1. Do you see the strengthening of America's cities and improving the quality of life for urban residents as an important priority for your administration?

2. How specifically would your proposals to address America's foreclosure crisis protect urban residents from losing their homes? How do you intend to expand the supply of affordable housing and end homelessness in our cities?

3. What aspects of your program to revive America's economy will help cities strengthen their own economic development programs?

4. The Community Development Block Grant - the main source of federal support for neighborhood revitalization - has been cut badly in recent years. The U.S. Conference of Mayors is proposing to double the budget from $4 billion to $8 billion. Do you agree?

5. How would your initiatives to improve education help teachers and urban school districts provide the intensive attention to inner-city students that are a prerequisite to their success?

6. You have each made a commitment to the COPS program that provided funding to local governments to hire more police in the 1990s.

How would you shape the program to meet the needs of law enforcement today?

7. You have each pledged support for a prisoner re-entry program aimed at helping ex-offenders become productive members of the community, modeled after the current $16 billion welfare-to-work program. How much will the federal government invest in re-entry programs in your administration?

8. As part of your new federal energy programs, do you support an energy block grant modeled after the Community Development Block Grant that will enable communities - large and small - to create the kind of energy efficiency that we want in our cities?

9. Do you support new federal investment in urban mass transit systems like SEPTA to complement the $40 billion that the federal government spends on highway programs?

10. Will you establish a federal jobs program to create the "reservoir of public employment" for the unemployed that was called for in the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill passed nearly 30 years ago during the Carter administration? *

Ed Schwartz is president of the Institute for the Study of Civic Values.