i am not sure it is that much better. >> host: important question all about what it was like to face your mortality. you actually thanked two doctors. you were diagnosed and recovered from cancer. it was 30 years was the timing. .. >> i love bookstores. i was in stanford's bookstore today, and there was a book about -- i think it was

dr. henry kaplan that developed the treatment for radiation treatment for hodgkin's disease. so they tell you when you get this radiation, look, we're giving you the amount of radiation, basically, the body can stand, and at some period of time, maybe 20 or 30 years, there may be repercussions of having that radiation. but, you know, when you're 30 and you get, and you have a life threatening illness, it's just a shock. you can't believe it, and it takes a while to realize you're going to be, you have a chance to be okay, at least i had that chance. this last, this last situation i just knew i was really, really sick, and it had advanced. it was an advanced case -- >> stage iv, right? >> yeah, stage iv. so, but they had a, they had the kind of a standard -- i mean, it was one of those things where they call you up and say -- at

first they called me up and said, okay, you've got, we found some bad cells. and that's just that moment where your blood runs cold. and then you meet with the encologist, and he says, well, actually it's this -- he calls it garden variety large b cell whatever, and he says, actually, you know, the bad news is it's progressed, the good news is it's curable, so i consider myself very lucky. >> i'm going to ask one last question from the audience, then my own last question. how does that reflect your two battles of mortality? >> again, i think you have to think about, you know, all the things you do, you know, to enjoy, you know, work and create things, but there's so many other parts of life that you need to do justice to and explore, and so to find that balance is such an important thing. and when these things happen, you realize the importance of, you know, key friends and

family, and then you ask yourself, and if i only have limited time, what do i focus on? so you do go through that soul searching process. >> um, lastly, i kind of wanted to go back to, like, lakeside school. what, you were in tenth grade and you were, what, dumpster diving looking for codes, right? if that were to happen now in 2011 in this age of apple devices and twitter and bing and everything else, what do you think an eighth grader, a tenth grader would be looking for in that dumpster? >> i'm not sure how many listings people make anymore. [laughter] coffee stains, at least in seattle i'm sure there's still coffee stains. [laughter] you know, i think today the rate at which young people adopt new technology is breathtaking. >> yeah. >> um, and we were talking earlier about how do you, how do

you get them excited about becoming programmers or developing things. i was never -- there's so many kids today that are excited to spend hours online, you know, playing this, this role-playing thing or this first person shooter, whatever. i was interested in how those things, how anything worked inside internally -- >> the mind, yeah. >> how does it do graphics that look that great? and those are the engineers of the future. so we really have to put on our thinking caps and try to figure out how to get kids today excited about being creators of tomorrow. >> i think i'm going to invite john up here. i should say, by the way, you know, i grew up here. i grew up, like, a few blocks from here. and what's interesting is going through the museum downstairs and, again, the first 2,000 years of computers. for me, like, you were there during the birth of the personal computer revolution. i am somebody who has directly

benefit prd that revolution. i've been able to create, like, a life for myself because the internet and computing was the way to go, so i just wanted to personally thank you for that. >> thank you. >> thank you so much. [applause] >> for more on paul allen and his work, visit ideaman.paulallen.com. >> with titles like slander, godless, guilty, and her latest, demonic, ann coulter has something to say. now sunday, august 7th, your chance to talk to, e-mail and tweet "the new york times" best selling author and syndicateed author ann coulter for three hours, in depth on c-span2. >> now on booktv, rick baker, former mayor of st. petersburg,

florida, presents his thoughts on the revitalization of american cities. this is just under an hour. >> so good morning and welcome to this breakfast forum by the manhattan institute's center for state and local leadership. my name is michael, and i am the newly-appointed director of the center, and it's truly an honor to be with you. one week on 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 30 years the manhattan institute has 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. and 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,

the governments for which they work, their pension systems, their retiree health benefits, whether it's talking about new public safety strategies, whether it's working on issues as diverse as prisoner reentry in praises like newark, new jersey, or immigrant assimilation into our cities and states, the manhattan institute and be this center is at the core of the policy debates taking place. i urge you to visit our web site, manhattaninstitute.org, to learn more about what we're doing, to share it with people, and also to visit a new site that we've put up recently called public sector inc..org, and that focuses on the public sector, the pension issues, the union reform issue. hopefully it'll be a go-to site for you. now, as mayors and governors across the country battle -- and i use the word "battle," because

that's what it's turned into "close budget gaps, the need for innovative but also bold leadership, it's unquestionable. now, as the mayor of st. petersburg, the honorable rick baker turned st. pete into a hub of economic vitality and civic pride. as you read the book and hear more from steven gold smith, you'll get to know just what he did there. and the book, "seamless city," is once again on sale as you walk by. here to introduce him, the former chairman of the manhattan institute's own civic information, 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 stephen goldsmith. he is currently the deputy mayor

for operations here in new york. he has a very simple mandate promulgated by mayor bloomberg; create a city government for the 21st century that is smaller, more efficient and more cost effective. good luck with that. [laughter] using skills and commitment that the mayor gained while mayor of indianapolis from 1992-1999, deputy mayor goldsmith has a remarkable playbook from which to share with us today and share with people like rick baker and ores. under mayor goldmyth's leadership, entire neighborhoods were completely revitalized. i believe it's over clash 400 -- $400 million was recognized, and i something i think was truly remarkable, real authority was diffused down locally to community groups which is a real testament to the power of local leadership. he was appoint bed by former

president bush as senior domestic policy adviser and later chair of the corporation on national and be community service. he kept that position in many to the obama administration as a testament to the work that he did. but perhaps more than anything else, steven 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 innovations in american government program at harvard's kennedy school of government, professor goldsmith shared his road map for reinvigorating american cities with countless aspiring leaders, and i was one such student in his class, i believe it was in '05, and candidly, it was a great course. the former district attorney of marion county for 11 years, a graduate of the law school of the university of michigan and the author of four books, two of which were published while at the manhattan institute; 21st

century city and entrepreneurial city. he is a scholar. he's an inspiration to today's author, rick baker, who will share with you the relationship they've, obviously; had. we're, therefore, honored to welcome steven goldsmith to the stage. please join me. [applause] >> thank you. i always like to appear at manhattan events. the introductions make me feel so good about myself. thank you very much. [laughter] i wonder if i went in at how you rated me as your professor, if it's be the same as you mentioned today? [laughter] i'm a little under the weather, so pardon my voice. it's great to introduce you to my friend rick. i'm aware of what he did in st. petersburg, it feels a little bit -- where are you? it feels a little bit like i'm reading my own stuff, it's exciting. all right, rick, way to go. let me just say a couple of they

cans by way -- things by way of introduction. the path he took is the path i took. my first book was a regnery book promoted by manhattan, and 21st century city which you're kind enough to at least assert you read at one point in time, and it's been great to watch the story of cities over the last 20 years. i began as mayor of indianapolis with kind of an explicit manhattan agenda, literally. cities could be great places that celebrated their diversities and assets and could come back again. this was a period of time as you remember where several of us coming into the early '90s took large cities -- not as large as this one, but we could apply 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 particularly dear to my heart which is that cities are

diverse places, and if you can apply conservative principles, you can create opportunities for all of your commitments, all of your neighborhoods. and it's the creation of opportunity in a seamless city that's particularly important. the other thing that i saw in rick's book that i thought was fascinating and i wish it were more well recognized acrses the country is -- across the country is you can cut costs and taxes and increase the quality of services concurrently. and we're now in a debate across the country about how much pain we have to inflict on our citizens in order to right size our budgets. rick pull all these things together, and st. petersburg flourished, did exceptionally well, and he put that all together in "seamless city." it's a great story, and here to tell you about it is 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. but what i'm really excited about is steve goldsmith is going to be here. he may not fully recognize he's been one of my great mentors. when i was running for mayor in 2000, i want today learn what other cities were doing. somebody had given me a copy of the book 21st century city, and i read it, and can i said, you know, this looks like a good way to do it, and i witness stander if there's -- wonder if there's more? i said, what's manhattan institute? so this was before, i think, as good at e-mail as we all are now. so i called them and said what

else do you have? and they just started sending me stuff. city guides and city journals, and they sent me the entrepreneurial city which mayor goldsmith led. and be i really -- it's about 100-page book, and i think 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 that they had been involved with whether it was public safety or neighborhoods, whatever, and then in the back of it it had a resource guide of each chapter. so i'm on the -- you probably don't know this either, i was on the phone with his budget director in indianapolis saying, how'd you do this? and calling people around the country. so it was a great opportunity for me to learn, and the reason he recognized a lot of the stuff in my book is because i stole most of it from be him. [laughter] and it was a, i can't overstate how important it is to have groups like the manhattan institute that are out there doing research and disseminating

the people that 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, and he has this thing, he says ideas are powerful things, and i think that is so true. somebody's got to implement those 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. appreciate that. well, my book is -- first, i also want to, i have to do this, introduce my family. i want to do this. my mother irene is here today 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 joanne. please, welcome them. [applause] what is a seamless city? and i think mayor goldsmith started out talking about what it is. a seam let city is a place

where, it's an aspiration. it's a place where if you live in it, you don't go to one part of town and another part of town and cross a seam. that seam could be a neighborhood line or a railroad or a road, and you wind up coming 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 are broken windows and be locked buildings, and you just don't want to be there. too many of our cities are like that. a city should -- you know, not all parts of a 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 you're going to have other parts that have apartment complexes and duplexes, that's okay too. but there's some things we should all 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, going down to

see their friend down the street, where the infrastructure look okay, it's the streets and the sidewalks, they look okay, where there are not drug dealers and prostitutes down the street. that's not how you and i would want to live, have our children grow up, and we should -- i know we don't want any of our children to have to grow up in places like that. they should have a grocery store down the street and a bank and a library. they should have, generally, the amenities that all of us have, and every child should have at least the opportunity, there's no guarantee of results in america, but the they should have opportunities to grow up in a place and be able to believe in the same dream that you and i are 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 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 a reurbanization of america. we lost ground in our cities in the '60s and '70s. he 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 and 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 high of a mayor of a large city. as mayor goldsmith said not as large as new york or chicago, but one of america's major cities. st. pete, in the census when i took office, it was the 68th

largest in america, so it's a big enough city that it can provide some lessons but, frankly, 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. so the second part of the city is the life of a mayor a little bit because there's challenges that you have, and there's opportunities you have, and can a lot of people don't quite see the day-to-day life of a mayor. i know mayor goldsmith can testify a lot that how does it impact your family, how does your faith interplay? i talk about that in the book. i've already received some create similar for that, but i'm okay with 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's the one

that 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're running the business of the city. it's a big organization. most cities, major cities have hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes billions of dollars in budge. lots of different departments. our city has 34 departments, so you're doing everything from police and fire and parks and water and be sewer and sanitation and lots of other things. 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 about three months i noticed i wasn't getting any reports. and so -- i take that back. i got the crime statistics, and i got the rainfall level. now, i had run a law firm before

i came to the city, and i thought, well, you know, don't you -- shouldn't i get some reports? after three months, don't you get reports? this they say, no, you don't really get any 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 scorecard. so we got together with all the departments, and we wanted -- took us a while to do this. we said, okay, how is the water department, are we serving the city better this year than lars year? and, of course, they said yes. they all said yes. and we said, well, how do we tell? the 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 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. and we wanted to do it a small enough number so it'd be meaningful. some cities have thousands.

thousands is too many. et doesn't help you. you want to have enough where you can get a good feel for it. we also did it all in graph form and with historic basis. so, for instance, i can tell you that we took about 7.2 minute to respond to a priority one police call when i was mayor. now, that's an important thing to know, you know? is 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. and our performance measures were designed to not just tell the mayor what's 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 for us to fix a sidewalk? nobody knew, so we checked. it took us 30 months.

and i said, well, maybe that's why it's the number one complaint. [laughter] so we went, and we analyzed, we put a strike team together. that was the easy part. we got down, now be it takes i will tell you about a week, five days, six days to fix a sidewalk. we did that with potholes and how long does it take to fix a traffic lightening, but we also measure our schools. thanks to jeb, but we measure our schools to see how it's going based on student achievement scores. so we started measuring that. our tax rates, and one of the driving forces as mayor goldsmith said in the city was to reduce tax rates. we reduced them five of our nine budgets, the other four we kept them flat, and reduced it by almost 20% during that period of time. at the same time, we did improve service levels that 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 went up. and we tried to do it in such a way not to harm the individual. by the last three years we got the recession, and we just froze our hiring all the time. so we would be very judicious on what we hired, and then when we eliminated positions, we moved people around so we tried to eliminate empty positions so that the least amount of people lost their jobs. some did, but it wasn't that 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 a crisis, crises are constant. 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. so it's, you're constantly addressing the crises as they come about. as mayor of the city to try to

keep the direction going. so we had, 2004 we had four hurricanes that were targeted at the eye going through st. petersburg during the path. our emergency operations center was activated virtually the whole three month period of time, and you deal with those issues. we talk about a lot of the crises that you go through, and from the mayor's perspective in the book as well. so those, crisis is the second part of the job. 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. you have a plan, you have 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 so bogged down that you never quite get to the point of advance ling your vision, or you get stopped in the middle of vabsing your vision -- advancing your vision. so you have to be very focused

at making sure you're continuing that forward momentum and that forward path on advancing your vision while you're dealing with the crises and dealing with the business as you're going forward. in our case we had a five-point plan which was our strategic plan for the city. to advance division. and i think every plan needs to start with a mission. our mission was simple, we wanted st. petersburg to become the best stir in america. some folks say, that's kind of broad. you can really doe that? -- do that? and my response was that should be the objective of every city in america. who is going to follow you if your mission is to become the fourth best city in florida? [laughter] eighth best city in america, right? nobody's going to follow you. people follow excellence, and what you find is when you set out a bold agenda like becoming the best city in america, people are drawn to it. resources come to it. businesses start saying, how can

we help? individuals start coming forward. and other people hear about this and say, you know, i want to be part of that. sri, the large research and development company, very big, we were recruiting them to florida, and kurt carlson is the head, and he came and met with me, and he said, well, we're thinking about doing here, here and here, what do you have to offer? i said, well, i want to ask you what do you have to offer? how are you going to help us build the best city in america? in his recent book he's about to publish he said that's what got him to st. pete. he wanted to be part of becoming the best city in america. so that has to be your mission, in my opinion be, everybody's. how do you do it? improve the quality of life of the people in the city every single day. so every day everybody in your organization in the city, and not just, not just the government, but the businesses and the civic organizations, the faith organizations, everybody in the neighborhood organizations, everybody involved in this enterprise should come in with the idea of

how are we going to build, make the quality of life better for people that live here? the if everything you're thinking about doing you go through that filter and say is this going to make the quality of life better for the folks in st. pete, and be -- and if answer is yes, you probably should do it. so you run it through that filter. that was our mission, and we had five ways to get there. one is make it safer, improve public safety. number two is improve your neighborhoods. number three is participate in improving your schools which was a radical idea when i ran for our city, and be i'll tell you why in a second. number four is economic development. and the economic development can has to be across the board. and number five 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. you identify your five strategies, and i promise you every manager in our government could tell you those five

principles anytime they were asked, i promise you that. because everybody understood. that was our objective. so public safety, we did a lot of things that mayor goldsmith and be mayor giuliani have talked about, we tried to copy good things they've done and add some of our own to make it safer. we had a hard, hard focus on drug enforcement. drugs are the absolute poison of america. they're at the root of so many of our problems that you have to go after. you can't just go after them by arresting people, although you have to do that, and we did can it very aggressively. but youal have to have opportunities for drug rehabilitation in your community, especially in the area of prostitution. we actually -- i believe -- impacted our prostitution issue by drug treatment and job training for the women that were prostitutes. so you hit the drug issue, then you hit all the issues, and you

just have to be very aggressive and very focused on all that -- but recognize that what you do in these other 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 and certainly what you do in your most poverty areas is going to impact your crime as well. when i was running for mayor i said, you know, i want a very special focus at the poorest part of our community, we call it midtown. and people who 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. and the answer is you have to do both. you have to have aggressive law enforcement to go after the crime. you have to do that. but you also have to change some of the environments and some of the causes of why you got there. and i don't think that's a liberal philosophy. i think that's just a real philosophy that you have to go after the crime and have strong

law enforcement and, also, work on getting kids educated and work on changing the environments of some of your poorest areas, which we did. so public safety's number one. number two is -- public safety is number one. all the others are in no particular order. public safety's always number one. neighborhoods. we built dog parks. my -- [laughter] i always like to tell this story. my first year we had two openings in a row, one was a library, and the other was a dog park. and the library we had a great, over $3 million library we were building, and the, we were -- had a groundbreaking for it, and we had a few folks come from the neighborhood, not a big crowd, it was nice. the next day we opened the ribbon on our dog park. it had $9,000 to build, and we had 200 people show up. the dogs tore up the grass. it was so overrun that i'm thinking the neighborhood

started saying, please, get these people out of our neighborhood, and be i started thinking, you know, thesing to parks are very popular and they're cheap, and i'd like to get reelected, so i'm going to build a lot of it. it's a quality of life issue. it seems big, it's small. bicycle paths. seems like a small thing, it's a big thing, i can promise you. we went from being rated in the mean streets list the number one mean street in 2000, we took office in 2001, to 2008 i was invited to the mean street conference as the best turn around city in the country because of our sidewalks and our bicycle path system and safety issues we put in place. it seems small, it's not. quality of life is a big thing. we had a playground policy within a half mile walk of every child in the city.

i think that's a big thing. if you can walk with your child to a playground in less than a half a mile, you feel differently about your neighborhood. you know your neighbors. that seems small. we put two water slides at every one of our pools, and we increased the attendance by 40%. now, i credit a lot of this with my children. they were 4 and 5 when i took office, water slides, 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, the state of florida by the florida building coalition. it's not a feel-good thing, it's a lead certification for city, so it's a very serious program, but it was all based on sound strategy. we did not do something unless we looked at what is our payback period for whatever we're doing. so when we put led traffic lights at all of our traffic lights, cost me $450,000 to do, i saved $150,000 in electricity

costs per year, 33% return. anybody should do that. and so with every one of our energy saving things, we looked at the payback. if period was at least 12 years or less, we did it. and that's how we did all of our green programs in the city and became the first designated green city in the state. schools, and i've got to go quickly because i'm running out of time, but schools, we had an aggressive effort. we don't run our schools. most cities don't run their schools, we have separately elected school boards that run the schools, but we need to help our schools. if you don't help your schools, you're not going to get people moving into the neighborhoods, businesses coming into the community so you better be involved. i could go through a series of programs we did. if somebody wants to ask me a question, we're going to have time for questions afterwards, talk about the schools. we wound up going from -- jeb bush started the program of grading our schools based on

student achievement stores, we went from having zero a elementary schools out of 27 to 16, and we had a 260% increase in the number of a and b schools based on stand achievement -- standard achievement schools. we actually passed the suburbs in some categories with our urban program. 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've got to believe in economic development. jobs are important, you know? you can do a lot of things in a community, you can build great parks, you can build great libraries, if people don't have jobs, you're not going to advance is city. you can't do it. you have to have jobs in the city. so your focus has to be on job development. there are two ways at looking at jobs, retention and recruitment. most of us have this tendency, many included, to look at what's

the next business i'm going to bring to town. but 80% of the new jobs in if most communities next year are going to come from the existing companies in your community right now. so you've got to focus on those. and so we did a lot in the permitting department. i talked a lot about permitting departments are hard, but we did a lot to -- there are structurallish shies, attitudinal issues, and you've got to would be on both of them. one of the ways we did it, i won't talk about all of them, but i had a 7:0 meeting in my office, so everybody's invited. the first couple meetings that we had i would tell you it was standing room only, it was a room about half this size, madder than hornets, and i had my staff around me and every time somebody would scream at me, i'd say, what about that? so we worked at it. there's union issues involved, there's attitudinal issues involved, structural issues involves, but we eventually got to the point where my last one

we had was five or six people, most of them were representative of the various contractors coming to thank us for turning our permitting around. so you have to make it that easy. yeah, make it easy for people to do business in your community, but they still have to follow the rules. you can still have, you can still make them build beautiful buildings and have cultural amenities, and most of them are glad to do that. they just don't want to have to waste six months of time trying to get through the process. so you work with the businesses you've got, and then you also try to recruit businesses as well. and we did, we recruited a lot. especially in the high-tech area. florida, historically, has had great construction industry, agricultural industry, tourism industry, the military industry, but we need to diversify it. right now 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 need to diversify. we're working on r and be d.

d r&d. we brought sri to our community. i'm working now for the university of south florida, head of the innovation partnership, there, and our job is to try to put r&d partnerships together with the university. important to do. so we did that generally. we also worked on our downtown. anybody that went to downtown st. pete 20, 15 years ago and went today would see john avlon, a good friend of mine, is here today. he's walked with us during this whole process, and you'll see it's a remarkable, different place than it was. sidewalk cafés, cultural amenities, we're very focused on the cultural. we set o out to become the number one cultural center of the state of florida. everybody kind of snickered when we said that ten years ago, and then last year american living magazine ranked us the number one city cull culturally in america because of things like the museum and the expansion of

fine arts, the florida orchestra coming to town, lots of other things. lots of focus -- we brought a grand prix to st. petersburg. the indianapolis 500 is still the best irl race in the country, but even tony george said st. petersburg is second behind indy. so that counts for us down there. and 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 then into my second term as well. and why do you do that? why do you focus on the poorest parts of the community? when i ran for mayor, people said why should i put my money into that part of the town? not everybody said, but it say that. and i said, well, for two reasons. 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 children grow up in that environment. you would not. that's not the children's fault. they're growing up in environments that they should not grow up in america or st. petersburg or anywhere, and we need to work toward a change in that. and some people would buy that. and 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 tax revenues from it. so if we could flip it, we would have to put less services in the, more revenues out, so it would be better for you. so between those two points, we had great unanimity in our city focusing on that. talks about length at midtown, what we did 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 in pinellas, of pinellas county when i ran in 2005.

and be 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 thety -- [inaudible] if you try to do downtown or bring job or help your neighborhoods and part of your community is lagging way behind, you not going to be able to advance it. you've got to change it. thank you so much for having me, and i look forward to your questions. [applause] >> folks, now we're going to turn over to some q&a. i'd just like to remind everyone a question always ends in a question mark. so, um, and, please, wait for the mic to come around. but i'm going to take moderator's prerogative and just ask a quick question and, mr. mayor, we'll bring you up here. you mentioned when you were talking and articulating the third job of a mayoring being te

articulation of a vision for your city. you had touched on public employee unii don't think so. could you talk a lit about how you brought some of those unions, perhaps, onboard, 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 the -- in our case we had five union bargaining groups, and we had three -- we had six bargaining groups and four unions. so we were dealing with that a lot, police, fire, blue and white collar unions that you had to deal with. 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 the 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, that's not the objective of the city. the objective of the city is to improve the quality of life of the people that live in the city. that means you have to have good services and 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 move it forward. and sometimes that's contrary to the union. sometimes we were able to put agreements together, sometimes we went to impasse, so it works both ways. i think you have to always remember that the job of the city is to improve the quality of life of the people that live there. >> [inaudible] >> where were the cuts made that enabled you to balance the budget, and you described a lot of thing that cost money, but there must have been some things, um, initiatives that involved cutting to enable you

to put this percentage 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. what were they doing, would be really the question, and did what they were doing cause you to impact services? over -- about, about half of the position reductions were management, professional and supervisory. so the other half would have been line-oriented. so we did not go in, you know, there's a, there's a response that you can get sometimes. i'm not going to say -- [inaudible] but you can get this response. and that's when you're the president, you have the department of interior reduce their budget by 1%, they do a press conference saying they're closing the smithsonian and some of the great parks across america because that's where the

impact' going to be, and then people start screaming about that. well, we tried not to do that. i'll tell you exactly the process i used. i would, i would ask every department to come back with 5, 7, 9% cuts. sometimes it was 3, 5, 7, sometimes 5, 7, 9 depending on the budget year. and they would bring those in, 34 departments, and i would actually have my cabinet, i'd give them instructions led by our first deputy mayor with the instructions i want you to go through those cuts, identify the ones that have 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 then i want the cabinet to go through without me and give me a list of what they come up with. and then i would go through that himself, and i would then -- that list, and i would then circle the list that i know litically are not things i want

to do for whatever reason because it would impact services. so i would circle those, and i'd send it back to the cabinet, and i'd say, okay, now you've got a new number to come up with. and we would continue that process back and forth. i think the concept of 5% across the board cuts is not a sound cop sent. that -- 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 to get into every budget, 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 kind of a bell-shaped term. i started with the end of the dot.com crash and the recession that followed. we had three or four great years in between, then we had the great recession of '08 and '09 that we bottomed out on. but leveling 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 was the city across the bay at tampa was hiring away my police officers as was the pinellas sheriff during the middle of the 2000s, and before the recession it was hard to get police officers. so we had to increase it to become competitive. so 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? >> i think there are probably a lot of category like that. i think if you force a process in place that -- well, let me

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

today look at their individual department and say how am i going to do this without impacting service? some of them cooperative, some are 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. >> [inaudible] >> if you could mention your name as well. >> steve sabbas from brew college. did you do anything in the way of privatization, public/private partnerships? could crowd elaborate? -- could you elaborate? >> one of the last chapters, about a third of it talks about public/private partnerships. we privatized some operations, for instance, all of our nursery function, plants, nurseries, and that enabled us to, actually, get a new park as well. we provided people in the community with nurseries, got jobs, and we did that with our management of theater, other facilities, so we did.

we did a huge amount of public/private partnerships. our school program was a good example of that. we recruited 100 corporate partners to come in and work in be our public schools, so every public school in the city had one or two private partners. so those partners would, they'd provide mentors, they'd provide tutors, they would provide strategic help for the principal. they'd actually sit down with the principal and provide help and sometimes money. one time it was 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 public partners come in to help with our, we developed a whole sweet bay grocery store system in the heart of our community which wound up being a big turn around for it. 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 i, really, across the board. we did some actual direct privatization through -- actually, i like mayor goldsmith's term of marketization where you're trying to instill the competitive forces into the bidding process. >> paul. even though you didn't have direct control of the schools, schools are still on your top five list. >> they are. >> how did you help the schools improve without having direct control? >> thank you for asking the question, i was hoping someone would. [laughter] i, we did a lot in the schools. we supported a mentoring program that was actually started by, exhale a college -- actually, a college scholarship program called doorways. and the doorways program tells a child in a free or reduced school that if you do certain things, 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 12th grade, you have a four-year college scholarship waiting for you. it's an incredible -- i call it an incentive for a kid to stay good for those six years' period of time. how did you finance it? all -- no city money. it cost for a prepaid tuition scholarship for a sixth grader, let's say -- i don't remember -- let's say it costs $14,000. so the state has a program in if florida that if you buy a scholarship for a free and reduced lunch child, they'll pay for half of it. there's 7,000. then i worked a deal with businesses in our community, and be i said how about if i raise 3500, would you match it 3500? and they said, yes. and then i worked a deal with the private businessmen in town and said if i raise 1750, will you give me 1750?

and he said, yes. so then i could go to you. and i said, well, you give me 1750, and i'll send a kid to college for four years. and i doubled and doubled and doubled. we ran it all the way through the private funnation and did not use city money, and at the end of the day, we used statistics, so what is the average graduation rate from, for a low income free and reduced child in florida? i don't, i've never been able to get a good statistic. i bet it's under 50%. so our kids, by the time i left office we had had three classes of kids had 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 in the free and reduced lunch, that's how you would impact your crime rates too, by

the way, in the long term, and that's how you impact your overall environment of your community. so we gave out a thousand of those scholarships while i was mayor, and that was one program. as part of that we did the mentoring, so we trained 1200 mentors to mentor the kids identified by the teachers as in need of mentors in our public schools. we did a top ap award. it's incentive based, so we grade our schools in florida, but we don't give the principals any incentive to do good. and i know the state's working on that now. so what we did is we provided, we created the 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 a, you became a top apple. we brought you to this ceremony on tv, school board, legislative delegation, everybody attended, we then gave you a little marble

apple with your name inscribed, and we give you a big banner that all the schools are hang anything front of their school today. 2007 mayor's top apple award winner. we then gave you a gift basket, and we gave you dinner for two at the columbia restaurant which was a nice restaurant downtown, we gave you a weekend at the tradewinds resort which is on st. petersburg beach, and we gave you a $2,500 cash bonus all privately donated. so it became an incentive for the principal. i've actually had principals tell me they have put their application to move to the suburbs, and they decided to stay in the urban schools. so you're providing 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, a quick question -- [laughter] >> [inaudible] >> okay. i can do that. >> a bunch of questions, and i'll ask them all at once.

>> [inaudible] >> well, 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 were you term limited? is. >> i'll answer the third one. i served my first term was a long term, four years and nine months. and my second term was four years, and i was limited to two terms. so i served the complete almost nine years. my term ended last year, 2010. the, um, the corruption issue, if you're talking about internal 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's corrupt, but in general we had, we did not have corruption issues within the city. and what was the third question? >> [inaudible] >> 250,000. oh, ethic? it was 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, but a good size southeast asian population. and hispanic population as well. it's pretty mixed. >> let's have another round of applause for our author. [applause] >> thank you. >> every weekend booktv offers 48 hours of programming focused on nonfiction authors and books. watch it here on c-span2. what are you reading this summer? booktv wants to know.

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