An article in The Atlantic recently suggested that the drop in violent crime, hitting a low not seen since the 1960s, may just be the result of a massive infusion of federal funds to cities and towns through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).
The article arrived as local leaders met in Boston for the Massachusetts Municipal Association’s annual conference, and they braced for a fiscal storm on the horizon. State aid is expected to increase by a modest amount – Gov. Maura Healey has proposed a 2.5% increase in unrestricted aid, below the 26.5% local leaders had argued would make up for years of funding below inflation.
And the days of plentiful federal funding, as the country crawled out of a pandemic, is in the rearview mirror. “A lot of cities used these monies for universal basic income. They used it to provide food security. They used it to expand housing production. They used it to increase educational access and recreational access in their communities, and more. Clean drinking water,” said Adam Chapdelaine, head of the MMA. “All those things, they all make people’s lives better.”
Clarence Anthony, a former mayor of South Bay in Florida who now serves as CEO of the National League of Cities, spoke at the MMA’s conference. “If you think back three or four years ago, crime, like housing is now, was one of the number one things that most municipal leaders wanted to take on,” he said. “We know what’s best in our local communities, and we focus on those things to be able to address those challenges.”
Anthony and Chapdelaine sat down with MASSterList inside the Boston convention center named for the late Mayor Tom Menino during a break in the MMA’s annual meeting. We discussed the partnership with the federal government, or lack thereof, the challenges facing local governments, and how incivility is a top problem. The interview, which took place Friday, before U.S. immigration agents killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis amid an ongoing federal crackdown, was condensed and edited for clarity.
MASSTERLIST: Staying on partnership – House Speaker Ron Mariano has said since the Trump administration has come in, ‘We have lost our partner,’ and that’s obviously at the state level. At the city level, you’ve got leaders like Boston Mayor Michelle Wu who say the federal government is attacking cities. You can point to Minneapolis, as one example. What’s your take on that?
ANTHONY: We start with wanting a partnership with the federal government, and we are nonpartisan as a national association as well as a state municipal association. MMA is nonpartisan. I think it’s more targeted than that, and it’s not every city, and it’s not every state, and I think that what we’re trying to do is keep our head focused on the challenges that cities are facing, and no matter whether they’re Republican or Democratic-led. We advocate as a state association, a national association, or cities, because people in those communities are not looking for what party you’re in. They’re looking for solutions.
CHAPDELAINE: Right, it’s hard to argue what you read in the headlines, or what you read in memoranda or policy documents that come out of the White House. But I would double down on what Clarence is saying. From the MMA point-of-view, we are much more interested in the outcomes. One of the outcomes we talked about this week was, how do we maintain funding for supportive housing that comes through HUD. We do try to focus on the immediate needs that our members have and what they’re trying to accomplish.
MASSTERLIST: And what are those immediate needs or challenges? I talked to some mayors today, and they talked about transportation, they talked about health care costs, insurance costs.
ANTHONY: Transportation is a big issue for a lot of cities in America, getting people to work, their kids to school. Housing continues to be an issue. There are cities building a lot of housing, whether it’s single family and multifamily, but the quality that’s left behind is important. You can build a house, but Adam has to be able to afford it, and that’s what we got to work on.
The next issue is, I would say, civility. Our polling shows that 79% of municipal officials have experienced some type of violence, whether it’s themselves at a grocery store or church service, or their kids being bullied at school or online. We’re finding more municipal officials are saying ‘I’m out of here.’ Unfortunately, a lot of them are women and people of color as well as LGBTQ individuals who are being harassed at a higher level. The approach in each individual city is different, and it should be, because the residents of those communities decide how they want their community to be and the vision for their community, but everybody has to have a commitment to addressing them in an inclusive way. And I think that’s a goal of ours at the National League of Cities is to talk about that a lot more.
MASSTERLIST: Something that Mayor Wu has talked about is the frustration with how much the cities and towns, when they’re looking for flexibility on things, they’re at the mercy of the state legislature. Do you see that elsewhere?
ANTHONY: The concept of preemption of local authority is real, and I’ve talked about that nationally, that residents elect their mayor and selectmen or the council to lead their community, and we are seeing across the nation where legislatures are preempting local authority. Land use, water management issues, recycling issues, you name it, we are seeing that nationally.
CHAPDELAINE: We’ve been advocating for the Municipal Empowerment Act, which fits into that category. It allows more flexibility in terms of the way local government has operated, proposes more flexibility in some local option revenue sources, and we’ve been having good dialogues with the legislature about it. We’re hopeful that it’ll start to advance as this session moves forward. And as we get into fiscal year 2027 things are getting tighter and tighter, so having any tools that can be available is going to be necessary.