New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio wants a federal initiative to eradicate toxic lead in the environment that tainted Flint's water.

Author Marianne Williamson said the Flint water crisis would have never happened in Grosse Pointe, where she once resided.

And Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar gave Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer a shoutout for her "fix the damn roads" campaign slogan.

But when it came to laying out a federal approach to fixing Michigan and America's broken infrastructure, that's about all voters heard from 20 Democratic candidates running for president during five hours of debates at Detroit's Fox Theatre televised over two nights this week.

It certainly wasn't Infrastructure Week in the Motor City, despite the glaring fact that aging infrastructure above and underground remains a huge blind spot for Detroit's long-term economic trajectory.

And when it came to setting an agenda for the future of American cities like the town that put the world on wheels, there was little vision offered by the candidates vying to take on President Donald Trump.

To be fair, in two-and-half-years of occupying the White House, Trump has made no progress himself on passing a massive infrastructure funding bill, despite repeated promises to do so.

But the lack of ideas coming from the Democratic field about infrastructure wasn't lost on Whitmer's lieutenant governor.

"The Democrats need to own infrastructure, own the fact that the public sector can invest infrastructure that supports life," Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist II said as Wednesday night's debate was winding down. "I think there's more that we need to hear in Michigan."

There were brief moments where infrastructure and an agenda for cities got mentioned, but mostly in context of social issues such as criminal justice reform. No one laid out a plan for actually getting toxic lead out of Flint's homes or Highland Park's water pipelines.

Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper touted a universal preschool program he implemented in the Centennial State.

"We did major police reform 10 years before Ferguson — why is it now that five years after Ferguson we still don't have anything?" Hickenlooper said, referencing the August 2014 police shooting in Ferguson, Mo. of an African American man that set off weeks of protests.

But his commentary was just that — talk.

On the first debate night, former Maryland congressman John Delaney, a former finance industry CEO, said Detroit's model of public-private sector cooperation in turning around the city is more "workable, not fairy tale economics" than the expansive government programs some of his opponents are offering.

"That has to be our model going forward," Delaney said.

Delaney made the comment in response to Massachussets Sen. Elizabeth Warren defending her long-running war with Wall Street banks and the financial sector. The firebrand progressive senator dismissed Delaney's argument of modeling federal governance after Detroit's post-bankruptcy cooperation with the private sector in recent years.

"I don't understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can't do and shouldn't fight for," Warren said.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who upset Hillary Clinton in Michigan's 2016 Democratic presidential primary, later said he was "delighted that Detroit is rebounding."

"But let us understand, Detroit was nearly destroyed because of awful trade policy which allowed corporations to throw workers in this community out on the streets as they moved to low-wage countries," Sanders said, sneaking in a jab at global trade agreements.

Aside from his Medicare for All plan creating universal health care coverage, Sanders offered no concrete plans for turning around cities like Detroit that were ravaged by both globalization and abandonment.

Gilchrist counts health care as an urban agenda issue.

But he advises Democrats to follow the roadmap that swept him and Whitmer into power last fall: Fixing broken transportation infrastructure, ending inequities in education funding between urban and suburban schools and something as simple as ensuring access to clean water in the wake of Flint's government neglect.

"If they talk about those things, the things we won on in 2018, they'll be able to win here in 2020," Gilchrist said.