$200M program aimed for cities to effect policies

Bloomberg set to announce initiative at mayors forum

NEW YORK — Michael 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.

Bloomberg intends to announce the initiative today in a speech to the U.S. 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, Bloomberg, 75, has embraced a public role since the election as a kind of elite-level organizer against certain policies of President Donald Trump’s administration.

In an interview, 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 bigcity 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 Trump announced this month that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate accord, Bloomberg helped marshal an alliance of U.S. cities and private companies to support participation in the pact and offered to pay out of his private philanthropy for the U.S. share of a United Nations budget to coordinate the deal.

The American Cities Initiative, 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 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. 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,” 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. 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 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. 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.

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, 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, Bloomberg endorsed Hillary Clinton in last year’s presidential race and denounced Trump at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

One lesson of that election, 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.”