Being a public servant at any level means making trade-offs. No country, state, county, or town has unlimited funds, and managers of those funds are always sensitive to the idea that they’ve been wasteful—especially when that waste can be a factor in voters taking away their jobs.
For many mayors, “I’ve been a good manager of your money” is line number one on the Why You Should Re-elect Me resume. So it shouldn’t be surprising that, in light of what’s happening in Flint, Michigan (where a cost-saving measure ended up poisoning the city’s water with lead), many mayors are starting to weigh the possible consequences of their own decisions.
Nearly 1 in 3 American mayors think they may already have hurt their own citizens by making cost-saving decisions on critical infrastructure—a startling admission of fearfulness and accountability from the nation’s top urban executives on the heels of the Flint water crisis.
This isn’t an admission of evil. It’s certainly not bragging. The guys who are expressing this worry are likely the good mayors—those who have a real concern for the citizens who have trusted them with the responsibility of maintaining services. The mayors that we should be worried about are the other two-thirds, the ones who think they’ve done no wrong.
Because real mayors in real cities are in a real bind—one that has clamped tighter and tighter over the past four decades, as conservative policies have increasingly pushed down responsibilities while paring back funding.
Mayors of all political stripes say they’ve been placed in an untenable financial bind because of severely limited infrastructure dollars that once flowed freely from state and federal coffers. More than a third of mayors said the next occupant of the White House should make infrastructure the top urban issue, ahead of even economic inequality (18 percent) and education (14 percent), otherwise high-profile priorities for this overwhelmingly Democratic bunch.
This doesn’t excuse what happened in Flint. Flint was an example of what happens after you’ve not just pushed a city to the breaking point, but used its remains to make a political point. The worst decisions at Flint were not made by mayors who felt accountable to the people who elected them, but by emergency managers accountable to no one but the governor who appointed them.