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Bloomberg offers $9 million to cities that innovate, collaborate
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New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Thursday announced his charitable foundation Bloomberg Philanthropies will award shares of a $9 million prize fund to five cities that innovate and collaborate with each other to solve major problems and improve city life.
“Unfortunately, in this country, we’re not sharing ideas as much as we could. The whole idea of the Mayor’s Challenge is to get cities to come up with really innovative, creative ideas which are useful in government at the city level and that are transferable to other places,” he said in an interview with CBS.
Bloomberg said he wants to promote competition among localities, but he also stressed that cities should work together to tackle issues and share knowledge about the best policies.
“Historically, cities have seen each other as competitors in a zero-sum game, with neighbors pitted against each other in a battle to attract residents and businesses,” he wrote. “But more and more, a new generation of mayors is recognizing the value of working together and the necessity of borrowing ideas from one another.”
Bloomberg — who has signed into law a smoking ban and a requirement that restaurants post the calorie counts of their meals — has come under fire recently for his own innovation: a proposal to ban the sale of large sugary drinks.
“There are some people that say, ‘Oh government shouldn’t do anything,’ but if you really think about it, in today’s society, letting people just willy nilly go at 100 miles per hour, not telling kids that smoking is bad for them, I don’t think, if you really think about, people would want to do that,” he told CBS.
Bloomberg earned the title of Nanny of the Month in May from Reason TV for the proposal — no small feat, considering he was up against actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who promoted a ban on plastic bags in Los Angeles.
Bloomberg is currently ranked 20th on Forbes’ billionaire list and has a net worth of $22 billion. Bloomberg Philanthropies has also donated $2.5 billion to a variety of other causes.
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