Mayor Hoy Signals Interests when Meeting Mayor Wu of Boston

Late this week the City blurbed Mayor Hoy's participation in a "Harvard program for new Mayors."

It's not the first time a Mayor has gone to some kind of conference or gathering that might be described as professional development or continuing education. So it wasn't necessarily remarkable in that way, but perhaps its location right at the beginning of a tenure was a little remarkable.

You may recall Mayor Bennett going to Boise to "to review its downtown layout and revitalization efforts" in 2016. We never heard a peep in public about what he might have learned. In 2013 Mayor Peterson attended an Institute on City Design. That didn't seem to bear much fruit either. These trips and conferences don't ever seem to have ripples, at least ones visible publicly.

By contrast, Mayor Hoy immediately pointed to a reformer and to a world outside of Salem and outside of himself. He seems to relish the learning and show openness to new things.

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Mayor Wu of Boston is an interesting figure in transportation reform. I have not paid close attention to her, but maybe more will be warranted.

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In a Q & A published on Boston.com she said:

I don’t see cars as the enemy. I see traffic and wasted time as the enemy. Pollution is the enemy.

Look, I’m in a multigenerational household. I have two young kids. I know the way that our streets are currently designed. We get in the car to go places as well. And so, it’s not an all or nothing proposition to say we need to make changes so that our whole system and the many ways that people get around all fit together.

Getting rid of traffic is an urgent issue. It is choking the growth of our economy. It’s making our housing market more strained. It’s affecting so many aspects of people’s day-to-day lives. It’s miserable to be stuck in traffic to get to work, and that makes it harder for companies to locate here or for young people to connect with the internship opportunities and social activities and resources that we’re trying to create for everyone all across the city.

She's also got attention in large, mainstream and national publications, and underlined themes on transportation and change.

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One of the most visible has been her talk about making transit a fareless system.

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Salem does not seem very well positioned for a free bus system. Our great need has seemed to be more frequency, which "free" would hinder. So that's not necessarily something for which Mayor Hoy may advocate specifically.

But what seems very promising is Mayor Hoy's willingness to look at what other communities, larger or smaller, are trying to do, and what might be learned from their successes and their failures.

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So often Salemites have been trapped in a narrative of Salem exceptionalism. We are unique, and therefore cannot learn from other communities or engage in any kind of comparative analysis. You may recall at the start of his tenure, recently departed Director of Community Development flattered Salemites with "The Salem Model." Our difficulty acknowledging a good model and just outright copying with credit gets in the way. Conceptually, we wall ourselves off, and this serves the status quo.

It is exciting, therefore, to see Mayor Hoy immediately signal engagement and dialog with other cities and other mayors. This is a good sign and promising start, and it will be interesting now to follow Mayor Wu a little more closely, and to follow Mayor Hoy's interests outside of Salem in this way.