Remarks by Martin O'Malley at the Leland Center

January 30, 2005

Charles, Thank you.

Thank you. Only in Montgomery County, right, on a snowy day 20 months in advance of the election would you get a group of fine upstanding individuals together to talk about taking our state back in 2006 – only in Montgomery County.

Let me first thank the host committee. Charlie already thanked the host committee. I see Neil Quinter from the House of Delegates in Howard County. Brian Feldman, thank you for being here. Blair Ewing always good to see you, my friend.

I really want to thank the host committee who put this together, Fred and Dorothy Solomon, Marcy Forrest, Mike Kazen, Arthur Forrest, and I really want to thank all of you for coming out here today.

This really is a bit of homecoming for me. I grew up in a small log cabin right over there on Ceford Road. Right where the road that leads up to Lynnbrook Elementary dead ends in Sleaford that was my house. It is a little white house. We had a small Irish Catholic family of only six children. People at Our Lady of Lourdes thought we were Lutheran spies we had such a small family. There is not yet a brass plaque there. Charlie. I guess that we will have to wait for another time.

Ah, my parents always told me never to play near the railroad tracks, you know that cut through here, so of course everyday I had to go up there and play at the railroad tracks. But really, this is like coming home, and I feel very old coming back to Bethesda now because I give directions, as many of you might. You know, you tell people, you want to go up and take a right at where the People’s was, then take another right where the Baronette was, then take a left where that used to be.

But you all should to be very, very proud of what you have going on in your county. It has to be one of the most dynamic and fast moving counties, and I know from the sort of debates that you all have on the trade -offs between open-space and mass transit and things like that maintaining that quality of life is not an easy thing. And I don’t think anybody thinks for a second that it is, but you all are to be commended on the tremendous work that you have done, and the way that Montgomery County has grown – the way that Montgomery County has built.

I wanted to share just a little bit with you, if I may, about myself, and more importantly about the people that I have had the honor of serving for the last five years in the City of Baltimore – the one big, major city within the borders of our great state.

You know, there are from time to time, I have the occasion to go to events not dissimilar from this in big halls, and packed with people. We call them the Mayor’s night out, and they usually give me a stool as well – thank you Charlie. And I answer questions from people who are in the audience. And ah I will never forget this one time, on the East side of Baltimore, at Dunbar High School. The gymnasium was packed and people were asking questions about property taxes and their water bills and potholes and the like.

And a little girl came up from the back of the room, and she said, “Mr. Mayor, My name is Amber, and I am 12 years old, and my question for you is this. I live in neighborhood that because of all of the addicted people and because of the drug dealers, there are people in the newspaper who refer to my neighborhood as ‘zombie land,’ and the questions I have for you is this, do you know that there are people in the newspaper that call my neighborhood ‘zombie land,’ and are you doing anything about it?”

And the question she asked of me as Mayor of her City is really, I think, a question she asks of all of us as citizens not only of this state, but also as citizens of this country. Do we know, and are we doing anything about it.

And I am very proud to tell you that your neighbors in no small part, through the progressive investments that you have made, are doing something about it. In the 1990’s, Baltimore lost more of our population than any major city in America. And why is that? The same reason we lost more of our private job base than any major city in America.

It was because in1994 the Drug Enforcement Administration of the United States of America declared that Baltimore was the most addicted city in America, and we stayed there in ‘95, ‘96, ‘97 and ‘98. And by ‘99, the FBI also dubbed us the most violent city in America.

Well, you know as well as I do, that no one, black or white, rich or poor, wants to stay or invest or raise a family in a place that is becoming progressively more dangerous, more unhealthy or dirty where there is less opportunity rather than more.

So in that election of 1999, we had an honest and open discussion – it’s called a campaign. We talked about our hopes. We also talked about our fears of one another, of policing, and of all the ramifications those issues hold in a country with a very painful 400 year legacy. But at the end of the day, we concluded there is more that unites than divides us, and we came together realizing that public safety, that security if you will, really is the foundation of any civilization of any free people, and that we could not content ourselves with having a decent city if 300-plus young men every single year were dying in turf battles over drugs.

So we started making government more effective. We started borrowing ideas from other cities where they had worked. We also, thanks to progressive leaders that all of you have sent to Annapolis, we were able to double the state’s investment in drug treatment for uninsured people.

And what has happened over those last five years?

Our major city, Baltimore, has led all cities, with the exception of Dallas, in the rate of reduction in drug-related emergency room admissions. Our major city has had the largest reduction in violent crime of any of the top 20 cities in America – though we still have a long way to go, and it is hard everyday.

But with that justice agenda, moving forward again, we also saw the investment coming back – $6 billion in new investment going on right now in the city. We created 8,000 new jobs last year which outpaced the job creation in our surrounding jurisdictions. We also have seen, ah, I love saying this in Montgomery County, we have seen the average sales price of our homes double, from $69,000 a year to one month I think it was actually up to $155,000 average sales price of a home. That’s my pitch. It is still a bargain. Come in, buy a home, fix it up, and get it back on our tax roles.

And we have seen our schools start to improve also. Why? It wasn’t luck. It was because of that justice agenda, and because the committed votes that realized as a state that really the engine of this new creative economy is education and is the sort of work force that we will churn out of our public school system.

Our second graders last year joined our first graders for the first time in 30 years in scoring above the national average in reading and math. Our third graders this last year, 54% of them scored either proficient or advanced on the MSAs – the first time that’s happened in 30 years. Why?

Because of the investment that all of us made in early childhood education, critically important, especially for children who come from families who are struggling from poverty, and we are seeing that wave come up through our school system, such that their scores on their state standardized tests were higher than Chicago, higher than Washington, higher than Philadelphia, higher than Los Angeles, higher than Boston. Not a small achievement for our kids.

What does all of that have to do, you ask yourselves, with our state and the direction it is headed? I submit to you that it has a great deal to do with our state and where it is headed.

I know that there are some in the no-government, weak-America Republicans, who now govern us. . . there are some who would like to tell us all that we are all individuals, that we are all islands unto ourselves, that greed is the new American value.

I disagree with that. That wasn’t the way I was raised.

I think we’re all in this together. I think the investments that we make because we have the guts to prefer a better future to the immediate present are the things that unite us not only as Marylanders, but unite us as Americans.

I think what we have been doing in Baltimore, and the way we have been doing it, with openness, with transparency, with opening up public institutions so that the people who actually pay for it, and whose government it actually is, with all due respect to our incumbent governor, it is not his government, it our government, that that openness and transparency is what makes government effective. It is what makes it responsive, and I don’t think as Democrats that we should try away from making government effective and responsive – that’s what people want. I’ve never met a person that didn’t.

We now have a state, which has been the great beneficiary of the investments that you and I and our parents have made over the years. We are a state that despite the downturn in the national economy actually did better than other states. Why, because we made the investments necessary. We had the guts and the courage to believe that all of us are in this together. So we invest in higher education. We believe that people who work hard, who are responsible enough to work their way through high school, and want to work their way through college that they shouldn’t be priced out of an in-state tuition.

We’re a people who believe that one of the greatest things that prior generations have passed on to us is the beauty of this state, including the Chesapeake Bay, and we have a moral obligation to pass that on to the next generation. In a cleaner, better, healthier state than we received ourselves.

We are a people who believe that if we make sound investments based on a common vision that we can even tackle thorny problems like the transportation gridlock that threatens in a very well way the quality of life we have and the time we are able to spend with our families.

We are a people who believe that we are all in this together. And that indeed security, whether homeland security, or whether security in our cities or older communities is something that effects all of us.

There is a doctor named Jeffery Sachs, and he an advisor to Kofi Annan at the U.N. All of us have seen the outpouring of generosity that comes from Americans in the wake of the horrible pictures we all saw in the tsunami disaster, right? Even as our national government embarrassed us in the eyes of the world with miserly contributions to reliving that, we saw the goodness of the American pour out their hearts and open their wallets to that suffering – that loss of 175,000, I haven’t read the paper today – whatever it may be up to, especially with all the other diseases that might be hitting them.

Well, Dr. Sachs points out in a kind of mind blowing way that 200,000 people died last week around our planet, most of them children, from things that from an American perspective are entirely preventable. Things like dysentery, tuberculosis and malaria, and another 200,000 will die next week from things that from 1% of our GNP we can prevent or eliminate.

There is in Brooklyn, NY a little marker – you know, we all remember 1776 as the time our independence was declared – but what we don’t remember as well is that it was an awful year for the American Army. Defeat after defeat at Harlem Heights and on White Plains. There is a marker that says there in Brooklyn over the mass graves of 256 Marylanders, a marker that says, “In Honor of the Maryland 400, who on this Battlefield on August 27, 1776, saved the American Army.”

The reason I throw out that little history tidbit is this. The people who saved the American Army in 1776 were your neighbors and mine, whether our families came here long after that or not. They were your neighbors and mine, and we have inherited from them not only a legacy, not only an opportunity, but also a responsibility.

There is a tide that is pushing against what I think are the true ideals of America, of fairness, responsibility, opportunity, and security. There is a tide that is pushing against us at a national level and friends, it is also right here in Maryland. And it is time for Marylanders once again in the “Old Line” state to defend the line that makes America, America.

To defend the line against a state government that would raid transportation trust funds, that would seek to secretly sell off public lands, that would gut open space dollars, that would play these cynical shell games where they cut $23 million in vouchers for child care, increase $3 million in another, $20 million gets pocketed to the general fund, and then they do press conferences talking about how this is the “Year of the Child.”

And in the “Year of the Child” we’ve cut $375,000 from the lead abatement efforts that Baltimore has received national awards for, for the lawyers that go after those contaminated properties.

There is a responsibility that we have in Maryland to hold the line. To hold the line, to hold the line against this sort of cynicism, this sort of divestment in the future, this sort of irresponsibility, and yes, the lack of honesty, the lack of candor, the lack of open communication that has descended in Newt Gingrich-style from Capital Hill down to the State House in Annapolis.

Let me go back to Amber and Jeffery Sachs before I open it up here and try the best I can to answer any questions you have, giving the disclaimer right off the top that I don’t have the answer to every single problem that faces us, but I am willing to try, and I think you are too.

I really think that our future as a country is going to be determined not by how many smart bombs we are able to send against our enemies, but by how many smart, compassionate and educated American hands we are able to extend from places like NIH, Metamune, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Maryland to the most fragile our neighbors around the world.

It’s also going to be determined by how we defend this state and the quality of life that we pride ourselves on. And it is also going to be determined in a very real way in what we do in the battle between justice and injustice that rages in every single big city in the United States of America most starkly across battle lines where 12-year old girls like Amber live.

I think, I know. I believe Maryland can do better, and I think you do too.

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