WASHINGTON - Even as President Barack Obama told the nation's mayors yesterday that they now have a friend in the White House, he warned that he would use the "full power" of the presidency to expose and crack down on them if they misuse the stimulus dollars meant to boost the economy out of its doldrums.
The mayors, in turn, encouraged Obama to focus the stimulus on cities, where they said it would have the greatest impact. Giving state governments too much leeway with the funds could reduce the effectiveness of the program, they said.
Obama cautioned the mayors that the American people had placed their trust in their political leaders to spend the $787 billion wisely and that such trust would be squandered if mayors and other officials wound up wasting the money on dubious projects.
"If a federal agency proposes a project that will waste that money, I will not hesitate to call them out on it and put a stop to it," Obama told the mayors, who were gathered in the White House. "And I want everybody here to be on notice: ... If a local government does the same, I will call them out on it and use the full power of my office and our administration to stop it."
The mayors, including Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles and Richard Daley of Chicago, were in Washington for the winter meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
Absent from the meeting was Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon, who was indicted last month on 12 counts including theft, perjury and misuse of office.
Her absence became contentious after her spokesman, Scott Peterson, said Thursday morning that Dixon would attend and was scrambling to change her flights from Florida, where she was speaking at a conference on homelessness. A few hours later, Peterson reversed himself, saying that the U.S. Conference of Mayors made a mistake and that Dixon was not invited.
In their meeting with Obama, the mayors implored the president to get the stimulus money out as quickly as possible and to direct it to urban areas, where they said it would be most effective.
"We raised the concern that some states, particularly states like California, may try to use the money to balance its budget," Villaraigosa said after the meeting. "We want to make sure that the metropolitan areas ... are getting their fair share. What we don't want is states building roads that connect the ducks to the geese, and not people to goods, the way metropolitan areas do."
