Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan is in Washington, D.C. attending the U.S. Conference of Mayors Winter Meeting.
The three-day conference brings together a bipartisan group of more than 250 mayors from across the nation to discuss the challenges facing their cities.
During the 92nd annual gathering, Sheehan helped lead an event on Women Small Business Owners and Entrepreneurs. "Where we talked about how cities can support women owned businesses and entrepreneurs, and talked about some of the challenges that women face with respect to accessing capital and navigating some of the bureaucracy that we have in place in our cities to be able to open businesses. And it was wonderful to hear ideas from mayors across the country of how they are addressing those challenges. I was able to share some of the successes we've had with the ARPA funding that we provided to our small businesses. And we were able to have 59% of those receiving the grants from Capitalize Albany corporation were women owned businesses. And, you know, that was a result of some very specific strategies with respect to outreach," said Sheehan.
According to the conference, in 2021, women started nearly half of all new businesses in the U.S. In 2022, annual earnings for women-owned businesses increased by almost 30%.
Sheehan says other mayors are “stunned” when they hear 64% of city of Albany property is off the tax rolls, which results in higher property taxes than in other cities and towns in the Capital Region. She says she’s spoken with other mayors about the pending closure of the College of Saint Rose. "The mayor of Santa Fe, New Mexico has a situation where they have a campus that was vacated, and the city actually now owns it and is in the process of redeveloping it," Sheehan said. "So anything that I can learn that might be helpful as St. Rose is determining what it's going to do with its building and its bondholders. I'm not at all proposing that the city of Albany would want to own that campus. We certainly though want to facilitate the transfer of that campus to get it make sure that it gets reused in productive ways that would be helpful for our community and for our city."
In December, the Livingston Avenue Railroad Bridge was left out when $8.2 billion in U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Administration funding was awarded to 10 projects nationwide. Sheehan says she’s picked up the baton to advocate for federal funding for the bridge replacement project.
"Well we certainly want to see the bridge project move forward, I think that it is not a matter of if the state will receive the funding, it looks like it's an issue of when," said Sheehan. "But I am here in Washington. And I can assure you that when I sit in on the transportation meeting, I will be making sure that the folks here at the federal level know how important that project is to us, and that we need to get that funded as quickly as possible. And so, you know, being here, it's an opportunity for me to be part of advocating and you know, I do talk with my partners in state government before I come here to say, you know, I'm going to be meeting, I met Pete Buttigieg last night. If I'm going to have the opportunity to be meeting with these individuals, what would you like me to be advocating for? And of course, the Livingston Avenue Bridge is top of mind with respect to that."
Sheehan says each city has its own set of challenges and opportunities, and the conference offers the mayors a chance to talk with leaders in the Biden administration... "...who are responsible for ensuring that we're able to access that funding, to understand how best to access that money, so that we can see projects happen in our community, I'm thinking of the Livingston Avenue Bridge, for example, but also investments that are happening at UAlbany and at the Nano College campus. These are all being driven by these large projects and large dollars that are available here in Washington. And so that's why I make the trip every year because I didn't make it my first couple of years as mayor, I wasn't really sure whether it was a good use of my time, I felt I should be in the city, only to realize that actually, I can help our city a great deal more by coming here for these three days, and really using the opportunity to lobby for resources and to learn from other mayors."
Sheehan says the conference has fostered ideas that often turn into policy decisions that affect quality of life in Albany.
"The whole idea of street treatment teams grew out of conversations and workshops that I attended last year, learning from other communities, having people talk about what was working and what wasn't working in their communities. One of the challenges is that the funding for mental health services goes from the federal government to the state to the counties. The cities don't see that money and we don't have a seat at the table. And so, once I realized that part of it was not that we didn't know what to do, it's that we weren't really seeing the whole picture of what was being done, I was able to work with our County Executive Dan McCoy, work much more closely with the County Department of Mental Health. They launched a pilot program for us. And collaboratively, we worked together and found a way to fund the street treatment teams and the that really just grew out of the aha moment of being in a room and hearing from other mayors about what they had done in order to sort of break through some of the challenges and barriers that they were seeing. And getting to the point where we can be helping people. We don't want people to be suffering on our streets. And that's really, at the end of the day, what we need to address," Sheehan said.
The conference continues through Friday.
