>> yes. >> who determines who gets a seat at the table presumably even warlords have -- are representing someone and have something to say even if they are detrimental to the process, how do you discourage them from participating, and who says no? >> well, actually the idea was that all aftergans are -- afghans are welcome to participate, but you cannot bring the power base, the warlord brings an international crime syndicate power base, okay? that can want -- that is an uneven playing field. one perp, one vote. that really is the idea, so it is not to exclude the leader who would be considered, i think, you know, he is a world class terrorist who has been recognized as a drug lord and killed thousands upon thousands upon thousands of afghans.

.. time the eyes of the world will be watching the process and will help to restrain the obvious imbalance of power that has been given to the warlords, the bush administration agree and covering them again, they were

given power in the 1980's and the first place when they were given billions of dollars which as we just explained to you was a process that could have ended as early as 1983. >> [inaudible] time and time again -- i'm sorry -- that warlords are the establishment and suddenly they are part of the status quo. >> what needs to be done is the issue needs to get down to the fact that this whole situation has to be disarmed, and instead of being rearmed and read politicized of these things have been done peace process in ireland has worked successfully. that's an issue that has existed for 800 years and the animosities are real and very present. these kind of things worked out in south africa as an example. they were worked out in kosovo at least perhaps not to their ultimate conclusion but at least

there are mechanisms by which these things can be done. when it comes to pakistan it remains it never seems to change it keeps going back around the same issues again and again and again and the same people keep getting put forward in order to represent the same size of the issue. so if the united states and western powers could get behind and the indigenous that actually represented the will and the interest of the people who haven't been heard in this, the vast majority of the afghan and pakistani people, then perhaps there can be some kind of resolution and peace otherwise we face a cataclysmic situation in this part of the world. all the ingredients are there and just like my nell irvin and the reaction to the war and iraq there will be a strategic shock and this strategic shot could be far more catastrophic than any previous ones.

>> that's all we have time for tonight. i'd like to thank you all for coming and thank you for the guests. [applause] that was elizabeth gold and paul fitzgerald on book tv for more on the authors get their work, visit invisiblehistory.com. rick baker former mayor of st. petersburg florida prisons his thoughts on the revitalization of american cities. this is just under an hour. >> good morning and welcome to the breakfast forum by the manhattan institute center for state and local leadership. my name is michael and i am finally appointed director of the center and it's truly an honor to deal with you one way gone to the job and what a great event to kick things off. it's an honor to be here with everyone. as you know, for over 40 years the manhattan institute has been

a national leader in advancing the idea is of greater economic independence and choice and individual responsibility. we have our roots as you all know in the cities having led the movement from welfare to work and from broken windows to see for cities. during the coming weeks you will be hearing a lot about our center for state and local leadership. whether it is examining public employees and the relationships with the government's for which they work, detention systems, the retiree health benefits, whether it's talking about new public safety strategies with its working on issues as diverse as prisoner reentry in places like newark new jersey and the assimilation into the cities and states the manhattan institute is at the core of the policy debate. i urge you to visit our web site, manhattaninstitute

dhaka.org, and also to visit a new site that we've put it recently called publicsectorinc.org that focuses on the union issues, pension reform, it is a go to site for lawmakers all around the country and hopefully it will be for you as well. as the mayors and governors across the country battle, and i use the word battle because that is what it's turned into close enormous budget gaps while simultaneously delivering quality services. the need for innovative and bold leadership is unquestionable. as the mayor of st. petersburg the honorable rick baker turned safety into a variable hub of economic vitality and civic pride. as you read the book and hear more from stephen goldsmith, you get to know just what he did there and the book seamless city once again is on sale when you

walk in and i encourage you to stop by and look at that. first here to introduce him is the former chairman of the manhattan institute center for civic innovation mali project of the center on state and local leadership the honorable stephen goldsmith. if ever there was a public official who truly embodies in my opinion falafel, selfless and innovative policymaking that's stephen goldsmith. he's currently the deputy mayor for operations here in new york. he's a very simple mandate promulgated by mayor bloomberg, created the city government in the 21st century that is smaller, more efficient and more cost effective. good luck with that. [laughter] you the commitment of a year gained one of the mayor of indianapolis from 1992 to 1999 deputy mayor goldsmith has a remarkable play book from which to work and which to share with us today and share with people like rick baker and others.

under mayor goldsmith's leadership entire urban neighborhoods of indianapolis were completely revitalized. i believe it is over $400 million recognized in savings the money was then reinvested into the city, the crime dropped and something i think is truly remarkable, real authority was defused locally to the community groups which is a real testament of the power of local leadership. his record in indianapolis led him to be appointed by the former president bush and senior domestic policy adviser and leader the chair of the corporation on the national and community service. he kept that position in to the obama administration, to the estimate the work he did. but perhaps more than anything else, stephen goldsmith is a teacher. he believes good leadership doesn't come from just the board of one but the work of many. as the director of the innovations in american government programs at harvard school of government, professor

goldsmith shared his road map for the reinvigorating american cities with countless spiraling leaders and i will say i was one such student in his class and 05 and candidly it was a great course. in 11 years undergraduate of the college and graduate of lowell school of the university of michigan and the author of four books, two of which were published while at the manhattan institute, 21st century city and entrepreneurial city. he is a scholar comegys an inspiration today's author rick baker who will share with you the relationship that they obviously had and we were there for honored to welcome stephen cord smith to the stage, please join me. [applause] thank you very it's great to be

here to introduce you to my friend, rick, i read the promotional material about what he did in st. petersburg it feels a little bit where are you --. what we see a few things by way of introduction. my first book was regular promoted by manhattan and 21st century so kind enough to assert that you read at one point in time and it's been great to kind of watch the stories of the cities over the last 20 years. and. i began as the mayor of indianapolis and the explicit manhattan agenda literally which is cities instead of centers of

pathology the places that sell which their diversity and assets and can come back again and this was the period of time as we remember as coming into the early 90's the large cities not as large as this one but a series of problems to apply conservative principles to produce really good results and to some extent we did that. it's dear to my heart which is cities are diverse places and you can create opportunities for all of the communities, all of. it's the creation of opportunity and the simplicity that is particularly important i wish there were more well recognized across the country you can cut taxes and increase the services concurrently been we are now across much pain we have to inflict on the citizens in order to right size the budgets and

that really is in many cases a false choice so people these things together in the city in st. petersburg flores and crème dropped the bid for in the minority communities one wouldn't accept to put all that together into seamless city. here to tell you about it is rick maker. [applause] >> i'm always excited to be able to just be in new york only new york city but to be able to be involved in the manhattan institute, and of course but what i'm really excited about is steve goldsmith is going to be here. he may not even fully recognize he's been one of my great mentors when i was running for

mayor in 2000i wanted to learn -- semidey had given me a copy of the book 21st century, and i read it and i thought you know, this looks like a good way to do it and i wonder if there's more and i looked in the binder and it said that it has been supported or published by the manhattan institute if so this was before as good a female as we all are now, so i called and said what else you have and they started sending me stuff. city dalia and city journal and things and they sent me the entrepreneurial city which mayor goldsmith land, and that is about 100 page book and i think i took three days to go through it because the first part of the book talked about written by a great mayor on different issues they had been involved with rhetoric was public safety or neighborhoods or whatever and then in the back of it had a resource guide, each chapter so,

people around the country so it is a great opportunity for me to learn and the reason he recognized stuff as my book is a small sum of it from him. [laughter] to have groups like the manhattan institute that are out there doing research and disseminating people that are leading our cities and states around the country because you need to have that in order. jeb bush is a good friend of mine yet to be believe that enough to attack and go after them. dirty of manhattan institute think you i appreciate that. first, i also want to -- i have

to introduce my family. my mother, irene is here today, and who is still my great mentor, and my family who shared this adventure with the is here my wife and my son jake and my daughter joanne, please welcome them. [applause] what is a seamless city and i think mayor goldsmith started talking about what it is, a seamless city is a place where it's an aspiration, it is a place where if you live in you don't go from one part of the town to another part across the city and that could be a neighborhood line or it could be a real road a road fought pfft. you feel the need to reach over and lock your door because it doesn't seem safe and there are broken windows and boarded up buildings and you just don't

want to be there. not all parts of the city are going to be the same, we will have some neighborhoods that have large houses of big lots and that's okay and apartment complexes and that's okay, too and there's things you can have in common oral or neighborhoods, the should be places where he children can grow up safely but they feel comfortable walking next door to see different on the street where there are the infrastructure looks okay. there's freaks on the sidewalks, they look okay, there are not drug dealers on the street corner or prostitutes on the street. to have our children grow up i know we don't want any of our children to have to grow it in places like that. they should have a grocery store down the street and bank and the general amenities all of us have and every child should have at

least the opportunity. there is no guaranteed result in america but they should have opportunities to grow up in a place and to be able to believe in the same dream you and i believe in and are trying to instill in our children. that is a seamless thing and that's what this book is about to begin its hard to get to that. but we have to work at it but it's important to get towards it to be cut because america is only going to be as great as the service centers are. mayor goldsmith helps lead the purpose of the organization of american. the 50's and 60's and 70's we lost ground in our cities. he helped lead that effort at that effort i think is still underway to try to build back our citizens and make them grow in places again so that we could raise our families are to be attracted to our cities faugh. the book approaches it from two perspectives and talks about in

the book i talk about. the approach to the urban leadership across america. to the mayor of a large city mayor goldsmith said america's major city so for those of you that hour that familiar in the last census when i took office was the 68 largest of 15 or 20,000 cities in america and it's a big enough city that it can provide some lessons but frankly it is a small enough city it might be easier to get your arms around some of the dillinger is quicker if you start to apply some ideas to make it work. the second part of the city is the life of the mayor because there are challenges that you have and opportunities you have and a lot of people don't see the day to day life and mayor goldsmith can testify to what

but how does it impact your family, how does your faith interplay. i talk about that in the look and receive some criticism for that but i'm okay with that. it's a big part for all of us and that's important to see how it plays out. so we talk about those things. and it comes from the perspective of my experience which is in st. petersburg but also from the perspective of a mayor because the mayor is the leader of the city, they want to at least identify the path to take and so why talk a lot about the job of a mayor and the job of a major in my mind is three things. its first you run the business of the city, the both cities, major cities have hundreds of millions of dollars sometimes billions of dollars in budget, lots of different departments. our city has 34 departments and everything from police and fire parks and water and sewer and sanitation and lots of other

things, traffic and lots of other things. so you have to deal with all those issues when you are running the business of the city so how do you deal with that? my first few days, after about three months i noticed i wasn't getting any reports. so i take that back. i got the crime statistics. i had run a law firm before i came to this city and i thought shouldn't we get some reports after three months don't you get reports and they would say no, so we decided to start this process of developing the report but was a study of performance measures and we called it the city scorecard so we got together with all of the departments and it took awhile to do this. we said okay, how is the water department serving the city

better this year than last year? and of course they said yes. and so we said how can we tell? how do we know? how do i demonstrate to the community the we were doing that? and that really became a remarkable discussion among us and among the community of what we want to do. so at the end of the we developed 160 performance measures and many cities have them done this. i like ours. we did it in a small enough number it would be meaningful. some have thousands. thousands is too many. we want to have enough where you can get a good feel for it. we also did it in graph form, similar graph form. so, for instance, you can -- i can tell you that we took about 7.2 minutes to respond to a priority one police call when i was mayor. that's important to know. when he left was about 5.6. well if you're the one waiting for that call that is an important thing so that became one of our performance measures.

now performance measures were designed to not just tell them a year what's going on the community what's going on so we can also see how long it took. when i took office i asked what is -- what takes the longest, what is the biggest complaint to the mayor's office, and i would have thought it was crime or traffic or speeding or something like that. it was a sidewalk repair and i said how long does it take to fix a sidewalk because nobody knew so we had to check. it took 30 months to fix a sidewalk, two and a half years. so maybe we went and put a strike team together and that was the easy part so we got that now takes about a week. how long does it take to fix a traffic light, but we also did it with schools, we measure the schools like for jeb bush we measure our schools to see how the schools are going based on the student achievement scores, so we started measuring that.

that is how the scorecard as well. we've of the major driving forces of the city is to reduce tax rates five of the nine budget and the other for weekend on and 20% during that part of time and at the same time we did improve service levels the require us to do the government size. and the government went from we reduced it to a number of employees by 10% and a number of police officers will we were doing that and the service levels were going up and we try to do it in such a way not to harm the individuals we can freeze the budgets by the last three years because the recession and we just froze over - all the time and when we were eliminating positions we moved people are not as we try to eliminate mt positions so a lot of people lost their jobs, some

did but it wasn't that much compared to the other reduction of the size of government. that's an important thing. so the business of the city's party. second is dealing with the crisis. as i say, some of them are natural like hurricanes, some are man made like crime and a lot of them are media and you have to deal with all free. so you are constantly addressing the crisis as they come about as the may year to keep the direction going. and we had in 2004 we had four hurricanes that were targeted with the ongoing through st. petersburg and emergency operations center was activated virtually the whole three month period of time and when you deal with those issues, lots of talk about lots of crises that you go through in the mayor's perspective said it is a crisis of the second part of the job. third part of the drug is advancing division for the city.

you run because you to do something and have a plan intifada and you want to make the city better and it quite often the mayor can get so bogged down in doing the business the budgets are terribly hard the union issues, employee issues dealing with the crisis as they come you can get so bogged down that you never quite get to the point of advancing division and get stopped in the middle of advancing division. on advancing division while you are dealing with the crisis and what you are dealing with the business as you move forward. in our case, we had a 5. plan which was our strategic plan for the city to advance the vision and i think every strategic plan needs to settle the mission. ours was simple. was to build the best city in america. we wanted st. petersburg to be the best in america. some say that is broad. you can really do that?

my response to that was there has to be -- that should be the objective of every city in america. who is going to follow you if your mission is to become the fourth best city in florida? [laughter] eighth best city in america, nobody's going to follow. people follow excellence coming and what you find is when you sit out a bold agenda and a bold goals like becoming the best city in america people are drawn to it. they want resources to come to it, individuals start coming forward and other people hear about it and say i want to be part of that. out of stanford the large research company we are recruiting them to florida and karl says the head and came and met with me and said we are thinking about doing it here and here and what do you have to offer? i want to ask you what you have to offer. how are you going to help us build the best city in america. the recent book about the publishing he said that is what the government is going to be.

he wants to be part of becoming the best city in america so that has to be the mission and how do you do it? you do it by improving the quality-of-life of the people that live in the city every single day. not just the government and the civic organizations and fifa organizations and everybody in the neighborhood organizations and everybody involved in this enterprise should come with the idea of how are we going to build and meet the quality-of-life better for people who live here? will the sncc the quality-of-life better for the folks in st. petersburg? of the answer is yes you should do it and if the answer is no you probably shouldn't do it even if every but he wants you to do it so you run through the filter and in our case that is the mission and we have five ways to get there. one is to make it safer and improve public safety. number two is improve your

neighborhoods. number three is participate in improving your schools which was the radical idea when i ran for the city and i will tell you why in a second. member for is economic diplomat and economic development has to be across-the-board. number five is improving the city services and operations which it talked about when running the business of the city. those are the five components. identify the five strategies and i promise you every manager in our government can tell you those five principles at any time they were asked to read i promise you because of righetti understood that was our objective. as a public safety, we did a lot of things mayor goldsmith that mayor giuliani and others talked about for the good things they've done and we try to add some of your own towards making it safer. we have a hard focus on drug enforcement, drug czar the poison of america just the absolute please send an american. they are at the root of so many of the problems that you have to go after.

you can't just go after them by air arresting people but you have to do that and we did it very aggressively. but you also have to have opportunities for drug rehabilitation in your community, especially in the constitution. i believe the constitution issue is by the nature of treatment and job training for the women that were prostitutes. so you hit the drug issue then you hit all the issues and you have to be very aggressive and focused but recognize what you do in these other areas is going to impact as well. when you dillinger school is going to impact crime and when you do in your neighborhood will affect the crime and certainly what you do in the poverty areas will affect crime as well. i'm going to have special focus and i want to help lift what we called and people would stand up and say you know, you can't fix

it until you get rid of the crime, and my response to that was i don't think you get rid of the crime until you change the environment, and the answer is you have to do both, you have to have aggressive law enforcement to go after, but you also have to change some of the environment and some of the different causes of what you got there and i don't think that is a liberal philosophy by the way. i think that is the real force that you have to -- to have to go after the crime and have strong wall enforcement and work on getting kids educated and changing the environment of the poorest areas which we did. number two is neighborhoods -- safety is number one. all the others are in no particular order, public safety is number one. as we work on improving the neighborhood of the city and build all the parks. i'd like to tell the story that my first year we had two openings in a row, one was in the library, and the other was a

dog park and in the library we have over 3 million-dollar library we are building in the -- we had a groundbreaking but also a few folks come from. the next day we opened the ribbon on a ballpark that cost $9,000 to build, and i have 200 people showed up for it. the absolutely, that all this -- it was so overrun. please get these people out of our neighborhoods, and i started thinking these ballparks are a very popular and they are cheap and i like to get reelected is i'm going to build a lot of them and we build all the parks all over the it may seem small. it's not small. it's a quality-of-life issue. bicycle path, they are building the largest on the southeast united states. seems like a small thing. it's a big thing. we went from being treated in the mean streets the number one main street in the country in

2000, in 2001 to 2008i was invited in the main street conference the best turnaround city in the country because of the sidewalk efforts we were taking and because of our bicycle paths and safety issues we put in place. it's in quality-of-life it's a big thing. we have committed to build a playground within half a mile of every child in the city. i think that's a big thing to be i think that's a big thing. if you can walk with your child to a playground from your house in less than half a mile and you get to know your neighborhoods. that seems small, it's a big thing. we kaput to water slides and increased the attendance of the schools like 40% in one summer. there were four and five when i took office said they would tell me what to do and i go through it. bike paths, and but they seem small but they are not. neighborhoods are important. the first green city by the way

in the state of florida it's not a feel-good thing it is actually like a lead certification for cities so it's a very serious program that we went through but it was all based on sound strategy. we did not do something unless we look at what is our pnac period for whatever we are doing so i can tell you that when we put l. eda traffic lights at all of the cities it cost $450,000 to receive $150,000 the city costs a year. that is a 33% return. anybody should do that. at every one of the energy savings we look at the payback and if the period was at least 12 years or less, so i got at least an 8% return, we did it and that's how we did all of the programs in the city and became the first designated green city and state. schools, i have to move quickly because i'm running out of time, with the schools, we had an aggressive effort, we don't run our schools. most cities in america don't run the schools, they have

separately elective school boards that run the schools but we need to help our schools. if you don't help your school you're not going to get people moving into your neighborhood and you're not going to get business is coming to george communities and you ought to be involved in the school so we are very focused on our schools and i can go through a series of programs we did if someone wants ask a question we have plenty of time afterwards. but we wound up going from jeb bush started of creating the schools based on the student achievement scores we went from having zero elementary schools out of 27 to 16 out of the 27. and we had a 260% increase in the number of the schools based on the achievement scores. we actually passed the suburbs in the categories with urban scores which is a hard thing to do but you can be focused and i would be glad to talk to you about it today if you like. then economic diplomat and i already talked about this. when we approach the economic

development, you've got to believe in economics. jobs are important. you can do a lot of things in the community. you can build great parks, a great libraries, if people don't have jobs you're not going to advance the city, you can't do it, you have to have jobs in the committee so your focus has to be on job development. there's two ways of looking at jobs. one is retention and the other is recruitment. most of us have this tendency, me included, to look at what is the next business i'm going to bring to town? but 80% of the new jobs in those communities next year are going to come from the existing companies in the community right now so we have to focus on those i talked a lot of the permitting is hard but there are structural issues and you've got to work on both of them to get them back and we made a lot of progress. one of the ways we didn't i had a 7:30 meeting once a quarter in

my office with anybody that complained about the department since i've been there. so everybody is invited. the first couple of meetings we have i would tell you it was about half this size and they were after me and i had my staff around me and every time someone with a scream and say what about that? so we looked at it and it was hard. there were issues involved and we got to the point where the last one we had five or six people they were most of them represented by the various contractors we had come in to thank us for trend the department around so you have to make it easy. meek easy for people in the business community but they still have to follow the rules but to meet ec and you can still have -- you can make the bill beautiful buildings and cultural amenities and all that stuff and most of them are glad to do that they just don't want to have to waste six months of time to get through the process so you try to work with the business is that you've got and then you

also try to recruit business as well and we do especially in the high-tech area. florida are historically has had an agricultural industry, the tourism industry, the military industry, but we need to diversify it. right now when the nation has gone through this recession would have really gone through this recession because of our construction industry and dependence. we need to diversify. we are working on r&d and we have brought sri and i had of the innovation department their and our job is to try to put the r&d companies into the partnerships with universities, important to do so we do that. we also worked on the downtown anybody that went to downtown, st. petersburg, 15 years ago and a good friend of mine today has been a number of times during this process and a remarkable

place that it was, sidewalk cafes, cultural amenities were focused on the cultural. we set out to become the number one cultural state of florida and said that ten years ago and last year the american magazine ranked as the number one city culturally in america for 10500 people because of things like the new museum, salvador dali museum which brought the expansion of the fine arts coming to town. lots of other things. lots of other focus with the st. petersburg. the indianapolis 500 is still the best in the country but even tony george said st. petersburg is second behind. and i'm going to close with midtown and refocused the poorest part of our community probably the most effort

certainly during my first term and then into my second term as well. why do you do that? why do you focus on the poorest parts of the community? when i ran for mayor, people said why should i put my money into that part of town? people say that. and i said you should do it for two reasons. number one, you do it because it's the right thing to do. because there are children growing up in this part of the community that you wouldn't want to have your children grow up. they're growing up in environments they shouldn't growth in america or st. petersburg or anywhere and we need to work on that and work towards changing that and some people would buy into that supplies it is a second reason, too. the second reason is better for you because if right now we are pouring a disproportionate amount of money to public safety and social services and to this part of the community and not getting tax revenues from so if we could fit we would have less

service and more revenue helps will be better for you so between those two we have great unanimity in the city and focusing on the internet and we could talk at length about midtown and what we did to turn it around but i will tell you that i am a conservative republican and i ran for reelection against the chairman of the democratic party. when i ran in 2005, and we want 90% of the vote for no reelection. there will tell you that they believe that we turned the community in a different direction. it's important to do. you can't do the rest of the city in the balance if you try to do downtown brings jobs or hope the liberals or the first you will fail to advance it. thank you so much for having me a look for to questions. [applause]

we are going to turn over to q&a and i'd like to remind everyone a question always ends in a question mark. and please wait for the microphone to come around. but i'm going to take the moderator's brought it and as a quick question mr. mayer we will bring you up here. you mentioned when you were talking and articulating the third job of the mayor being the articulation of the vision for the city and recruiting others to be part of that and touched on public employees unions. can you talk a bit about how you brought some of those unions perhaps on board and if you were not able to do so how you dealt with that especially right now when so many elected officials are facing that. >> well, for the most part, in our case we had five union bargaining groups, and we had

six bargaining groups and for unions in the city. so we were dealing with that a lot, police, fire and the blue and white collar unions to work with and i'm not going to say that's an easy process to go through its difficult process to go through and the motivations and this is not a criticism their objective is to improve the benefits of the folks they represent. and while you certainly care what the employees of the city i care deeply. i love them. i have many friends that are employees of the city and throughout every level of government, but that is not always be objective. the objective of the city is to improve the quality-of-life of people that live in the city. that means you have to have good service is and keep taxes at a minimum the will be hard to move it forward and is certainly means you have to be able to balance your budget and keep the budget meeting forward and sometimes the will be contrary to the union so sometimes we are able to put agreements together

so it works both ways, but i think you have to always remember that the job of the cities to improve the quality-of-life people that live there. >> [inaudible] >> we will bring a microphone around. >> where were the cuts made that enable you to balance the budget and you describe a lot of things that cost money but their must have been some things initiatives that involve cutting to enable them to put the package together a curious but the majority of khator personnel if you take an average employee with benefits and costs multiply that times 300 positions we reduce that's where the money was, that is the dollar amount that came from. why were they doing would be the question and did what they were doing cause you to impact services? about half of the position

reductions were management professionals and supervisors. so, the other half would have been lying oriented. so we did not go ayaan -- you know, there's a response you can get some times. if we ever did this you could get this response and that's when you're the president of the department of interior reduce the budget by 1% the to a press conference saying they are closing of the smithsonian, and some of the great parks across america because that's where the impact is going to be and people start screaming about that. we try not to do this. i will tell you exactly the process. i would ask every department to come back with five, seven, 9% cuts sometimes was three come five come seven, sometimes seven, depending on the budget and they would bring those income of 34 departments and i would actually have my cabinet, i would give them instructions led by first deputy mayor with the instructions i want you to go through those cuts,

identified the ones that had the least impact on the services to the community. first of all i don't want to cut any police positions. beyond that, at least impact on the surfaces and that means not closing down the libraries and facilities and then on the cabinet to go through without me and give me a list of what they come up with and then i would go through that list and circle the ones i know politically are not things i want to do for whatever reason because it will impact the services in response to the community. >> now you have a new number to come up with and they would come up with that number and we would continue that process back and forth. i think the concept of 5% across-the-board cuts is not a sound concept, that means that the devotee is operating at the same efficiency level which is not true. the trouble is when you're marian auf tricots and people it's hard for you to get into every budget and detail so you

have to have a process in place to address it. and i will tell you while we did cut -- we had a kind of bill shaped term. restricted at the end of the crash of 9/11 and the recession that followed. but three or four years in between and then the great recession in 08 and 09 that we bottomed out on, so but through that level, we were able to reduce the tax rates and i will also say we did not have the zero budgets. one thing i had to do is increase the police pay and the reason i had to do this because the city in tampa was hiring where the police officers as was the sheriff during the middle of the 2000 because they were paying so much more and i was not competitive before the decision to give police officers and we had to increase it to become competitive so that puts a burden on the budget we haven't dealt with.

>> were their things you're doing before but were doing them smarter? in terms of repairing streets and changing rules and regulations that allowed you to just be more efficient? >> i think there's a lot of categories like that. i think if you force a process in place, then let me just answer it directly. yes probably the biggest thing we do is invest heavily in the computer technology and we went heavily on line for the complete services and response services, so you could go on line and say my sidewalk is broken, here's the address and get a number assigned online and you then could track of a sidewalk and pears or the drug deal on the corner whatever it was you were complaining about. so we made it much more

recognized and the computerization across-the-board and we were careful on how we did it because the computer conversion as a lawyer i can tell you i've seen they can mess up pretty badly. so we did okay and the end of the day that helped us to save a lot functionally. but also think the way that you approach it structurally on the budget cutting drives that because if the department heads are looking at five, three, seven, they know the department is there. they're then forced to look at the individual department and say how am i going to do this without impacting services? some of them are proper some are not, but then you need to constantly -- if you have to push the decision down to the people to know how to do that. >> steve from blue college. anything the way the public-private partnerships, can you elaborate?

>> at one of the last chapters of third talks about public-private partnerships. we did some privatization, some operations for example the nursery function, plant nurseries and that enabled us to get a new part as well. we provide people in the community that had nurseries, got jobs and we did that with the management of the theater. we had a huge amount of public-private partnerships. our school program was a good example of that. we recruited 100 corporate partners to come and look at our public schools. so every public school in the city had one or two partners. they provide mentors and they provide tutors and strategic kuhl for the principle. sometimes. so whenever it was, the

corporation would come and they are a big part of the turnaround. the midterm effort relies heavily. to help with our redeveloped first restore system at the heart of the community they spent half a million dollars on some equipment so we recruited businesses to be partners with us really across-the-board. triet actually i like the governor mayor goldsmith term marketization where you installed the competitive forces into the process. if you didn't have direct control of the schools have to

do help the schools improve? >> thank you for asking the question. i -- we did what in the schools. we support the mentor program that was essentially started by county education foundation and the doorway program tells the child in the free reduced school so it's a low-income child that if you do certain things, if you maintain at least a c average, six to 12th grade if you maintain a c average, if your attendance and your conduct is good, if you are drug free and crime free by the time you get to 12th grade it is an incredible -- i call with an incentive good for those six years and that period of time so the way the we did it and how to do finance them? most of the money it cost for a prepaid tuition scholarship for a sixth grader let's say i don't

know what is right now but it cost $14,000. so the state has a program in florida that if you do it your body a scholarship for the free and reduced lunch they will pay for half so they're seven kills and then i worked at a deal with the local education foundation which is business in the community and i said how about if i raced 3500 will you match and they said yes. then i would deal with the private businessman in town and said if i raised 1750 will you give me 1750? and he said yes so then i can go to you and i said well you get 1750 and i will send the kit to college for four years and i put it on bill will -- double and we ran through the private foundation and and to not use the city money to fund them. >> what is the average graduation rate for the

low-income free and reduced child for? i've never been a good statistics budget 50% of the total was like 54%. so, the argument that by the time i left office we have had three classes of kids that started in sixth grade. all classes graduated and a rate of 93% from the public schools. so, if you can do that with the children that's how you impact your crime rate by the way in the long term and unpack your overall environment of the community. so begins a thousand of the scholarships while i was mayor and that was one program as a part of that with the corporations coming and we train the 1200 mentors to mentor the kids identified by the teachers as a need of mentors in the public schools. we did -- i love the top. it is incentive based. so we greater or schools in florida.

what we did is we provided weekly to the top award. meter increase the letter from bea to an a or d2c or ftd and state your become a top apple student and brought you to the ceremony on tv city council, school board legislative delegation from everybody who attended and give you a marble apple. hanging from of the schools today 2007 that toppled the top apple award winner we then gave you a gift basket and dinner for two at the columbia restaurant which is a nice restaurant downtown and a weekend at the trade would resort which is on st petersburg beach, a great beach, and we gave you the $2,500 cash bonus all privately donated for us to do it. so it became an incentive.

they decided to stay the urban schools, you're providing an incentive and i know that -- we did a lot of different things. are we done? >> we have time for one more very quick question. okay i can do that. >> [inaudible] >> what is the population of st. petersburg and the background? did you have any corruption issues and run for the reelection? >> the third when i ran for reelection and served a first term because we change the long term so it was for years and nine months. so i served the complete almost nine years the term ended last year, 2010.

the corruption issue to talk about the internal government corruption we had minor employee issues but no significant issues when i took office. i was going to say the newspaper always thinks corrupt but in general we don't have corruption issues within the city. 250,000. it's about 20% african-american, it's got under 8% that say east european and also another three or four or 5% a good size southeast asian population and hispanic population as well. >> let's have another round of applause. [applause]

the book is subtitled the man the myth of the american story and i hope i adequately show the myth of johnny appleseed keeps getting reinvented generation by generation. in the late 1800's and the early 1900's it was a symbol of american innocence, the time before the civil war had ravaged the land before native americans had been driven into the reservations and the west for the expansion swept away the supposed country once had been. two decades later after the temperance union have laid, johnny reemerged as the spokesman for the property has not the inebriating ones of america's fruit. in the mid 1900's as we have seen the disney studio turned johnny into a sermon on brotherly love and selflessness. advertisements in the 1950's and

1960's praised his financial shrewdness. oddly enough since his real finances were often a complete mess. by the mid-1970s, the so-called johnny appleseed or black or otherwise trading around the countryside with the expectation of the new utopia of the stone. the phrase johnny appleseed of pot will still get you something like 10,000 hits on google amazingly enough. [laughter] and so the constant reinvention continuance in your own time and the distinct modern interest in scaling back going local and preserving a wonderful creation we have been handed. two centuries before there was some positive movement, john chapman created a lifestyle of simplicity itself. a level of consumption or drive the national economy back to the system of wide practice. snuff, the occasional toole, the rear wheel or night under a rented room, the board books, the was ought earth's resources he seemed to have needed and the

books he recycled fairly well. johnny didn't merely live likely in the land he barely touched it even though he walked constantly it is the gift to be simple, the gift to be free, to is the gift to come down where you ought to be it goes. and when we find ourselves in the place just write it will be in the valley of love and the light. there'll be a 42 year summary of his life. a handful of people realized what a fragile creations the earth is chapman and appleseed were there too calling nature as if she were a newborn baby and that may be the greatest gift of our own time. john chapman had scripture urging him of not only the bible but sweden all things in the world excess from the divine origin closed with such forms of nature has enabled them to exist and perfect their use and correspond to high your things. but however it came to be, by god's hand or nothmo