At a recent talk, former mayors Manny Diaz and Greg Nickels (of Miami and Seattle, respectively) talked about the frustration mayors face in having to go to the state to receive funding.
The ex-mayors were speaking together at "The Reinvented City," in Cambridge, Mass., a conference sponsored by the Nieman Foundation, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Newsom writes that Nickels and Diaz "pretty much went off on a tear about their anger and frustration with state legislatures. Legislators, Diaz said, don't know or care about cities. "If he's a state elected official he should stay the hell away from what's going to affect mayors," he said. The federal government hardly gives cities any money - they funnel it to states. And states don't give it equitably to cities. "We get peanuts," Diaz said."
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