Thinking Local: How Two Mayors Handled the Pandemic

FB: The town of Laval and its metropolitan area underwent a severe outbreak of Covid-19 in July. When I took office on July 3, the rate of cases (the number of new cases detected per 100,000 inhabitants) in the district of Mayenne was 42.5. This rate went up to 153.91 on July 24, before falling back to 17.35 a month later on August 27. This peak, which took place in the middle of the summer, required a lot of reactivity and pragmatic thinking. As we identified multiple clusters and saw the disease spreading, we had to act and communicate quickly in order to inform, reassure, and instruct the population. We had to act in order to organize testing and deploy teams on the ground.

As mayor, what was your role in managing this crisis, and how were you involved in the decisions taken by the public authorities?

PS: Unlike France, the mayoral system of leadership is not the standard in every municipality, Leicester being one of the few. At a time like this, people particularly refer to their mayors for information but also to express their frustration. Thus, the mayor is in the front line: I’ve had to be particularly engaged in both local media, in terms of talking to the local community, and national and international media to talk about the city, and to hold the government accountable.

There has recently been some improvement in the implication of local authorities and the government itself has begun to draw some of the lessons. However, Leicester has sought to share its experience very widely, by sharing reports and studies. These were surprisingly well received by the government, which was prompted to set up a review. The expectation was that the review would point the blame on local authorities. But instead, it was full of praise for the work that Leicester has done.

FB: My role as a local elected official was first and foremost to ensure the full mobilization of all elected officials and of the city’s administration, whose firepower was crucial to the management of this crisis. All of our agents worked around the clock to ensure the continuity of service to the public. All the departments were mobilized, implementing massive awareness campaigns, deploying signage around town, conducting prevention patrols, assisting the most vulnerable through the Social Action Municipal Center social workers, or distributing masks through our agents in the community centers...

Being Mayor also comes with significant media attention. Mayors must use this attention to inform the local population. I think we were able to successfully use media and social networks to inform Laval residents, who adopted social distancing rules very early on. We strived to ensure information was shared with citizens in a transparent manner.

In early June, the relevant public authorities (Préfecture, the Regional Health Agency ["Agence régionale de santé, ARS"], Social Security ["Caisse Primaire d'Assurance Maladie"]) published a press release that mentioned a "mass testing" of the population. The use of this term set off a media storm, and we, the elected officials, were on the front line of the response. Subsequent dialogues with the Prefect of Mayenne and the RHA were constructive.

What would be your recommendations to improve local crisis management systems and to effectively respond to the virus?

PS: It is certainly true in the UK, as it is probably true in a number of other countries, that the central government has an insufficient understanding of the expertise at the local level and an insufficient trust in the local people. That lack of understanding of local administration, coupled with a lack of trust, has led them to believe that the response to the virus was best to be central.

While in the first few weeks it may be understandable for central governments to act centrally and uniformly, they missed the opportunity to decentralize and to co-design public decisions: this would have been a major, national source of empowerment.

Of course, all wisdom is not at the local level, as local administrations do vary dramatically in their competence and leadership. But it isn’t so much a question of localizing and decentralizing, as it is a question of developing genuine partnerships with local areas. The central government is quite right to insist on some uniform standards. However, decision-making would gain in effectiveness if that is done with proper engagement with local authorities, drawing on the understanding that municipalities have of the communities from which they come.

What happened in Marseille shows the importance of consultation with local officials, who know their territories well and thus have an important role to play in managing the crisis.

In order to ensure such coordination, it seems useful to clearly identify a leader. Who is in charge: the prefect, the director of the RHA, the elected official, the government…? Governance rules and decision making chains must be neatly outlined.

As mayor and president of a metropolitan area, I was able to observe how important it was to anticipate decisions. This virus intruded into our lives at the beginning of this year and much about its behavior remains unknown, but we still have to work on establishing forward-looking scenarios. That is what I asked my staff to prepare in time for the end of the school break.

In practice, this implies asking the three following questions:

• What happens if indicators improve?
• What happens if indicators remain stable?
• What happens if indicators worsen?

Designing a roadmap for each of these scenarios is very useful to assist with decision making at the political, business, and individual levels.

In summary, you have to innovate while remaining receptive to citizens. The acceptability of a decision hinges on proximity, transparency and clear rules that citizens can understand.

Copyright: Oli SCARFF / AFP