- A group of 150 mayors is urging Congress to provide immediate financial assistance to
local governments . - "It is imperative that we have resources available through the
stimulus package to effectively maintain city services and deploy the pending vaccines," Kyle Moore, the Republican mayor of Quincy, Illinois, said Tuesday. - A recent survey of local leaders found the vast majority believed the federal government had provided insufficient support during the
COVID-19 pandemic.
Aid for state and local governments in the US has been framed as a "blue-state bailout" by some Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader
The logjam over another spending package - amid the worst surge yet in COVID-19, sending a record number of people to the hospital - has prompted a coalition of local leaders in the Midwest and the Deep South to speak out.
In a statement, 150 mayors representing areas from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico rebutted the red-versus-blue rhetoric at the national level and urged lawmakers to provide what they described as "urgently needed financial relief for
The message echoes that of Mayor Dee Margo of hard-hit El Paso, Texas, who in a recent interview with Business Insider spoke of the tension between protecting public health and ensuring the city and its businesses would not go bankrupt. "We need more help," the Republican put it bluntly.
A $748 billion relief package backed by a bipartisan group of senators, unveiled this week, omits any support for state and local governments, focusing instead on aid to small businesses and a temporary increase in unemployment payments. A second, $160 billion proposal ("less of an emergency but also important," in the words of Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana) would provide aid to local governments in exchange for blocking most lawsuits against companies related to COVID-19. (According to a report from NBC News, McConnell said he'd drop the lawsuit-shield provision if Democrats dropped the funding for state and local governments.)
In their statement, the group of mayors urged lawmakers to treat aid to their cities as an emergency priority.
"The pandemic is reaching critical levels now as contagion sweeps through our
Mayor Mike Vandersteen of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, who is the Republican chair of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative, urged Congress to pass a relief bill before adjourning.
"Regardless of how it is structured, it is imperative that Congress approve revenue replacement for local governments to ensure the swiftest possible recovery from the pandemic," Vandersteen said.
On Tuesday, McConnell, the top Republican in Congress, vowed to stay in Washington until a "COVID package" were passed, though he did not specify what such a package would include.
In a survey of 130 mayors across the country released earlier this month, 45% of city leaders said they expected serious cuts to public education, social services, and transportation budgets because of a drop in tax revenue brought about by the pandemic. Over 85% said the federal government's assistance had been insufficient.
In an interview with Business Insider earlier this year, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman warned of a "huge fiscal time bomb" as the pandemic subsided because state and local governments could not run a deficit, unlike the federal government, and were collecting less revenue during the pandemic while spending more.
"It's going to be a lot like what happened after the 2008 crisis when layoffs of school teachers, layoffs of government employees, were a big factor in holding back recovery," Krugman said, adding: "Yeah, just as the pandemic starts to fade, we hope, we're going to be seeing state and local governments cutting back severely."
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