NYC and Carmel, Indiana mayors: Trump and Congress need to bail out cities

If you had told us two months ago that Carmel, Indiana, and some of its local businesses would come rushing to the aid of New York City, neither of us would have believed you. But that’s exactly what happened this week. The City of Carmel, Aria Diagnostics and other entities jointly donated tens of thousands of locally made test kits for Covid-19 to New York, the epicenter of the epidemic. And what’s more, a biotech company in Carmel will begin supplying New York City with 50,000 more for purchase every week.

All this happened because a Republican mayor from a small city in the heartland, and a new Carmel company, Apex, saw the pain in America’s largest city and reached out to a progressive Democratic mayor to offer help. This is the very best of America. And this is what mayors across this country, Democrats and Republicans, need from our federal government right now.

Congress has passed three stimulus bills, with the most recent one providing limited state and local direct aid. It was a good first step, but not nearly enough. The next stimulus being debated has to do right by cities on the front lines of this pandemic. It has to make cities whole. Sales taxes across the nation are plummeting because people are staying home. Income taxes are falling because people are out of work. States are in their own bind, slashing services and support to local governments, leaving us to make up the difference.

All this while we’re on the front lines of a pandemic. Whether it’s Elmhurst Hospital in Queens or a nursing home in Carmel, our health care systems are valiantly working for the sick. Our firefighters, EMTs and paramedics are responding to a record number of 911 calls and emergencies. Our social services and charities are providing food and shelter to people who have lost their livelihoods. New York City alone is spending $170 million on emergency food.

And yet, all that is not enough. So, we only have one place to turn for help: Washington.

We’re part of a bipartisan coalition of mayors across the nation fighting for billions in funding from the federal government to replace lost revenue and keep frontline services running through this crisis. Right now, we’re bending under that pressure. We need the President to put his finger on the scale with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to help us before we break.

President Trump should recognize the need to bail out cities. He wants a recovery. We all do. But if America’s cities aren’t made whole, there won’t be any recovery. So far, Washington has passed $2.2 trillion in stimulus spending. And that spending, while welcome, doesn’t reflect the right priorities. The airline industry saw a $58 billion bailout. Meanwhile, New York City, the epicenter of this crisis, has seen only $1.4 billion in direct aid — even as we project the crisis will cost the city more than $7 billion in lost revenue.

The upcoming stimulus has to set this right. For starters, we need at least $150 billion in direct aid to states and cities. It should be prioritized based on need, and usable to replace lost revenue to keep public and emergency services running. We want to see an additional $100 billion for hospitals and health care workers, and $250 billion to avoid small businesses from going under and to keep their workers on payroll, even if they’re closed. That’s what it will take to keep cities big and small running, keep them whole and make sure that we can deliver an economic recovery instead of an economic freefall.

The federal government wasn’t there for us in the first round of this fight. We never got the testing we needed from the federal government to stay ahead of this pandemic. As mayors, we were on our own taking actions to keep our people safe by shuttering restaurants and bars; closing schools; and issuing shelter-in-place orders. We didn’t have a national strategy to get ventilators and supplies to the places that needed them.

We’ll never get those precious weeks and months back.

But there’s time for President Trump and Congress to be there for America’s cities for the next round of this fight. That’s what Americans, Democrat or Republican, have always done for each other in a crisis. It’s what the good people of Carmel have done for their neighbors in New York City. And it’s what New York City will do, in turn, to help other Americans when our local emergency eases.

If the federal government stands with us, we can win this fight.