Tom Cochran: The voice of US mayors
06 March 2015
by Richard Forster
Cities Today US editor, Tom Teodorczuk, spoke to Tom Cochran, CEO and Executive Director of the US Conference of Mayors during their Winter Meeting in Washington DC
You seem remarkably relaxed given we’re speaking in the middle of your Winter Meeting conference?
You have to be. I’m rested. This is my 46th Winter Meeting since 1969.
The US Conference of Mayors (USCM) was born with a US$300 million assistance programme from the US government during the Great Depression. How is USCM funded today?
It is funded through public-private partnerships and awards programmes but we’re also funded by individual cities. Cities’ tax money pays a certain amount and the structure is based on population that has been set since 1932. Additionally we have corporate sponsors and relationships with foundations.
How have things changed for mayors since 1969?
It has become much more complicated. I think you have an economic situation that is totally different now where there is a lack of federal funds. Mayors are in many ways alone. We don’t have the federal contribution that we once had and the dysfunction in our legislative branch and our executive branch is not good. For example we have to fight for mass transit. In Germany and Japan that is guaranteed but we have a constant struggle in America between rural and urban.
The suburban rings around our cities are becoming like us and they have the same kind of challenges. We’re in a situation in 2015 where we can’t even get a transportation bill. That’s how bad it is. That used to be a bipartisan issue starting with President Eisenhower in 1956 when the nation came together to build a state highway system.
Is one of the main functions of the USCM to try and serve as a bridge between national and local interests in American politics?
We are constantly doing that. We have private meetings going on right now with Republican leaders and we have a bipartisan group of mayors who agree that we can work on these five or six issues such as transportation and immigration. As far as the White House goes, we have total access but the challenge is Congress. The metro- economic strength of our cities is still not recognised.
Why do you think this is?
Sometimes Congress–especially the Republican Congress–favours Governors in the states. For example the economy of Louisville, Kentucky, takes in three counties of Indiana if you look at the economic print so our issues go into two states because you have to look at our cities now as metro-economies. We are still in a rigid system where some states were created because of where the rivers go and the prairie states are where the farm was. In our nation still, politically in congress, out-of-suburban and rural still have a lot of power.
Do you think that the voice of mayors is listened to more at a national level?
The one group that understands this is the business community. Ten years ago I didn’t have 111 business people inside my organisation. So when we go to Capitol Hill and we have the business community with us, that helps us with the Republicans and even with the Democrats. If we go and talk about tourism and we have Mr Marriott with us that gives us credibility. Money is still very important in the United States so that is a positive thing. You have Democratic and Republican mayors who are really working with the business community, small medium and large businesses. That’s a new phenomenon that is going on in America. I’m very pleased with that. Still we have to recognise how much money we send to Washington and we believe there should be better formulas to come back that deal with our issues where the people are, rather than where pine trees are or where geese are! That’s a devolution issue that we continue to struggle with.
How has the remit for the USCM changed over the years?
The mayors decided in 1932 that they needed to come and establish themselves in Washington DC. We have been here for 82 years. If you look at the first meeting we had, those mayors, like La Guardia [former mayor of New York City from 1933-1945] and others, they talk about housing and transportation. In addition to that now, we have to deal with Ebola, we have to deal with community relations, we have to deal with a lot of social issues. Property tax funds those basic things – fire, water and police protection. There are so many other challenging things that we have to deal with – hunger, homelessness, crime and dropout rates in schools. The structure does not provide the funds for that so we have to reach out to the private sector to help us. It is a different thing than it was 20 years ago.
Is it tougher to be a mayor now than 20 years ago?
Yes, a lot tougher. You have the media and social media and you lose your name, you lose your identity, you are a totally public person. President Reagan used to get off the helicopter and put his hand up to his ear or do a thumbs-up. Mayors can’t do that. If they go to the grocery store or the bar or the synagogue or the church, people are all over them. But what mayors are doing is taking social media and turning it around with their own messaging. So we have had several meetings here, and we continue to have them, on innovations. Mayors are tweeting or crowdsourcing via social media. The mayor of Tampa, Florida, says he speaks to 90,000 people every Monday, so we’re using that to communicate.
But we didn’t have the violent crime that we have in America until Crack came during President Clinton’s administration. Before then cocaine was a rich man’s drug. People in suburbia played tennis and snorted cocaine on their glass-top tables. When they started making crack, kids could get a hit of crack for what you pay for a Big Mac at McDonald’s. So they started selling it and then you had guns, you had gangs, you had killings. The whole thing has changed with youth in America so crime piked up. Now crime is down in general in the United States but there are still pockets of killings that are going on in Philadelphia, New Orleans and other big cities that mayors have to deal with.
In America, contrasted to Germany and Japan, the police function is ours [city responsibility]. In other words, 40,000 police officers in New York are paid by the citizens of New York, not
the federal government and not the state government. When you saw the tragedy in Paris, the national police come in. If that had happened in New York, it’s local police. Contrast that with the German mayor who said to me one day: ‘If there’s a robbery next door and they call me, I tell them to call the state or the federal government’.
There are 19,000 police departments in the US, every small town in the country has one. It’s in our culture, that’s a big part of being a mayor. They work with the police chief, look at the body count, especially in those homicide cities. But crime is down across the nation. But still you have too many murders, too many kids sent out to prison and the re-entry issue where we have to make sure when they come back from prison they don’t go to gangs. It’s a whole ongoing process there of giving those kids something to say yes to and keep them out of the gangs. There are all kinds of mayors that are doing great and innovative things.
It is often said that mayors can’t afford to be partisan, as they have to get things done, being the closest level of government to the people. In the current partisan atmosphere in the US, does this statement still ring true among your members?
In our organisation, we do not have the R and the D in our vocabulary. We have the issues in our vocabulary– immigration at the local level, export- import, transportation, community development. When they have debates and they are deliberating you don’t know who is Republican and who is Democrat because they’re all trying to get it done. All the partisan stuff that’s going on at the national level and with the governors, it doesn’t happen in this organisation. It’s all bipartisan in that we are dealing with issues and we are into delivering services. We are getting it done. That’s the phenomena inside our organisation.
What successes has the organisation had in lobbying and persuading the US government on issues that impact on cities?
With President Clinton, we lobbied for 100,000 cops. After the 2008 meltdown there was an attack on our programmes and it was more of a defensive operation than an offensive operation. How do we protect our bonds? How do we protect the community development block grant? How do we make sure that money does go out directly to us and not to the governors?. We have managed, for example, to protect the CDBG (Community Development Block Grant) programme which started under President Nixon.
That’s the only vestige of money that goes back into cities under a formula basis and was written into the Conference of Mayors in 1973. It goes directly into cities. We had energy block grants similar to that coming under the stimulus programme of President Obama who supported that. We very much advocate the block grants based on a formula to meet local needs. There are some things we are doing today such as the Summer Youth Jobs. There are a number of things mayors are doing at the local level without the help of federal government that are positive things.
Broadly speaking how are mayors presently regarded by the US public?
If you look at the polls, they jokingly say that Nazi Germany had a higher rating than Congress does. The President’s numbers have been low too. All over if you poll them on your mayor, people trust them and support them. We have found for example in Oklahoma City that they will even vote to raise their taxes if you have the leadership to articulate how you are going to use that tax increase. If there’s a disaster and the governor gets on TV to tell people to do something, they won’t listen. If the mayor gets on TV, they move. They trust him.
Why is that?
People have a way of electing mayors that really identify with the local level. I think it’s just [a sense of] ‘He’s my Mayor’, ‘It’s all local’ and ‘We’re all in this together’ kind of thing. It’s very important to understand that when the Mayor of Philadelphia speaks, the chicken farmers in Delaware are looking at him. The weatherman in Philadelphia is the weatherman for Delaware chicken farmers. The mayors are media captains. They’re living with TV, even the medium- sized towns. They have to communicate that way. It’s no longer the evening news and the morning news. There’s a trust that develops there.
Does the USCM have contacts with Chinese cities? Who else do you network and collaborate with on an international level?
We have a Chinese Association of City Mayors that are not elected but we have had that relationship for about 20 years. We do exchanges with them. It’s mainly around best practices, waste management and how do you treat the elderly–topical issues. We have a strong relationship with the Japanese Association of City Mayors, we have a strong relationship with the Mexican Association of Mayors. Our linkage in the past five years has been around our climate centre.
In Copenhagen 1,000 mayors signed our climate agreement which related to the Kyoto Accords. The European Union copied our climate agreement, the Mexicans copied ours. A lot of our relations in the last five or 10 years has been around climate and sustainability. We have strong relations with Italian mayors. I know Matteo Renzi, the Italian Prime Minister, from when he was Mayor of Florence. In Florence they were trying to figure out how they could keep people out of the central city. We took five mayors and spent time on transportation and during that period, we got to know him. His politics and his style are very American. I haven’t seen him since he became Prime Minister but I was very excited about it and we will probably go see him one of these days.
The Mayors’ Climate Change Protection Centre was formed under the auspices
of the USCM that aimed to cut city C02 emissions to 1990 levels by 2012. Was this achieved by many cities?
We have been trying to work with the EPA [Environmental Protection Authority] to quantify that but it’s very difficult. But we can show you energy savings and things we have done in our best practices but my climate people say it has been very difficult to quantify that. There are several people who say they have and we’re just not sure. But I know that if anybody’s doing anything on climate change, it’s the mayors of the United States.
We see from abroad that many leaders in the US are sceptical of climate change. Is this the same at a mayoral level?
No. They’re practising it. The [US] President last year formed a task force on climate. The American people, I think, were ready to deal with climate. The President decided to go with healthcare first. If he had gone with climate, running off the Al Gore movie [An Inconvenient Truth] and the movement in this country, things would be different.
What issues will be your focus during 2015?
Right now we’ve got to deal with the trust in community policing. The Ferguson incident and what happened in New York City–in 2015 we have to deal with that. The President has a Task Force that will deliver a report on his desk 2 March. We have our own Task Force here. That’s an immediate need.
In 2015 I’ve got to get the Presidential Candidates to come to San Francisco for my June meeting. We’ve got to start talking about the next Presidential campaign. We will be inviting all the Republican candidates and Democratic candidates. Obama is on the way out. Next January they will be in New Hampshire and in the primaries so one of the goals this year is to connect up with Mrs Clinton and all those people running for President. Our goal is to get our policy positions inserted into their vocabulary.
The police thing is right on this and we’ll be involved in that a lot in the early spring. We’re going to be involved in the Paris meeting in December [COP21] but ongoing is also the transportation legislation that is before the Congress. That’s going to be a big issue.
Is there a difference between how Republicans and Democrats view the office of mayor?
Yes. But we have a working committee that we can narrow down to five or six issues that we can take to the Republican leadership. That’s one of the agenda items of 2015. We have total access to the President but we have to find out a way that we can deal with Congress and pick out issues. We have Republican Mayors who are working with us on that right now. We’ve got a new Congress, new majority leaders and we’ve got to determine how we can work with them and present our issues in a way that’s a win-win for them because the American people want them to deliver on something.
What has been your most memorable moment at a USCM meeting?
I think working with President Clinton on the crime bill is something we won’t forget. He had a way of bringing us into the White House that was very special and a way of dealing with us that we really appreciated. His wife Hilary will probably be with us in
