Latest news with #mayor
New York Times
3 hours ago
- Politics
- New York Times
Mamdani Won Over N.Y.C. Democratic Voters. Can He Charm Washington?
The head of the local Democratic Party in Queens, where Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani got his political start, has never met him. The party's longtime state chairman had not spoken to him until the day after a stunning primary night that stamped him as a rising Democratic star. And among the party's strategists, officials and elected leaders in Washington, he's almost entirely unknown. Now, as the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, Mr. Mamdani, 33, is on a crash course to change that. He is unleashing a full-scale charm offensive of private meetings, phone calls and public promises aimed at wooing top party leaders, donors and activists. On Monday, he met with Jewish elected officials in New York City. The next day, he took pointed questions about his views on Israel and tax policy from a group of 150 business leaders in the city. A day later, he headed to Capitol Hill to offer campaign advice to dozens of Democratic members of Congress at a breakfast hosted by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York before returning to Manhattan for a private meeting with younger technology executives. And on Friday, he met with Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader and a fellow New Yorker who has yet to endorse his bid. Already, some establishment Democrats have been grappling with Mr. Mamdani's sudden standing as their party's standard-bearer in America's most populous city. And they want to quickly get the measure of a man who has spent much of his political life far outside of their big tent. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Globe and Mail
a day ago
- Politics
- Globe and Mail
When cities keep doing the wrong thing
At the Crossroads of Canada, people can once again cross the road. Barriers that stopped pedestrians in Winnipeg from walking across the intersection at Portage and Main for nearly half a century were recently removed. It was an overdue decision, and a reminder that cities shouldn't wait to be forced into doing the right thing. In plenty of places, the right and obvious decision that will build a better city is put off as politicians avoid hard choices. Paraphrasing a sentiment apocryphally attributed to Winston Churchill, cities often do the right thing only after exhausting all other possibilities. The small-town mayor in the movie Jaws stands out, even 50 years after the movie's release, as a fictional epitome of this civic myopia. He is determined to keep the beaches open in spite of a marauding shark. Viewers will recall that a young child gets eaten as a result. Only then were swimmers kept out of the water. In less gruesome ways, that mayor's instinct to try everything but the obvious is equally common in the real world. The benefits of opening Portage and Main have long been clear. It will knit together a city centre now divided by eight- and nine-lane roads, encourage more walking and ultimately make the area safer and more prosperous. But suburban worries about traffic delays took precedence over improving the downtown. So pedestrians needing to get across Portage and Main kept getting shunted down urine-tinged stairways into a bleak underground concourse. To City Hall, this was fine. Only when faced with a $73-million bill to fix the waterproofing of the subterranean passage did it decide it was too expensive to keep doing the wrong thing. The change won't turn downtown Winnipeg overnight into a pedestrian mecca. People navigating on foot the Crossroads of Canada, named for its proximity to the country's longitudinal middle, must still cross many lanes, including multiple turn lanes, but it's a step in the right direction. A nation's crossroads: Winnipeg's famed Portage and Main intersection, shut to pedestrians for nearly half a century, has been reborn Unfortunately, civic foot-dragging is not unique to the City of Winnipeg. Consider the economics of sprawl. Cities that exploded in size in the latter half of the 20th century were able to do so cheaply because of constant expansion. Fees charged on new development helped keep taxes down for existing residents. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a sort of Ponzi scheme. Such an approach works – if one is willing to set aside the loss of green space and increasingly awful commutes that an expanding city requires – as long as there was more land to be developed. When the land within city boundaries runs out, the party stops. And typically that means substantial property tax increases, because it's expensive to provide city services to homes that are spread out. Moderately increased density can both help postpone the day the land runs out and soften the tax blow, because such housing is cheaper to service. Politicians know this, but they pretend otherwise in order to avoid angering residents who don't like change. Or consider how road space is divvied up in a crowded metropolis. It's self-evident in dense cities, where the roads are essentially full, that future residents will not all be able to drive. As a result, the proportion of people who get around by car will gradually decline in Canadian cities. That will require a sea change in how politicians view transportation. Making life better for non-drivers, especially people who take transit, will help cities attract the residents they need. This is why ideas such as bus-only lanes should no longer be controversial. Rejecting them is saying that drivers matter more than transit riders, that existing residents matter more than newcomers. Making it easier to get around by transit, bicycle and on foot is not an ideological stance, it's an acknowledgement that space on the road has to be shared among many users. However, instead of accepting this reality, too many city politicians fight rearguard actions to preserve the status quo. Winnipeg, refreshingly, is turning a downtown street roughly parallel to Portage into a pedestrian zone. It is also refurbishing a park near the arena where the Jets play. Doing all that without improving Portage and Main, which local councillor Vivian Santos called 'the heartbeat of Winnipeg,' would have been foolishly short-sighted. Luckily, after resisting as long as possible, city council eventually did the right thing.
BBC News
a day ago
- General
- BBC News
'The village will die' - Italy looks for answers to decline in number of babies
Winding down the narrow main street of his north Italian town, Giacomo de Luca points to the businesses that have closed: two supermarkets, a barbershop, restaurants – all with shutters drawn and faded signs above their pretty town of Fregona at the foot of the mountains is emptying out like many here, as Italians have fewer children and increasingly migrate to bigger places or move the local primary school is at risk and the mayor is worried."The new Year One can't go ahead because there are only four children. They want to shut it down," De Luca explains. The minimum class size to get funding is 10 children."The drop in births and in the population has been very, very sharp."The mayor calculates that the population of Fregona, an hour's drive north of Venice, has shrunk by almost a fifth in the past decade. By June this year there were just four new births and most of the 2,700 or so remaining residents are elderly, from the men drinking their morning prosecco to the women filling their bags with chicory and tomatoes at the weekly market. For De Luca, closing the school reception class would be a tide-turner: if the children leave Fregona to study, he fears they will never look he's been touring the surrounding area, even visiting a nearby pizza factory, trying to persuade parents to send their children to his town and help keep the school open."I'm offering to pick them up with a minibus, we've offered for children to stay at school until six in the evening, all paid for by the council," the mayor told the BBC, his sense of urgency obvious."I'm worried. Little by little, if things keep going like this, the village will die." Nationwide problem Italy's demographic crisis extends far beyond Fregona and it is the past decade, the population nationwide has contracted by almost 1.9 million and the number of births has fallen for 16 consecutive average, Italian women are now having just 1.18 babies, the lowest level ever recorded. That's under the EU average fertility rate of 1.38 and far below the 2.1 needed to sustain the its efforts to encourage childbirth, and much talk of family-friendly politics, Giorgia Meloni's right-wing government has been unable to stop the slide."You have to think a lot before having a baby," Valentina Dottor admits when we meet on Fregona's main square, her 10-month-old daughter Diletta cooing in a pushchair. Valentina gets an allowance of around €200 (£175) a month for Diletta's first year, but just missed out on the government's new Baby Bonus of €1,000 for children born in are new tax breaks, too, and longer parental Valentina now needs to return to work and says accessing affordable childcare is still very tough."There are not many babies, but not many kindergarten [places] either," she says. "I am lucky to have my grandmother take care of my daughter. If not, I don't know where I would leave her."That's why her friends are wary of motherhood."It's difficult - because of work, schools, the money," Valentina says. "There is some help, but it's not enough to have babies."It won't solve the problem." Self-help schemes Some companies in the Veneto region have taken matters into their own hands.A short drive down into the valley from Fregona is a big industrial estate filled with small and medium-sized firms, many run by a blast chiller manufacturer, spotted the parenting problem long ago and decided to act rather than lose valuable firm joined forces with seven others to create a creche a short walk from the factory floor – not free, but heavily discounted and convenient. It was the first of its kind in Italy. "Knowing I had the chance to put my son two minutes from here was very important, because I can reach him any time, very fast," one of the firm's finance bosses, Melania Sandrin, the creche she would have struggled to return to work: she didn't want to lean on her own parents, and state kindergartens won't generally take children for a full day."There's also a priority list… and there are few, few places," Melania Valentina, she and her friends delayed having children into their late 30s, keen to establish their careers, and Melania isn't sure she'd have a second baby, even now. "It's not easy," she childbirth, a growing trend here, is another factor in lowering of that is why CEO Katia da Ros thinks Italy needs to make "massive changes" to address its population problem."It's not the €1,000 payments that make a difference, but having services like free kindergartens. If we want to change the situation we need strong action," she says. The other solution is increased immigration, which is far more contentious for Meloni's than 40% of the workers at Irinox are already from abroad.A map on the factory wall dotted with pins shows they come from Mongolia to Burkina Faso. Barring an unlikely sudden surge in childbirth, Katia da Ros argues Italy – like Veneto – will need more foreign workers to drive its economy."The future will be like that." End of a school era Even immigration couldn't save a school in nearby month, Pascoli Primary shut its doors for good because there weren't enough pupils to sustain it. Just 27 children gathered on the school steps for a final ceremony marked by an Alpine bugler with a feather in his hat, who sounded the Last Post as the Italian flag was lowered."It's a sad day," Eleanora Franceschi said, collecting her 8-year-old daughter for one last time. From September, she'll have to travel much further to a different doesn't believe the falling birthrate alone is to blame: she says Pascoli school didn't teach in the afternoons, making life harder for working parents who then moved their children headteacher has another explanation."This area has been transformed because many people from abroad came here," Luana Scarfi told the BBC, referring to two decades of migration to the Veneto region with multiple factories and plenty of jobs. "Some [families] then decided to go to other schools where the immigration index was less high.""Over the years, we had lower and lower people who decided to come to this school," the headmistress says, in English, hinting at tensions.A UN prediction suggests Italy's population will drop by about five million in the next 25 years, from 59 million. It's ageing, too, increasing the strain on the measures to tackle that have so far only scratched the Eleanora argues parents like her need a lot more help with services, not just cash handouts, for a start. "We get monthly cheques but we need practical support, too, like free summer camps for the children," she says, pointing to the three-month school holiday from June that can be a nightmare for parents who work."The government wants a bigger population but at the same time, they're not helping," Eleanora says."How can we have more babies in this situation?"Produced by Davide Ghiglione.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Lateek Shabazz sworn in as new mayor of East Cleveland
EAST CLEVELAND (WJW) — The city of East Cleveland has a new mayor. More than 130 people sickened on Royal Caribbean cruise Lateek Shabazz, former council president, was sworn in Friday morning. He'll take over for interim Mayor Sandra Morgan. Morgan was appointed after Brandon King was found guilty of public corruption charges in May. The Cuyahoga County Court of Appeals found Shabazz should take over as mayor. His term begins immediately. King was sentenced to three years of probation earlier this month and ordered to pay more than $27,000 in restitution. He was also ordered to receive random drug testing, find full-time employment, and complete 100 hours of community service. He is also disqualified from holding a position of public office. King, who had been mayor since 2016, is accused of pushing more than $75,000 in city money to businesses owned by himself or his family. Teen killed in 'calculated, targeted' shooting in South Euclid He had previously been found guilty on charges including theft in office, having unlawful interest in a public contract and soliciting improper compensation. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Running man: Augusta's chief deputy tax commissioner wants to be elected city's next mayor
Augusta's chief deputy tax commissioner is taking another run at the mayor's office. Steven Kendrick confirmed on social media what he announced Thursday on a local podcast – that is, for those who didn't yet know. "It's not a secret," he said on the podcast. "I've told everybody." Kendrick stepped down as Richmond County's tax commissioner in 2022 to jump into a nine-candidate nonpartisan race for mayor. Outlasting the others to reach a runoff, Kendrick lost to current incumbent Garnett Johnson. Kendrick's desire "to help improve the city" might draw naysayers, he said on the More Than the Masters podcast. But that just means he has to do a "better job to convince them" that he's the right candidate for the job. "We need good leadership," Kendrick said Thursday. "I thnk we're still devoid of such, and I think I present an opportunity for people to get the right type of leadership at the right time." 'We Make, They Take': 50 protest billboards go up across the nation, including Georgia Kendrick also leads Augusta Blueprint, the print company he helped build and lead with his father, James, before his death earlier this year. Since 2015, Kendrick also has served on and has chaired the nine-member board of directors for the Augusta Economic Authority, which is tasked with attracting job-creating business and industry to Richmond County. This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Augusta leader Steven Kendrick announces intention to run for mayor Solve the daily Crossword
