Mayors Matter
Mayors can make a difference. Chicago’s new Mayor Lori Lightfoot took office this week, becoming the first African American, openly queer woman to head the city. A few days before she took the oath, she announced she would stop water shut offs. In unequivocal terms she said, “Water is a basic, basic human right. If you’re turning off water, you are effectively evicting people. And we know that that disproportionately affects low income people of color who are going to be shut off from water services.”
Mayor Lightfoot called water shut offs “heartless,” and said, “When you cut somebody off from water, you’re effectively evicting them and putting them on the street. We will not do that in the city.”
As with Detroit, Chicago has experienced rapidly accelerating water bills. They have tripled in the last decade. In the past 12 years 150,000 households have received shut off notices. Illegal reconnections have actually outpaced the legal ones.
The decision by the Mayor to move Chicago systematically toward a water affordability plan was based on a thoughtful report prepared by her transition team. It is a document worth reading. I especially recommend it to our own Mayor and City Council.
The report also provides a basis for the Mayor Lightfoot to “(resume) leadership in Great Lakes issues” such as climate resilience, restorative infrastructure and aquatic invasive species. “Chicago City government has an absolute responsibility to protect Chicagoans from environmental harms,” Lightfoot said. “This starts with bringing back the Department of Environment to combat climate change and ensure that residents have clean air to breathe and safe water to drink no matter their race, economic status, or zip code.”
These actions are important because they bring into the public sphere values that are badly needed as we develop policies in the face of increasing challenges around access and safety of water.
The values behind the choices the new Mayor is making are essential as we prepare for long term struggles around the role of cities and democracy in our country. Increasingly we are coming to understand that right wing, corporate forces are aggressively limiting direct democracy in cities. Pursuing state level preemptive actions, right wing, corporate financed legislatures are blocking direct democratic actions by local governments.
The rate of preemption bills introduce by state legislatures has spiked dramatically with the rise of conservative power. For example, “six out of 10 Americans now live in a state where a city can't pass a minimum wage that's higher than the state minimum wage," according to Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, an assistant professor of political affairs at Columbia University and the author of the new book, State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States—and the Nation.
We in Michigan have seen plenty of this doctrine in action, from the effort to limit residency requirements, to forced cooperation with ICE, and emergency management, the State has deemed cities, especially Detroit, as nothing more than administrative units.
Yet the growing power of progressive cities will not be stopped. For centuries, cities have been the natural site of politics. Part of the deep, structural changes we are finding our way to creating, begins with a new understanding of the power of cities, the purposes and responsibilities of local governments. The new Mayor of Chicago is helping make clear what kind of values are at stake for our futures.