President's proposal gives cities greater flexibility

When the Obama Administration released its proposed 2012 budget, U.S. Conference of Mayors
President Elizabeth Kautz (Burnsville, MN) said, “With 85 percent of the people in this country living in cities and metropolitan areas, we believe the best way to "out-innovate, “out-educate” and “out-build" is to make investments that foster growth."

And last week, when I addressed a US Conference of Mayors leadership dinner, my message was simple: we agree with you.

That's why the President's proposal for new surface transportation legislation includes:

• Three discretionary grant programs
• Transit operating assistance
• An expanded national highway system
• An infrastructure bank
• Municipal planning support

The president's proposal creates three discretionary award programs that will benefit cities.  I'm most excited about the competitive Transportation Leadership Awards, which will let us reward cities that break down barriers to performance-based and outcome-driven policies and investments.  It certainly makes sense to me that we invest in success.

But in a time when cities face significant unemployment and budget deficits, it also makes sense to extend transit operating assistance to communities that are struggling to keep up.  Our goal, first and foremost, is to make sure that essential transit services are not reduced.  After all, if a city can't move its residents to jobs, schools, and critical services, how can it help our nation out-compete in the global economy?  This is only a temporary program to help mayors and city councils deal with the immediate problem while they develop a strategy to stabilize their transit funding.  In the short term, however, this assistance is crucial to maintaining services, particularly for transit-dependent communities.

Redefining our national highway system is another step we're taking that will benefit the 85 percent of American who live in our nation's cities.  The President’s proposal changes the definition of the national highway system to include 200,000 more miles of roadway.  That's a 30 percent increase.  This will make it easier for communities to access the highway funding they need--and to direct resources to the projects of greatest significance to the largest number of people.

You can find the same theme running through all of our proposals for new transportation legislation: America's communities know which projects matter the most.  They know which projects are likely to create the most jobs and which projects are likely to increase the flow of goods and people along our arteries of commerce.  So we want to give them a greater voice in making sure those projects are selected for federal support. 

We are, as I've written before, at a crossroads.  We can stick to the rigid funding formulas of the past, or we can create the conditions for a way forward that is more agile and robust.  We can maintain a staus quo that has allowed our infrastructure to deteriorate, or we can lay the foundation for a vibrant 21st century economy.

As Mayor Kautz said:

“Investing in America's cities can produce the type of economic expansion the President envisions. Without growth in our cities and metropolitan areas, there can be no sustained national recovery to win the future."

Comments

[Michael E. Bailey]

The President's Transportation Proposal is great for the country's economic development and great for transit dependent people. Most people in the disability community and many seniors are transit dependent and need to rely on public transportation to access jobs, housing, medical and oter critical services. In California, the State Council on Developmental Disabilities is working on a new policy--Employment First Policy--through its Employment First Committee and is about to issue its report to the Governor and Legislature. Employment First is about taking everyone who wants to work on a job in the communihty and can out of more expensive workshops and day programs and putting them into integrated employment in the community at at least minimum wage. To make the policy work, there must be good systems of public transportation to get clients to and from home and work. This will be an issue in the committee report. In other states and counties in some states, public transportation has been a major barrier to Employment First and has meant that in several states the policy has not worked well. And in some counties in another state the policy has not worked well. In one county in a state that now has Employment First Policy in place, over 100 clients are still in the workshop and just 15 have community jobs because of poor public transportation in the county. For a large number of people, public transportation is not a lifestyle, it is a lifeline service. Best wishes, Michael E. Bailey.