3 Democrats Warn Mayors of Limited U.S. Aid to Cities

Three big-city Democratic presidential candidates, in a departure from their party’s traditional approach, signaled to the nation’s mayors Monday that they can no longer depend mainly on federal largess to solve the country’s growing backlog of urban problems.

Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt, who started in politics as a St. Louis alderman, called for broad educational efforts to stop the poverty cycle before it starts.

Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, whose Operation Push is based in Chicago, urged the establishment of an “American Investment Bank” to channel public pension funds into rebuilding the urban infrastructure.

And Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, who has presided over the resurgence of his state’s once economically decrepit factory towns, outlined a private-public partnership to surmount the urban housing crisis.

Their campaign messages, delivered in Nashville to the 55th annual session of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and made available in Washington, take on additional political significance because of their close ties to urban constituencies. Moreover, the three candidates lead the Democratic field of seven contenders in national polls and in surveys in key states.

Gephardt is running first in surveys in Iowa, where the Democratic delegate-selection process begins; Dukakis leads in New Hampshire, the first presidential primary state, and Jackson, helped by his relative celebrity, tops most national surveys of Democratic voters.

Their remarks, consistent with statements made earlier in the campaign, appeared to portend a shift in emphasis in the historic relationship between the Democratic Party and the nation’s urban centers.

For more than half a century, city voters--particularly blacks, other minorities and the economically less privileged--have been one of the party’s most dependable bases of support. In turn, the Democrats, particularly when they controlled the presidency, have been generous in funding a variety of programs to help meet urban needs.

No one expects the Democrats to turn their backs on the cities if they regain the White House in 1988. But the emphasis of the three speeches to the mayors’ conference Monday amounted to an acknowledgment that the taxing and spending policies of the Reagan Administration had severely limited what the federal government could do for the cities and created a need for more imaginative and flexible answers to urban problems.

Choices Limited

“The Reagan years have left us with a limited range of choices,” Gephardt told the mayors.

Jackson made much the same point. “Much as I would like to,” he said, “I cannot promise that the next President of the United States will unlock the safe to find billions of dollars which should have been accumulating to the cities’ accounts for the last seven years.”

The mayors are moving toward adoption of a new “urban investment policy statement” seeking renewed federal aid for cities, and they want the candidates to pledge to back it.

“We respectfully demand the urban investment policy become the urban platform for those candidates,” said Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. of Charleston, S.C., president of the group and a Democrat.

Can’t ‘Have It All’

Gephardt contended that what he called “the Reagan budget legacy” had forced the nation to establish targets and priorities for urban aid. “Don’t believe anyone who comes to you with a wish list and says we can have it all.”

The Missouri congressman used the occasion to take an implied slap at one of his chief rivals, Dukakis, who has received widespread publicity for a welfare reform program in his state known formally as Employment and Training Choices and informally as “E.T.”

Without mentioning that specific program, Gephardt said: “In recent years, there has been much ballyhoo among us Democrats about welfare reform.” He added that “I don’t think these programs go far enough to halt the perpetuation of poverty from generation to generation.”

Instead, Gephardt set forth a series of steps to “reach poor children early and give them help that will enable them to dream of a better life.”

The steps included requiring prenatal care and food supplementation for pregnant women on welfare, in-home training in rearing children for new parents, special preparation for parents to help their children develop positive attitudes toward school and requiring that children whose mothers are on welfare participate in Head Start or a similar program starting at age 3.

Jackson, for his part, asked mayors to support his previously announced idea for a national investment plan by helping channel public employee pension funds toward rebuilding infrastructure, such as roads and sewers, and improving worker retraining.

Frank Watkins, a Jackson spokesman, said many mayors appoint members of the boards and commissions that control decisions on public employee pension fund investments. Jackson called for a national conference of government officials, union leaders and businessmen to study ways to use pension funds to help the cities.

And, as the centerpiece of his speech, Jackson proposed what he called “an American Investment Bank,” which could sell bonds and pool capital provided by public pension funds to lower the risk and the interest rates charged for development projects. Its investment priorities would be determined by a board made up of business, labor and government officials.

In his turn before the mayors, Dukakis focused on housing, which has long been an area of special concern for him. He noted that the number of low- and moderate-income housing units built or rebuilt by the federal government had dropped from about 200,000 a year under the Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations to 25,000 in the current fiscal year.

Rehabilitating Housing

The governor called for an arrangement under which the federal government would work with city and state officials as well as building trades unions and bankers. Its goals would be building and rehabilitating housing for low- and moderate-income citizens, modernizing and improving existing housing for such groups and expanding opportunities for home ownership for young families.

To avoid past problems caused by attempts to establish low-income housing in urban areas, Dukakis called for setting up such housing in small clusters or mixing it with housing for other income groups, a tactic that he contended had been tried successfully in his own state.