>> what can the students do? [speaking in native tongue] [laughter] [applause] >> translator: the best thing that is student can do is study well and go back to iran. [laughter] >> booktv has over 100,000 twitter followers. be a part of the excitement. follow booktv on twitter to get news, scheduling updates, author information, and talk directly with authors during our live programming. twitter.com/booktv.

>> this one came out, and they exhausted their inventory of it, and nobody was back as far as i know. >> oh, okay. >> they're doing an electronic version of that, i don't know. >> sure. >> it's a transitional time period for the book. the nature of the book is changing in our culture, and we are -- here we're committed to the printed word. we have not engaged in selling the e-books or electronic things at all. we like to think that there's probably going to be a happy medium in years to come, but there will still be a need and a demand for the bound and printed book as well as the convenience

and so forth of the e-book. we -- it may be jeep rational, but there's just something about having a book in your hand. it's not going to change. that book that i bought, that cash register that day, that i have in my hands right now, those will be the same words. nobody can come in and change them or erase them when i sign on or e leaveuate any of -- alleviate any of it which for a lot of people makes a difference when they think about it. >> we've been here since 1933. it was 1933 that my wife's grandparents, john and mary has haslam opened this store and started by selling used magazines and hand crafts made by the family special idahoing in specializing in paper flowers

and you could represent any book for two cents a day. they did fairly well into the beginning of world war ii at which time they took an opportunity to expand and relocate to central avenue, and they enjoyed a boom after the war, immediately after the war, my father-in-law charles haslam took a job with jc penny and took an opportunity to accept his folk's invitation to join the business, and he did the expanding into the new books and did the same for my wife and i. in 1973, i was stationed at the pentagon and accepted an invitation to join the family business. we expanded it sense that time into the size that you see now,

and engaged in both in new book selling and iced book sell -- used book selling. it was a unique arrangement in a city and town this size. it was at that juncture you started to see the beginning of the chains and after a decade or so, the beginning of the superstores. there's certainly a flatness if not a lessening in sales of books nationally. whether it's the economic time or the change in the culture, i'm inclined to think it's both, but it's cyclical in nature, and it will change just like before. i think the interesting part is the fact that there are cycles, and it's looking at a time in which there wasn't proliferation of the large stores which may be a boom for the independents.

>> now on booktv, rick baker provides his thoughts on the revitallyization of cities. this is just under an hour. >> i'm michael allegretti, the newly appointed directer of the center, and it's truly an honor to be with you one week into the job, and what a way to kick things off. it's great to be with everyone. we've been a national leader in advancing the ideas of greater economic independence and choice and individual responsibility. we have our roots, as you all know, in cities. having led the movements from welfare to work and from broken windows to safer cities.

during the coming weeks, you'll be hearing a lot about our new center for state and local leadership whether it's examining public employees and their relationships with the public governments through which they work, their pension systems, their retiree health benefits or talking new public safety strategies, working on prisoner reentry in places like newark, new jersey, or imgrant assimilation into our cities and states, the manhattan institute and this center is at the core of the policy directs taking place. i urning -- urge you to visit our website to share it with people and also to visit a new site we put up recently called publicsectorinc.org focusing on the pension reform issue and it's a go-to site for lawmakers

all around the country, and hopefully it will be for you as well. as mayors and governors around the country battle, and i use the word "battle" because that's what it's turned into. they talk budget gaps while delivering services. the need for bold leadership is unquestion baling. the honorable rick baker turned this into a hub of vitality and civic pride. as you hear more from stephen goldsmith, you'll know more what he did there, and the book, "seamless city" is on sale, and i encourage you to go look at that. first, it's the center's civic innovation, now a project on the leadership, the honorable

stephen goldsmith. if there was anyone who embodied selfless innovative policymaking, that's stephen goldsmith. he's currently the deputy mayor for operations here in new york. he has a very simple mandate by mayor bloomberg, create a 21st century government that is smaller and more effective. good luck with that. [laughter] while mayor of indianapolis from 1992 to 1999, deputy mayor goldsmith, has a remarkable playbook from which to work and share with us today and share with rick baker and others. under his leadership, entire urban neighborhoods of indianapolis were revitalized. it's over $400 million recognized and reinvested into the city and crime dropped. what's remarkable is real

authority was diffused locally to community groups, a true testament to the power of local leadership. his power in indianapolis led him to be

>> i always like toe appear at manhattan events because the introductions make me feel good about myself. [laughter] thank you so much. i wonder if you raised me as a professor if it would be the same as it were today. i'm not sure. [laughter] i'm a little under the weather today, pardon my voice. it's great to introduce my friend rick. i read the promotion material about what he did to st. petersberg. i'm aware of it -- where are

you? it feels like i'm reading my own stuff. it's exciting. all right, rick, way to go. i'll say a few things by way of introduction. you're here to see rick. the path of his book is the path i took. it was promoted by manhattan and 21st century city which you were kind enough to assert you at least read at one point in time, and it's been great to kind of watch the story of cities over the last 20 years. i began as mayor of indianapolis as an explicit mayor and centers of pathology could be great places to celebrate diversity and assets and come back again and this was a period of time where several of us coming in the early 1990s took cities with a set of problems and apply a set of principles to produce really good results.

to some extent we did that. what i noticed about the book is particularly dear to my heart. cities are diverse places, and if you apply conservative principles, you create opportunities for all of your communities and neighborhoods. it's that creation of opportunity in a seamless city that's particularly important. the other thing i saw in rick's book that i thought was fascinating, and i wish it were more well-recognized across the country is you can cut costs and taxes and increase the quality of services concurrently. we are in a debate about how much pain to inflict on the citizens to right size the budget. that's really in many cases a false choice. the city in st. petersberg flourished and crime dropped and urban neighborhoods responded and the conservative republicans did well in a minority community which one doesn't exbt and he

put that together and here to tell you about it all is mr. 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 just be in new york. i love new york city, but to be able to be involved with the manhattan institute, and of course to launch a book is exciting. what i'm excited about is steve goldsmith will be here. he may not fully recognize he's one of my favorite of running for mayor in 2000, i wanted to learn about what other cities were doing. some of you gave me a copy of the book, "21st century city," and i read it, and i thought this looks like a good way to do it. i wonder if there's more. i looked in the binder and it was supported and published by

manhattan institute. what's manhattan institute in this was before we were as good at e-mail as now, but he started sending me guides and the entrepreneurial city which mayor goldsmith led, and it's about a 100-page book, and i took three days to go through it because the first part of the book talked about, it was written by great mayors on different issues they had been involved with whether it was public safety or economic development or neighborhoods, whatever, and then in the back of it there was a resource guide of each chapter. i'm on the -- he probably doesn't know this, but i was on the phone with his budget director in indianapolis saying how did you do this? i called people around the country, so it was a great opportunity for me to learn, and the reason he recognized the stuff in my book is because i stole most of it from him. [laughter] i can't, you know, overstate how

important it is to have groups like the manhattan institute that are out there doing research, and deseminating it to people who are leading our cities and states around the country because you need to have that in order to progress. ideas -- jeb bush is a good friend of mine. he says ideas are powerful things. that is so true. somebody has to implement the ideas, believe them enough to attack them and go after them, but you have to have the ideas, so i thank you, howard, and everybody at manhattan institute, and steve, thank you so much for coming today. i appreciate that. my book -- well, first, i have to introduce my family. my mother, irene, is here today, still my great mentor, and my family who shared this adventure with me is here. my wife joyce and son, jacob,

and my daughter. please welcome them. [applause] >> what is a seamless city? a seamless city is a place where it's an aspiration, a place where if you live in, you don't go from one part of the town to another part and cross a seam. that seam could be a railroad or a neighborhood line or a road, and you wind upcoming into a different place, a place you're not very comfortable, you don't want to be. you feel the need to reach over and lock your door because it doesn't seem safe and there's broken windows and boarded up buildings. it doesn't seem to be right, and you just don't want to be there. too many of our cities are like that. not all parts of the city are the same. there's some neighborhoods that have large houses and big lots. that's okay. there's other parts with apartment complexes and that's

okay too, but there's something we should have in all neighborhoods. there should be places where children can grow up safely, where they feel comfortable walking next door and seeing their friend down the street. where there are the infrastructure looking okay, it's the streets and the sidewalks. they look okay. where there are not drug dealers hanging on the street corner or prostitutes down the street. that's not how you and i want our children to grow up. i know we don't want any of our children to grow up in places like that. they should have a grocery store down the street. they should have a bank and barbers and the amenities they need and every child should have the opportunity, no guarantee of results in america, but they should have opportunities to grow up in a place and to be able to believe in the same dream that you and i believe in and that we try to instill in our children. that's a seamless city. that's what the book is about. it's hard to get to that, but we

have to work at it, but it's important to get towards it because america is only going to be as great as its urban centers are. mayor goldsmith helped lead this period of reurbanization of cities. we lost ground in the cities, but he led the effort, and i think that effort is still underway to build back the cities and make them great places again so we can raise our families to be attracted to our cities. that's what we want to try to do, and i think it's important for our country. 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 to america, and at the same time, it provides a look into the life of a large city. as mayor goldsmith said not as

large or new york or chicago. st. pete, for those who are not familiar, in the last census it was the 68th largest. it's a big enough city to provide some lessons, but frankly a smaller city where you can get your arms around the challenges quicker if you apply ideas to make it work. the second part of the city is the life of the mayor a little bit because, because there's challenges that you have, and there's opportunityings you have, and a lot of people don't quite see the day-to-day lave. i know mayor goldsmith can testify to that, but how does it impact your family? how does your faith interplay? i talk about that in the book. i know i received criticism for that. i'm okay with that. i think faith is a big part of all of us and important to see how it plays out. we talk about those things. it comes from the perspective

of, of course, my experience which is in st. petersberg, but also from the perspective of a mayor because the mayor is the leader of the city. mayor's the one who needs to identify the path to take, and so i talk a lot about the job of a mayor, and the job of a mayor, in my mind, is three things. it's first you run the business of the city, it's a big organization. both cities, major cities have hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes billions of dollars in the budget, lots of different departments. our city has 34 departments. you do everything from police, fire, suer, sanitation, traffic, and lots of other things. the -- but 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 in office after three months, i noticed i

was not getting any reports, and so i -- i take that back. i got the crime statistics and the rainfall level. i had run an offer before i came to the city, and i thought, shouldn't we be getting reports? they said, no, you don't really get reports. 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 awhile to do this. we said, okay, how is the water department, are we serving the city better this year than last year? of course they all said yes. i said how can we tell and know? how can i demonstrate that to the community that we're doing this? it became a remarkable discussion among us and among the community of what do we want to know? at the end of the day, there was

160 performance measures. many cities have done this, but i happen to like ours. we wanted it to be a small enough number to be meaningful. some cities have thousands. thousands is too many. it doesn't help you. you want to have enough where you get a good feel for it. we did it all in graph form, similar graph form with historic basis. for instance, you can tell -- i can fell you it took about 7.2 minutes to respond to a priority call police call when i was mayor. that's important to know. when i left, it was 5.6 minutes. if you wait for that call, that's an important thing. performance measures were designed not to just tell the mayor what's going on, but the community too. we could tell how long it took to fix a sidewalk. what took the longest? what's the biggest complaint to the mayor's office? i would have thought it was crime or traffic or speeding or something like that. it was sidewalk repair.

i said, how long does it take to fix a sidewalk? nobody knew. it took 30 months to fix a sidewalk. two and a half years. i thought maybe that's why it's the number one complaint. [laughter] we went, and put a strike team together. that was the easy part. now it takes about a week to fix a sidewalk, five or six days. we did that with potholes and how long it takes to fix traffic lights. we measured the schools too. thanks to jeb bush, we measure the schools to see how they grow based on student achievement scores. we started measuring that. it's on the city score card as well. the tax rates, and one of the driving forces as mayor goldsmith said in the city was to reduce tax rates. we reduced five of the might be budgets, the other four were light -- flat, and we grew 20%

during that period of time. we grew service levels that required us to reduce the government size. the government -- we reduce the number of employees by 10% in the city, not an easy thing to do, but yet increased the number of police officers and the service levels went up. we did it in such a way not to harm the individual. we would freeze budgets. by the last three years there was the recession, and we just froze our hiring all the time, and so we were very judicious in who we hired, and when we eliminated positions, we moved people around so we tried to eliminate empty position so the least amount of people lost their jobs, some did, but not that much compared to the total reduction in the size of government. that's the important thing. running the city is your job. the second part is dealing with crisis. some are natural madely hurricanes, some are manmade like crime and others are media

made. you have to deal with all three. you are constantly addressing the crisis as they come about as the major e-your of the city to keep the city going. in 2004, we had four hurricanes targeted and the eye going through st. petersberg at one time. the emergency center was activated virtually the whole three month period of time, and you deal with those issues, lots of them, and we talk about the crisis you go through in the book as well, and so that's the second part of the job. the third part of the job is advancing your vision for the city. now, it's interesting because that's why you run. you run because you want to do something and you have a plan, a thought, and you want to make the city better, and yet quite often a mayor gets bogged down in doing the issues, the budget issues are hard or dealing with the crisis as they come. you can get so bogged down you

never get to the point of advancing your vision or get stopped in the middle. you have to be focused and your organization has to be focused to continue that forward momentum in advancing your vision while dealing with the crisis and business going forward. in our case, we had a five-point plan, the strategic plan for the city to advance division, and i think every one needs a mission. it was simple, it was to build the best city in america. we wanted st. petersberg to be the best city in america. some say that's broad. you can really do that? my city is better than yours. 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 be the fourth best city in florida? [laughter] nobody will follow you. people follow excellence. what you find is when you set

out a bold agenda, people are drawn to it. they want -- resources come to it. businesses say how can we help? individuals start coming forward and other people hear it and say i want to be a part of that. the large research company, a big group, we were recruiting them to florida. he met with me and said, we'll thinking about doing this here, here, and here. what do you have to offer? i said, what do you have to offer? how will you help build us the best city in america? he says in his book, that's what got him to come to florida. he wanted to be a part of the mission. you do it by improving the quality of life of people who live in the city every single day. every day everybody in your organization, in the city, and not just the government, but the

businesses of the civic organizations and the faith organizations, everybody involved in this enterprise should come in with the idea how do we build and make the quality of life better for people who live here? if everything you think bullet doing, you go through that filter and say does this make the quality of life better for the folks here or whatever city you live in? if the answer is yes, do it. if the answer is no, don't do it even if everyone wants you to do it. run it through the filter. that was the mission, and there's five ways to get there. improve public safety, number two, improve the neighborhoods, number three is improving the schools which was a radical idea when i ran. number four is economic development, and the economic development has to be across the board. number five is improving city services and operations which is the business of the city.

those were the five components. identify your five strategies. i promise you ever manager in our government could tell you the five principles any time they were asked. i promise you that. everybody understood that was our objective. we did a lot of things with public safety that mayor goldsmith and others talked about. we tried to copy things they did and tried to add some of our own towards making it safer. we had a hard, hard focus on drug enforcement. drugs are the poisen of america, the absolute poisen of america, at 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 with prostitution. i believe that impacted our prostitution issue by drug

treatment and job training for the women that were prostitutes, so you hit the drug issue, you -- then you hit all the issues, and you just have to be very aggressive and focused on all of it, but recognize what you do in the other areas impact crime as well. what you do in schools impacts crime. what you do in neighborhoods impacts your crime and what you do in the most poverty areas impacts the crime as well. you have to do it all. as running for mayor, i had a special focus in the poorest part of the community. we called it midtown. we wanted to lift midtown. the people who were not for me said 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 an aggressive law enforcement, but you need a

change in environment. that's not a liberal philosophy, by the way, just a real philosophy that you go after the crime and have strong law enforcement and also work on getting kids educated and working on changing the environment in some of the poorest areas which we did. public safety is number one. number two is neighborhoods an the public safety is number one. all the others are in no particular order. public safety is number one. neighborhoods, we improved the areas. we built dog parks. i like to tell the story of my first year. we had two openings in a row. one was a library, and the other was a dog park, and the library there was over $3 million library we were building, and we had a ground breaking for it and it was not a big crowd, but next. the next day we opened up our dog park. it cost $9,000 to build.

i had 200 people show up for it. they absolutely, the dogs tore up the grass, so it was so overrun that we -- i'm thinking they wanted the people out of their neighborhoods, and i thought these dog parks are popular and cheap. i want to get reelected. i'll build a lot of them. we built the city. it's a quality of life issue. it seems small, but it's big. it's a quality of life issue. bicycle path systems, we have the largest system in the united states. seems like a small thing, but it's a big thing. we went from being rated the number one main street in the country in 2000 and by 2008 i was invited to the conference as the best bike around city in the country because of our sidewalks and because of our bicycle path system and other safety issues put in place. it seems small, it's not. quality of life is a big thing.

we have a playground policy. 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 walk with your child to a playground from your house less than a half mile, you feel differently about your neighborhood. you know your neighborhoods and feel good about the whole thing. seems small, it's a big thing. there's two water slides at the swimming pools and increased attendance by 40% in one summer. my children were 4 and 5 at the time, they told me what to do, parks, water slides, and dog parks. they seem small, but are not. the first designated green city in florida by the way. it's not a feel-good thing, but a lead certification for cities, so it was a serious thing we went through. it's based on sound strategy. we did not do something unless we looked at the pay back period for whatever we are doing.

when we put led traffic lights in the city, it cost $450,000 to do. but i saved $150,000 in the light costs a year. that's a 33% return. anybody should do that, anybody should do that. with every energy savings thing, we looked at the pay back. if the pay back was 12 years or less with an 8% return, we did it. we were the first designated green city in the state. quickly, the schools are -- we had an aggressive effort. we don't run our schools. most cities have separately elected school boards to run the schools. we need to help the schools. if you don't help them, people don't move into your neighborhoods. if you don't help the schools, no businesses come to your community. be involved in your schools. we are focused on our schools and there's a series of programs we did. if you have a question, we have time for questions afterwords.

but we wound up going from jeb bush starting the program of grading our schools, a, b, c, d, f and we had 0a elementary schools to 16 out of 27 schools with a's and an increase on the number of a and b schools and we passed the suburbs in some cases which is a hard, hard thing to do. focus on the schools, and i'd be glad to talk about it today if you'd like. fourth is economic development. i'll end with this. you know, when we approached economic development, you know, you have to believe in economic growthment jobs are important. you can do a lot of things in community. you can build great parks and libraries. if people don't have jobs, you don't advance the city. you have to have jobs in the community. your focus has to be on job development. there's who --

two ways of looking at jobs. one is retention and the other is recruitment. we have this tendency, me included to see what's the next business i'll bring to town. 80% of the new jobs in new communities next year come from the existing companies in your community right now. focus on those. we did a lot in the departments and those departments are hard, but did a lot to work on there. there's structural departments, and you have to work on both to get them back. we made a lot of progress. one of the ways we did it, i had a 7:30 meeting once a quarter in my office for anyone complaining about the permitting department since i was there. everybody was invited. the first meetings were standing room only, a room half this size, madder than hornets and everybody somebody would scream, and we worked at it.

it was hard. there's union issues involved. there's structural issues involved, but we got to the point where my last one we had was maybe five or six people, most were representatives of the various contractors who came to thank us for turning the permitting department around. you have to make it easy, well, not easy, yeah, easy for business, but they have to follow the rules. you can still have beautiful buildings and cultural amenities and all that stuff, and most want to do that, they just don't want to have to waste six months of time to get through the process. work with the businesses you got, and then you try to recruit businesses as well. we do. we recruited a lot in the high heck area. -- hi tech area. there's been the ark tech churm industry, tourism industry, military as an industry, but we need to diversify. right now when the nation has

gone through a recession, we have really gone through the recession because of the construction industry and our dependence on it. we had to diversity. we worked on research and development, soi was brought to the community, and now i work for the community of south florida and our job is to try to put research and development companies and partnerships together with the community. important to do. we did that generally and we also worked on downtown. anyone who went downtown 20 years ago and went today, would see john, a good friend of mien, he's here today. he walked with us through the whole process, and you'll see it's a remarkable different place than it was. sidewalk cafes, cultural amenities. we set out to be the number one cultural center of the state of florida. everybody snickered when we said that 10 years ago, and last year american living magazine ranked

us the number one city culturally in america for under 500,000 people because of the new dali museum and we brought the expansion of fine arts and the florida orchestra comes to town and others. the grand prix in town, and the indianapolis 500 is still the best race in the country, but even tony george said we are second behind indy. that's high comments for us down there. 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, and why do you do that? why focus on the poorest part of the community? when i ran for mayor people said why put my money in that part of the town? not everybody, but people say that. two reasons to do that.

number one, 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 chirp grow up in that environment. you would not. it's not the children's fault. they grow up in environments they should not grow up anywhere, and we need to work on that. we need to work towards changing that. some people bought into that, others did not. there's a second reason too. it's better for you. if right now we have a disproportion amount of money to social services into this community, and we are not getting tax revenues from it. if we flip it, there's less services and more revenues out so it's better for you. between those two points, we had great unanimity in the city and focusing on that. we talked about midtown and what we did to turn it around, but i'm a conservative republican,

and i ran for reelection against the chairman of a democratic party in the county. when i ran in 2005, and we won 90% of the vote in the midtown community during that reelection. that tells you that they believed we turned that part of the community in a different direction. it's important to do. you can't do the rest of your city justice. if you try to do downtown on jobs or help the neighborhoods or whatever, part of the community is lagging behind, you will have problems. you will not move forward. thank you so much for having me. i look forward to your questions. [applause] >> folks, now we're turn over to q&a. i want to remind you that a question always ends in a -- question mark. [laughter] the mic will come around. i'll ask a quick question, and

mr. mayor, we'll bring you up here. you mentioned when talking in the third job of the mayor being the articulation of a vision for your city in recruiting others to be a part of that. you had touched on public employee unions. could you talk a bit about how you brought those unions perhaps on board, and if you were unable to do so, how you dealt with that especially right now when so many elected officials are facing that? >> well, you know, for the most part in our case we had five union bargaining groups, and we had three -- no, we had six bargaining groups and four unions in the city. we dealt with that a lot, police, fire, and the blue and white collar unions you had to work it. it's, you know, i'm not going to say that 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 the folks they represent, and while you certainly care about employees of the city, i care deeply. i love them. i have many friends that are employees of the city, and throughout the city, every level of government, but that is not always the -- that's not the objective of the city. the objective of the city is to improve the quality of life of people who live in the city. that means you have to have good services and ma means you keep taxes at the minimum otherwise it's hard to move forward. you have to balance your budget in order to move forward. sometimes that's contrary to the union. sometimes we got agreements together; other times it was impasse. ic you have to -- i think you have to remember the job of the city is to improve the quality of life of the people who live there. >> we'll bring a mic around as we go. >> where were the cuts made to

enable you to balance the budget and you described a lot of things that cost money, but there must have been things, initiatives that involved cutting to enable you to put this package together. >> sure. the majority of cuts were personnel. if you take an average employee with benefits and costs and multiply that times 300, the number of positions we reduced, that's the dollar amount that it came from. what were they doing was the question and did what they were doing cause you to impact services? over -- about half of the position reductions were management professional and supervisory. 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 people who worked for me did that, but you can get this response. when you're the president and at

the department of interior reduces a budget by 1%, there's a press conference saying they're closing the smithsonian and some of the great parks across america because that's where the impacts will be and people scream about that. well, we tried not to do that. i'll tell you exactly the process i used. i would ask every department to come back with 5%-7% cuts. it depended on the budget year. they brought those in, 34 departments, and i would have my cabinet, give them instructions led by the first deputy mayor, with the instructions i want you to go through the cuts, identify the ones with the least impact on services to the community. first of all, i don't want to cut police positions. beyond that, the least impact on services. that means not closing down libraries and facilities like that. ..

you have 3000 people, it is hard for you to get into every detail, so you have to have a process in place. that is the way we address the process and i will tell you while we did cut -- we had kind of a bell shaped t.a.r.p.. i started with the end of the dotcom crash in 9/11 and the russian edition of all. if there are four good years in between and then we had the

great procession of 08 and 09 that we bottomed out on. but through that leveling of that, we were able to reduce tax rates. i will also say we did not have zero budgets or reduced budgets. one thing i had to do with increased police -- and the reason i had to do it was because the city across the bay in tampa was hiring away my police officers as was the analysis sheriff during the middle of 2000 because they were paying so much more and i was not competitive. before the recession was hard to get police officer so we have to increase it to become competitive so that put a burden on my budget. 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. >> i think there are probably a lot of categories like that. i think if you force a process in place -- let me just answer it directly. yes probably the biggest thing we did was invest heavily in computer technology and we went heavily on line for complaint services and response services so you could go on line. by my third year of office you could go on line and say my sidewalk is broken. here's the address. he would get a number assigned to on line and you then could go and track how your sidewalk repair was or the drug dealer around the corner whatever it was you were complaining about. we made it like mechanized and we did that with their police reporting and computerization across the board and we were careful in how we did it. a computer conversion as a lawyer i can tell you i have seen it, they they can mess you up pretty badly but we did okay. at the end of the day that helped to save a lot functionally.

but i also think the way you approach it structurally, your budget-cutting, if the department heads are looking at having to come at three, 57 they are then forced to look at their individual department and say how my going to do this without impacting services? some of them will in some will not and then you make changes, but you need to constantly -- i think you have to push that decision down to the people that know how to do it. >> if you could mention her name as well. >> steve from baruch college. did you do anything in the way of public-private there -- public-private partnerships? >> at the end of one of the last chapters i have about a third of it talks about public-private partnerships and we did some privatization. we privatized some operations for instance all of our nursery functions. nurseries in plants and that enabled us to get a new park is

well. we provided the people in the community that had nursery scott jobs and we did that with management of our theater, management of 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. every public school in the city had one or two private partners so those partners would provide mentors. they would provide tutors. they would provide strategic help for the principal and would sit down with the principal and sometimes would provide money for things the schools needed that -- one time it was a lawnmower. whatever it was the corporation, they were a big part of it. our midtown effort, we had partners come in to help with -- we developed a grocery store in the heart of our community which wound up being a big turnaround. we had to come in every step of

the way. everything we did, one company came in and spent a half a million dollars in 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 mayor goldsmith's termers marketization where you try to instill the competitive forces into the bidding process. >> even though you didn't have direct control of the schools, schools are still in your list. how did you help schools improve without having that? >> thank you for asking the question. i was hoping somebody would. we did a lot of the schools. we supported a mentoring program that was actually started by actually a college scholarship program by the education

foundation called doorways. that darwin's program a child in a free religious school, okay so a low income child, that if you do certain things, if you maintain at least a c average starting in the sixth grade, six to 12 grade if you maintain a c. average, if you attendance and conduct is good, if you are drug-free and crime free by the time you get to 12th grade, you have a four-year college scholarship waiting for you. it is an incredible -- it is a good incentive. how did you finance it? no city money. it cost for a prepaid tuition scholarship for a sixth-grader, let's say i don't know what it is now but let's say it costs $14,000. so the state has a program in florida that if you do it, you buy a scholarship for free and reduced lunch for a child they will pay for half of it so there are $7000. and i were to deal with our local education foundation and i

said if i raced 3500, imagine 3500 they said yes. then i worked to deal with a private businessman in town and said if i raced 17 -- $17.50 we give me 1700? then i said we'd give me $1750 i can send it kid to college for four years and then i flipped it doubled to double. we ran it 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 kept statistics. what was the average graduation rate from -- for low income child in florida? i have never been able to get the statistics but i will bet you it is under 50% but the total is 64% at one point. so our kids, by the time i left office we had had three classes of kids that this 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, that is how you can finance your projects and that if any impact your overall department of your community. we gave out 1000 of those scholarships while i was there. that was one program and is part of that we did a mentoring. we are the corporations come in and we train 1200 corporations to mentor kids in our public schools. it is in santa fe so we grade our schools in florida but we don't give the principals any incentive to do it and i know the state is working on that now so what we did is we provided, we created a top apple award so if you were a principal of the school that either increase the letter grade from a at the max on a or a d to a c orrin f to a

d or stated a, he became a top apple school and if you were the principal we brought you to the test ceremony on tv, city council school board and legislative delegation everybody attended and we gave you a marble apple. and we gave you a big dinner like in mca banner that all the schools are hanging in front of their schools today. 2007 mayor's top apple award winner. we then gave you a gift basket. we gave you dinner for two at the columbia restaurant which is a nice restaurant downtown. we give you a weekend at the tradesmen's resort on st. petersburg each, a great beach and we gave you a 2500-dollar cash bonus all privately donated and raised for us to do it. so it became an incentive for the principal. i have had principals tell me they have put in their application to move to the suburbs and that came about and they decided to stay in urban schools. 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 question. >> either a long answer or a quick question. i can do that. >> a bunch of questions and i will ask 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? >> the third one, ran for re-election. i served my first term because we change the charter. it was long long-term sir for years and nine months. my second term was for years and i was limited to two terms so i served to complete almost nine years. my term ended last year in and 2010. the corruption issue, if you tell the internal governmental corruption, we had minor employee issues that never, no significant issues when i took office. now i think i was going to say the newspaper thinks everybody is corrupt but in general they did not have corruption issues

within the city. and what was the third question? 250,000. ethnic? it is about 20% african-american. it has got under 8% let's say eastern european. also another maybe three, 45% but a good-sized southeast asian population and hispanic population as well. it is pretty mixed. >> another round of applause for our author. [applause] >> thank you. >> visit booktv.org to watch any of the programs you see here on line. type the author or book titled in the search bar on the upper left-hand side of the page and click search. you can also share anything you see on booktv.org easily right clicking share on the upper left side of the page and selecting it.

speier is a video from c-span's recent trip to florida where local content vehicles partnered with bright house networks and tampa st. petersburg to give you a closer look at the local literary scene. >> tell me about teddy roosevelt as a third-party candidate. >> okay, well teddy roosevelt was born in new york, born in new york city in 1859. his father was a wealthy businessman in the roosevelt family. there were two branches of the family. the other branch is where franklin roosevelt came from. and he is also a philanthropist. he is interested in helping the poor. he is a big contributor to causes for the poor. his mother interestingly is a southern belle from the

plantation aristocracy from roswell, georgia. there is a big plantation called hola call. that is where she was born and that is where they remarried. she supposedly is the model for scarlett o'hara in gone with the wind. martha her name was. back in those days upper-class people did not get into politics. it was considered dirty and disreputable let's teddy roosevelt developed an interest in the political system. he becomes a state legislator in new york state. he goes to washington and becomes an assistant secretary of the navy during the spanish-american war in 19 -- and organized the regiment and becomes a national hugo for his charge up san juan hill and he comes back and he is approached by boss platt of new york state to run for governor. they figure they have a high