As OKC moves forward, it hopes for help from Trump
Michelle Patterson stepped off the still rumbling train just as it pulled into its final stop a little more than 30 minutes behind schedule. The weary traveler whipped her backpack around to her front, pulled her phone out of the front pouch and hailed an Uber car that was estimated to arrive in seven minutes.
“Long day,” Patterson, a resident of northwest Oklahoma City, said about her train ride that began 10 hours earlier in Temple, Texas. “But it’s good to be home.”
Patterson walked down the dimly lit stairwell from the train platform atop the Santa Fe Depot, the majority of which is closed off for a massive renovation project that will position the 82-year-old train station into a central transit hub along the city’s new downtown streetcar line.
Patterson said the quick visit to her mother’s house was relatively peaceful, although the topic
of politics came up and produced some expected tense moments.
“She has her views and I have mine,” Patterson said. “We live in different worlds.”
Those “different worlds” could be defined along several characteristics, but the starkest might be the urban-rural divide that has played a role in American politics for over a generation and was strongly reinforced during last year’s presidential election.
But it doesn’t take a lengthy journey to smalltown Texas to find a political contrast to urban Oklahoma City. The deep blue neighborhoods of central Oklahoma City are surrounded by Republican strongholds in neighboring suburbs and outer ring communities, putting politically polar opposites just a few blocks from one another.
America is a politically divided nation and Oklahoma City — like most of the country’s major cities — is a politically divided metropolitan region.
President-elect Donald Trump won every county in Oklahoma — the fourth Republican candidate in a row to achieve that feat — but Oklahoma County, the state’s most urban county, saw Trump’s lowest vote share at 52 percent.
Suburban cities like Edmond and Bethany helped give Trump the edge in the county, but central Oklahoma City was a stronghold for Democrat Hillary Clinton.
On Friday, Trump becomes president of a splintered country where more voters supported his Democratic rival, yet he reached the necessary electoral votes with a wave of support in rural communities, especially in economically distressed parts of the upper Midwest, where voters often expressed a feeling of being overlooked for big city interests, especially along America’s two coasts.
On the campaign trail Trump said he wanted to give a voice to forgotten pockets of rural America, despite building his empire as a Manhattan developer.
But Trump’s posture toward the country’s urban communities will have a great impact on the majority of Americans, 85 percent of whom live in metropolitan areas.
“This issue of red versus blue kind of breaks down when you get to the municipal level because most cities need the same thing, like new water and sewer pipes, better roads and better public transportation,” said Shane Hampton, executive director of the University of Oklahoma’s Institute for Quality Communities. “Those are not really partisan needs on the surface.”
The federal government plays a role in infrastructure, education and public safety, especially from a funding perspective, but often the most important policy decisions made in these areas as it relates to urban life are made at the local government level.
“Because the national election and national politics is what is on the news all the time, it is what people think about the most,” said Effie Craven, a community activist and board member of Let’s Fix This, a nonprofit that works to increase public participation in city and state government. “But local politics is really where the change happens and I think the more local the issue the murkier the partisanship gets.”
Craven pointed to teacher pay as one of the most important education issues in the state and Oklahoma City, but added, “That’s not something that is decided by who is in the White House.”
America’s mayors
Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett made the trek to Trump Tower in December to meet with the president-elect, a journey made on behalf of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the organization Cornett currently serves as its president.
“(Trump) talked about policing and infrastructure, and those are the two areas mayors right now are highlighting,” Cornett said.
A president who advocates for increased federal spending on law enforcement, roads and bridges would be welcomed by most cities, Cornett said. But Oklahoma City’s mayor added the relationship between cities and Washington has shifted over the last few decades to one where agencies play more of a leading role.
“The whole system in Washington has been evolving since they took out earmarks,” Cornett said. “It seemed that mayors shifted from lobbying to Congress to working with federal agencies.”
That could mean an effort to grab transportation funding for a project in Oklahoma City is better achieved through conversations with the Department of Transportation, rather than relying on a one-on-one with a congressman or White House representative, Cornett said.
“That’s why it’s important to look at who Trump is putting in these positions to lead agencies,” Cornett added.
A shift to a Republican president might give America’s mayors concern as most big city mayors are Democrats. However, Cornett is a moderate Republican who some believe is the right person to represent the nation’s largest mayoral group during this time of transition.
“This is an interesting moment in time in that we have a Republican president and you have a Republican Oklahoma City mayor who is president of all the nation’s mayors,” said Sen. David Holt, who worked in the George W. Bush White House and was Cornett’s chief of staff before becoming a state senator.
“Cornett might have some credibility with a Republican president and can speak about urban issues at this critical moment,” Holt, R-Oklahoma City, said. “And I believe it would look different if the (U.S. Conference of Mayors) was led by a liberal Democrat.”
Holt said Democrats have traditionally viewed cities as more important than Republicans, something he believes the party should work to change.
But big city mayors have said there has been a withdraw of the federal government from municipalities by both parties.
“Cities have increasingly had to go on our own for the last few decades,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti told Governing magazine in an interview this month. “Ironically, at the time that people are coming back to cities, the federal government has been steadily withdrawing from them. In the ’60s and ’70s, as people were fleeing cities, the federal government engaged with them. Now that people are going back to them, through Democratic and Republican administrations, the federal government has withdrawn from cities.”
Larger issues
While a new president and Congress could impact cities through infrastructure spending, there are also decisions made on a variety of social issues in Washington that have some of the biggest effects in cities.
Decisions on criminal justice reform, education policy, immigration enforcement and a host of other issues have yet to emerge from the president-elect.
“There’s much we don’t know yet,” said Valerie Thompson, president of the Urban League of Greater Oklahoma City.
Thompson said the national network of Urban League chapters planned to meet later this month to discuss its strategy for the next four years as it relates to the new president. But she said the key issues for cities were not going to change.
“The major issues that people are concerned with, particularly in urban communities, are access to jobs and quality education,” Thompson said. “That’s going to remain the focus.”
But beyond new laws and policy decisions made by the president and other federal government leaders, the national tone on social issues can still have an impact on life in Oklahoma City, Craven said.
“The most important decisions made in (Oklahoma City) are local decisions, but they often happen in the national context, and the president helps shape that,” Craven said. “I don’t think the panhandling ordinance would have happened here if we didn’t have the type of national conversation we had at the time as it relates to issues of poverty.”
Craven was referring to the Oklahoma City council’s passage of an antipanhandling ordinance for individuals standing in roadway medians. Even though the ordinance was approved locally, Craven suspects an anti-poor tone at the national level had an impact.
As more Americans flock to urban centers, cities across the country have stepped up local investment, taking the lead on issues of job creation, housing and transportation. Mayor Cornett said there was still a place for the federal government to improve cities, especially as they are the places with the most people, but he suspected urban success would remain largely dependent on local efforts, no matter the posture of the new president.
As Patterson waited for her ride in front of the train station, signs of local investment were not hard to find. Beyond the renovation of the Santa Fe transit hub there was a new office tower rising several blocks away, construction on the new streetcar line is beginning to the south and a renovated riverfront is on the other side of new interstate entrance into downtown.
“We seem to know what kind of city we want and have been working ... to create it over the last several years,” Patterson said. “I would hope our efforts would continue no matter what happens in D.C.”