Mayor Dave's baby comes home: Progressive mayors group meets in Madison
In March 2007, Mayor Pegeen Hanrahan of Gainesville, Fla., launched a program designed to reunite some members of the city's long-term homeless population with family members.
"It's not just a bus ticket out of town," Hanrahan told The Gainesville Sun at the time. "It's trying to reconnect people to the places and people that have the resources to get them back on their feet."
The program was new to Gainesville at the time, but it was by no means a new idea; San Francisco already had a similar program in place for two years that had been hailed as a model for other cities.
What really convinced Hanrahan to adopt the program for her city, according to the Sun, was a discussion at the summer 2006 meeting of the Mayors Innovation Project, which brings mayors from all over the country together to discuss progressive solutions for cities.
This week, the same group will hold its four-day summer conference in Madison, beginning Wednesday night. In a way, it's a homecoming for the project, which is the brainchild of Mayor Dave Cieslewicz.
Cieslewicz said he was inspired to create the Mayors Innovation Project in 2004 from his experiences at past national mayors conferences, which were heavy on speeches and short on discussion.
"I really felt that when I would go to national conferences, the best thing I got out of them were the informal conversations I'd have with mayors between formal presentations," he said. "So that was the original inspiration, to sort of strip out a lot of the other things that tend to take time at a national meeting -- the award ceremonies and the cocktail parties and the corporate receptions -- just get rid of all that and really just boil it down to a relatively small group of mayors in a room together with some national experts on a given issue, and take time and just really work through that issue."
Cieslewicz teamed up with Joel Rogers from the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS) to plan the meetings, the first of which was held in 2005. The Mayors Innovation Project holds two meetings per year, right after the twice-a-year gatherings of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Piggybacking on the larger group's meetings was a convenient way for mayors to attend both conferences, said Janet Piraino, chief of staff to Cieslewicz. But this summer the Mayors Innovation Project is striking out on its own.
The decision to break away from the U.S. Conference of Mayors was intentional, said Piraino, as Cieslewicz wanted to begin highlighting cities that have participated in the project, beginning with Madison.
"Dave was a big advocate for saying, 'You know, let's go to cities of members of the project, and let's try something different. Let's use communities as sort of a showcase,' " she said. The idea is to share successes with others and get help on issues cities are struggling with, she added.
For a first-year showing, Cieslewicz said that attendance is "pretty good," with 26 mayors -- many from Wisconsin -- on the roster. While the mayors have to cover their own travel and hotel costs, he said, there are no additional fees for first-time attendees. Cities that participate regularly pay dues ranging from $500 to $2,500 annually, a fee that Cieslewicz said was a "small line item" for most cities. Other expenses for the meetings -- including bringing in national experts, paying for food and a location for the meeting, among other costs -- are paid for by foundation grants as well as about $5,000 from the city of Madison that Cieslewicz said he took from the $11,000 the city was previously paying the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
The conference kicks off Wednesday night, July 30, with a field trip to Concerts on the Square and concludes Saturday morning with trips to the Dane County Farmers' Market and Troy Gardens. In between, sessions will highlight transportation, equitable development and local food systems. All meetings will feature local and national experts, and provide time for questions and discussion.
"There is a lot more of this kind of give and take, and learning from each other's successes and failures than might happen at a big national convention where people just sit in an audience quietly and listen," said COWS communication director Patty Gelenberg. "This is a real opportunity for them to take home information from somebody else."
The session Friday morning will spotlight Madison's own redevelopment efforts on Allied Drive and of the Lincoln Park Coast Cultural District in Newark, N.J. Cieslewicz said he has applied things he has learned at previous meetings to Allied Drive plans but noted that affordable housing continues to be a challenge for Madison as well as many other cities. He said he will be looking for new approaches to the problem at this meeting.
"How do you develop a neighborhood, improve the quality of life there, without pushing out the residents who live there?" he said.
The transportation session, which lasts all day Thursday, will focus on biking as an environmentally and physically healthy form of transportation, with other transit alternatives up for discussion as well.
While the presentations are not open to the public in order to allow mayors room for honest conversations, Cieslewicz said there will be plenty of opportunities to get a glimpse of the mayor invasion this week. Beyond Wednesday's concert, meeting participants will take in the sights of Madison in other ways, including on bikes provided by Wisconsin-based Trek Co.
The mayors will also get to experience Madison's local food offerings with visits to the Farmers' Market and Troy Gardens to supplement a discussion on urban and community gardens. Coordinating such activities is new to the conference this year, Piraino said.
"What we wanted to do was not just drive people around in a van," she said. "We wanted them to really experience it."
Mayor Dave Cieslewicz
