5 Good Governing Mayors

Focused on the issues most important to their constituents, mayors have to ensure public resources get used wisely and in a way that achieves results while respecting the law and democratic values.
As mayors from across the nation gather for The United States Conference of Mayors’ Annual Meeting this weekend, here are five that are practicing good governance in small and mid-sized cities.

Mayor Mick Cornett supported a one cent sales tax to fund projects that enhance the quality of life for Oklahoma City residents, such as the construction of RIVERSPORT Rapids.

Mick Cornett, Oklahoma City

Once dubbed one of the five most innovative mayors in the country by Newsweek, Cornett has been credited with helping his city shed a collective 1 million pounds through an ambitious health campaign. He’s also invested nearly $2 billion to improve schools and infrastructure and boosted civic engagement by including residents on various subcommittees. Cornett, who’s been mayor since 2004, is now the longest-serving leader among the 50 biggest cities in the U.S. and is hoping to take his changemaking ways statewide by running for governor.

Mayor Svante Myrick takes a selfie with the Child Development Council after his proclamation of Child Development Council Day in Ithaca, N.Y

Svante Myrick, Ithaca, N.Y.

First elected at age 24, Myrick – now 30 – is known for hanging an LED sign in his office that displays text messages from constituents. But more importantly, he’s tackled the heroin epidemic by proposing a detox center, methadone clinic and supervised safe injection site. “It’s a great example of good governance because although it’s experimental, there are early signs of success where it’s been done (like Vancouver, B.C.),” says Alex Torpey, former mayor of South Orange, N.J., and visiting professor of governance and technology at Seton Hall University. The idea may seem counterintuitive, but Torpey says Myrick’s team “brought in all possible stakeholders, did appropriate research and made a really brave decision to try something to help attack this problem.”

Local Louisville high school seniors discuss their post-graduation plans with Mayor Greg Fischer.

Greg Fischer, Louisville, Ky.

This Bluegrass State inventor turned businessman turned politician was elected mayor in 2010. Last year, he was voted the country’s “most innovative” mayor in a Politico survey and credited with driving the creation of a new economic development agency and an innovation office. One of his administration’s top goals includes making the city more compassionate, as well as improving education and creating “good-paying” jobs. “Throughout this tenure, the city of Louisville has moved from an old industrial town without a lot of industry to a modern creative class magnet in the Midwest,” says William Hatcher, associate professor of political science at Augusta University.

Mayor David Bieter congratulates new enlistees in the United States Navy at Boise City Hall.

David Bieter, Boise, Idaho

This fourth-term mayor – the longest in Boise’s history – has expanded access to childhood education programs and affordable housing while taking a bold stance to protect immigrants and refugees. His city does better than many others at ensuring the safety of residents and providing them access to hospital beds and certain health outcomes, helping Boise rank at the top of the America’s best-run cities study.

In Washington D.C., Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed participates in a panel discussion on the economy and job opportunities for Americans.

Kasim Reed, Atlanta

Under his leadership, the local government of this bigger city has strengthened its economy and developed urban amenities “in a manner that is effective, efficient and fair,” notes Hatcher. The second-term mayor established a bike share program to help with traffic congestion and pushed for new transit infrastructure. Recently, Reed pledged to uphold the Paris climate accord and joined the Global Parliament of Mayors, which is tackling local issues resulting from worldwide problems. “Mayors need to be at the forefront of global challenges like immigration, social mobility, climate change and resiliency,” Reed has said.
MORE: America’s Youngest Mayor

Day Jobs for Panhandlers

Coming up with a unique, innovative way to solve a problem is great, but sometimes borrowing an existing idea is just as good.
The city of Tulsa, Okla., is looking to earmark $25,000 to fund a program that will combat panhandling by offering cleanup jobs and social services to people on the streets. It got the idea from a neighbor to the west: Albuquerque, N.M.
“Certainly, we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel. We are shamelessly stealing the idea,” says Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum, a republican who was elected last December.
Tulsa’s version is a carbon copy of the Albuquerque program — even taking its name, “There’s A Better Way.” That city’s initiative began in 2015 and allocated $50,000 from the annual budget to hire 10 to 12 day laborers twice a week. They were paid nine dollars an hour for their work and given access to social service workers who could help them find more permanent employment.
The program achieved such wide success that its funding has been increased by nearly 500 percent.
With just under 400,000 residents, Tulsa has a significant homeless population. In 2016, between 6,000 and 7,000 residents lived on the streets. That number, while small in comparison to homeless populations in cities such as New York and Los Angeles, is noticeable in medium-sized Tulsa.

Former panhandlers work as day laborers as part of the “There’s A Better Way” program in Albuquerque.

The visibility of panhandlers is worrisome to those in Tulsa’s business districts, says Bynum, and city residents want change. After Bynum’s election, his social media accounts were flooded with a Washington Post article about Albuquerque’s initiative.
Prior to adopting the Better Way program, Tulsa had proposed limiting panhandling by requiring those on the streets to apply for a license. Failure to do so or panhandle in a prohibited area would result in a fine.
But Bynum says that punitive measures wouldn’t address the root of why people panhandle.
Officials in Dallas and Portland, Maine, also have plans to implement There’s A Better Way in their cities.

7 Environmental Disasters That Are No More

On the eastern edge of Niagara Falls, N.Y., 100 homes and a public school stood on Love Canal — an unfitting name for a ditch filled with industrial waste that had been covered over with earth and sold for $1. The three blocks of working-class households looked like any other community, but in basements and backyards, residents found carcinogenic compounds seeping through the soil, leached out of the rotting drum containers buried underneath.
“Trees and gardens were turning black and dying. One entire swimming pool had been popped up from its foundation, afloat now on a small sea of chemicals,” recounts Eckardt Beck, an EPA administrator in the 1970s. “Everywhere the air had a faint, choking smell. Children returned from play[ing] with burns on their hands and faces.”
The environmental calamity at Love Canal prompted officials to launch a national cleanup of the country’s most toxic wastelands. The program — the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund, named for a trust fund bolstered by taxes on petroleum and chemical products — promised long-term remediation for dangerous sites and gave the agency power to bill offending companies for the costs. Since its inception in 1981, 387 sites have been officially cleared. But chronic underfunding — the petro-chemical taxes expired in 1995 — has weakened the EPA’s efforts. Most funding goes to less than a dozen major projects, even though there’s still 1,322 sites in need of further detox, according to an EPA spokesperson.
Despite the odds, here are seven projects that prove a cleaner future is possible and that the residents of Love Canal didn’t suffer for naught.
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The Savvy People That Are Saving Prescription Drugs From Landfills and Giving Them to Needy Patients

Most of us are aware that Americans waste a lot of food, which has spurred nonprofits like the Food Recovery Network to avert some of that loss and give it to hungry people. But you may not know that Americans also toss out an astonishing amount of perfectly good prescription drugs as well. These drugs end up in landfills, flushed down the toilet or burnt in incinerators where they can harm people or the environment, keeping them from people who could use them.
Fifty percent of the Americans that the Commonwealth Fund surveyed said that they had failed to fill a prescription ordered by their doctors because of the price of the drug, and according to the CDC, 25 percent of Americans struggle with paying their medical bills.
Which is why several crusaders are working to get unused prescription drugs into the hands of people who need them. George Wang, whose Stanford, California-based nonprofit startup Sirum recovers these drugs, calculates that $700 million worth of prescriptions could be saved each year. He talked with Marketplace about “the absurdity of the waste and how gross it is, the fact that it’s raining down on families where these drugs are being burnt. It’s insane, right?”
One of the big culprits is nursing homes. Residents use a lot of prescriptions, but regulations require these facilities to toss prescriptions instead of sharing them between patients. Larry McCarty, a medical waste hauler who works for nursing homes in California describes, “brand new packages that have never been open and still have the saran over the top of them. Whole packages, just sitting in there.”
Sirum has developed software to make it simple for nursing homes to donate leftover drugs, shipping them to pharmacies that will give them to low-income people or those who don’t have insurance.
In Oklahoma, Linda Johnston, the Tulsa County Director of Social Service, heads up a program that involves retired doctors in collecting unused drugs and delivering them to the needy, saving $16 million worth of drugs so far, and countless lives. Johnston talked with Marketplace about one young man who’d received anti-depression medication from the program. “He wanted me to know he was not going to commit suicide, because he had his medication, he could take it.”
MORE: How Much Food Could Be Rescued if College Dining Halls Saved Their Leftovers?
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When Families Are Left Behind After Veteran Suicide, This Oklahoma Nonprofit Helps Out

The staggering tally of 22 veteran suicides a day has impacted communities across the country. In Oklahoma alone, more than 140 veterans kill themselves each year, and these deaths account for about a quarter of all the suicides in the state.
One vital nonprofit, Veterans Corner, of Goldsby, is working to end this trend and to help the families left behind by it.
The families of veterans who commit suicide often need financial assistance, but they can’t bear facing the paperwork required to access their benefits. So Shirley Clark-Cowdin, a volunteer with Veterans Corner, personally accompanies widows and widowers to apply for their survivor benefits from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. And when a veteran comes to her in grave need, as did a suicidal female veteran who had been raped while she serving in the military, Clark-Cowdin makes sure they are immediately admitted to a psychiatric facility.
Dale Graham, the VA agent who founded Veteran’s Corner, tells Rick Green of NewsOK, “There was a boy who came back from Iraq and went to Oklahoma City to the VA hospital and asked for help and was given paperwork to fill out. There might be 10, 15, 20 pages to fill out. Talk about a stressor. For PTSD, you have to fill out a form saying who got killed, what day it happened. That’s bringing all that stuff to the forefront. When the kid got back home and looked at all those papers and just killed himself.”
But when Veteran’s Corner is able to reach despairing veterans in time, they are able to prevent this outcome. And so far, they have a 100 percent success rate.
MORE: This Mobile App is Preventing Veteran Suicide

How Competing in a Horse Show Gives Disabled Veterans a Sense of Belonging

When serving their country, members of the armed services display their expertise on the battlefield. Back at home here in the U.S., some veterans are putting their skills on display in a different type of theater: the equestrian show ring.
Recently, a group of more than 20 veterans gathered at the Tulsa, Okla. fairgrounds to show off everything they know about horsemanship for a panel of judges at the National Snaffle Bit Association’s World Championship. All are participants in Heroes on Horses, a nonprofit providing equine therapy to disabled veterans. Some, like Army veteran Matthew Evans, are lifelong riders, while others had never been on a horse before they became involved with the program.
“It’s kind of like a milestone, you know?” Evans tells Tony Russell of News On 6. “Some of these people have never seen a horse before and they step up to a horse for the first time, and now here they are competing in a world show, you know? That just goes to show how far they’ve come and how great they are.”
While horse riding is meant to be therapeutic, there’s something about the thrill of competition that gives the disabled vets an extra boost. The judges evaluated them according to the stringent standards they use to measure other riders before announcing the winners. Still, Evans tells Russell, “Being able to compete with other veterans again isn’t so much a competition, it’s more of a camaraderie and a brotherhood. It’s kind of like a reunion.”
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As for the value of equine therapy, Marine veteran James Mincey says, “They always say that the best thing for the inside of a man is the outside of a horse, so there’s a lot to that.”
MORE: This Injured Veteran Healed Himself. Now He’s Bringing His Secret to Others
 

Which States Are Tops in the Open Data Movement?

As more local municipalities join the open data movement, the Center for Data Innovation, a think tank, has assessed which state governments are actually measuring up with the best policies.
A new report ranks states based on progress with open data policies and digital accessibility to data portals. Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New York, Oklahoma and Utah are the top six states, respectively, in making strides with the open data movement.
The report also finds that 10 states currently maintain open data policies, and all but one offer an open-data portal. (New Hampshire being the exception as the only state with an open-data policy that doesn’t offer complete datasets.) Over the last two years, five states have created new policies while four have amended existing ones. Overall, 24 states offer some form of an open data portal, including some without policies in place.
The rankings were determined based on four categories including the presence of an open-data policy, the quality of the policy, the presence of a open-data portal and the quality of that portal, according to Government Executive.
The report also explores common elements among those states with the most successful open data campaigns, including data being open by default — which includes public, expenditure and legislative records — as well as being released in a non-proprietary format or a machine readable format. A universal format is important in order for nonprofits, businesses and other users to process and translate the datasets. For example, if a state releases data in a PDF or DOC, it may not be considered effective because the format is not machine-readable.
While some states have polices on government transparency, the report points out that often that translates to publishing data on only a few topics, which is a good starting point, but not comprehensive enough.

“While a general transparency portal is a good start, open data portals can help increase transparency and accountability by opening up all government data, non just certain types of records,” the report says.

MORE: To Increase Government Transparency, San Diego Joins the Open Data Movement

How Hearing Their Parents’ Voices From Behind Prison Walls Helps Children Feel Less Depressed

Hearing a bedtime story before being tucked in at night is often the best way to ensure a child’s peaceful night’s sleep.
However, for the children of incarcerated parents, having a book read by their parents isn’t an option. This sad fact is the reality facing many families in Oklahoma, where 7,701 children have mothers in prison, and 121 women per 100,000 people are incarcerated, compared to the national average of 65.
Enter Redeeming the Family, an Oklahoma nonprofit working to preserve the bond and relationships between parent and child.  According to the organization, after a parent is incarcerated, the chances of depression, suicide, poor performance in school and arrest all increase for kids.
That’s exactly why they’ve launched the Oklahoma Messages Program. Under it, volunteers go into prisons and video a mother or father talking to their children or reading them a book. The videos are then sent to the offspring, who can now see their parents for the first time in, what may be, quite a while.
These videos are an important lifeline between individuals because, for children living with their mothers, only 55 percent have visited and only 40 percent have spoken on the phone during incarceration. In its four years of operation, the program has sent videos to more than 3,000 children, 823 in 2013 alone.
These DVDs are really making a difference. Redeeming the Family conducted outcome surveys on the children to gage impact. Initially, 81 percent said that after their parent was imprisoned, they had moderate to huge increases in sadness and depression.  Another 84 percent reported moderate to huge spikes in stress and anxiety. After the videos entered the children’s lives, however, 65 percent reported a decrease in feelings of sadness and depression, while 54 percent had less anger and disruptive behavior.
While the videos do not replace the presence of the actual parent, receiving them three times a year — Christmas, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day — can make all the difference. Executive Director of Redeeming the Family Cheri Fuller has witnessed this first hand.
“Over and over, we hear children say it felt like my mother was in the room,” she told NewsOk.
For these children, hearing and seeing their parents is just what’s needed to induce a great night’s sleep.
MORE: When Families are Separated Because of Criminal Acts, This Technology Keeps Everyone Connected

This Unique Program Tackles Poverty Two Generations at a Time

Poverty often results in a myriad of problems for families that a single intervention is unable to fix. That’s why in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Career Advance Program (CAP) is tackling the effects of poverty in two generations at the same time: Working to help low-income mothers attain training for nursing and other medical-industry careers while ensuring their kids receive high-quality childcare through the local Head Start program.
CAP includes a required monthly seminar class for the mothers on career skills — such as interviewing and resume building — and meetings with life coaches to help participants learn time management skills, how to deal with stress, and ways to overcome troubles (ranging from dead cars to kitchen fires, for example). CAP pays for the mothers’ tuition and childcare. Plus, the program offers $200 bonuses (in the form of gasoline cards or expense reimbursements) for good grades.
Steven Dow, the executive director of CAP Tulsa, told Eric Westervelt of NPR, “The paradox of our early childhood work is that we are so focused on young children. And yet, many of the outcomes we want for young children are dependent on being able to also make progress with their parents and the adults. So this interplay is a tough nut to crack.”
CAP is producing positive results: When the kids see their mothers studying, they’re more motivated to study, too. And when the families increase their income and move off public assistance, the kids’ academic futures become brighter.
It’s a tough road for a low-income parent to earn an RN degree, but CAP is finding that even those who drop out before reaching the end still earn other medical certifications and are able to move up to better jobs than they had before. The career coaches make the difference for many of the participants who are able to stick it out and succeed. “They’ve become almost like second mothers,” program participant Shartara Wallace told Westervelt. “Because they really stay on you, they push you. And then, at the same time, they are there to hold your hand. But just like a parent where it’s like, ‘OK, I need you to walk on your own and handle this, but I still got your back.'”
Consuela Houessou, who immigrated from Benin, is studying to be a registered nurse through CAP Tulsa. She said, “[My kids] want me to do well. We compare grades. ‘I get A today, what did you get?'” With two-generation assistance programs already in place across the country in places including Iowa, Boston, and San Antonio, these mothers and many others may finally be able to break the cycle of poverty.
MORE: Here’s Why We Should Be Investing in Single Moms
 

This Father and Son Are Hitting the Trail to Prevent Veteran Suicide

On an average day, 22 United States veterans commit suicide, resulting in more lives lost than the combined military missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Air Force veteran Kevin Steele, a resident of Eufaula, Oklahoma, learned of this sobering statistic when a young veteran he knew killed himself after returning home from deployment. The loss devastated Steele, so to raise money for veteran suicide prevention, he decided to hike the Appalachian Trail (a lifelong dream of his) with his son Hunter.
“The one particular kid that I think about, he practically grew up in my house,” Steele told Burt Mummolo of Tulsa’s Channel 8. “If we can do anything to spare any family out there that kind of pain, it’s worth walking 2,200 miles for.”
Kevin and Hunter have named their mission the Hike for Heroes and set a goal to raise $100,000 on their walk, which will take them through 14 states — from Georgia to Maine. They believe that they can meet their target if they find about 5,000 people willing to donate a penny per mile walked — or $22 in memory of those 22 veterans lost every day to suicide. With the funds, the Steeles want to work with the Kentucky-based charity ActiveHeroes to build a retreat center that will provide treatment for veterans suffering from PTSD and other issues.
The duo embarks on March 17. Presumably, every blister they endure will be a reminder that they’re walking to prevent the pain that suicide causes.
 MORE: Salute the Non-Profit That Helps Continue to Serve When They Return Home