children, as well as a major cause of hunger.
“This report underscores the fact that issues of poverty in this country are often inter-related,” said Des Moines Mayor Frank Cownie, Co-Chair of the Conference’s Task Force on Hunger and Homelessness in a press release. “It is instructive in that we must deal with these issues collectively to make sustainable impact, but cities cannot handle these challenges alone. We need all levels of government, as well as the private sector, to partner with us.”
Mayor Cownie is right. Bashing Washington may be fun, but it can only go so far. Some problems are just too big for local governments to solve.
Which is why the USCM (again, love the mayors) also recently released their 10-point plan for ’08, which includes their policy priorities for the next president to consider along with glossy photographs of all the 2008 presidential hopefuls (now past and present).
Perhaps not surprisingly, the USCM calls for tackling many of today’s problems with the policy recommendations we at the RAC recommend. For example: passage of a “cap-and-trade” bill to limit carbon dioxide emissions (point #1), reinstatement of the assault weapons ban (#2), enactment of the National Affordable Housing Trust Fund (point #4), increased funding for Head Start, Food Stamps, and children’s healthcare (point #7), and approval of comprehensive immigration reform (point #8).
Mayors don’t (or at least shouldn’t) have the luxury of going off on ideological rants. While they do, children starve, bridges crumble, cities burn.