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My father was was appointed mayor of Nampa, Idaho. Nampa is in the Boise Metro, it's Idaho third largest city at around 110,000 people. R+20. He's only gonna be in office for a year an a half, doesn't plan on running after.
What would be the most impactfully policies he could pursue.
Of course he probably won't listen to me, and the city council certainly won't listen. Parks and Rec is more real than people think...
Probably the most important thing he could do is to pick a single (currently) nonpartisan, nonsalient bugbear that never the less causes unambiguous quantifiable harm and go after it with the fury of a thousand suns. For example, there's been some pretty decent research lately that shows that high CO2 levels reduce educational attainment, so he could make improving school HVAC systems a central priority. Compared to something grand like "fixing immigration" it probably sounds pointless, but remember that expected value is a joint consequence of how effective an intervention is and HOW LIKELY IT IS TO HAPPEN! There is almost certainly tons of low-hanging fruit lying around, because politicians typically prefer to expend all their time on salient and therefore voter-grabbing issues.
Such thinking is why I came here! Trying to identify such issues. Granted my proclivities are for less spending.
Oof, reducing spending is much harder than reallocating it. my impression of american municipal governments is that they're both fairly efficient and the "waste" that exists is fairly load-bearing. You could cut money from the parks and rec budget, but that will be immediately salient to the people who use those parks. Cancelling a local festival will infuriate more people than it's worth. And anyways, your biggest line items are probably police budgets and road maintenence, and those are a terrible mix of highly salient and very opaque.
The best he can probably do is probably fuck around with your city's zoning/building codes to reduce how hard+expensive it is to get new stuff approved and built. The direct savings will be pretty small or even negative (if you have to hire more bureaucrats to process stuff faster.) But time is money, so a complicated permitting process is effectively a tax on building new things, and therefore a tax that gets spread out over everyone who uses those new things in the subsequent years. Maybe there's some minor occupational licensing stuff your dad can make easier too?
Agreed on thr housing stuff. Zoning is probably the single most powerful tool for effective change at the hands of a municipal government. Pushing through a modest reform to Loosen zoning, making it cheaper and quicker to build stuff (especially housing) is the most imprtant thing a random mayor is likely going to be able to accomplish. Most of our current societal ills are ultimately downstream of the fact that nobody but retired boomers can afford to buy a house.
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