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Jess Zimbabwe: We’re in the middle of a presidential election season, and we’ve just heard Barack Obama address this conference on Saturday. How do you think the campaigns have discussed issues that are important to America’s cities?

Mayor Cornett: One of my concerns is that they are not addressing the infrastructure needs that are becoming more and more critical. The system that they have in place for funding our interstate highway system is clearly broken. It seems that whoever has the oldest senator gets the highway dollars. The candidates are caught in a situation where they have to deal with the issues that the American people are interested in right today, and not necessarily what will occur over the next four or eight years…

Mayor Cicilline: I would say that there was not a lot of discussion of issues that are important to cities, issues like public safety, infrastructure, and economic development. When you think about the role that cities play in the economy of this country, and the fact that most Americans live in cities, it will be very important for mayors and people who live in cities to press the presidential candidates… I think Senator Obama on Saturday really did invite us to change the paradigm and to stop talking about cities as places that have all of these problems and challenges, and recognize instead that cities are the places that provide solutions for America. We need our presidential candidates to believe that and to talk to the American people that way.

Mayor Blum: Candidates for president get by with a lot because they can make their broader statements and then leave, and we’re the ones that have to fix the potholes and that kind of thing. I hope that they can get a little bit more specific. The healthcare issue is one that’s important for cities, for a lot of reasons. The other big issue that we haven’t talked about yet is the budget, because money at the federal level does go to cities. The CDBG money is used so well in our cities, and I think in most cities, that money is used to leverage other dollars.

Mayor Smith: I’m pleased that at least transportation and connectivity are being mentioned at all. I’ve listened to so many addresses, waiting to hear something about transportation and how we connect our people, and never hear it, from Democrats or Republicans.

Mayor Cornett: What I hear mayors say typically is that urban issues aren’t truly understood at the White House. Neither of these candidates have been mayors… They can make up for that by putting former mayors into key roles in the cabinet… Short of that, we’re probably going to have the disconnect that we’ve had in the past.

Mayor Cicilline: One of the things that I thought was very exciting was the proposal by Senator Obama to create in his administration a person charged with the responsibility of coordinating urban policy, so that cities and mayors will have one person that will be responsible within the administration, so that someone is thinking strategically about what impacts federal policy is having on cities.

Jess Zimbabwe: Do you have any ideas or priorities for improving the role of the federal government in your city?

Mayor Blum: We need the federal government to do what the federal government is supposed to do. In [Santa Barbara], we have flood control problems, and the Army Corps of Engineers is supposed to help us on that. With federal highways and Amtrak, there are all kinds of things that the federal government is supposed to be helping us with…

Mayor Cicilline: We have the lowest per capita investment in infrastructure of any industrialized nation. What mayors are looking for, as Mayor Blum said, is not for the federal government to take over, but rather to restore a partnership in terms of resources and policies.

Mayor Cownie: [Iowa has] so many infrastructure problems. In each of our towns, it’s manifested in different ways: we need a process that moves quickly. Since 1993, we’ve been moving to get approval of new levees, and it just hasn’t happened. Maybe it was a Freudian slip, but the Corps of Engineers said that, “we are at war.” The federal government needs to rethink its priorities and ask, “is it sensible that we can’t protect the places where American people live?” This administration has handled that over the last seven years by spending a lot of money in other countries for the wrong reasons.

Mayor Smith: A little thing that is going to affect us: the federal government has said that platform heights in all train station must be at train floor level to accommodate those less-than-able. It’s a noble goal. The disconnect is that there are five different floor heights of trains, and many stations have four of those different trains that will pull into the station. Which height do you build to?

Mayor Cownie: As they look at re-funding the transportation bill, we have to look again at priorities… In the state of Iowa, we put all of our transportation dollars into concrete and asphalt. We need rail; we need high-speed mass transit across this country. There’s a rail line through Iowa that is used for other purposes, but could connect passengers in lots of smaller communities. Due to the condition of the rail, however, they’re down to 30 and 40 mph. It hasn’t been updated in years, and there’s not one transportation dollar that’s going to it.

If I had a message to send the next administration, it would be to have an urban person in the inner circle. Someone representing cities should be heard on a daily basis.” - Mayor Cornett

Jess Zimbabwe: Mayor Smith, as a former Chairman of the Amtrak Board of Directors, I’m sure you’ve been following the reauthorization of the surface transportation bill. What are some of your priorities for that piece of legislation?

Mayor Smith: We’ve ignored our transportation in this country for the last three or four decades. The last vision we had in transportation was the interstate highway system, which was really built for the military. The single greatest priority is for our modes of transportation to work together and feed each other and not act as separate, competing entities. For too long, we’ve had an aviation bill, a surface transportation bill, a rail bill, and they’re seen as disconnected silos… There is an incorrect notion that we have this vast country and certain modes of transportation don’t make sense because we’re so big, while Europe and Japan are smaller and that’s why rail makes sense there.

Mayor Cownie: We have to remember that the mayors have been fighting for the environment so hard. As we continue to invest in concrete and in asphalt, when we talk about moving goods and services, it costs 75 percent less in energy to move a ton of goods by rail than by truck…

Mayor Smith: There’s a sense of urgency about passing the transportation bill. Congress has been working now for 12 years on Amtrak reauthorization. We don’t have 12 years to figure out the transportation bill. Our people don’t have other transportation choices. If you’re going to get somewhere, you’re going to take your personal automobile, or you aren’t going to get there!

Jess Zimbabwe: Yesterday, there was a strategy session here on the growing problem of vacant and abandoned property, which is on the rise across the country due to mortgage foreclosures. How is the foreclosure crisis affecting your community, and how are you handling it?

Mayor Cicilline: The crisis is serious in Providence. We have over 1,500 homes in foreclosure. There are some neighborhoods that are feeling impacts of the last seven or eight years. We’ve developed a help center with our state housing agency and our CDCs to help educate people about how to avoid foreclosure and to encourage them to seek assistance. Most families can ... if they seek assistance early enough, but they avoid it because it’s embarrassing, so they don’t answer the phone. I created a housing trust fund program with interest-free loans specifically for repairs, and I have introduced to the city council a resolution to create a vacant and abandoned property penalty of $100 per thousand-dollars of value, so that makes a disincentive for banks to hold on to these properties. What we see now is that some bank in Germany is making decisions that are impacting my neighborhood. I’ve also asked the city council to borrow $1 million dollars against our CDBG funds so that we can partner with the CDCs to begin to buy, repair, and resell properties.

Mayor Smith: We deal with abandoned property [in Meridian] with absentee landlords. We’ve worked very aggressively with the [Mississippi] secretary of state’s office to take title to this land through a much quicker process than the normal three-year process. We turn it over to developers at almost no cost if they sign an agreement that they will build an affordable home there, and we ultimately have veto approval of what they’re going to build so that they fit into older neighborhoods and look like they belong there. We worked with Habitat for Humanity and the Housing Authority for infill housing, because we already have the streets, the water, the sewer service, the streetlights, and the infrastructure there. So let’s stop building out in pastures.

Mayor Cownie: In Des Moines, we share the same problems with abandoned properties. The city has to figure out how to reuse some of these vacant properties located in and around existing infrastructure. We’re always looking at what it costs to get property out of the hands of people who can’t or won’t clean up brownfields and such. We’ve found that 70 percent or more of the people facing foreclosure have never even contacted their lenders after they receive notice. We’re trying to streamline a process to let us know when those notices are filed with the county so that we can work closely with the state and county to try to keep some of these people in their properties by restructuring their loans… Many of these people were barely hanging on before with two incomes, and if anything happens—they lose one income, they have a health issue, there’s domestic abuse, the rate goes up on an adjustable rate mortgage—then they can no longer hang on. They can’t even rent somewhere if they’ve been through foreclosure because they have a bad credit rating. I’ve initiated a collaborative process with government agencies, the lenders, and the faith-based community to try to get ahead of this cycle…

Mayor Smith: We need zoning and planning changes. When I was a little boy, a neighborhood had a church, a corner bar, a little grocery store. When everything was in walking distance—that was what made a neighborhood. Now, the paradigm is that everybody lives over here, shops over there, and we’re going to make products over there. The automobile propelled that, but now it’s not working because, at $4-per-gallon gas, people have to make a real choice about whether to drive to the grocery store on the other side of town.

Mayor Cornett: We’re starting to see the trend of building neighborhoods where you don’t have to have a car. That we built these cities around cars has consequences to the environment, to our pocketbooks, and to our obesity levels, which then plays into our healthcare costs… We need to look back to the ways that cities grew before the 20th century.

Mayor Cicilline: There’s also a loss of civic engagement and democracy in suburban planning because people get into their vehicles and travel to places with no engagement with other citizens. The former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, Enrique Penalosa, had a piece in the New York Times magazine last weekend about the sidewalk being the greatest symbol of democracy in cities because it’s the place where citizens interact and engage in that civic discourse. The more we can get back to the model that Mayor Smith described of a walkable neighborhood, the better off we’ll all be.

Mayor Cownie: And that’s going to be easiest to do in the larger cities. There are some new developments outside of our city that they’re calling New Urbanist, but there’s no way to get from one side of an eight-lane road to the other without getting into a car. We know that gas is already expensive, but we also know that we are near or past peak oil, and it’s only going to get more expensive. We have to look at how we move people around and at cul-de-sacs, and figuring out how to access these neighborhoods with mass transit is going to be really tough. The original layouts of Providence and Des Moines and Meridian all had gridded streets, where people could access their neighbors, their schools, their shopping. We did an energy future study, and one of the questions asked was, “in one year, if you had to move to zero-energy, how would you operate the schools?”
We said that the first thing we’d do is to stop bussing. Except for those who need a ride due to disability, we’re going to stop running those other 250 buses. Our school system was built on a neighborhood model.

Jess Zimbabwe: Mayor Blum, when you attended the Mayors’ Institute in Portland last month, you discussed trying to preserve a unique identity of place in Santa Barbara. How does that identity of place affect your city’s goals for attracting new residents, businesses, and tourists?

Mayor Blum: It’s very important for each city to figure out what uniqueness they have and what it is that they want to build on. Santa Barbara has been fortunate ... because we celebrate our place, we celebrate our history, and we celebrate the changing of these seasons. We don’t care what it is; we’re going to celebrate. You get a community feeling when you gather to celebrate. Santa Barbara has been blessed with natural beauty, but also with people who enjoy living there and want to be creative about it.

Mayor Smith: A city has a personality just as a human being does. Meridian has suffered from an inferiority complex for decades; it always wanted to be someplace else. If a community speaks ill of itself, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But when they begin to focus on who they are and their uniqueness, when they are told that the buildings they’ve been taking for granted all these years make up one of the largest stocks ofturn-of-the-century architecture in the Southeast, they begin to get it. Once they understand who they are and who they want to be, they can create a space that others want to be a part of.

Mayor Blum: It’s a lesson in democracy to get to that point because you have everybody sitting down together and talking about their shared history and what makes the community special…

Jess Zimbabwe: Mayor Cicilline, much of the recent renaissance in downtown Providence has been built in partnership with the nearby universities. What advice would you have to other mayors who want to build relationships with major institutions in their communities, be they universities, hospitals, military bases, or major employers?

Mayor Cicilline: We have Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design, Johnson & Wales, as well as major hospitals in our downtown. In the beginning of my term, it was important to settle the issue of how the universities would contribute, because they are tax-exempt. We, through a lot of negotiations, agreed to a situation where they would make voluntary payments directly to the city in lieu of taxes. Universities and hospitals are an important part of the economy of our city, and we want to be in a position where we encourage their growth and development. But since what they generate are income and sales tax and not property tax, which is our only source of revenue, that creates a sort of disincentive if we don’t work together. They have become incredibly good partners in the vitality of the city… They are incredibly resourceful, so you should never be shy about asking them to be a partner with you and work on projects. They want to be good citizens, and they understand that the health and prosperity of Providence is very important to Brown University, because no one will want to come to Brown if it’s in a city that’s not prospering.

Jess Zimbabwe: Last thoughts?

Mayor Cornett: If I had a message to the next administration, it would be to have an urban person in the inner circle. Someone representing cities should be heard on a daily basis about how impending legislation is going to affect cities… Fundamentally, the Bush administration has had a liaison dealing with cities, but I don’t think it’s been in the inner circle…

It’s not that they haven’t been receptive to me when I’ve needed them, but I never know that my word got to the president in a timely or efficient manner.

Mayor Cownie: Mayor Cornett, it sounds like you may have liked Senator Obama’s speech on Saturday.

Mayor Cicilline: It sounds like an endorsement! [Laughter; Mayor Cornett is the national president of the organization representing Republican mayors and local officials]... More than a person, really, we need a president that has an urban agenda and recognizes thevalue and strength of American cities. That leadership really does have to come from the top…

Mayor Smith: It’s the weight that voice is given, however many voices there are. Does the urban voice matter within the administration? We hope it will.

This article appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!