By Larry Jones
January 31, 2005

During the January 18 luncheon, former Conference President Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley urged fellow mayors from across the nation to join with him and the Conference of Mayors in fighting unfunded mandates that are slipping through the cracks of the 1995 Unfunded Mandates Reform Act and imposing enormous costs on state and local governments. Daley told mayors that while the 1995 law has made it more difficult to enact new mandates, Congress has found new ways to get around the law and pass the cost of these federal actions down to state and local governments.

"We know the temptation for anyone to take credit for a program while forcing someone else to pay for it will probably never go away," he said. However, he pointed out that there are too many loopholes in the current law and that it is now time to cast a wider net to stop these mandates form falling through the cracks.

In providing an example of one off federal mandate, Daley reminded mayors that the federal government recently refused to reimburse the city of Washington (DC) for the extra costs related to the presidential inauguration. Instead, Washington Mayor Anthony Williams was told to use federal homeland security dollars, which the city will have to replace.

Daley also told mayors that recent studies conducted by the Congressional Budget Office and National Conference of State Legislatures have concluded that the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act has enough loopholes that allows federal laws to be adopted that impose significant financial burden on state and local governments. Fortunately, he said state and local governments have many friends in Congress "who will go to bat for us on the issue of unfunded mandates." He pointed out that Senator George Voinovich (OH), a former mayor of Cleveland who led the fight for the 1995 law when he was governor of Ohio, intends to hold hearings on the issue in the spring.

To prepare for the hearings, Daley called on mayors to join with him in a nation-wide effort to collect examples of federal actions that escape the definition of a mandate under current law but impose costs on local taxpayers. Daley told mayors that he has ordered members of his cabinet to begin a formal process to collect and catalogue these mandates in four categories: unfunded regulatory mandates, underfunded mandates, unreasonable grant requirements and federal preemptions. He urged mayors to collect similar data and submit it to the Conference of Mayors in preparation for the spring hearings.

In closing, Daley said "Mandates are costly. They force us to replace our own goals with federal priorities. They tie our hands by forcing us to deal with problems the way Washington wants, rather than the way we feel is best to meet our own local needs. Usually it's much more expensive."