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Mayor Mindy O’Neall on Building Civic Infrastructure for Strong Communities

Publication Date:

20/08/2026

Content Type:

Guest Articles

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Civic InfrastructureCommunity Engagementcommunity resilienceLocal LeadershipMayoral LeadershipSocial Cohesion

— 6 minutes reading time

The following article has been adapted from remarks delivered by Mindy O’Neall, Mayor of Fairbanks (Alaska, USA), at the Strong Cities Network third US Mayoral Retreat in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania, USA).

Pittsburgh is known as the City of Bridges. More than 400 bridges connect neighbourhoods, universities, businesses and families across three rivers. They’re marvels of engineering, and they’re also symbols of something more: every bridge represents a decision that connection was worth the investment.

Here’s what I mean:

If physical infrastructure determines whether a city functions, civic infrastructure determines whether a community endures.

Roads connect places. Communication connects people. Trust keeps both working. And infrastructure, in either case, is anything that allows a community to function when conditions become difficult.

In Fairbanks, where I serve as mayor, we know something about difficult conditions. Winter has a way of exposing weak systems. Roads must be maintained. Water systems must be resilient. Power has to stay on. We can’t wait until the first heavy snow to decide whether the infrastructure can handle it.

The same is true for our communities. We have invisible infrastructure too — a network of trust that connects residents to their institutions. It’s the relationship between city hall and neighbourhoods. Between schools and families. Between hospitals and faith communities. Between nonprofits and businesses. Between people who may disagree politically but still believe they belong in the same community.

That invisible network is what carries us through our hardest moments. And yet we rarely budget for it with the same intentionality we bring to roads or bridges.

Before becoming mayor, I spent my career in organisational communications. I used to think communication was about messaging — crafting the right words, writing the right press release, delivering the right speech. The mechanics still matter, words still matter, but I see it differently now. Communication is infrastructure. In fact, the words ‘community’ and ‘communication’ share the same Latin root: communis, meaning shared, or held in common. That’s not a coincidence. Communication is how trust travels.

A bridge doesn’t exist simply to span a river — it exists to move people from one place to another. Communication doesn’t exist simply to move information. It exists to move trust. And just like physical infrastructure, civic infrastructure requires thoughtful design, regular maintenance, and long-term investment.

Think about it this way.

Relationships are our roads — we build them over time, maintain them continually, and when they’re neglected, people stop travelling them.

Trust is our bridge — every difficult budget vote, every public tragedy, every contentious public meeting asks the same question: is the bridge strong enough to carry this weight?

Information is our utility system — water only matters if it flows, and information only builds trust if it flows honestly, consistently and transparently.

Listening is maintenance. Every public works director knows that unusual water pressure or an unexpected vibration deserves attention before it becomes a crisis.

Leadership works the same way. We have to listen — not only to what’s said at council meetings or on social media, but to what isn’t said. Around kitchen tables. In coffee shops. At youth sporting events. In schools and churches.

Silence is often where isolation begins, and isolation is fertile ground for contempt.

Transparency is our inspection process. We inspect bridges before they fail — we don’t wait for one to collapse. Transparency helps us find the cracks in public trust before they become fractures. It lets us correct course, acknowledge mistakes, and demonstrate accountability before cynicism hardens into distrust.

And community partnerships provide redundancy. Engineers build redundancy into critical infrastructure because they know failure is inevitable somewhere. Strong communities do the same — no single institution can carry the weight alone.

That’s why I love looking around this room.

Pittsburgh has shown the nation what long-term healing and collaboration can look like after unimaginable tragedy.

The Village of Broadview, Illinois, reminds us that local leaders are often called to navigate decisions made far beyond city hall — when a community suddenly becomes the focal point of national attention, civic infrastructure becomes every bit as important as emergency operations.

Highland Park understands the difficult work of helping a community heal after violence. Minneapolis continues to demonstrate the extraordinary challenge of leading a city through profound grief, public trauma, and hard conversations about safety, justice, and belonging. And every one of us brings lessons from our own communities.

None of those stories is about tragedy, not really — not in this context. They’re about leadership. They’re about communities choosing to stay connected when it would have been easier to pull apart. None of those successes belongs to one mayor. They belong to civic infrastructure.

Like physical infrastructure, civic infrastructure rarely fails overnight. By the time a bridge collapses, the warning signs have usually existed for years. The same is true for trust. Many of us inherit communities with fractures we didn’t create — political polarisation, economic hardship, social isolation, declining trust in institutions, untreated mental illness, homelessness and substance abuse. No mayor creates those conditions overnight, and no mayor solves them overnight either.

But mayors possess a remarkable superpower: we convene. If we invite people to the table, they usually come. That may be one of the most underestimated forms of leadership in local government.

Earlier this summer, in Fairbanks, I called together more than 50 leaders to begin operationalising a plan for a low-barrier winter shelter. Around the room were tribal organisations, nonprofit leaders, faith communities, public safety agencies, healthcare providers, state and local government, and people with lived experience. People came with concerns — some worried they’d be criticised for not doing enough, others worried they’d be asked to do more than they could sustain. There were differences. There was uncertainty. But there was also something stronger: a shared commitment to our community.

We made progress on shelter planning, certainly. But something else happened that day — we strengthened the relationships that will help us face the next challenge together, and we signalled this cooperation to the community.

That is civic infrastructure.

As mayors, people often think we’re chief executives. Or chief budget officers. Or chief emergency managers. Increasingly, I think we’re something else. We are Chief Civic Infrastructure Officers. We build confidence. We build relationships. We build partnerships. We build the conditions under which people continue believing in one another.

That work matters especially now, at a time when this retreat asks us to confront rising hate, polarisation and violence. Those are real challenges. But they’re also symptoms. Our work isn’t only responding to crisis — it’s strengthening the civic infrastructure that makes communities more resilient before crisis arrives.

Every bridge in Pittsburgh was built because someone imagined connection before construction. Our communities deserve the same vision.

We cannot prevent every crisis. We cannot eliminate every disagreement. We cannot legislate trust into existence. But we can build the conditions where trust grows. Every neighbourhood partnership is another bridge. Every transparent conversation is another support beam. Every young person invited into civic life is another foundation poured. Every faith leader, librarian, teacher, nonprofit director, police officer, business owner, volunteer, and resident who chooses relationship over retreat strengthens the structure we all depend on.

History may remember the bridges we built, the buildings we opened, the budgets we balanced. But I believe we will be remembered for something even more important — whether, in a time of division, we built communities strong enough to carry one another.

That is the work of civic infrastructure. And I believe it’s the most important work local government has ever been called to do.

Author

Mindy O’Neall
Mayor of Fairbanks (Alaska, USA)

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