Executive Director's Column

This week, the aftermath of the November 2 elections around the United States continues to rearrange the power players in the official leadership of our federal government.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, certainly a friend of mayors and cities throughout her political career, has won a challenge from North Carolina Congressman Heath Shuler. Congresswoman Pelosi will become the Minority Leader when she is sworn in as the new Congress convenes. As Minority Leader, she will continue to stand and fight for us as she has done before. She is the daughter of the mayor of Baltimore. Her brother was the mayor of Baltimore. I have said before that the office of mayor is in her DNA. And throughout her tenure as our Speaker from the first week when former mayor of Trenton, Doug Palmer as our President, met with her, she endorsed and supported our Conference of Mayors 10-Point Plan.
Throughout this last Congressional mid-term, there was a concerted plan, a funded effort, in many Congressional districts to demonize her and attack Democratic candidates for voting with her. Many of these votes were votes for federal resources for our own Conference of Mayors legislative priorities.
We cannot predict what the future holds for many of our Congressional priorities. We send money to Washington from our cities. The Constitution provides that Congress shall allocate all this federal money nationally. Our challenge for decades is to get the money back to our cities where today 85 percent of Americans live. Throughout Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi's career, she has been a champion for the cities and the mayors of America. In the morning, noon and all night, she is there for us. That is important because there is a lack of transparency today with so much of how Congress operates. Throughout history, we read how a Congressman or Senator voted on key turning point pieces of legislation – Civil Rights, Declaration of War, etc. Today, key votes are done in Committee, in the middle of the night where our priorities are imbedded in some omnibus legislation. And we don't know who is with us or who is cutting us because of the secret machinations of Congress. This system continues and if anyone questions why it is important to have Nancy Pelosi in the leadership, I ask you to look back at previous votes where year after year she has been unwavering in protecting our programs.
The day will come soon when the future of the Community Development Block Grant may well be once again on the chopping block. We will have to fight again and again and again for key urban programs. Nancy Pelosi will be there for us. Morning, noon, and night in the summer, winter, spring, and fall you can count on her to defend and to fight for us. That's why I'm glad she's still up there. She could have ridden off into a Western sunset and spent her time left on this earth with her grandchildren. She decided to fight not only for herself, her reputation, her career; she decided to stand and fight once again for us, for cities and for mayors. We appreciate her support and we look forward to working with her as we develop our strategy in the political atmosphere brought on by the mid-term elections as we now enter and face the beginning of the Presidential campaign of 2012.
These are challenging times because of the economic conditions in so many of our cities who are experiencing a jobless recovery from the worst recession since the Great Depression. Our President, Burnsville Mayor Elizabeth Kautz, is communicating to all of you to let you know that she is working with me, staff, and our leadership as we establish our contacts and have meetings with the new Congressional Leadership.
As we thank so many at this Thanksgiving time in our nation, we need to thank our mayors and their teams who live with the economic pain and suffering of foreclosures and loss of jobs of so many of our people. Through other great crises in the last century, in a different time, in an almost different world, in time of want, when people were in breadlines, looking for jobs, they looked at Franklin Delano Roosevelt and he told them that the only thing to fear was fear itself. Well, FDR is not around anymore. And people nowadays don't look to Washington the way they once did. They turn to their mayors. Today, we are thankful to you, and this nation will one day look back at this period and marvel at how when Washington was confused, and Washington was fighting, it was our cities, our mayors, and yes our people who just kept going forward. Mayors, large and small, are working together at the local level with their partners in the metro areas doing their best to wipe away the tears, comfort the jobless and to do their best to work with the private sector, state, local, and national partners to keep their cities and metro areas economically strong. As we all know, our metro economies will drive the national economy to recovery.
On behalf of President Kautz, our officers and staff, we wish you and your families, those you hold dear and close, and to your staff teams who give so much, a blessed Thanksgiving of 2010 as we continue to move forward for our cities and above all for our people.
Happy Thanksgiving 2010!