On September 9, the Urban and Regional Policy Program of the German Marshall Fund, in conjunction with the Daniel Rose Center for Public Leadership in Land Use at the Urban Land Institute hosted a day-long meeting on “Local Leadership during the Financial Crisis: New Approaches to Municipal Finance and Investment” at the Bank of America in Washington, DC. The meeting brought together high-level city officials from the United States and Europe to discuss how cities are coping with crippling budget deficits and painful cuts in personnel and programs resulting from the ongoing global recession. While some of the conversation focused on how cities can best navigate necessary cost-cutting measures, much of the dialogue explored ways in which cities can innovate around budgeting and service delivery models in order to fundamentally restructure their fiscal circumstances.

Many of the participants on the event’s featured “City Leaders” panel underlined the need to approach municipal investment through a two-pronged strategy that emphasized meeting short-term, immediate service needs while investing in large-scale infrastructure projects that would boost long-term fiscal health. Mayor Kasim Reed of Atlanta, for instance, pointed out that if a city did not fulfill its critical obligations to citizens now, its reputation could suffer to the point where economic recovery in the future might be rendered moot. The Mayor’s argument was taken a step further by Stephen Hughes, Chief Executive of the City Council in Birmingham, UK, who noted that if governments could successfully identify basic service priorities, they would be better able to focus on preventative and interventionist measures that would reduce service delivery costs at the outset. Officials and experts throughout the day spoke consistently of the need to challenge prevailing ideas about just what constituted those core city services: even the sacred cows of police, emergency, and fire services were subject to debate.

To read a complete analysis of the event, visit the Urban Current blog here.