Janelle Irwin Taylor
Karl Nurse will be representing St. Pete at the National League of Cities meeting this Monday and Tuesday in Washington D.C. While the longtime city council member doesn’t have any specific goals in mind, he is hoping to identify opportunities to help families by identifying possible pilot programs that would be funded through various foundations.
Nurse has been successful in doing this before.
“Several years ago, I brought back the ‘Bank on St. Pete,’” Nurse said.
That program pushes cities to promote credit union-type banking systems in order to steer residents away from predatory lending associated with some of the bigger banks.
That program has since spread to several Florida cities and is now known locally as “Bank on Tampa Bay.”
“We [also] helped a couple of thousand people get financial literacy training and bank [or] credit union accounts,” Nurse said.
The city is also in the midst of a test program that uses late water and utility payments as what Nurse described as the “canary in the mineshaft.” The program uses the late fees to invite residents to participate in free budget training courses aimed at reducing incidents of late payments and help them work out repayment schedules for the fees.
“Collecting late water bills is expensive,” Nurse said.
He said it’s not clear yet whether the program will be a success, but so far the program has connected 100 families in St. Pete with classes. It serves as one of several examples of what can be brought home from league of city workshops.
In addition to foundation grants to kick-off pilot programs, there are also some opportunities to nab federal dollars. Those resources, Nurse admits, have shrunk in past years.
Nurse said the meetings are also a way to get a little insight from leaders in other cities.
“I have been active in the National League of Cities for two reasons,” Nurse said. “[The first is] to learn best practices from other cities and bring them.”
