Bourbonism can't help us. Neoliberal frauds be gone. Greg Fischer is clothesless, and he should resign, now.

A survey of America's mayors finds that many "aren’t eager to challenge the status quo."

"If they don’t adjust their priorities to match the urgency of the crises they’ve identified, mayors might have no one to blame for stalled progress but themselves."

I attended yesterday's DNA-sponsored merchant meeting, the first such gathering of 2020.

The meeting lasted an hour, during which there was no mention whatever of the impending (2021) Sherman Minton Bridge repair-mandated adjustments -- lane and ramp closures and the like -- that stand to have a disruptive impact on downtown specifically, and in more general terms the city as a whole.

Does Team Gahan have a secret plan for the 11th Hour?

If not, or even if so, shouldn't this be something we're planning for? Or is participatory "infrastructure" of this sort simply not a priority in Nawbany?

U.S. Mayors Say Infrastructure Is a Priority. But What Kind?

The Menino Survey of Mayors identifies priorities like infrastructure, traffic safety, and climate change. But many mayors aren’t eager to challenge the status quo.

... Generally, pedestrian and cyclist safety was prioritized by many mayors—a reflection, perhaps, of the limited progress most U.S. cities are making on their efforts to reduce traffic-related injuries. New research shows that even as being a car passenger is getting safer, being a pedestrian is becoming more dangerous. Still, “majorities of mayors rate travel in their city as safe for all of the groups we asked about,” and only 22 percent of mayors ranked “pedestrian friendliness” as a top infrastructure priority, while 66 percent listed “roads.” Democratic mayors did full-throatedly commit to sacrificing car lanes and parking spaces to bike lanes, with 92 percent on board compared to Republicans’ 34 percent—a partisan divide that’s ballooned 30 points since the survey’s 2015 edition.

Vision Zero, the global movement to dramatically reduce pedestrian fatalities, may be a hot topic in transportation circles but it’s not exactly a national priority in America’s city halls: It’s tied for seventh place (with “lighting”) on a list of what’s been most important for pedestrian safety improvements. Based on CityLab research showing that Vision Zero efforts aren’t paying off fast enough in some of the U.S.’s largest participants, perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising. As for other traffic safety measures, most mayors think their cities are doing enough. Despite global efforts to drop vehicle speeds inside cities, nearly three-quarters of mayors surveyed thought their speed limits were set at the “right level,” while only 15 percent thought they were set too high.

Scammers, fraudsters, and the task of "Un-Corrupting City Hall."

This long read helpfully explains why New Albany's Ethics Commission was stillborn.

Un-Corrupting City Hall, by Ethan McLeod (CityLab)

These cities all suffered notorious municipal scandals. What have officials and voters done to tackle corruption and keep it from happening again?

H. Philip West Jr. breathed a sigh of relief in June when Providence’s 294-room Graduate Hotel decided to remove the portraits of Vincent “Buddy” Cianci from its guestrooms. The longtime mayor, who died in 2016, is an iconic character in the Rhode Island capital’s history. But as far as West is concerned, Cianci is a stain on Providence—one that he’s spent years trying, unsuccessfully, to scrub away.

It was only five years ago that Cianci—out of prison after a racketeering conspiracy conviction in 2007 and twice forced to resign from office due to felony convictions nearly two decades apart—mounted a third run for mayor. He lost, but West, former director of Common Cause Rhode Island, was still troubled to see him draw 45 percent of the vote.

“When you’ve dealt with such a brilliant scammer and fraudster, how can you convince people that they should not support him? I’m not sure you ever can,” says West, who helped write a new city ethics code and create a municipal investigatory body after Cianci’s 2001 indictment. “Ultimately you just have to say, ‘We’re going to build a structure that’s going to hold anybody who’s elected going forward accountable.’”

That’s the same pledge that voters and leaders have made in other places where civic corruption has been a chronic issue. Weary from national embarrassment and seeing history repeat itself, cities like Baltimore, New Orleans, and Chicago have responded to political scandals with charter overhauls and executive orders, empowered independent investigators to probe corruption, and challenged problematic local political traditions.

But successfully leading a wave of reform can be a tall order, with human nature and deeply entrenched political culture standing in the way. “This is about personal greed,” Tim Krebs, chair of the University of New Mexico’s political science department, says. “As long as you have human beings in government, you’re not going to be able to root [corruption] out entirely.”

Boosting oversight doesn’t always work, and for some, the jury is still out as reforms await testing. But in cities large and small, when voters and officials commit to challenging corruption and embracing transparency, they’re seeing results.

Examples are offered from Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, Greater Los Angeles and New Orleans, before the narrative turns back to Providence.

The Providence Ethics Commission didn’t actually meet until 2015 ... West said he’s proud of the ethics code and other reforms he helped with, but is bothered that he hasn’t yet seen the commission enforce the new rules for any violations. “With a power, you can’t really know what it is until you exercise it and you find out what the resistance is. I really can’t say that they’ve got decent enforcement power until I see that they’re using it.”

The coda.

“It takes a long time to build good government, and sadly, a clever, corrupt official can do great damage in short time,” he says. “Until those people retire and are gone, corruption will still have its presence, its taint.”

Yep, "A Police Shooting Gives the Lie to Buttigieg’s Campaign Narrative."

If Joe Biden can be VP, there's nothing stopping Mayor Pete -- except that if the Democrats nominate the sort of candidate likely to choose Mayor Pete as VP, Trump will win re-election.

Just try to imagine Jeff Gahan's probable handling of such municipal matters (his inept public housing putsch gives you a pretty good idea of his attitude) amid the veneration of local Dickeyite neoliberals, and the basic disconnect is easy to see. It's all surface sheen deflecting attention from functional vacancy.

Maybe Gahan can move to South Bend and be Pete's vice-mayor.

A Police Shooting Gives the Lie to Buttigieg’s Campaign Narrative, by Jeet Heer (The Nation)

Black voters are wary of Mayor Pete, for good reasons.

... In announcing his candidacy, Buttigieg said, “But I would also argue that we would be well served if Washington started to look more like our best run cities and towns rather than the other way around.” The implication is that South Bend was one of the “best run” cities. Now Buttigieg has to acknowledge that he’s failed in dealing with one of the pressing municipal problems of our time, police violence.

But Buttigieg’s problems go even deeper. Buttigieg has often touted South Bend’s diversity and economic success. But the shooting of Eric Logan has exposed the fact whatever economic success South Bend enjoys has been unevenly distributed, with a glaring racial divide persisting.

If you live OUTSIDE New Albany, this trend should enthuse you: "Is Mayor a Dead End Job?"

Deaf Gahan may be agoraphobic, but he's also ambitious, and for a while the rumor mill emitted regular signals that he'd seek higher office.

But Deaf hates a contested race against his betters, and the Democratic Party somehow found younger cannon fodder to challenge Ed Clere and Ron Grooms, so it appears New Albany is stuck with the deadendanchorweightgenius of the flood plain, at least until someone defeats Gahan's imposing Elsby-sized sack o' cash.

We're undaunted, right?

Let's gather those HazMat suits, and we'll reason together in preparation for 2019, when there'll be one chance in the spring, and if necessary, a second in the fall to return Dear Leader to a purely workmanlike career in veneer.

Meanwhile, too bad about Pete Buttigieg's restricted political mobility. He seems actually competent.

Is Mayor a Dead End Job? by Aaron Renn (Urbanophile)

We constantly hear that it’s the era of cities. Benjamin Barber wrote a book called If Mayors Ruled the World. Mayors are touted as pragmatic problem solvers who are taking on the challenges politicians at other levels of government are afraid to face.

One would think that if mayors were that much better than state or federal officials, then mayor would be a great stepping stone to higher office. However, that does not appear to be the case ...

 ... One such young mayor who has gotten huge attention is Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana.

Renn outlines the problems facing Buttigieg, then concludes:

A bitter irony is at play here: At a moment when the faces of the Democratic Party are 67-year-old Chuck Schumer and 77-year-old Nancy Pelosi, when so many novice Democrats are banging at the gate, spurred into action by powerful social currents and opposition to the president, one of the party’s most talented young politicians has nowhere to go.

Indiana is a red state and mayor hasn’t generally been a great route to higher office. Two Indianapolis mayors after Richard Lugar ran for statewide office and lost. But the pattern is clearly more widespread.

Looking around, you hear about lots of people who’ve acquired the monicker “Mayor for Life,” but not nearly as many former mayors who moved up to higher office at all, much less proven to be dynamos there.

Wonderful.

"Revitalized into oblivion": An astoundingly synonymous cautionary tale about Gah ... sorry, I mean Stephen Reed, former mayor of Harrisburg PA.

Last September, the Confidentials drove through Harrisburg, capital of Pennsylvania. We were road-tripping from Massachusetts to Maryland, and as we looked around, I harbored a vague notion that Harrisburg was somehow famous (or infamous) for malfeasance. The details eluded me at the time.

Only now does it come full circle with me. We'll begin this amazing story with a new post at CityLab.

The Mayor Who Broke Harrisburg, by Brentin Mock

Stephen Reed used to be known as Harrisburg’s “Mayor for Life.” His tenure as head of the Pennsylvania capital spanned almost 30 years, and in some quarters he still holds that title, even after he was voted out of office in 2009. Now he may be known as the “Mayor Who Avoided Life,” after dodging a sentence of thousands of years in prison for a 499-count indictment of theft, bribery, and corruption while he was mayor.

Today, Reed was sentenced to two years probation after pleading guilty to 20 counts of the least-serious crimes on his docket. Earlier this week, he admitted that part of his small collection of artifacts was bought with taxpayer money. The stolen items were part of an even larger collection of Civil War-era trinkets, documents, statues, and other memorabilia left over from Reed’s failed campaign to make Harrisburg a “city of museums.” Reed began siphoning taxpayer money into a secret account that he used to purchase heaps of 19th century American relics, all in an effort to transform the city into a “Westworld” of the East.

This was just one of Reed’s poorly (and criminally) conceived schemes that brought Harrisburg to the brink of bankruptcy—and almost landed the ex-mayor a 2,439-year jail sentence. How he got off with a two-year no-prison cakewalk instead is owed to a unique confluence of circumstances ...

The writer Mock makes several references to an article written last year by David Gambacorta at The Baffler, and as a resident of New Albania, I felt my neck hair doing calisthenics while reading it.

No, the billion-dollar economy of scale isn't the same. But the parallels are eerie, indeed. We pick up the narrative several paragraphs into Gambacorta's essay. I've marked certain passages in bold. Be sure to click through a read this in its entirety.

Called to Purchase: How mayor Stephen Reed shopped Harrisburg, PA, straight to hell, by David Gambacorta

 ... No one was really prepared to question Reed, or to peek behind the curtain of his kindly, eccentric persona. If they had, they would have found a petty autocrat hunkered down on a pile of redevelopment schemes, mistaking hoarding for a model for governance—a scenario only too possible in municipal America, the land that term limits forgot. The artifacts? Oh, they were just the spoils of a spending bender fueled by hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. When the spree was over, Reed would end up facing hundreds of criminal charges, and Harrisburg would be left in fiscal ruin.

The shared rise and fall of Reed and Harrisburg was decades in the making, a story of ambition and corruption that stands out even in Pennsylvania, a state that can’t go more than a few years without seeing one of its political giants succumb to arrogance, egotism, or the irresistible urge to take, take, take. As Reed prepares to finally go to trial on 114 charges, including theft, his case offers a stark reminder that the urban renewal and revitalization initiatives of the last century continue to dog our cities—and that too many of those initiatives turned out to be rip-offs, luring tourists to urban “playgrounds” at the expense of existing residents.

Sound familiar? Bright shiny objects, rather than daily nuts and bolts.

... According to state prosecutors, in the decades that followed (Reed's election in 1981), he set out to seize the puppet strings of anyone who had a say in the city’s financial decisions.

To the public, he appeared to use this power for good. Eateries and museums cropped up, along with hotels and a university. Reed was like a gleeful patriarch who continually surprised his children with vacations and shiny new toys—just never mind about how any of it would be paid for.

Imagine how many boards Reed packed. He was mayor for life, but elsewhere it was poverty for life.

Reed sometimes ran unopposed for reelection, earning the “mayor for life” tag from the media along the way. And why not? The ongoing projects seemed to prove that Harrisburg was a city on the rise. But with at least 33 percent of its residents now living in poverty, according to 2014 census data, and with state-owned tax-exempt land comprising a significant portion of the capital, where was the money coming from to cover the cost of these huge efforts?

“Nobody asked those questions,” sighs Patty Kim, a Pennsylvania state representative who worked with Reed when she served as a Harrisburg city councilwoman from 2005 to 2012. “He was able to play a shell game. He always had a new project to distract people.”

Note the connection between Reed's Special Projects Fund and the city's bond-compounded debt.

So money began to flow into the Special Projects Fund from every imaginable direction. Mealy said Reed began tacking on inexplicable “administrative fees” to the multitude of bond sales and debt that the Harrisburg Authority incurred at the mayor’s direction, and those fees were routed directly to the fund, according to the grand jury records.

Not unexpectedly, enforced loyalty maintains the cult of personality. Remember when Diane Benedetti and own John Gonder were messily deposed for failing to agree often enough?

“It was always, ‘You vote with me or you are the enemy,’” former Harrisburg City Council president Richard House told state investigators, according to the records. But Reed, apparently, had a lighter touch too. House said Reed offered him a community relations coordinator job in 2001 with the Harrisburg Senators—a position that previously didn’t exist—with the understanding that Reed was buying House’s votes, and the votes of other council members.

In the end, the accumulated debt could no longer be hidden.

... After a month of combing through handwritten records, (Eric Papanfuse) pieced together the big picture: Harrisburg was fucked. Everyone knew the incinerator was costing the city a fortune, but it seemed no one had done the math on the years and years of bond and debt deals that had built the city’s new attractions and also covered the cost of Reed’s artifact obsession. The total sum was north of a billion dollars—for a city with a population that couldn’t fill up a professional football stadium.

Such was Reed's hold that it took several years for Papenfuse to interest anyone in investigating, but once the state attorney general intervened, the house of cards collapsed. Reed was defeated for re-election.

(Linda) Thompson, at least, broke the “mayor for life” cycle, lasting only one term. She took heat for spending $35,000 to renovate the mayor’s office, after complaining about the inescapable cigarette odor that Reed left behind—and was replaced by Papenfuse, who was tasked with rescuing a city that had been revitalized almost into oblivion.

Looking for epitaphs?

Maybe Reed’s growing pile of dead-end revitalizing fantasies, tied more to his idiosyncratic understanding of leisure than to the interests of his city, was firmly in line with late twentieth-century urban-planning trends, which held that no city was too small to bet the farm on tourism-first redevelopment projects, the benefits of which would somehow trickle down.

Lots and lots of similarities, don't you think?

Hmm. Does Harrisburg have a luxury doggie park?

As Deaf Gahan hunkers in the bunker, America’s small-town mayors are speaking out -- about their communities, about Donald Trump, about SOMETHING.

Here's what we've gotten so far from Jeff Gahan, mayor and de facto kingpin of the Floyd County Democratic Party, or at least until the party's chairman has the good sense to resign or be fired.

Gahan said he looks forward to positive actions by the new administration — President-elect Donald Trump and Indiana's own Gov. Mike Pence, who will take office as vice president Jan. 20. “We certainly are rooting for them to be successful, too,” Gahan said.

But here's the funny part. Here in New Gahania, not only does the mayor have nothing coherent to say about Trump; he also refuses to give "State of the City" speeches, or to attend city council meetings, or to emerge from the Bunker of Down Low Governance for any reason at all.

Let's not forget what agoraphobia can do to the weak-willed, because instead of addressing Trumpism, or making a speech about the city, or emerging from the bunker for any reason at all, Gahan has had ample time to target a loyal Democratic city council attorney for removal from his job because a self-described council Copperhead snake who quit Gahan's dysfunctional party in a fit of pique but now has palms extended, waiting for the inevitable envelope, has a hard-on to kneecap someone.

Read about it here. As POTUS would say: SAD.

What America’s Small-Town Mayors Think About Trump, by David Murray (The Atlantic)

The local leaders are breaking from tradition to weigh in on presidential politics.

Just as a U.S. president delivers an inauguration speech or a State of the Union address, mayors across the country deliver State of the Village speeches. But while presidents can speak in broad strokes, mayors are expected to detail the town’s accomplishments. As a result, these speeches are typically less aspirational and less rhetorically artful. Yet this year, a number of small-town mayors broke from tradition, as they weighed in on presidential politics.

"How do we solve all those issues if we have a rural mentality where things are static?"

Search this page at City Lab for the word "parks," and you won't find it. Yes, Charlotte is a much larger city than ours, but its mayor obviously has more important things to talk about.

Just try to imagine Jeff Gahan in a discussion with Charlotte's mayor. You simply can't. As proof, just one question and answer is enough.

'Just Let Charlotte Be Charlotte', Ronald Brownstein

Mayor Jennifer Roberts on urban growth, tolerance, poverty, and why rural areas and cities need different rules: America isn’t “one-size-fits-all.”

BROWNSTEIN: Research we’ve done at The Atlantic has looked at big cities across the country: We find an enormous gap in the share of white versus African American versus Hispanic kids who are in schools where most of their classes qualify as poor or low-income. The concentration of economic poverty here in Charlotte is: 23 percent of white kids are in schools where a majority of the students qualify as poor or low-income, 77 percent of African American kids are in such schools, and 80 percent of Hispanic kids are. Can changes inside the four walls of a school overcome that? Or if you have that level of concentrated poverty, are you unlikely to get the results that you want?

ROBERTS: It has to “both and.” And in Charlotte, we have this can-do attitude: We know the odds can be stacked against you, but we believe that if you get the right number of organizations and groups together and focus on a problem and put some real collaborative effort into it, then we can improve it. Statistics are challenging when you have high concentrations of poverty, so what are we doing? We’re looking at our housing policy. We’re constrained by our state in many ways, but we have some tools—for instance, inclusionary housing, trying to get more workforce and subsidized housing in some areas of town. So we want to work with the private sector to help that happen. We’re looking to rewrite our zoning ordinance, which is one tool we have for trying to get that mixed-use development. How do we work incrementally to bring about some of those changes so that we get more of our students in diverse settings?

Caesar baffled and inconsolable as "anti-establishment" candidate leads the mayoral race in Rome.

Caesar said “establishment politics is different than anti-establishment politics." He said when people have several choices to make, they are just interested in getting to their same old unimaginative ward heeler in a timely manner.

“If you make them think too much, they won’t vote the straight party ticket,” he said. “And people’s attitudes when it comes to pandering will have to change. With two-way pandering, they have to look for solutions in different directions.”

Rome likely to have elected its first female mayor, by Rosie Scammell (The Guardian)

Exit polls suggest that Virginia Raggi, a 37-year-old lawyer, has won the job for the anti-establishment Five Star Movement

An anti-establishment outsider is on track to be elected mayor of Rome, according to exit polls, and become the first woman to run the Italian capital.

Virginia Raggi, the Five Star Movement’s (M5S) candidate, won between 64% and 68% of the vote, according to polls published on Sunday night by the Ansa news agency. The 37-year-old lawyer was well ahead of her rival, the Democratic party’s Roberto Giachetti, who was forecast to win between 32 and 36% of votes.

Your Saturday Radical 3: Bernie Sanders and progressive municipal policies.

Pragmatism, grassroots, collaboration and livability.

Who's the radical, again?

There's this ...

What Kind of Mayor Was Bernie Sanders?, by Peter Dreier and Pierre Clavel (The Nation)

... Thanks to the enduring influence of the progressive climate that Sanders and his allies helped to create in Burlington, the city’s largest housing development is now resident-owned, its largest supermarket is a consumer-owned cooperative, one of its largest private employers is worker-owned, and most of its people-oriented waterfront is publicly owned. Its publicly owned utility, the Burlington Electric Department, recently announced that Burlington is the first American city of any decent size to run entirely on renewable electricity.

And this ...

Most of Burlington’s business leaders initially distrusted Sanders. They didn’t know what a socialist would do once he held the reins of power. But even many of Sanders’s early opponents came to respect and even admire his willingness to listen to their views and his efforts to adopt progressive municipal policies.

Also this ...

Under Sanders, Burlington became a magnet for attracting and incubating locally owned businesses, many of which expanded into large enterprises. Burton, the nation’s largest snowboard company, has its headquarters (as well as a snowboard museum) in Burlington. The city assisted Seventh Generation, a green cleaning-products firm, when it started in 1988. Today, with its downtown waterfront headquarters in a LEED-certified building and over $300 million in annual sales, it is one of Burlington’s largest employers. With the city’s help, Gardeners Supply Company, which sells environmentally friendly gardening products, moved to Burlington in 1983. Four years later, its founder, Will Raap, began the process of selling the firm to its workers. It now has over 250 employee-owners.

"Cities across the country have been electing mayors who understand one of the keys to growing a city is having equitable transportation policies that work for all people."

As JeffG pithily notes:

From Pittsburgh we get "We're reworking the whole place". From far smaller and easier New Albany we get "Can't move some temporary booths".

Watch the video here: Pittsburgh's Mayor Peduto Wants to "Leapfrog" Your City in Bicycling & Livability (Streetfilms). The introductory text follows.

Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future as it pertains to a progressive program like this one?

Mayor Bill Peduto is putting the rest of the United States on notice. His city is on the rise and he fully intends on implementing bicycling, walking and complete streets policies that enhance and make his city more attractive to young talent and business. For the first time in over half a century, Pittsburgh is expecting an increase in residents as the trend in the number of people moving back to cities grows.

In September, the ProWalk ProBike ProPlace conference took place in Pittsburgh and the energy of the city was on display as was Mayor Peduto, who was very active at the event. The hope local advocates have for the mayor is apparent as Pittsburgh has implemented its first true protected bike lanes downtown and is looking to create a more multi-modal city that more fairly balances transportation modes.

When talking with the Mayor it's immediately obvious how well-versed in urbanism and the history of cities he is. Even so, he went on a study tour with The Green Lane Project to experience some of the best bicycling in Denmark this past summer.

Our interview with Mayor Peduto touches on quite a few topics of Streetfilms' audience will love. There is a real momentum: cities across the country have been electing mayors who understand one of the keys to growing a city is having equitable transportation policies that work for all people.