Local governments across the U.S. are doing fresh, important things. Las Vegas is ... fighting over the meaning of an imaginary soccer stadium?
Seattle got most of the headlines. But last year, nine other cities and one county in the U.S. established higher minimum wages. Big cities were on the list — Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego — but several smaller California cities raised the wage, too, as did Las Cruces, N.M. This year, at least a half-dozen local governments are considering proposals to raise the minimum wage, most prominently in New York City and Los Angeles (both city and county), but also in Portland, Maine, and Louisville, Ky.
In January, Tacoma, Wash., became the 16th U.S. city requiring employers to provide paid sick leave. A couple weeks ago, Philadelphia became the 17th.
From Hartford to San Jose, to Denver, San Antonio and Tulsa in between, several cities are establishing programs to provide universal or near-universal pre-kindergarten childcare.
Closer to home, Phoenix and Salt Lake City have moved aggressively on “Housing First” programs, which provide homeless veterans with housing without requiring them to pass a drug or sobriety test first. Both cities claim to have all but eliminated chronic veteran homelessness.
When low-income citizens don’t make economic progress, it’s not just bad for them. It’s bad for businesses that depend on people having enough money to buy whatever businesses are selling. A “precariat” class mired in unstable, low-wage, low-quality jobs, precariously and persistently teetering on the edge of financial collapse (i.e., maybe a third of Southern Nevada’s workforce), weakens a community’s consumer core while raising the demand for and cost of public services. Customary economic “thought” among politicians — promote growth and wait for all that yummy prosperity to magically follow — has manifestly failed to deliver.
Instead, there is a turn to policies designed to help people directly — not just because it’s good for people who are struggling, but because it’s good for the economy. And in a growing number of cities and counties, local officials, having glanced at the policy wastelands of Washington, D.C., and most state capitals, are convinced that they must act, locally, to help assure higher wages, child care, housing, transportation, non-predatory banking or paid sick leave, and take other steps to tangibly and meaningfully improve the lives of their citizens. Cities and counties have discovered, or rediscovered, a willingness to tackle stubborn problems instead of, oh, waiting for Congress to do it.
So, naturally, the campaign for Las Vegas mayor is all about … a soccer stadium.
Policy Punch
Major League Soccer has passed on Las Vegas for an expansion team. But the race between Mayor Carolyn Goodman and Councilman Stavros Anthony will still be about Goodman’s effort to publicly subsidize a private sports franchise — inasmuch as the race will be about anything at all.
Look, this isn’t really about them. By ignoring the role of local government in economic policy that might actually pack a punch, Goodman and Anthony are hardly unique.
Take minimum wage as an example. Organized labor has spearheaded the movement to raise the wage in Nevada. That movement has targeted Congress, corporations, the state Legislature and has tried more generally to move the needle of public opinion. It hasn’t targeted city or county governments.
“I’m not sure we’ve done the work to move (city councilmembers or county commissioners) on those issues,” says Yvanna Cancela, the Culinary Union’s political director. Part of that may be the relative newness of local government action on wage regulation, sick pay and other issues. But Cancella says local governments in Nevada may not have the authority to act even if they wanted to.
Clark County Commission Chairman Steve Sisolak agrees. It’s a legal question that “has never been brought up,” but “I don’t think that we can have a separate minimum wage,” he says. Sisolak, echoing perhaps every county commissioner and city councilman in the history of Nevada, says that local governments can do whatever the state allows them to do, and no more.
The city would appear to be in the same boat. There’s nothing in the City of Las Vegas Charter, sort of the city’s constitution, that authorizes wage regulation, says Val Steed, from the Las Vegas city attorney’s office.
Well, could the state Legislature pass a law authorizing local governments to, say, raise the minimum wage or require employers to provide paid sick days?
“I guess they could,” Sisolak says.
“Theoretically,” Steed says.
All the wage
“I’d love to do it,” says state Sen. Tick Segerblom, D-Las Vegas.
Segerblom has proposed a state constitutional amendment to raise Nevada’s statewide minimum wage to $15 an hour. (There’s “not a chance in hell” it will pass the Legislature, Segerblom recently told the Sun.)
Segerblom notes that the current wage ($8.25 an hour, $7.25 for employees offered a qualifying health care plan) is in the state constitution. So while he would like the state to authorize local governments to raise the minimum wage, he suspects that authority might be meaningless without the amendment. (The constitution says employers will pay a wage “not less than” the minimum. That reads like a constitutional floor, not a constitutional ceiling. But I’m not a lawyer.)
Meantime, the prospects of a Nevada city or county pursuing initiatives that would cost public money — providing affordable child care or a Housing First plan for the homeless — are limited by state restrictions on local government’s ability to tax and spend.
It’s not as if the state refuses to grant local governments any flexibility at all. For instance, cities can subsidize wannabe soccer team owners.
We’ll be reminded of that over the next few weeks during the campaign for the April 7 mayoral primary (almost assuredly there won’t be a general election in June because one candidate will win the primary with more than 50 percent). But attack ads about a non-existent stadium erection should also remind us that local governments across the nation are taking direct actions — as opposed to faith in “pro-growth” policy — to improve their citizenry’s economic well-being, and local governments in Southern Nevada aren’t.
The conventional wisdom is “it can’t be done.”
But Las Cruces? Phoenix?
Seriously, Tulsa?