In an era of state preemption, by which state governments (often Republican) increasingly limit the ability of large-city mayors (often Democratic) to implement policies, mayors across the United States are finding innovative ways to preserve local control.
Yet the loopholes they find, no matter how creative, are often inadequate to surmount restrictive state policies and enable communities to meet pressing needs in housing, food insecurity, public health, safety, climate, and elsewhere.
US mayors play a significant role in shaping the day-to-day lives of everyday Americans.
How can this logjam be overcome? While many challenges remain, mayors are finding ways to strengthen local governance and local democratic control.
Why Mayors Matter
At the Mayors Innovation Project’s 2024 summer meeting—held in Knoxville, TN—Reverend Harold Middlebrook’s voice reverberated: “Washington is not going to come down to pave these streets!”
Indeed, as leaders of the executive branch of local government, US mayors play a significant role in shaping the day-to-day lives of everyday Americans. Tasked with everything from keeping communities safe to cultivating thriving local economies, mayors are often the political first responders to the compounding crises of our time.
However, over the past few decades, mayors have been subject to increasing constraints. Most notorious has been state preemption, a legislative tool state governments use to remove city jurisdiction over key issues. Because cities tend to vote more “Democratic” than states (where often rural and suburban voters dominate), the most common effect of preemption laws is blocked progressive legislation.
The state sets these limits in many places. A 2018 National League of Cities report noted, for example, that in 28 states, cities are banned from setting minimum wages higher than state levels. This has resulted in city bills to raise local minimum wages being blocked in places like Louisville, KY, and Kansas City, MO. Other local policies, the report notes, are also restricted, including laws mandating paid leave, rent control, and immigrant sanctuary policies, among others.
State preemption has become so prevalent that the US Conference of Mayors adopted a set of resolutions in 2023: “Preserving Our Democracy and Assuring the Ability of Cities to Keep Their Residents Safe and Make Sure Their Rights are Protected.”
Finding Local Workarounds
What can mayors do if the state bans cities from implementing the policies that residents want? One approach is the workaround.
For example, preemptive legislation in Wisconsin prevents cities from barring tools, appliances, vehicles, or utilities that use fossil fuels to generate power. But the legislation did not deter Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway from pursuing her goal of net zero carbon emissions for city operations by 2030.
“There are some things only mayors can do…expending their political capital is one of those things.”
Instead, funded by a grant from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and working with local partners such as the Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness, the Latino Health Council, the Hmong Institute, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, among others, the City of Madison engaged in a community-based process to determine where air quality sensors that measure particulate matter pollution would be placed.
Now, 65 monitors citywide, many in BIPOC neighborhoods, report their data regularly to residents through an interactive dashboard called Love My Air. In this way, residents can make informed decisions about how best to interact with their natural environment, and the mayor’s office can promote cleaner air.
Where Mayors Have Leverage
Even though state governments have the power to ban actions by cities, the mayor holds more power and influence than is usually assumed. Not only are many mayors homegrown in the cities and towns they represent—enabling them to better understand their communities’ needs—public approval and trust in their efficacy has also remained consistently high over the past two decades. This is especially true in small and midsize cities.
As Knoxville’s Mayor Indya Kincannon aptly encouraged attendees at the Mayors Innovation Project meeting, “There are some things only mayors can do…expending their political capital is one of those things.”
So, how can mayors leverage this political capital that builds a culture of place-based democratic ownership?
Sign up for our free newsletters
Subscribe to NPQ's newsletters to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.
By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from NPQ and our partners.
First, unlike their federal or state counterparts, because of their proximity, mayors are very visible and thus often face greater public accountability. As one mayor shared in Knoxville, “People want to know what you did in the last three months, and how come you didn’t fix everything?”
This kind of hypervigilance of the mayor’s seat may actually be an opportunity. Mayors—especially incumbents—can leverage their position, both during election season and while governing, to build resident power.
Trusted, community-based organizations like CivicLex in Lexington, KY, can support mayors in connecting directly with their constituents while simultaneously providing resources that demystify local governance for everyday people. Indeed, CivicLex’s efforts helped the City of Lexington run a public input process for its comprehensive plan, “Imagine Lexington.”
Second, mayors can use their executive power to invest in community engagement infrastructure that bake democratic governance into public processes from the beginning. A popular example is participatory budgeting (or PB). According to the Participatory Budgeting Project, PB “is a democratic process in which community members decide how to spend part of a public budget. It gives people real power over real money.”
Mayors can reshape everyday institutions—from workplaces to housing—to promote community ownership.
Several cities worldwide have implemented PB processes, but many have moved from ignoring their constituents to merely consulting them. In Durham, NC, however, residents are engaged from idea solicitation to budget delegation to voting to implementation and evaluation.
In this way, Durham residents directly make decisions regarding the expenditure of $2.4 million. However, the city’s total budget is over $900 million, so expanding such efforts beyond a meager 0.2 percent is critical to advancing true ownership.
Third, seeding paid distributed leadership models can go a long way in supporting community-responsive governance. It is no secret that residents—often those of color—trapped most firmly in a system of wage labor are the most unable to participate in democratic processes. As such, providing a monetary incentive to engage is critical to move beyond addressing the needs of the same few people who show up to council meetings.
A long-standing example of this model is CAHOOTS, a program founded in the City of Eugene, OR, in 1989 to address public safety. Funded by the city’s police budget, the program deploys mental health workers—in lieu of armed police officers—to respond to 911 calls involving mental health crises.
Since then, mayors in Portland, OR, Olympia, WA; San Francisco; CA; and Ithaca, NY, have adopted similar programs. In Madison, Rhodes-Conway established the Bilingual Community Connector program, in which three residents who speak Spanish, Hmong, and Mandarin (the city’s three most spoken languages) were hired to help people learn about city services. In Salt Lake City, Mayor Erin Mendenhall set up the Salt Lake City Resident Food Equity Advisors Program, in which 13 residents affected by food insecurity were hired to support the city in identifying solutions to address food hardship.
But perhaps most importantly, mayors can reshape everyday institutions—from workplaces to housing—to promote community ownership.
Toward a More Participatory Democracy
One way to advance this kind of “little ‘d’ democracy” is for mayors to invest in community wealth building (CWB) or a solidarity economy, an economic development strategy that encourages communities to leverage public ownership and control of resources—especially land, labor, and capital—to support locally based community economic development.
In Chicago, for example, former Mayor Lori Lightfoot leveraged her executive power to invest in CWB strategies, using federal COVID recovery dollars to seed a $15 million program. But Chicago is not alone. In the past decade, many cities have used various CWB tools to leverage public ownership of assets to meet community needs—from land banking in Detroit, MI; to community benefits agreements in Nashville, TN; to community land use planning in Lafayette, LA.
Yet another example is in Michigan City, IN—located 60 miles east of Chicago. There, Angie Nelson Deuitch, the city’s first Black mayor, has been working closely with residents in two majority-BIPOC neighborhoods to rekindle the community’s once-thriving Black economy.
By providing grants to small businesses and having residents co-determine how best to leverage 200-plus acres of community-owned land—land previously used as a prison property and a decommissioned natural gas plant—Deuitch is one of many unsung leaders investing in long-lasting democratic infrastructure rooted in community ownership of resources.
