State of the City AddressFebruary 2, 2004 This is the fifth time we have shared this occasion together as a group. First, I would like to thank Sheila Dixon for affording me this opportunity to discuss with all of you the State of Our City. This has become an important and meaningful tradition by which we mark our City’s progress – together. I would like to thank Attorney General Joe Curran for over four decades of public service by example, not rhetoric. But your most important contribution General Curran, sits right next you. And I would also like to thank my wife Katie Curran O’Malley. You are my sword and my shield. Thanks for being here today. I would like to thank each of you for your hard work – consistently placing the interests of our entire city above narrower concerns. And I would also like to remember a dear friend and colleague who left this earth a few years ago, but her mission carries on in the lives she touched: Bea Gaddy. Typically, during a speech such like the State of the State, the State of the Union or the State of the City, living examples are singled out from seats in the audience for example and inspiration. The examples I point to this year are now spiritual: Myrtle “Mama Myrt” Howerton, whose spirit still urges her neighbors to make their West Baltimore neighborhood better – you can almost here her loud whisper in this chamber – wearing out Commissioner Clark to send more officers up her way. a safer, cleaner city; Two weeks ago, Neal Peirce, a syndicated columnist with the Washington Post, wrote that CitiStat “may represent the most significant local government management innovation of this decade.” We are changing the way government operates – here and in cities across America. Hundreds of elected officials and managers have come to visit us up on the 6th floor. The new Mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, was here to visit last week; in his inaugural pledge he called Baltimore’s tools of CitiStat and a 311 call center system tools that were “not just evolutionary but revolutionary.” We still have a long way to go, but every day we’re getting better; everyday the foundation of our City’s comeback is getting stronger. And the foundation of comeback is public safety. CRIME Under the leadership of Commissioner Kevin Clark, our Police Department is taking its performance to the next level, winning back our corners from drug dealer occupation. His expertise in narcotics enforcement has led our department to some of the biggest heroin, cocaine, and ecstasy seizures in the history of Maryland – including only the 5th Ecstasy lab to be shut down in the United States – all of this in just the last six months. The new organized crime unit created by Commissioner Clark has so far seized $5.2 million in currency. And we’re just getting going. At the same time, we’re freeing our communities of drug use with new substance abuse facilities. We’ve opened five new drug treatment centers, and with the help of our legislative delegation, we’ve been able to double drug treatment funding, helping thousands more of our neighbors beat their addictions. The DEA which had dubbed us the most addicted City in America from 1994 to 1999, now says that Baltimore has had the second largest reduction of drug related ER admissions of any City in America over these last three years. And, in a few months, we will be breaking ground on yet another residential treatment facility. SCHOOLS every single grade for the last few years in our schools have been improving their reading and math scores after 30 years of decline; Unfortunately, these historic and significant classroom accomplishments have been eclipsed by the failure of this City/State partnership to create independent accounting and human resources capabilities within a newly independent school system. And what is the result? The result is a $58 million deficit. We must rebuild the administrative side of our school system before it derails the hard-won progress that our children, that our parents and our teachers have been able to make in the classroom. These last few weeks have been hard ones. Bonnie Copeland you are to be commended for moving us forward instead of retreating. 650 people were laid off. 371 were in the central office on North Avenue – 225 were permanent employees, with an average salary of $60,000. 34 of the 70 employees in human resources are gone. 79 of the 139 employees in information technology are gone. 43 of the 56 employees in finance are gone. In order to honor union contracts, some temporary classroom employees were laid off. And administrators and teachers were reduced because of shifting enrollment. We have a new team in place leading our schools. The North Avenue Freeze-Out is over. And all of us should have confidence in this new team. Dr. Copeland has shown that she has the courage and the honesty to face up to tough problems and meet them head on. And with the addition in November of Diane Bell-McCoy, Brian Morris, and Ralph Tyler, five of the nine new members of the school board are, for the first time, appointees of this Administration. Our job now is to balance the budget within the existing revenue, to ensure that new Thornton funds go to helping to educate our children rather than making up for adult errors of the past. If we are to eliminate the $58 million deficit in the next 18 months, we will have to find $120,000 every day until July 1, 2005. There will be more layoffs in central administration. There will be more reductions based on enrollment numbers. There will be inefficiencies eliminated, unnecessary contracts ended. And Dr. Copeland is working collaboratively with our leaders and with the unions to find more savings. As I rattle of this sad state of affairs, I’m sure that many of you are asking how do we turn this situation around? What steps do we take? The truth of the matter is we have been down this road before with virtually every big major department in city government. An now our school system is finally joining us on the path to reform: First, we jointly asked the Greater Baltimore Committee and the President’s Roundtable to do a study of the school’s management and financial systems – just as we did upon arriving at City Hall. Their 43 pages of recommendations and the school system’s actions are on our city website, and the school website. Thanks to this City Council, we will once again start receiving monthly financial reports telling us how much they’ve spent on a year-to-date basis and how that compares to the prior year. When this is all said and done, we will have moved millions in administrative expenses from North Avenue to our classrooms. We will finally have in place effective management and finance systems in order to sustain the gains that are being made in the classrooms. Today, City Hall and North Avenue are allies not adversaries. Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist William Raspberry pointed out that America responds to righteous demands – as we did during the civil rights movement. But, he said, education is different: “Education cannot just be delivered – it has to be actively sought and received.” Fixing our schools isn’t just a job for us and it isn’t just a job for Dr. Copeland. We all know that an engaged, active citizenry is the only way our city moves forward. Many parents, and many churches, businesses and other organizations are putting a huge effort into improving our schools, and helping individual children. I want to thank Sally Michael for helping me connect willing businesses and organizations to principals who want the help. I do not raise this issue to diminish their efforts, but to challenge the rest of us. The facts are these: At least 40% of our schools have no PTA or other parent-teacher organization. How can a principal make parental involvement a priority if they have no PTA at school? As we move to single member districts, I really need the help of every council member to use the power of your office to help us forge meaningful partnerships in schools in your smaller districts. I can think of no better use of that title than putting together those connections as you’ve done in many of the schools in larger districts. Doing it in all of the schools in your new districts can be critically important. REASON TO BELIEVE Reason to Believe is a joint effort between government and our philanthropic community to answer the call made a couple of years back in the Believe campaign. We are pooling public and private dollars in smarter, more effective ways to: Help expectant mothers deliver healthy babies in a healthy environment; We know that drug treatment is more cost-effective than foster care. We know that education is more cost-effective than incarceration. We know that preventive medicine is more cost-effective than emergency room care. And more important than being cost-effective, we know in our hearts, these are the right things for us to do as a city…as a State…and the right thing for us to do as Americans. And this year, despite trickle-down cuts that are being passed own to us from the state and federal level, we are going to commit to find $1 million in new funding for the Reason to Believe effort. We can’t ask businesses, foundation and other people to do more if we are doing less. We’ve got to find the dollars to reach out to our most vulnerable families with the focused array of services that they truly need in order to stay together. This year we have pending before the legislature and the Governor, $1 million in new funding to fight HIV/AIDS in Baltimore. Last year, we saw one-tenth of the deaths from AIDS that our city experienced a decade ago. But four zip codes in our city are driving the growth of AIDS in our state. We must invest more in testing, education and outreach, and if the state is unable to come up with these dollars we may need to do this on our own as well. Contributing an additional million dollars to the Reason to Believe effort, in these fiscal times, will not be easy… This year, Council members, our budget may well be the most difficult we have faced yet. BUDGET Almost every year, we cut funding for every city agency except schools, recreation and parks, police and the State’s Attorney’s Office. Over time, these cuts have been enormous. In 1980, there were 9,500 city-funded employees in non-public safety jobs. Now, there are only 3,500 people trying to do the same amount of work. In Recreation and Parks alone, we have gone from 1,138 employees in 1980 to 296 this year. In some cases the decline of population has reduced the workload, but in the overwhelming majority of cases, it has only increased it. The roads haven’t gotten younger, the parks haven’t gotten smaller and no one left the city an endowment to care for the abandoned homes left behind. Fortunately, everyone sees the new investment coming into our city , not just downtown but also in our neighborhoods; everyone knows property values are rising. But unfortunately what most people do not realize is that although residential property values have increased by nearly 60% since 1999, revenue from property taxes has grown only 5.3% during that same period of time – due to a number of factors, including abandonment of residential and industrial properties s during the 1990s, the growing non-profit sector, and the third most restrictive property assessment cap in the state. The fact remains that Baltimore, disproportionately, is home to many of our State’s poor residents. In real terms, that means we yield half as much from our income tax on a per capita basis as a neighboring counties. Our property tax rate is already twice as high as any jurisdiction and our income tax rate is at the top rate. Additionally, we have very limited control over some of our highest costs. We spend three times more on prescription drugs than we do on the entire Department of Recreation and Parks. And our growth in health care costs and pension contributions, alone, far outstrip our revenue growth and with the smaller number of active employees contributing, you can imagine the sordid straits we’re headed into. When Harry Truman said: “The buck stops here,” he was talking about responsibility, he wasn’t talking about starving state and local government with trickle down cuts to public safety, transportation and schools. Ronald Reagan and George Bush’s fiscally irresponsible crusade to “starve the beast”, meaning the government, with deficits and tax cuts for the wealthy is continuing today with lightening speed. And these policies reach us at a dangerous time in our nation’s history when, for the first time since 1812, providing for the common defense has been relegated to the status of yet another unfunded local mandate. At the state level, it’s no better. The State’s Department of Legislative Services just reported that local governments have seen their funding cut by $261 million in the past two years. Baltimore took the biggest hit by far, at $33 million. We lost $25 million for our roads and transportation. PROGRESS Crime is at its lowest level in 34 years. There is nearly $2 billion in new development underway in our city, creating new jobs and restoring neighborhoods. And we’ve got another $1.3 billion in the pipeline. You passed a new ordinance and together we defended that ordinance in court and won -making us one of the first cities in America to pass a minority business ordinance crafted skillfully enough to pass constitutional muster. With all of this momentum, how do we take Baltimore to the next level? How do we make Baltimore the great, creative city we all know it can and should be? We recently called together a focus group of entrepreneurs – big and small, black and white, men and women, from a diversity of fields – and they confirmed what we’re seeing and we asked them how we build on this momentum. They said workforce was a big concern. To foster the creativity and growth we want, one asset is more important than all others: people. Economist Richard Florida, author of “The Rise of the Creative Class,” joined us at our arts town hall this year. His major thesis is that our country’s economy is now fueled by the growing creative class, a diverse and expanding class of Americans whose economic and social lives are organized not by employer but by place, by cities. Cities that are diverse, cities that nurture creativity, cities that are culturally alive, and cities that preserve their history are cities that thrive – because they create a better quality of life… they create new businesses… they create living neighborhoods, they retain and they attract members of this growing creative class. Our city is simmering with creativity and Baltimore’s entrepreneurs, musicians, artists, architects, engineers, researchers and scientists are already moving our local economy forward. Our world-renowned medical research institutions, most notably Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland, form a potent eastside-westside wishbone offense for the future of Baltimore’s economy. Both of our Arts Districts are gaining momentum. This year, Entrepreneur magazine reported that Baltimore moved from 30th to12th on their list of best cities for entrepreneurs, and we’re number 2 in the East. We make our city welcoming, not with stadiums or by subsidizing corporate relocations from other cities, but by having great parks, and walkable neighborhoods, and authentic buildings, and galleries and music clubs, and restaurants and shops, and by respecting, indeed, treasuring diversity. We have been making some of these types of investments over the past four years, we must build on that the foundation now in the realization that we are also investing in the creation of a place that attracts and retains creative economic development. But in order to achieve our goal of becoming a modern creative American City, we must invest in the attributes, amenities and assets of place that allow small and mid-sized companies to attract and retain creative human capital. Baltimore already has the authentic environment many entrepreneurs are looking for. Historic tax credits are helping build the office space entrepreneurs desire – and we’ll fight to make sure they are in the State budget this year. Partnering with neighbors, we also need to invest in making our parks and bike trails usable assets to established communities and potential newcomers. We must move the Collegetown Network to a much higher and more effective role. Converting college students into permanent new Baltimoreans is essential to our economic future as a city. Baltimore was once the second largest port of entry for immigrants in the United States, behind Ellis Island. We lost that attraction for newcomers in the 80’s and 90’s, and we must regain it. To turn that around, we’ve established an Immigrant Support Task Force, and with the help of Baltimore’s foundation community, we’ve hired a coordinator to focus our collaborative efforts. While we work to retain students and attract new immigrant families, we also need to make sure the children born in Baltimore are prepared to succeed in Baltimore. This fall, through our Mayor’s Office of Employment Development we are opening a new, small innovative high school, in a partnership with Johns Hopkins University and the Baltimore City Community College. Our Academy of College and Career Exploration will have a longer school day – from 9 to 5. Students will be connected to the world outside their classrooms – in internships, worksite visits and job shadowing – in addition to enrichment like music, art and sports, and tutoring from Hopkins students. Students who enter performing below grade level will get double doses of reading, math and writing until they catch up. Because in our City, there is no such thing as a spare American. We need everyone. Everyone should contribute and everyone must. That ’s the sort of city we are building. CONCLUSION One hundred years ago this week, much of our entire downtown was burned to the ground in the Great Baltimore Fire. If you’ve seen the pictures, it was a scene of utter devastation. But the resilient people of Baltimore rebuilt their city…bigger, better, and stronger than before. Fifty years ago, we were divided by racism. Brave people like Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Mitchell, Jr., brought healing to our city – and our nation. Over these last few decades, we have been scorched by the devastating fires of drugs, drug addiction and drug violence. But from these ashes, Baltimore, once again, is rising. Baltimore’s story is the story of perseverance, it is the story of hope in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds, and it is the story of hard work and a courageous and diverse people who join together time and time again to triumph over adversity. Our city’s spirit thrives on beating the odds – on achieving what others thought was unachievable. We learn from our past, a past whose buildings, ramparts, and monuments still surround us. Soon, we will be able to stroll the Baltimore Heritage/Star Spangled Banner trail from our new visitors center, and see the Flaghouse, the Shot Tower, the new Reginald Lewis African American history museum and other great museums and monuments, not to mention Fort McHenry. Here in Baltimore is where our liberty was defended, defined and exercised – and, today is honored. A spirit of risk-taking and innovation helped define Baltimore’s past. Now, we are resurrecting that spirit to guide our future – against a political climate that threatens the most basic operations of government. In four years, together, we have laid a foundation on which to rebuild this great city. Up from the ashes, now is our opportunity; against the odds, now is our responsibility to give our children reason to believe in their Baltimore – the Greatest City in America. |
 
 
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