The Menino Survey of Mayors is a survey where mayors are surveyed. Basically they say they need help with infrastructure, and they complain that states are useless at best and anti-city at worst.

It would make sense to have some kind of infrastructure planning at the scale of the metropolitan area. If a metro area could agree on a planning body to represent it, and that planning body could come up with a truly comprehensive infrastructure plan, the federal government could bypass the state and pass funding directly along to that body for implementation. An infrastructure bank, part of the Federal Reserve or alongside it, could issue infrastructure bonds as part of the country’s monetary policy – invest when the private sector is underinvesting and the overall economy is lagging, and let the private sector play as large a role as it is willing to when the economy is strong. This shouldn’t be controversial – there is a near-consensus among economists that expanding infrastructure spending would be a win-win for jobs and economic growth.

This wouldn’t have to mean states would be completely obsolete. They could do the planning and implementation for the infrastructure that connects the metro areas together, and for agriculture policy and the infrastructure that brings agricultural goods to market. Their political power could be equal to a metro area in proportion to the people they represent, not the empty land they represent.

Changing the balance of power on paper between the federal government, states, and cities might require constitutional changes. But create the infrastructure bank and the funding mechanisms might change the practical balance pretty quickly.