>> 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 weather it's examining public

public employees and their relationships with the public -- the governments through which they work, their pension systems, their retiree health benefits. whether it's talking about new public safety strategy, whether it's working on issues of prisoner reentry in newark, new jersey, or immigrant assimilation, the manhattan institute is at the core of the public debates taking place. i urge to you visit our website manhattan institute.org to learn more about what we're doing and also to visit a new site that we put up recently called public sector, inc..org and that focus very closely as the name implies the public sector, the union issues, the pension reform issues, it's become a go-to site for lawmakers all around the country and hopefully it will be for you as well. as mayors and governors across the country battle and i use the word battle because that's what

it turned into, closed enormous budget gaps while simultaneously delivering quality services, the need for innovative but also bold leadership, it's unquestionable. now, as the mayor of st. petersburg, the honorable rick baker turned it into a hub of economic vitality and civic pride. as you read the book and you hear more from steven goldsmith, you'll get carbon monoxide what he did there and the book "seamless city" once again is on sale and i urge to you stop by and look at that. but first here to introduce him is the former chairman of the manhattan institute's own center for civic innovation, now a project of this center on state and local leadership, the honorable steven goldsmith. now, if ever there was a public official who truly embodies in my opinion thoughtful, selfless and innovative policy-making, that's steven goldsmith.

he's currently the deputy mayor for operations here in new york. he has a very simple mandate promulgated by mayor bloomberg. create a mandate for the 21st century that is smaller, more efficient and more cost-effective. good luck with that. [laughter] >> using the skills and commitments that the mayor gains while mayor of indianapolis from 1992 to 1999, deputy mayor goldsmith has a remarkable playbook from which to work and which to share with us today and to share with people like rick baker and others. under mayor goldsmith's leadership, entire urban neighborhoods of indianapolis were completely revitalized. i believe it's over $400 million were recognized in savings. that money was then reinvested into the city. crime dropped and something that i think is truly remarkable, real authority which diffused lawn locally to community groups which is real testament to the power of local leadership. his record in indianapolis led

him to be appointed by former president bush, as senior domestic policy advisor and later chair of the corporation on national and community service he kept that position into the obama administration. which is a testament to the work that he did. but perhaps more than anything else, even goldsmith is a teacher. he believes that good leadership doesn't come just from the work of one but from the work of many. as the director of the innovations in american government program at harvard's kennedy school of government, professor goldsmith shared his roadmap for the major cities with countless leaders and i will say there was one such student in his class. i believe it was in '05 and candidly it was a great course. the former district attorney for marion county for 11 years. an undergraduate of wabash college and 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's a scholar and rick baker will share their relationship that they've had had we'll honor and welcome steven goldsmith to the stage. please welcome me. [applause] >> the introduction is making me feel so good about myself. thank you so much. [laughter] >> i wonder if you looked in as you rated me as your professor, whether it would be the same as what it would be today. [laughter] >> it's great to be here to introduce you to my friend, rick. i read the promotional material what he did in st. petersburg. i'm aware of it. it feels a little bit -- where are you? it feels like i'm reading my own stuff. it's very exciting. rick, way to go. so let me just say a couple of quick things by way of

introduction because you're here to see rick. by the way, the path that he's taking with this book is the path i took. i had my first book was regnery book that was promoted by manhattan "21st century city" which you were kind enough to assert that you read at one time. and it's -- it's been great to kind of watch the stories of cities over the last 20 years. now, i began as mayor in indianapolis with kind of an explicit manhattan agenda. i mean, literally, right, which is that cities -- instead of being kind of centers of pathology could be great places that celebrated their diversity and their assets and could come back and this was a period of time as you remember where several of us coming into the early '90s took the large cities, not as large as this one and took the problems and applied some conservative principles to produce really good results. and to some extent we did that. one of the things i noticed about rick's book and his approach that's particularly dear to me heart which are citys

are diverse places and if you can apply conservative principles you can create opportunities for all of your communities, all of your neighborhoods. and it's the creation of opportunity in the seamless city that's particularly important. the other thing that i saw in rick's book that i thought was fascinating that it was more well recognized in this country is that you can cut costs and cut taxes and increase the quality of services concurrently. we're in a debate across the country how much pain we have to inflict on our citizens in order to right size our budgets and that really is in many cases a false choice. so rick put all of these things together in his city of st. petersburg flourisheded and as a conservative republican did exceptionally well in minority communities which one wouldn't accept, you put that all together into the seamless city, it's a great city and here to tell but it is mayor rick baker. [applause]

>> thank you, mayor. you know, i've been very excited about coming here today. i'm always excited to be able to be in new york. i love new york city. but to be able to be involved in the manhattan institute and, of course, to launch a book is exciting. but what i'm really excited about is that steve goldsmith was 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 2000, i wanted to learn about what other cities were doing. somebody had given me a copy of the book "21st century city," 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 it had been supported or published by manhattan institute of regnery. and i said what's manhattan institute so this is before i think as good an email as we are all now.

and i called them and i said what else do you have? and they started sending me stuff, city guides and city journals and they sent me "the entrepreneurial city." it's a 300-page book and it took three days because the first part of the book talked about -- it was written by great mayors on different issues that they had -- they had been involved with, whether it was public safety or economic development or neighborhoods or whatever. and then in the back of it it had a resource guide of each chapter so you could -- so i'm on the -- you probably doesn't know this either. i was on the phone with his budget director in indianapolis and how do you do this? and i called people around the country so it was a great opportunity for me to learn and the reason he recognized a lot of this stuff in my book is because i stole most of it from him. and it was -- i can't, you know, overstate how important it is to have groups like the manhattan institute that are out there

doing research and disseminating it to people that are leading our states and cities around the country. you need that to progress. jeb bush is a good friend of mine. he has this thing, he said ideas are a powerful thing and i think that is so true. somebody has got to implement in those ideas and you have to implement them and attack them but you have to have the ideas. and i thank you, howard, and everybody at the manhattan institute and steve, thank you so much for coming today. i appreciate it. well, my book -- well, first i also want to -- i have to do this, introduce my family. i want to do this. my mother, irene, is here today. and who is still my great mentor. and my family who shared this adventure with me is here. my wife joyce, my son jacob and my daughter joann. please welcome them here today as well. [applause] >> what is "the seamless city"? the seamless city is a place

where it's an aspiration. it's a place where you live you don't go across one town and across a seam. that seam could be a neighborhood line or it could be a railroad or it could be a road. and you wind up going into a different place, a place that's uncomfortable. you feel a need to reach over and lock your door because it doesn't seem safe and there are broken windows and there's boarded up windows. and it doesn't seem to be -- and you just -- and you just don't want to be there. well, that's not the way our cities should be. too many of our cities are like that. a city should -- you know, not all parts of the city are going to be the same. you're going to have some neighborhoods that have large houses and big lots. that's okay. and then you're going to have other parts that are going to have apartment complexes and duplexes and that's okay too. but there's some things we should have in common in all of our neighborhoods. they should be places where children can grow up safely. where they feel comfortable

walking next door or going down to see their friend down the street. where there are the infrastructure looks okay. it's the streets and the sidewalks. they look okay. where there are not drug dealers or prostitutes down the street. that's not how you and i would love to have our children growing up. and i know we don't want any of our children to grow up like that. they should have a grocery store down street. they should have a bank and they should have the libraries. they should have all the amenities that we have. every child should have the opportunity -- there's no guarantee in results. but grow up in a place to be able to believe in the same dream that you and i believe in and that we're trying to instill in our children. that's a seamless city. and that's what this book is about. it's hard to get to that. but we have to work at that time but it's important to get towards it because america is only going to be as great as its

urban centers are. you know, mayor goldsmith helped lead this period of a reurbanization of america. we had the suburbization back in the '50s and '70s where we lost ground in our cities. we helped lead that effort and that effort, i think, is still underway to try to build back our cities. make them great places again so that we can raise our families so that we will be attracted to our cities. that's what we want to try to do and i think it's important for our country. so "the seamless city," the book approaches it from two perspectives. it talks about -- in the book i talk, about i guess, the first city leadership and an approach to urban leadership to help bring our cities back across america. and at the same time, it provides a glimpse, i think, into the life of a mayor of a large city in america. as mayor goldsmith has said not as large as new york or chicago but one of america's major cities, st. pete, for those of you who aren't that familiar with it. in the census when i took office

was the 68th in florida, it's a big enough city so that it can provide some lessons but it's, frankly, a small enough city where it might be easier to get your arms around some of the challenges quicker if you start to apply some ideas to make it work. the second part of the city is the life of a mayor because there's challenges that you have and there's opportunities you have. and a lot of people don't quite see the day-to-day life mayor. i know mayor goldsmith could testify a lot but that -- how does that impact your family? how does your faith interplay. we received some criticism for that. i think faith is a big part of all of us and i think that's important to see how it plays out. so we talk about those things. and it comes from the perspective of, of course, my experience which is in st. petersburg, but also from the perspective of a mayor

because the mayor is the leader of the city. the mayor is the one who needs to identify the path to take and so i talk about the job of mayor. you run the business of the city, a big organization. major cities of hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes billions of dollars in budget. lots of different departments. our city has 34 departments so you're dealing with everything from police, fire, parks, water, 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? after three months i noticed i wasn't getting any reports. and so -- i take that back. i got the crime statistics and i

get the rainfall level. now, i had run a law firm before i came to the city. and i thought well, you know, isn't that -- shouldn't we get some reports after three months? don't you get reports? and next thing you know you don't really get some reports so we decided to start this process of developing a report for the mayor but what it became was a study of performance measures. and we called it the city score card. so we got together with all the departments, and we wanted -- it took us a while to do this. how is the water department -- are we serving the city better than this year than last year? and, of course, they said yes. they all said yes. and so we said, well, how can we tell? how do we know? how do i demonstrate to the community that we're doing it? and that became a remarkable discussion among us and among the community of what do we want to know? so at the end of the day we developed 160 performance measures. many cities have done this. i happen to like ours. we wanted to do it in a small enough number so it would be meaningful.

some cities have thousands. thousands is too many. it doesn't help you. you want to have enough where you can get a good feel for it. we also did it in graph form, similar graph form and we did it all with a historic basis. so, for instance, you can -- i can tell you that it took 7.2 minutes to respond to a priority 1 police call when i was mayor. now, that's an important thing to know. when we left, it was about 5.6 minutes. well, if you're the one waiting for that call, that's an important thing. so that became one of our performance measures. performance measures were designed not to just tell the mayor what was going on. but the community what's going on so we could also say how long it took to fix a sidewalk. when i took office i asked, 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 sidewalk repair. and i said well, how long does it take to fix a sidewalk? no one knew and we checked. it took us 30 months to fix a

sidewalk. two and a half years. well, maybe that's why it's the number 1 complaint, you know? [laughter] >> so we went and we analyzed. we put a strike team together. that was the easy part. now it takes about a week to fix a sidewalk, five days, six days to fix a sidewalk. but we did that with potholes and how long does it take to fix a traffic light when the traffic light is out and we did it with schools. we measured our schools to see how our schools are going based on student achievement scores and we start measuring that and that's on the city score card as well. our fund belts and our tax rates. we reduced them 5 of our 9 budgets. the other four we kept them flat. our real estate property tax which is the main tax rate. and we reduced them by almost 20% during that period of time. at the same time we improved service levels of required us to reduce the government size. and the government went from -- we reduced the total number of

employees by 10% in the city. which is not an easy thing to do. and yet we increased the number of police officers while we were doing that and the service levels were going up and we tried to do it in such a way not to harm the individual. so we would freeze our budget, you know, by the last three years we got the recession and -- we just froze our hiring all the time. and so we would be very judicious when we hired and we moved people around so we tried to eliminate empty positions, the least amount of people off their jobs. some didn't but it wasn't much compared to the total amount of reduction of the size of government. that's an important thing. so running the business of the city is part of your job. your second job is dealing with the crisis. as i say some of them are natural-made like hurricanes. some of them are manmade like crime. and a lot of them are media made and you have to deal with all three, you know, it's -- you're constantly addressing the crises as they come about. as mayor of the city to try to

keep the direction going. and in 2004 we had four hurricanes that were targeted as the eye going through st. petersburg at one time in the path and our emergency activation center was through the whole period of time and you deal with those issues. lots of them -- we talk about a lot of the crises that you go through and from the mayor's perspective as well. so that's -- the crisis is the second part of job. the third part of your job is advancing your vision for the city. it's interesting because that's why you run. you run because you want to do something. you run because you have a plan, a thought. you want to make the city better and yet quite often a mayor can get so bogged down in doing the business. the budgets are terribly hard, the union issues, the employee issues, or dealing with the crises as they come. you can get bogged down that you never get point of advancing your vision or you get stopped in the middle of advancing the vision. so you have to be very focused

and your organization has to be focused at making sure that you're continuing that forward-momentum and that forward-path on advancing your vision while you're dealing with the crises and while you are dealing with the business as you're going forward. in our case, we had a 5-point plan which was our strategic plan for the city to advance the vision and i think every strategic plan starts with a mission. our mission was the simple. it was to build the best city in america. now, some folks would say well, that's kind of broad, you know, how are you -- are you really going to do that? my city is better than yours. my response to that was you have -- that has to be -- that should be the objective of every city in america. who is going to follow you if your mission is to be the fourth best city in the america. eighth best city in america? who's going to follow it? people follow excellence. and what you find when you set a bold agenda like becoming the best city in america, people are drawn to it. resources come with it.

businesses start saying, how can we help? individuals start coming forward. and other people say, well, i want to be part of it. the large research and development company, very urban -- we were recruiting them to florida. and kurt carlson who is the ed. of sri and he came and met with me and he said well, we're thinking about doing here, here, here and what do you have to offer? i said well, i want to ask you what do you have to offer? i said how are you going to help us build the best city in america? in his recent book that he's about to publish, he said that's what got him to come to st. pete. he wanted to become part of the best city of america. and that has to be your mission? how do you do it? well, you do it by improving the quality of life of the people who live in the city every day. so every day, everybody in your organization in the city -- and not just -- not just for the government but the businesses and the faith organizations, everybody in the neighborhood

organizations everybody involved in this enterprise should come in, how are we going to build -- make the quality of life for everybody out here. if everything you think about doing and you go through this filter is this going to make the people life of the people in st. pete better, then you should do it and if it doesn't you shouldn't do it even if people want you to do it. in our case that was the mission and then we had five ways to get there. one is make it safer, improve public safety. number 2 is improve your neighborhoods. number 3 is participate in improving your schools, which was a radical idea when i ran for our city and i'll tell you why in a second. number 4 is economic development and the economic development has to be across-the-board. and number 5 is improving city services and operations which i talked about when i talked about running the business of the city. those were the five components. so you identify your five strategies and i promise you every manager in our government could tell you those five principles at any time that they

were asked, i promise you that. because everybody understood that was our objective. so public safety we did a lot of the things that mayor goldsmith and mayor rudy giuliani talked about and we try to add some of our own to work towards making it safe we had a hard focus on drug enforcement. drugs are the poison of america. they are the absolute poison of america. they are the root of so many of our problems that you have to go after them. you can't just go after them by arresting people, although 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 area of prostitution. i believe it impacted our prostitution issue by drug treatment and job training for the women that were prostitutes. so you hit the drug issue.

and then you hit all the issues and you just have to be very aggressive and very focused but recognize that what you do in these areas is going to impact your crime as well. what you do in your schools is going to impact your crime. what you do in your neighborhoods will impact your crime and certainly what you do in your most poverty areas is going to impact your crime as well. in fact, when i was running for mayor, i said, you know, i'm going to have a very important focus in the poverty. and i call it midtown. and people that were not for me 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. in the answers you have to do both. you have to have enforcement to go after that but you also have to change some of the environments and the causes of why you got there. and i don't think that's a liberal philosophy by the way. i think that's just a real philosophy that you have -- you

have to go after the crime and have strong law enforcement and also work on getting kids educated and work on changing the environment to some of your poorest areas, which we did. so public safety is number 1. number 2 is neighborhoods and the public safety is number 1. all the others are in no particular area. safety is always number 1. we built dog parks. i always like to tell this story. my first -- my first year we had two openings in a row. one was of a library and the other was a dog park. and the library we had a great -- over $3 million library we were building. we were kind of groundbreaking for it. we had a few folks come to it. not a big crowd. it was nice. the next day we opened up a ribbon on a dog park. it cost $9,000 to build. and i had 200 people show up for it. they absolutely -- the dogs tore up the grass so it was so

overrun that -- and i'm thinking, the neighborhood say please get these people out of the neighborhood. and i started thinking, you know, these dog parks are very popular and they're cheap and i'd like to get re-elected so i'm going to build a lot of them and we built dog parks all over the city. it's a quality of life issue. it seems small. it's not small. it's big. it's a quality of life issue. bicycle paths, st. pete is building the biggest bicycle path in the southeastern hundreds it seems like a small thing. it's a big thing. we went from being rated in the mean street in 2001 and in 2008 i was the best turn-around city because of our sidewalks and because of our bicycle path system and all the other safety issues we put in place. it seems small but it's not. we committed to build a playground within a half mile walk of every child in the city. i think that's a big thing.

i think that's a big thing. if you can -- if you can walk with your child to a playground from your house in less than a half a mile you feel differently about your neighborhood. so i credit a lot of this with my -- they would tell me what to do. waterslides, bike paths, dog parks. but they seem small but they're not. neighborhoods are important. we're the first designated green city by the way in the state of florida. it's not a feel-good thing. it's actually like a lead certification for cities. so it's a very serious problem. we cannot do something with what our pay back period is for what we're doing. when we put led traffic lights in all of our traffic lights. it cost $450,000. i saved 150,000 in electricity

costs a year. that's a three-year payback 33% return. anybody should do -- anybody should do that. and so with every one of our energy saving things we looked at the pay back. if the pay back period was at least 12 years, 12 years or less, so i got at least an 8% return, we did it. and that's how we became the first designated city in the states. schools, i got to go quickly because i'm running out of time. the schools, we had an aggressive effort -- we don't run our schools. most cities in america run their schools. they have separately elected school boards that run our school but we need to help our schools if you don't help your schools you're not going to to get people moving in your neighborhoods and you're not going to get businesses involved in your communities. so you better get involved in our schools. we're very focused in our schools and i could go through a series of programs that we did. if you have plenty of questions afterwards but we wound up going from jeb bush started the program of grading our schools

a, b, c. we went from having zero a elementary schools out of 27 to 27 out of 27. and we had a 260% increase in the number of a and b schools based on standard achievement scores. we actually passed the suburbs in some categories with our urban schools which is a hard, hard thing to do. but you can be focused in the school. the book talks a lot about it and i'll be glad to talk to you about that and fourth is economic development and i've already talked about city services so i'll end with this. you know, when we approached economic development, you know, you got to believe in economic development. jobs are important. you know, you could do a lot of of things in the community. you can build great parks, you can build 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 community. so your focus has to be on job development. there are two ways of looking at jobs one is retention and recruitment. most of us have a tendency, me

included, what's the next business i'm going to bring to town? but 80% of the new jobs in the new communities are going to come from your community right now so you ought to focus on those. so we did a lot in the permit apartment. permitting apartments are hard but we did a lot to work on their structural issues in permitting departments. their attitude al developments. i had a 7:30 meeting once a quarter in my office with anybody who has complained about the permitting department since i've been mayor. so everybody is invited. now, the first couple meetings that we had i would tell you it was standing room only. it was half this size standing room only and mad jer than hornets and i had my staff around me and somebody would scream at me, what about that? what about that? well, and so we worked at it. it was hard because there's union issues involved. there's attitudal issues involved there's structural issues involved.

and we got to the point where the last one we had maybe five or six people they were -- most of them were representative of the various contractors who have come to thank us of turning our permitting department around. so you have to make it easy -- not easy, yeah, make it easy for people to do business in the community but they still have to follow the rules and you make it easy and you can still make them build beautiful buildings and have parkland and cultural amenities and all that sort of stuff and most are glad to do that they don't want to waste 6 months of time to get through the process when they're doing it. so you try to work with the businesses that you got and then -- and then you also try to recruit businesses as well. and we do. we recruited a lot. especially in the high-tech area. florida historically has had the construction industry. we've had agricultural industry. we had the tourism industry. we've had the military industry. but we need to diversify. when the nation has gone through this recession, we've really gone through this recession because of our construction industry and our dependence on

it. we're working on r & d and we brought sri to our community. as a matter of fact, what i'm doing now i'm working with the university of south florida and i'm head of the videotaping department is there and our job to try to put r & d companies and partnerships together with the university. important to do. so we do that. we also worked on our downtown. anybody that went to downtown st. pete 15 years ago and today, they would see john avalon a good friend of mine who is here today, he's kind of walked with us during this whole process. and you'll see. it's a remarkable different place than it was. sidewalk cafes, cultural amenities. we're very focused on the cultural. we set out to become the number 1 cultural center of the state of florida. everybody kind of snickers when we said that 10 years ago and then last year living magazine ranked us the number 1 city culturally in america for under 500,000 people because of things like the new dali museum, the

new salvador dali museum. the orchestra coming to town. we brought the grand prix to indy. the indianapolis 500 is still the best irl race in the country but even tony george has said the honda grand prix of st. petersburg is behind the indy 500. i'm going to close with midtown. and we focused on the poorest part of our community with probably the most effort, certainly during my first term and into my second term as well. why do you do that? why do you focus on the poorest parts of the country. when i ran for mayor, people said, why should i put my money into that part of the town? not everybody said, people said that. and i said you should do it for two reasons. number 1, you do it -- you do it because it's the right thing to do morally. because there are children that are growing up in this part of

our community that you would not want to have your children grow up in that environment. you would not. that's not the children's fault. they are growing up in environments they should not agree up. in st. petersburg or anywhere. we need to work on that. we need to work towards changing that and some people would buy into that and so i said there's a second reason too. and the second reason is it's better for you. because if right now we are pouring a disproportionate amount of money to public safety and social services into this part of our community and we're not getting any tax revenues from it. and so if we could flip it, we would have less services and we would give more revenues out so it will be better for you. and i'll tell you between those two points we had great unanimity of our city focusing in on that. the book talks at length of midtown to turn it around but i will tell you that i'm a conservative republican. i admit that. and i ran for re-election against the chairman of the democratic party of pinellas

county when i ran in 2005. and we won 90% of the vote in the midtown community during that re-election. that will tell you that they believed we turned that part of the community in a different direction. it's important to do. you cannot do -- you can't do the rest of your city if it's imbalanced. if you are atrying to do downtown or do jobs or help your neighborhoods or whatever and part of your community is lagging way behind it's imblank and you're not going to be able to advance it forward. you got to change it. thank you so much for having me and i look forward to your questions. [applause] >> folks, we're going to turn it over to some q & a. i'd just like to remind everyone, the question always ends in a question mark. and please wait for the mic to come around but i'm going to take a moderator's prerogative and mr. mayor, we'll bring you up here. you mentioned when you were talking and articulating, when

you talk about the articulation of a vision and recruiting others to be a part of that, you had touched on public employee union. could you talk a bit about how you brought some of those unions perhaps on board? and if you were unable to do so and especially now when so many elected officials are -- >> you know, for the most part the -- in our case we had five union bargaining groups and we had three -- i thought we had six bargaining groups and four unions in our city so we were dealing with that a lot. police, fire, and the blue and white collar unions that you had to work with. i'm not going to say that's an easy process to go through. it's a difficult process to go through. the motivations and this is not a criticism, their objective is to improve the benefits of their -- the folks they

represent. and while you certainly care about 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 -- that's the objective of the city. the objective of the city is to improve the quality of the life of the people who live in the cities. that medium you have to have good services and that means you have to keep taxes at a minimum or it's going to be very hard to move it forward. it certainly means you have to be able to balance your budget and keep your budget moving forward and sometimes that's going to be contrary to the unions. so sometimes we're able to put union agreements together. sometimes we went to impasse. so it works both ways. i think you have to always remember the job of the city is to improve the quality of the life of the people who live there. [inaudible] >> where were the cuts made that enabled you to balance the budget and you described a lot of things that cost money but there must have been some things, some initiatives that

involved cutting to enable you to put this package together? >> sure. the majority of cuts were personnel. you know, if you take an average employee with benefits and costs and you multiply that times 300, which was the number that we ultimately -- positions that we reduced, that's where the dollar amount that it came from. now, what were they doing would be really the question. and did what they were doing cause you to impact services? about half of the position reductions were management professional and supervisor. so the other half would have been line oriented. so we did not go in -- you know, there's a response that you can get sometimes. i'm not going to say anybody that worked for me ever did and that's the response. when you're the president and you have the department of interior reduce their budget for 1%. they announce they are closing 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. well, we tried not to do that. i'll tell you exactly the process. i would -- i would ask every department to come back with 5, 7, 9% cuts, sometimes it was 3, 5, 7. sometimes it was 5, 7, 9 depending on the budget area and then i would have my cabinet -- i would give them instructions led by our first deputy mayor with instructions i want you to go through those cuts, identify the ones that had the least impact on services to the community. first of all, i don't want to cut any police positions. beyond that, the least impact on services. and that means not closing down libraries and facilities like that. and i want the cabinet to go through without me to give me their suggestion and then i would go through that list and i would then circle the ones that i know politically things i want

to do, for whatever reason, because it could impact the services and it would have a big response on the community. and i would circle those and i would send them back to the cabinet and i said say, you got a new number 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 concept. that means that everybody is operating at the same efficiency level, which is not true. the trouble is when you're mayor and you have 3,000 people, it's very hard for you to get in every budget and every detail. it's very hard so you have to have a process in place to address it. that's the way we addressed the process. and i will tell you while we did cut -- we had -- we had kind of a bell-shaped term. i started with the end of a dot.com crash and we had the great recession in '08 and '09 where we bottomed out on and leveled that we were able to

reduce tax rates. now i will also say we did not have zero budgets or reduced budgets. one thing i had to do is increase police pay. and the reason i had to do it is because the city across the bay and tampa was hiring away my police officers as was the pinellas sheriff during the middle of 2000's because we were not paying enough and during the recession it was hard to get police officers and we had to increase it to become competitive and that put a burden on my budget that we had to deal with in other ways. yes. >> mayor, did you have any successes in doing things that you were doing before but doing them smarter? in terms of repairing streets and changing rules and regulations that allowed you just to be more efficient? >> golly, i think there are probably a lot of categories like that. i think -- i think -- i think if you force a process in place --

well, let me just answer it directly. yes, probably the biggest thing we did was invested heavily in computer technology and we went heavily online for our complaint services and for our response services. so you could go online within my third year in office you could go online and say my sidewalk's broken. here's the address. you would get a number assigned to you online without a person being intervening and then you could go track how your sidewalk was repaired or your pothole or drug deal around the corner or whatever you were complaining about it. we made it much more mechanized and we did it with police reporting, computerization across-the-board and we were careful how we did it because a computer convergence as a lawyer i can tell you i've seen them -- they can mess you up pretty badly but we did okay. and at the end of the day i think that helped us save a lot functionally. but i also think that the way you approach its structurally your budget-cutting drives that. because if the department heads are looking at having to cut, 3, 5, 7.

they know their department better than i ever will. they are then to look at their individual force and say how am i going to do that without impacting services? some are cooperative and some are not but you make changes. i think you have to push that decision down to the people that know how to do it. >> if you could mention your name as well. >> steve staphas from blue college. are you doing anything in privatization, public/private partnerships. could you elaborate on that. >> i have a whole -- one of the last chapters, about a third of it talk about private/public partnerships. we did some privatizations. for instance, all of our nursery function -- plants nurseries and it enabled us to actually get a new park as well. we provided the people in the community that had nurseries, got jobs and we did that with a management of our theater, management of some other facilities so we did.

we did a huge amount of public/private partnerships. our school program is a good example of that. we recruited 100 corporate partners to come in and work in our public schools. so every public school in the city had one or two partners and so those partners would -- they'd provide mentors, they'd provide tutors. they'd actually sit down with the principal and provide strategic help and sometimes money with things that the schools needed -- one time a lawnmower. it could be a lawnmower. so whatever it was, the corporation would come in. they were a big part of our turn-around. our midtown effort relied heavily -- we had partners come in to help with our -- we developed a big grocery store in the heart of our community which wind up being a big turn-around for it. we had to come in every step of the way. everything we did -- one company came in and spent, i think, about a half a million dollars on sound equipment for a new performing arts theater in the inner city that we put in.

so we recruited businesses to be partners with us really across-the-board. we did some actual direct privatization through -- actually i like governor -- mayor goldsmith's term of marketization where you're trying to have competitive markets into the business services. >> even though you didn't have direct control of the schools, schools are still in your top 5 list. >> they are. >> how did you help the schools improve without having -- >> thank you for asking the question. i was hoping somebody would. [laughter] >> we did a lot in the schools. we supported a mentoring program. it was actually started by actually a college scholarship program. a program that was started by the pinellas college foundation doorways. and the doorways program tells a child in a free or reduced school, okay, so it's a low-incomed child.

if you do certain things and if you maintain at least a c average starting in sixth grade. if you maintain a c average, if your attendance and conduct is good, if you are drug-free and crime-free, by the time you get to twelfth grade you have a four-year college scholarship waiting for you. it's an incredible -- i call it an incentive for a good to stay good. how did you finance it? it cost for a prepaid tuition scholarship for our sixth grade. i don't know what it is. let's say it cost $14,000. so the state has a program in florida called spades that if you buy a scholarship for a free and lunched child, they'll pay for half of it. so there's 7,000. and then i worked a deal with our local education foundation which is businesses in our community and i said how about if i raise 3500 will you match it? 3500? and they said yes and i worked a deal with a private businessman in town and i said if i raise

1750 will you give me 1750 and he said yes. so then i could go to you and i said will you give me 1750, i'll send a kid to college for four years. and then i flipped -- it doubled, doubled and doubled. and we were able to provide the scholarships that way. we ran it all through the private foundation and did not use city money to fund them and at the end of the day, we keep statistics, everything i do we keep statistics. so what is the average graduation rate for a low-incomed free and reduced child in florida? i've never been able to get a good statistic. i bet it's under 50%. the total was like 64% at one point. our kids -- by the time i left office, we had had three classes of kids that started in sixth grade. all three classes graduated at a rate of 93% from the public schools so if you can do that with the children with free and reduced lunch, that's how you

affect your crime rate in the long term and you impact your overall environment of your community. so we gave out 1,000 of those scholarships while there i was. and we did the mentoring and we trained 1200 mentors to mentor the kids that were identified by the teachers that were in need of mentors. a top apple word. it's incentive based so we grade our schools in florida but we don't give the principals any incentive to do good. i know the state is working on that right now. so what we did is we provided -- we created a top apple award. so if you were a principal of a school that either increased a letter grade from a b to an a or a d to a c or an f to a d or stayed an apple you became a top apple school and if you were it the principal of the top apple school we brought you to the ceremony on tv, city council, school board, legislative delegation, everybody attended it.

we then gave you a little marble apple with your name inscribed on it and a big banner which all the schools are hanging in their schools today. 2007 mayor's top apple award winner and we gave you a gift basket and we gave you dinner for two at the columbia restaurant which is a nice restaurant downtown and we gave you a weekend on a beach and we gave you a 2,500 cash bonus and all privately raised donations to do. it became an incentive for the principal. i've had principals they put their application to move to the suburbs when that came about and they decided to stay in the urban schools so you're providing an incentive. and i know we're about out of time so we did a lot of different things and the rest of them are in the book. are we done? >> we have time for one more very quick question. >> how about a long answer -- [laughter] >> okay.

i could do that. >> this is a bunch of questions and i like them all at once. what is the population of st. petersburg and the ethnic background? did you have any corruption issues? and did you run for re-election or are you term-limited? >> i'll answer the third one. i ran for re-election. i served my first term because we changed the charter. it was a long term, it was four years and nine months. and my second term is four years and i was limited to two terms. so i served the complete almost nine years. my term ended last year, 2010. the corruption issue -- if you're talking about governmental corruption, i mean, we had minor employee issues but never -- no significant issues when i took office. now, i think -- i was going to say the newspaper always thinks everybody is corrupt in general we did not have corruption issues within the city. and what was the third question? 250,000. ethnic, it's about 20%

african-american. it's got under 8%, let's say, eastern european, also another maybe 3, 4, 5% and we'll find out more with the new census, a good size southeast asian population and hispanic population as well. pretty mixed. >> let's have another round of applause. [applause] >> is there a nonfiction author or book you'd like to see featured on booktv? send us an email at booktv.org. or tweet us at booktv@c-span.org. >> cynthia stewart was a mother in ohio, a small town who was a mirror of one child of an eight-year-old daughter nora. she lived with her partner in a little farmhouse outside of town. cynthia was a passionate photographer and she become a passionate photographer after

her daughter had been born. and she decided to document her daughter's life in great detail and she rel wished doing that and she took pictures of nora all the time. by the time nora was 8 she had taken 35,000 photographs of nora. these are not digital. these are rolls of film developed at discount drug martz processing lab. all of those pictures were numbered and filed and archived in cardboard boxes in her dining room stacked up on her dining room wall and she wanted some day to put together a book. but she was going to have a lot to choose from. on july the 6th, 1999, cynthia scooped up 11 rolls of developed film and took them to the discount drug mart to have them developed. and a few days later, 10 of those rolls came back but one did not. cynthia assumed that roll had been lost in the lab and she began calling the lab to see if they could track it down. it really upset her really to lose a photograph.

she knew some of those photographs had pictures of her daughter in the bathtub but it didn't dawned her and she had taken pictures of nora naked and most of those had been developed at the discount drug mart lab. a few weeks website by and on august the 11th the police knocked on her door. and they said they had her pictures down at the station and she was relieved. she thought they had found her pictures but they said there are serious questions about those pictures, ma'am and we want you to come down to the station to talk about them. she was completely willing to go 'cause she thought there was nothing to hide and she could explain those photographs and she invited the police into her house and she pointed out these boxes of photographs and explained what she did and she was a photographer. and they didn't ask to see the photographs. they said we want you to come to the station. when she consulted david he insisted they get a lawyer before they go to the station and so they informed the police that's what they would do and the police left. the next day they met with a

lawyer, amy wertz who was a specialist in family law. and cynthia explained to her -- what she thought was on the roll and the photographs she had taken in the bathtub. and amy listened and said, you know, i think what's likely to happen in this case is if the police are concerned about these photographs enough they might pass them along to the prosecutor. if the prosecutor is concerned enough he'll pass them along to children's services and if children's services is concerned they'll send on social worker at your house and find nora at school and find out what the intent of the photographs were. what did you intend to do. so she had cynthia write-up a affidavit in which she explained the photographs. and they had it notarized and submitted to the police. six weeks went by and in that six weeks, the police never returned to the house. there was never a search warrant to ask to see the photographs.

they never asked any other questions of the family. the county prosecutor did not contact the lawyer and ask further questions about the client. and children's services never showed up. so everyone assumed this little incident was over. that everything had been taken over. on september the 28th, two sheriff's deputies came to the door and arrested cynthia. and took her to the county jail and david had to bail her out by putting a $20,000 lien on their house. cynthia was arrested on two felony charges. the first felony charge was a law -- ohio law said you cannot take a photograph of a naked child. i saw someone's eyes go like this because that would make most of us felons, right? [laughter] >> fortunately, the law had been constrained by this ohio supreme

court and the u.s. supreme court to cases where there was a lewd exhibition or a graphic focus on the genitals. so nudity alone was no longer going to be the standard by which the photographs would be judged pornographic. there had to be a lewd exhibition or graphic focus on the genitals. the second law that she was indicted under was a law that prohibits the photographing of a child in a sexual performance. the photographs that cynthia had taken that day was after she and nora had been to a photo exhibit at a local art gallery and there was one photograph waif woman in a bathtub rising up mysteriously out of the tab and nora asked so they could replicate it and they filled the bathtub with bubble bath and nora had risen up mysteriously from the water and cynthia had taken photographs but once the water had run out cynthia -- continued taking some photographs. and she took a series of four in which norria was rinsing off

with a shower sprayer. she was standing up rinsing off with a shower spray in her hand, her head and neck and in the third photograph the water was streaming toward her genital area which was obscured by the water. the shower sprayer was not touching her she looked very matter of fact and then the last photograph of the sequence was the same thing with her bottom. it was those last two photographs that the prosecutor alleged was a child in a sexual act, performing a second act so that was the second felony charge. when this hit the newspapers, and it did big time, not only in the little town but beyond the region in the cleveland late night news with cynthia mug shot's with these allegations. you could imagine the town that was really shocked. it was a family that was beloved in the town and a well-known family. cynthia was a school bus driver. nora was a very gifted, bright,

lovely child and everyone was completely stunned. my son was 8 years old. he was a good friend of nora's and so there was this personal connection to a mother who was alleged to do something so horrific and yet she was the mother of my son's close friend. >> you can watch this and other programs on line at booktv.org. up next, elizabeth gould and paul fitzgerald take a critical look at u.s. policy towards afghanistan and pakistan and discuss the fight for control of the border region between the pastuns and punjabis. from the san francisco book store, this is about an hour. >> we are very delighted, very, very honored to representing paul fitzgerald and elizabeth gould. they are a husband and wife team since 1977. journalists, documentary