By Mayor Brent Coles

The dictionary tells us that a city is a center of population, commerce and culture - a town of significant size and importance. As mayors, however, we understand that a city, any city, is much more than this. Victor Gruen may have put it best when he said, "The city is the sum total of countless features and places, of nooks and crannies, of vast spaces and intimate spots, an admixture of the public and private domain, of rooms for trade, where money and wares change hands, and rooms where music and drama lift the soul, of churches and night spots, of landmarks expressing the spirit of the community, and homes for the comfort of the individual."

For the past 25 years, we have enjoyed a powerful tool to help us create the spaces that really define our cities. The Community Development Block Grant program (CDBG) has given us tremendous flexibility in providing housing, infrastructure and public service programs for low- and moderate-income individuals and families. Cities have utilized CDBG funds to build parks and senior citizen centers, to install streetlights and to build sewer systems.

In Boise, our investment in housing utilizing CDBG and HOME funds has paid off for both the community and for those families and individuals who could not have found clean, safe and affordable housing otherwise. We have leveraged CDBG and HOME funds with funds from private sources, thus increasing our ability to strengthen and build the community.

The flexibility built into the CDBG and HOME programs has allowed cities to address local needs in a way that works for individual communities.

The CDBG and HOME partnership should continue because it brings vital programs and services directly to the local level - where they are needed. It gives local governments, especially cities, the ability to act quickly to meet local needs. Yet there is a serious effort afoot to cut the CDBG program to the point that local programs would be gutted. A 40 percent cut in Boise would mean that some families could not buy their first home using an innovative home ownership program we offer through a local bank. It would mean the loss of operating funds for our low income medical program and our soup kitchen.

I urge every mayor to consider the positive impact that the CDBG program has had on your community and to envision where you would be without this local grant program. I encourage you to talk to your Congressional representatives about the successes of CDBG and to ask them to not cut CDBG, HOME and other related programs.

A city - the nooks and crannies and rooms described by Gruen - is not created by urban planners or architects, but grows from the collective values held by all the inhabitants who dwell within its boundaries. As leaders, we are elected to represent those values. The success of our cities depends upon what we do to make certain that public policy matches those values. We need to work to protect tools, such as CDBG, and HOME, which allow us to do this.