Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Bloomberg’s Next Anti-Washington Move: $200 Million Program for Mayors

Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, speaking last month in San Francisco. He has embraced a public role since the election as a kind of elite-level organizer against certain policies of the Trump administration.Credit...Kelly Sullivan/Getty Images for Sierra Club

Michael R. Bloomberg will throw his financial might into helping beleaguered American mayors, creating a $200 million philanthropic program aimed at backing inventive policies at the city level and giving mayors a stronger hand in national politics.

Mr. Bloomberg intends to announce the initiative on Monday in a speech to the United States Conference of Mayors in Miami Beach, where he will castigate federal officials and state governments around the country for undermining cities. He plans to describe the program, called the American Cities Initiative, as a method of shoring up the global influence of the United States despite turmoil in Washington.

A wealthy former mayor of New York who seriously explored running for president in 2016 as an independent, Mr. Bloomberg, 75, has embraced a public role since the election as a kind of elite-level organizer against certain policies of the Trump administration.

In an interview, Mr. Bloomberg said his city-focused initiative would serve in part as an extension of his advocacy for national policies that address climate change, gun violence, public health and immigration. That largely liberal agenda is aligned with the growing aspirations of big-city mayors, who are mainly Democrats and who have vowed to check conservative mandates emerging from Washington by using their power at the local level.

After President Trump announced last month that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate accord, Mr. Bloomberg helped marshal an alliance of American cities and private companies to support participation in the pact, and offered to pay out of his private philanthropy for the American share of a United Nations budget to coordinate the deal.

The American Cities Initiative, Mr. Bloomberg said, will reward cities for addressing such large-scale issues.

“You can argue that if people in cities use less energy, the coal-fired power plants outside the cities would pollute the air less,” he said. “You can make the case that immigration is a city issue, because that’s where a lot of people live and work.”

But Mr. Bloomberg, speaking by telephone from the Manhattan offices of his media company, said the program would also focus on less contentious subjects related to making government effective, despite interference or fiscal pullback at the state and federal level. Cities, he said, must increasingly “replace Washington and, in some cases, state governments, to provide services.”

“It’s really efficiency in government, how you marshal resources and how you deal with the public, explain to them, bring them along,” Mr. Bloomberg said, describing the focus of the American Cities Initiative.

A signature component of the proposed Bloomberg initiative will be a “Mayors Challenge,” through which city executives will be invited to compete for six- and seven-figure grants from Bloomberg Philanthropies, awarded to mayors who draw up compelling proposals for policy experimentation. Mr. Bloomberg’s foundation has run similar competitions in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson of Gary, Ind., whose city has received money from Mr. Bloomberg’s foundation in the past, said new grants could help address an issue closer to the ground level of government: removing or replacing vacant commercial buildings throughout the city. Ms. Freeman-Wilson said state and federal officials appeared to have little interest in facilitating such actions.

“They don’t have any sense of what we’re confronted with,” she said.

Mr. Bloomberg said the project’s $200 million budget would be spread out over three years, to start with, and could grow over time.

In a reflective aside, Mr. Bloomberg also appeared to acknowledge that he might have more success shifting public opinion on big issues by working through city governments. As a political donor, he has made gun control his central cause, with mixed electoral success, and has also backed campaigns supportive of an immigration overhaul and environmental regulation. Though he is not a member of a political party, Mr. Bloomberg endorsed Hillary Clinton in last year’s presidential race and denounced Mr. Trump at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

One lesson of that election, Mr. Bloomberg suggested, might be that elites have done too much to change “the moral and social fabric of the country” without explaining the changes to ordinary people.

“I’m certainly as guilty as anybody,” he said. “Maybe that’s one of the lessons of the Trump victory — that we’ve not really talked to lots of people in this country, particularly in the Midwest, where Donald Trump did very well.”

Mr. Bloomberg’s announcement in Miami Beach comes at a pivotal moment for the Conference of Mayors, which faces sky-high and mostly self-imposed political expectations: Many of its prominent members have promised in sweeping language to counteract the influence of the federal government under Mr. Trump.

And with the Republican Party, which is anchored in the country’s rural areas and outer suburbs, controlling Washington and most state governments, many mayors have few natural allies to secure financial support and policy cooperation for their cities.

In addition to advancing an ideological agenda that clashes with the social character of many big cities — on issues like climate and immigration — the Trump administration has proposed deep cuts to government agencies that municipalities rely on, including major grant programs in the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Health and Human Services.

The new president of the mayors’ group, Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans, has pledged to be a forceful champion for city priorities and to coordinate political action between mayors. Mr. Landrieu, who is a Democrat, has a warm relationship with Mr. Bloomberg.

As part of its introduction, the American Cities Initiative will give a six-figure grant to the mayors’ conference to coordinate mayoral advocacy in the national news media, advisers to Mr. Bloomberg said.

Mr. Landrieu said in an interview that mayors would have to collaborate more closely, on both policy and politics, to make up for the absence of support — or outright meddling — from state and federal authorities. Until a friendlier environment develops at the national level, he said, mayors will have to work together “without a federal framework.”

Mr. Bloomberg and his money would help facilitate that, Mr. Landrieu said.

“We’re moving to a different model in this country, and it’s really going to be nonideological,” he said. “It’s going to be problem-solving driven.”

Mr. Landrieu said the conference would continue to lobby state and federal lawmakers for city priorities, as it has done for years.

But Mr. Bloomberg expressed no particular optimism that the Trump administration could be swayed to take a more accommodating view of urban policy. Asked if he had made an appeal to the New Yorker in the White House, Mr. Bloomberg said he had spoken only once to Mr. Trump since his election, describing it as a “pleasant conversation.”

“He gave me his private cellphone number, and I haven’t called him,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “He has mine and he hasn’t called me.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Bloomberg’s Next Anti-Washington Move: $200 Million Program for Mayors. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT