A New Mayor and an Experienced Mayor Trade Thoughts
By Anne Li on 02/02/2011 @ 09:12 AM
Anne Li, CFED's Program Director of Innovation
Hello! My name is Anne Li and I am CFED’s program director for innovation. I will be blogging pretty regularly from now on, and also inviting you and others to be Guest Bloggers.
I’d like to share some observations from a standing-room only event on January 20th at the St. Regis Hotel. It featured a number of mayors and others who are leading cities into the forefront of asset innovation. CFED’s new report, Building Economic Security in America’s Cities: New Municipal Strategies for Asset Building and Financial Empowerment was the centerpiece of the event. Generous funders Living Cities and the Surdna Foundation were represented by Ben Hecht and Jasmine Thomas, respectively. The Cities for Financial Empowerment (CFE) Coalition, whose members inspired and provided much of the information in the report, were represented by (among others) Jonathan Mintz of New York City and Jose Cisneros of San Francisco.
Many in the audience, including myself, were struck by the observations of a new mayor and an experienced mayor. Mayor Angel Taveras of Providence RI had been in office only 17 days! Himself raised by a single mom and attending Head Start, Mayor Taveras went on to Harvard University and Georgetown Law School before being elected mayor last fall. He said, “A child is poor because the parents are poor. Lift the parent out of poverty, and you’ve lifted out the child, and broken the cycle of poverty.”
Mayor Chris Coleman of St. Paul, MN has more time in grade than Mayor Tavares. He had recently been re-elected to a second term. He said, “Cities are uniquely qualified to have an impact on citizens’ financial security. Cities can use their schools, their libraries, their parks, and so many other places and ways in which they touch people where they live.”
St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman at the Municipal Report Release Event
Mayor Coleman asked Mayor Taveras: “You’ve been in office 17 days. How many calls about snow removal have you already received?” He went on to use snow removal (a touchy subject for so many of us, this winter) as an example of the way cities have unique types of interactions with residents that affect their financial security. When a city declares a snow emergency, the Mayor said, it is very often lower-income residents who don’t move their cars from the snow emergency routes. Why? Sometimes because they’re not tuned in well enough to hear about the snow emergency declaration. Sometimes their car won’t start and they can’t afford to buy a new battery.
And then what happens? The Mayor asked and answered. Their car is ticketed and towed. And the $75 for a ticket plus the $350 for towing, while a nuisance for more affluent residents, may become a financial catastrophe for a low-income household. It may be enough to push that household into crisis.
With that very graphic and compelling story, Mayor Coleman sounded the theme echoed by the other speakers and by the report: cities can leverage municipal power and politics to advance a diverse financial empowerment agenda. The report describes a variety of innovative municipal approaches – not only New York and San Francisco, but also Seattle-King County, Newark and San Antonio among many others. It’s a user-friendly catalogue of innovative strategies and policies that localities across the country can adapt to the needs of their citizens to help them build and preserve financial security.
Interested in what else was discussed during the January 20th event? Watch the recorded briefing and panel discussion here.
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