I feel lucky to be governing a jurisdiction with a strong tax base, a healthy mix of rural, urban, and suburban land, and relatively low levels of poverty. I spent my early career working in distressed urban communities, and today watch closely as the mayors who govern them navigate their challenges.
Governments in cities have no choice but to be robust. They need transit systems to counter congestion, large police and fire departments to respond to constant service calls, and public utilities to prevent environmental disasters. Cities can only provide those services when they have a strong residential and commercial tax base, but all across America businesses and more affluent families have moved to suburban communities to escape urban challenges. That leaves the older cities with less revenue as their buildings, roads, and utilities crumble.
People expect the mayors to fix stuff without money, so they have to be creative and try new things. If they’re really good, they think outside political boxes and engage with their communities to solve problems.
The mayor I know best is Annapolis’ Gavin Buckley. He came in as an outsider, a formerly undocumented immigrant who became a successful restaurant owner, and led the revitalization of West Street by understanding the clientele better than anyone else.
He beat both an incumbent and an established career politician by huge margins to get the job, and he led a diverse younger generation against opposition from the town’s former establishment. He has launched the City Dock resilience project, made major progress on electric transit and bike infrastructure, added public water access, managed to get the city’s fiscal house in order, and thereby improved its bond rating.
Throughout his two terms, even after being re-elected by the largest margin in recent history, the “experts” complained about Buckley’s style. They don’t like his irreverent humor, his directness, or his tactics. I suppose I like all three.
My only complaint with Gavin Buckley, is that he’s always asking for money. He’s the greatest salesman for Annapolis ever, and if you’re a county, state, or federal official, or a private investor, he will never miss an opportunity to pitch you on a project that benefits the people of Annapolis. Mayors have to do that because their taxpayers are already paying a premium to live in the city. They need outside money.
I also know Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott. The establishment didn’t like him much either at first. They said he was too young, in over his head, and they didn’t like his style. Baltimore City developers in particular are used to having their way with politicians, and Brandon doesn’t play their games. He’s laser-focused on the well-being of neighborhoods like the one he grew up in, and on the young people most likely to get shot or end up in jail.
Despite Brandon’s first-term successes in attracting investment to his city on his own terms, and drastically reducing crime with the help of locally hired violence interrupters, a group of conservative business interests led by the owner of Fox45 and the Baltimore Sun invested heavily in a campaign to remove him from office last year. I hope that his resounding 14-point defeat of their candidate sent a strong message to both voters and campaign funders that Baltimore is not for sale.
I texted Brandon last week when I read about how he mobilized his City agencies, nonprofits, and community volunteers to knock on doors and search abandoned buildings looking for victims of a deadly batch of drugs in the Penn North neighborhood. The Mayor was one of the people door-knocking.
There were 27 overdose victims, and not a single one died. My text message was to thank Brandon for once again doing something with no political benefit, but a demonstration of what it means to be a caring human being. People in Baltimore know that their government, and by extension the city, cares about them. Maybe that’s part of why the murder rate has dropped so drastically under Brandon’s leadership.
I have family in New York City, so I followed the recent Mayoral primary election there. When Zohran Mamdani got within striking distance of former Governor Andrew Cuomo, I went to YouTube and watched his speeches and interviews.
He’s a Muslim immigrant who was born in Uganda, a 33-year-old state assemblyman, a former rapper, and a democratic socialist. He’s not the horse you’d bet on at the start of the race, especially if you knew that Cuomo was polling 40-points ahead of the field and had a war chest far bigger than all his opponents combined.
Cuomo’s campaign flooded the airwaves and mailboxes with attacks on Mamdani as antisemitic, defund the police, radical, and foreign. Mamdani beat Cuomo handily on election night, and by the end of the ranked-choice voting, where next choices from supporters of losing candidates get allocated to the top candidates until somebody gets a majority, the spread was 12%.
Mamdani’s campaign engaged over 50 thousand mostly young volunteers. His message was not antisemitic, defund the police, or radical, and he never came across as foreign. He’s lived in New York since the age of seven, was endorsed and supported by many Jewish leaders and voters, and his message was about the cost of living in New York City, and how the working people are being pushed out.
Some say that his proposals for free transit, free childcare, freezing rent, and public grocery stores are radical. But to New Yorkers, it didn’t appear that way, especially when he explained where the money would come from - a two percent income tax hike on people earning over $1 million per year, and an increase in the corporate tax to the level of neighboring New Jersey, both of which would require the support of state lawmakers.
Free transit increases ridership and thereby reduces traffic congestion wherever it exists, including in Anne Arundel County. Free childcare is an extension of the free pre-k that New York implemented under a recent mayor, and is done in most industrialized countries that want parents in the workforce.
Freezing rent only applies to New York’s rent-controlled apartments and was done three times under the mayor before the current one. The public grocery stores proposal is simply a pilot in seven food deserts. In Anne Arundel, we have a food desert in Brooklyn Park, and we do a public farmers market there.
My unsolicited advice to the corporate elite of New York City would be to listen to the voters of your city. Sit down with Mamdani. He says he wants to expand his coalition, even with the Cuomo funders who attacked him. Watch his interviews, especially the one with Comptroller Brad Landers on Late Night with Stephen Colbert, or the one with Jen Psaki.
I don’t know if Mamdani would be a great mayor or a terrible one, but like Mayor Buckley and Mayor Scott, he thinks outside the box and he listens to the people who live in his city, even the younger ones who are open to new ideas. Not a bad formula, in my view.
Until next week…