When Gloucester Mayor Carolyn Kirk travels to Washington, D.C., to testify before Congress at federal budget hearings, she will present a complaint shared by virtually every municipal leader in the state: Cities and towns are being crushed under the burden of federal mandates that come with little or no assistance to pay for them.

Yet, astonishingly, she will apparently be the first such municipal leader to testify on the topic. Kirk invited herself to testify during a recent "working meeting" with U.S. Sen. John Kerry hosted by the Massachusetts Municipal Association.

After a follow-up meeting earlier this week in Kirk's office between the mayor and Kerry, Kirk said that when she made the request, the senator's staff told her, "Nobody's ever asked before."

During the meeting in Gloucester, Kirk pressed Kerry for federal help paying for more than $100 million in sewer and water improvements facing the city, a message she will also take to Washington.

Presenting the complaint doesn't guarantee that anything will be done about it, of course. Most of the testimony that members of Congress hear is from people seeking more money for programs, projects and causes.

But give the new mayor credit for making the effort. She was one of two mayors - the other was Haverhill's James Fiorentini - at the working meeting with Kerry to question the senator about federal officials paying more attention to local concerns.

The result, just days later, was a visit by Kerry to both Kirk and Fiorentini.

There is indeed a case to be made that members of Congress tend to ignore the costs of mandates they impose on communities. Obviously, eliminating sewage pollution is a good thing, but a mandate to do so should not strip a community of its ability to provide public safety, education and other basic services.

Coastal communities such as Gloucester can be disproportionately affected by such mandates, since the accepted technology of decades ago was to combine storm drains with sewers, which sends raw sewage into the ocean during heavy rainstorms.

At a minimum, Kirk will have the chance to bring a message that members of Congress need to hear - while they may spend most of their time in Washington, they were elected by their districts to represent those districts.

They need to listen to the leaders of those districts.