Sell Cities’ Case to Washington, Bradley Urges Mayors

The nation’s big cities need to organize their plea to Washington like a political campaign, a group of mayors said today at the start of Urban Summit 1990.

“It seems to us that we need to do a better job of packaging the nature of our problems,” said Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, one of more than 30 mayors attending the two-day summit in Manhattan.

Bradley was joined at a media briefing by San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor and New York Mayor David N. Dinkins, who organized the meeting to help find ways to solve the nation’s urban problems.

The summit is focusing on issues such as housing, AIDS prevention and treatment, combating drug abuse, improving education and paying for costly projects such as bridges and roads.

The mayors complained that the federal government has mandated programs at the local level without providing cities with the money to pay for them.

“Over the last decade, we have lost about 26% of the federal support which we once enjoyed,” Bradley said. “In addition, more programs have been dumped on the cities. More problems exist in those cities.

“So we’ve been hit with a double-whammy.”

Dinkins last week announced that he intended to cut 5,400 city jobs to close a $388-million budget gap.

Bradley said the mayors are working to package their ideas and present them in such a way that Congress and President Bush can’t ignore them.