The Nation City by Rahm Emanuel

Author:Rahm Emanuel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

In the middle of 2018, I attended a meeting of mayors in Washington, D.C., and found myself sitting next to Bryan Barnett, the mayor of Rochester Hills, Michigan, a city twenty-five miles north of Detroit. Barnett is a Republican and represents a solidly Republican city. There is no way he would win a mayoral election in Chicago, and there is no way I would win an election in Rochester Hills. But Barnett and I have more in common than it might seem to an outsider.

That day we talked about immigration and how the issue affects our respective cities (New York City mayor Bill de Blasio joined us for a portion of the conversation). Immigration—and the way it’s being handled, or really mishandled, on the federal level—is a big concern for both of us. Barnett talked about how his community, though mainly wealthy and white, had the third largest Asian population in Michigan, the largest Albanian Catholic church outside of Albania, and the second largest mosque in metro Detroit. He told me about how he had put together a commission on diversity and inclusion, made up of business, faith, educational, and nonprofit leaders to “help foster diversity” in his city. He talked about how his local businesses were always looking for talent, and much of that talent came from overseas. In short, what he was describing was not too different from the way I’ve described Chicago: as a welcoming city. “If what I’m doing relative to immigration and diversity is creating economic opportunity and jobs, it’s a core principle of the Republican Party,” says Barnett. “How I get to that principle may be a bit different from people further right, but those things to me are creating self-sufficiency, and in order to achieve that you must have a system that works and gives everyone a chance.”

Barnett was full-throated in his opposition to some of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. “I don’t feel like I have to march in step with what’s coming out of Washington, D.C.,” he says. I was impressed by Barnett (and I thought that if he kept talking like that, maybe he could run for mayor in Chicago!).

On the issue of climate change, too, Barnett has taken a different tack from many of his fellow Republicans on the federal level. And he’s done it in a way that has appealed to his relatively conservative-leaning citizens. Rochester Hills, despite the high level of education achieved by the majority of its citizens, was the worst-performing city in the Midwest when it came to recycling. Barnett wanted to change that, so he started a recycling program that offered incentives—people could earn money, to keep or donate, by recycling. (A recycling truck measured their amount of recycled goods and then awarded points that could be used to buy goods or be given away.) Soon enough, Rochester Hills went from worst to first in the Midwest in recycling. The program has saved money and has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the local schools, where many city residents chose to donate their recycling proceeds.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.