>> it sounds very funny to say afghanisafghanis tan was great place to grow. it really was. i think from my perspective and i don't mistake my perspective because it was a very poor country. so i think that if i was born a girl in those days i certainly would have been educated. my mother was a vice president of a very large high school. they were very outspoken, professional women in my family.

in my family and among our friends. i don't think it would've been a problem. we need to get back to those days and that's one of the key things that needs to be a red line, the education of women. that is not a secret how you raised yourself out of poverty, you empower women. it cannot be used as a bargaining chip. the autonomy of the men and the role they play in the future of afghanistan up so the crucial, and absolutely nonnegotiable. [applause] >> you can see that for all of us, for me personally, and for everyone in this glorious space, this has been a very special, special time to hear you, your

thoughts about how you create these wonderful works of fiction. and this, i think, is the greatest, the best of all. so for those who have not had the chance, the book is "and the mountains echoed." it is extraordinary. it is compelling, a morality play told over generations, set in this place but also in paris, in california, and with themes that are universal to all of us. >> i appreciate, i didn't say this backstage but i've learned so much in the program and a great admirer of yours, and your terrific at what you do. when they told me you would be doing this interview, i was really floored. it's been a real privilege. >> thank you. [applause]

>> tonight on our special booktv programming in prime time we will look at books that viewers are reading this summer. on our facebook page, -- we will show you that at 10. several live events to tell you about. the center for strategic and international studies is looking

at disaster recovery and preparedness. that's your c-span2 at nine eastern. at 10 eastern on c-span3, it's a forum on women and the civil rights movement posted by several groups including the national council of league of women, the king sent and planned parenthood. our companion network c-span will have coverage of kathleen sebelius in philadelphia to discuss the new health care law and the latino community. up next, a debate among the seven democratic candidates for mayor of new york city. if none of them get at least 40% of the vote in the september 10 primary, the top two finishers will have a runoff on october 1. our coverage of this 90 minute debate is courtesy of new york one and wnyc radio.

>> i'm errol louis or tonight we're at town hall where i'm joined i'm more than 1000 new yorkers as well as our panelists, the host of portal politico, ryan, the show, the host of the brian lehrer show, katie, the city hall bureau chief and grace, political reporter for new york one. the next 90 minutes we been under up to the conversation we will get a chance to learn more about these seven democratic candidates seeking to become our cities next mayor. we are using the twitter hashtag, nyc 2013. our debate is part of nukes official the program for the 2013 elections administered by the city campaign finance board. the board manages the city's public matching funds program which is designed to strengthen the role of average new yorkers and their small dollar contribution.

tonight's debate is cosponsored by new york one news, the citizens union of the city of new york, the hispanic federation, the citizens committee for new york city, transportation alternatives, wnyc and time warner cable. now without further ado let's introduce the seven candidates. they are bill de blasio, bill thompson, christine quinn -- [cheers and applause] >> john liu, sal albanese and anthony weiner. now, some ground rules. the candidates will each have one minute to respond to questions that are asked of them by the panels they will be given the opportunity respond if they addressed directly by an opponent. we will have a we call a cross-examination what each candidate will be able to ask one of his opponents a question.

there will also be a lightning round in which candidates will be allowed to answer briefly can usually yes or no to each question. the candidates will make closing statements of one minute each. so with that in mind let's begin. we start with one man well beneath his. >> thank you and good evening. mr. de blasio come you got arrested recently, a hospital that nobody really wants to own. the state said it could take down the system of hospitals and then the former owner that was ordered to take it back said we don't want it. how are you planning on keeping it open? how are you going to pay for andy think it's fiscally responsible? >> our neighborhoods in brooklyn need one. is over 75,000 people for almost the closest emergency room by far, and the bottom line is for years we fought successor to keep it open there is for threatening 2008 and now in the last year, i'm proud to say we won in court yet again and the

hospital is open for business. that's so important for brooklyn. because went into this epidemic of hospital closures. how do we fix this problem? the city and state have to take responsibility it's time for leaders to step up. i propose first a brooklyn health authority to build a citywide overtime to have the city and state and most prominent role in determining how to protect local health care for still the health care must be provided locally. emergency run can be too far away. you will get the primary and preventive care you need so we need to see if they take responsibility and my plan is the one that actually would make that happen and i'm proud to be ththe only candidate up here who have presented that kind of plan. [applause] >> as a quick follow-up, if you want to keep it open, as mayor of the city of new york, will you find some money in the budget to keep it open? >> i think one of most important things we in the public sector do is protect public health. whether it takes subsidy funds,

what it takes state fund to what it takes a medicaid waiver the state has called for which are bringing federal dollars explicitly for hospital restructuring, it's time for the local government to take responsibility. what we been doing up to now is hospitals just close. look what happened with over a dozen hospitals i in the city in the bloomberg years. that's unacceptable, so it's time for the city to step up and the state to step up. >> thank you, ms. quinn you know the budget. is there money in the budget debate is hospitals that they're not the responsibility of the city. >> let me say that fairly robust round of applause was not for me. it was for my father who turns 87 today. [applause] the issue around health care is an urgent one. we have interface can we have

st. john's out in the rock with them when the most isolate parts of the city of is getting close and they lost. we have to make sure, if this is what i'm going to do what i am there, that the mayor isn't sitting on the sidelines as it relates to a private hospital and get involved. we need to get the federal medicaid waiver so we get the money we are owed into the city. that's going to bring us resources that can help us stabilize hospitals, but also great more primary preventive care. i've called for and i will implement when i am there a public health infrastructure commission, which will look at where we need to stabilize hospitals, where we need to reopen hospitals, where we need primary care, where we need preventive or urgent care. we're going to start figuring out how to use the federal money. then we'll have a case with the state from a from them but there are times as we did with the university medical center, there is times where it's appropriate for city money to be put in till

stabilize hospitals. not every time. one of the things we learned is we need more transparency about private hospital budget. i want to get legislation passed in albany that requires them to report about the finances publicly so it doesn't sneak up on us as it seems to every time. >> thank you. mr. liu, you are the comptroller do think the city should get involved and basically paid to keep it open? >> well look, i think this is the wealthiest city in the entire nation. and i'm tired of hearing that we don't have money for this or that. these hospitals more than a dozen to shut down under this administration are part of our public infrastructure. and they should be treated as such. they shouldn't be treated as just purely private entities. you look at what's happened, look at what we could have done in the case of st. vincent, a hospital that was here in the city for 160 years, shut down.

what happened immediately after? the area was rezoned so that luxury condominiums could be built in those areas. why didn't the rezoning take place around the saint vincent before and so maybe they could've sold some of those rights to short the financial to save st. vincent and keep of hospital open? that's what should've been done originally because you are nowhere on the scene at st. vincent. i wish it would've been more productive. and our public advocate, i've got to say, bill, you've been great the last few weeks on hospital closures, but where were you for the first three years of your public -- it goes without saying but let's be real. let's set the record straight. >> mr. thompson, what would you? >> clearly, brooklyn is going to a health care crisis. it isn't just leech. its interfaith. it is downstate sunni. it is wyckoff. so and hospitals, brookdale. the city can't sit on the sideline and has to get involved

at first it is important that the federal waiver come through but i think will have to push to make sure that happen. its leadership. we need to make sure that happen. they keep hospitals open. so we can create as i've proposed a health commission for brooklyn that allows for primary care, allows for us to plan for a few years. that keeps hospitals open. we can't turn our backs on central brooklyn and brooklyn health care inspect the mayor can sit on the sidelines. as mayor i would be other working with the government and working with others to keep hospitals open. they are the lifeblood of central brooklyn. and we've seen what happens across the city not just st. vincent we saw in queens when hospitals will close before and it created a health care crisis. >> before give you time for rebuttal, mr. weiner comedy think we should take from the city budget to keep hospitals open? >> you're asking entirely the wrong question. we already pay. we pay $15 billion for health care. we're doing it all wrong.

20% insurance companies. why? why do we have a single-payer system in new york city where we manage our own health care budget, we invested hospitals to invest in jobs, cover the entire to be. that's a we should be doing. that's ambitious plan i've laid out. in 2006, isotropic around the city with these proposal but when it is time to fight for obamacare the first thing i said was william it, why do we doubling down on employer model? let's have medicare for all americans. that was the fight we should be having. we have an opportunity to be health care laboratory. we've hospitals, doctors, nurses, and we're paying a ton of money. the cost is going to go for health care in this city. 40% in the next four years. it is eating up our ability to do anything else including giving racists or workers. i want to flip the script and say we will be a single-payer health care model here and if we do it in new york it will spread across the country where we'll finally get rid of the employer based model that just needs the

health insurance pocket doesn't take a citizens. >> thank you. to go back to the case of a long island hospital, mr. albanese come to think we should find the money from the budget and keep it open? >> great question. i jumped into this race in january, and dove right into this hospital closing was reaching epidemic proportions around the city. peninsula in rockaway, lich and other hospitals, st. vincent, and i said to myself, i've been in the private sector the last two years, while closing hospitals without a game plan? why don't have some kind of a strategy for we do this health discovery. i'm shocked to say we don't have the common sense is of government these folks have been for a long time. to even put together some plants and now people getting arrested their jumping around it is should've been handled years ago when we needed a common sense

approach. look, this is commonsense. you plan as a city, and i want to establish a common sense commission, since i took office the first day i'm going to 30 citizens together from around the city to look for common sense solutions, go through every directive, every policy and streamline the bureaucracy so we can make things happen instead catching people up in red tape. >> thank you for allowing me to talk. first of all, we talk about public health, we have to understand that the government has to be very vigilant to 25 years ago i started to work as a committee leader. the first community -- as older people they depend on long island hospital but it is good thing to fight [inaudible] you cannot obligate and the private sector to actually do a job. the governor, if we want them to provide the service with to make sure that we finance that

service. he's the only one who has been fighting. if i go there and arrest i'm going to become -- that's i didn't approach them. it's the government responsibility to invest money when the public health is at risk. >> let me give you 30 seconds each. >> in 2008 long island college hospital was first threatened and the committee leaders and i got together and we found that the plan that was is able to say that hospital until last year. it was once again in danger. this year we went to court to keep long island college hospital comrades in the neighborhood representative city council now as public advocate we kept long island college hospital open and we're ready to get a long-term plan. it topping all i needed to know about the role of the mayor because i appeal to mayor bloomberg twice private into times he told me he would not get involved to save a hospital. mayor of this city must stand up to save health care for everyone

in every neighborhood. that is part of the job description. >> you have the last 30 seconds of this segment. >> we have to keep the fight going to keep our hospitals open. particularly in neighborhoods the rockaways and parts of brooklyn and the west side of manhattan that don't have them anymore and don't have other options. to think about st. vincent's, when it went out of business we right in the middle of that recently. we were in the middle of the first reason that might have saved. a couple things happen. that's the honest. the board of directors of st. vincent's lie to all of us. two weeks before the final result they told me everything was good with their budget. clearly, it was an. maybe if we moved more quickly, if they hadn't lied, things could differ but i'm proud of the efforts many of us did they kept st. vincent's open for months, but at the end of the day, st. vincent's canceled its contract for staff and that killed a. that first reason, if it had

gone through without opposition, might have been a glimmer of hope. and it's sad now a protest where st. vincent used to be, the public advocate stance with people who went and testified against the that reselling. people like susan sarandon who said they would never send their children there. so you have to be what you are for all of the time. >> you have time to respond. >> let me say a word to the audience. to the extent that get those little outburst, it takes away time from all of the candidates and we don't want that to happen. we want to make sure everybody gets hurt. we will have a very quick response. then move on. >> speaker quinn's response is a smokescreen. she did not save a hospital in her own district as the chief ally of mayor bloomberg and the city government she did not find a way to save the hospital. sheets should not blame the protesters and activists and the citizens of her district. district. it was her job to step up and

get the mayor to come along and she wasn't able to do. in my district we saved a hospital and this year we save long island college hospital again and i'm proud that. >> as you all know, and inequality is a central issue for many democratic primary voters this year, and i believe that three of you, mr. liu, mr. weiner and mr. de blasio have proposals to raise taxes on some of the wealthiest new yorkers. mr. liu, for the first response, how would you raise taxes? on whom precisely, and how would you use that money to reduce inequality? >> thank you very much. this is something i've been focused on ever since i took office of comptroller. income inequality is ruining our chances for real economic recovery that can be a shared prosperity for all new yorkers. specifically, i've put together a tax plan, a tax reform plan that will ask those over 500, those who make over $500,000 per

year, the 1% is such as bill thompson to pay a little bit more -- [laughter] and those below that threshold will pay a little bit less. because right now it's shocking, it's appalling that in the city of new york we have a flat tax. meaning no matter how much o you make, you pretty much pay the same rate of tax. it should be a progressive tax system like everywhere else in the country and that means those to make less pay less but those who make more pay more. that is a fair system and it's one that will start narrowing the wealth divide that is continuing to record chances for full economic recovery, and it's more. >> what would you do with the extra money? >> this will be a plan that costs a little bit, a little bit of money to give the tax reduction to those below that threshold and it will raise money for those, from those above that threshold. overall my office has estimated that this will bring about $250 million to $1 billion of additional revenue and that is

part of my peoples budget will my peoples budget where we great lakes in the educational system that will start kids early on and take us all the way through college so they will find have a cradle to cradle approach in our school. >> mr. weiner, is your plan different, better? >> actually better. [laughter] look, i think for the longest time we've heard descriptions are not right. we ar are once he was a common aspirational goal and this notion we're all middle-class people struggling to make in middle-class. sometimes you see people who are quite wealthy. when you look in the near they seek new york as the capital of middle-class and to talk about their experience and a new york helped them get there. anyone who makes less than $150,000 a year will get a 10% tax cut but if you make $1 million or more you will pay 1% more. the point tha that we wanted tot into it is the fundamental numbers of the number of people that are struggling to make in the city. we are losing middle-class jobs and we're creating jobs at the

very low end of the spectrum. we are grading a lot of restaurant worker jobs and poor people jobs. we have to make it the middle-class capital again. that's what i've got education policies, tax policies and, of course, the health care policies that have laid out. it will wind up generating revenue. that's remarkable thing about how my people are doing remarkably well. always asked them to do is paid 1% more. >> mr. de blasio? >> my plan is for attacks in the wealthiest new yorkers to we can have full day preview for every child in the city. so we can have afterschool programs for middle school kids. because the greatest investment we can make is fighting inequality for the long run is to get more kids a good education. i say that as a heretic if elected i'll be the first mayor in history of this city to sure we'll have a child in public schools. i had together, i know that the investment in early childhood education which would not be making in the city will be the big difference maker. parents knowing that the chalk

and full day pre-k, there are almost 50,000 kids in the city right now who should have gotten full day pre-k this year and doubt because this plan was in place. what would it mean? for those who make a half million or more, a small increase in the local tax rate from 3.9% to 4.3% for the next five years. but what it would mean in terms of addressing inequality would be fast, especially because we would reach kids when they are most able to learn and women most able to fight back against the disadvantage and have experienced. reaching them when they're three or four is the greatest time to educate our children and set them on the right path so they can and will graduate and be as strong members of our economy today. >> mr. thompson and then ms. quinn, given the inequalities in the city and the responses of your call list, why won't you propose raising taxes on some of the wealthiest new yorkers?

>> i think first that i've supported tax increases on the wealthiest when the president proposed a. when the governor pushed that i supported it. tax increases are not off the table but they are last resort, not the first option. we have seen tax increases before that it comes to the city council that some my colleagues have voted for. they were tax increases on the wealthy. they are tax increases on working new yorkers, on middle-class new yorkers. those are the tax increases we've seen. when it comes to closing the inequality gap we have to be focused on education. making sure our children are reading on grade level, making sure we provide the opportunity for them to go to college or for them to be able to get a job. that's how we will close the inequality gap the best we can by not closing schools by 6 a.m., by working hard to make a education system work for all of our children. >> would universal pre-k not be central to that? would you find another way to

pay for that to you could specify? >> right now we send money back to the state of new york for preaching to the governor has indicated he wants to see and wants to work together on universal pre-k. that's what the mayor should be doing right now. working to make sure those dollars that are returned each and every year for pre-k, that we turn this into a full day pre-k and we fight to get the space that's needed because right now that's the biggest problem. >> ms. quinn? >> there is no way you can rule out the potential you might have to raise taxes if you're mayor. if you have to raise taxes i'm going to do that progressively. i supported the governor wind up with a million is tax in place, and if we have to do that, if we can't find resources within our budget to get what we need, we will go fight for more aggressive taxes. one thing i'm going to do regarded him right now in new york city people who are at the lowest income, we are one of the only places in the country they

still pay a personal income tax. that's insane to be taking money like that from the lowest income new yorkers. i'm going to push for legislation in albany to change that. but the key to really addressing income inequality is in addition to education to create the opportunity for pathway into more good middle-class jobs. let me give you an example. right now we have companies in the south bronx and in queens that retrofit trucks to make them nonpolluting. they are turning away work. why? because they don't have enough trained green mechanics. when i mayor i'm going to open a tactical high school to train people for those jobs. they will start at 30-$40 an hour and the only path into the middle-class. and i'm also going to first in the budget get rid of all the outside contracts we don't need, the no-bid contracts we don't need configured how much money we have to dedicate to the services we want to expand. thing if we need taxes after

that i will absolutely do it. progressively. [applause] >> thank you all. >> is unimportant rate is 8.4%. new jobs are being added but not enough to keep up with the newcomers are coming to the city looking for work. the fact is many of the new jobs that are being created are in lower paying areas, areas like tourism, education, retail. what would you do to create new good paying jobs in new york? with the best thing be to just give government and regulations out of the way so this business can grow on their own? we will start with mr. thompson. >> the first thing i think that as we look to create jobs and we have to grow jobs in the city of new york. we have been depend on wall street too long. some of the ways, first we look

at the high-tech sector. the are a lot of jobs being created and want to work to support the growth in that area. however, our young people don't have the training to get those jobs. we need to bring career and technical education back into our schools all the way back into middle schools and high schools. we also need, there are so many job training entities out there, but there's no coordination. there's nothing that ties them together and their focus on placement, not retention and not focus on the jobs of tomorrow. i want to create a chief jobs officer to be able to get that done. to tie those jobs to give. to be able to start to prepare people for the training that they need to get better paying jobs. as we look at minority and women-owned businesses, the state of mucus trying to get to 20%. new york city's numbers are abysmal. they stand at 3%. we need to start to create the

tie-in between minority and women-owned business and a city contracts to create that opportunity. new york city can do better and it will. last but not least as we look at -- >> we have to move on, sorry. mr. weiner? >> with a couple things that we need to do. first of all those low wage workers we should help them organize. if the unionized they will lift up their standard of living close they will be saving us money because we will require this companies to provide insurance for their workers. small business and family are getting tight and not by regulation red tape and higher fees passed by the mayor and city council or i'm going to do my best to try to put small presses back on the side. one of the reasons i talk much about health care into my for single-payer system in the city is this is a giant employer-based in our state that we're letting wither on the vine. it's got the lowest wage workers all the way up to the most skilled workers and our entire workforce.

13 hospitals would've allowed to close. under my plan we will not only stop hospitals from closing but we will reopen once we have because we can control more of the money. finally, when you things like microloans and financed it with the ability to flow debt in the city. we should build an out of -- >> many people would argue the mayor is somewhat limited in the ability to actually create jobs but it's not easy to talk about and do it. is that the case and what are the tools at in his disposal to create those good paying jobs? >> it is absolutely a real thing american do to help grow jobs, create jobs and health sectors that are doing well do even better and bring new ones here. we've all talked about the high-tech sector and we're very lucky the high-tech sector is interested in the city right now. for example, cornell coming is terrific but i'm not going to

lose a minute of sleep over the first cornell graduate class. they will be fine. but the cooney student, i do lose sleep over the future did was take the potential high-tech being interest in you can when i mayor, let's turn cuny into a pipeline for those jobs. it's possible we already started. this year we graduated the first class of attack apprentices program come a partnership between the tech folks, cuny and the council. everyone of those students got a full-time great paying job in the place they in turn. let's use the power of city contract to raise people's wages and put more money in their pockets. that's why i'm so proud to have passed the prevailing wage and living wage law. when i mayor on day one i will drop the law suits against those bills and put them into affect. now, we also need to do more to support the small businesses that are out there. our program can up with that but we also need to move to make

every first time fine that isn't about health or safety, make it a warning, not a financial violation. just like we will do, just like we will do with restaurants next month by law. [applause] >> mr. de blasio, i wanted to bring in. you've been supportive -- ms. quinn most are not raising, working to raise wages for workers in the city. >> [inaudible] >> speaking to raise wages for workers in the city. >> [inaudible] >> this destruction will be -- ms. quinn was speaking about trying to raise wages for workers in the city which is something that you've been supportive of the many in the business community have argued quite string is against that thing that you may raise wages for some workers but at the expense of new jobs, that

businesses can't afford to hire new people if they have to pay their workers more. so how do you strike the right balance? would raising wages for workers come at the expense of jobs that are badly needed in new york? >> i don't think that contradiction is accurate. .com we're experiencing a crisis of inequality in our city. it has been deepening over the last few years. it is unacceptable that city governments own report recently said 46% of new yorkers at or near the poverty level. while the situation has gotten worse and worse, mayor bloomberg -- has not addressed the inequality crisis. it's time for a very different approach and had to say to mr. thompson and ms. quinn, that approach must include taxing the wealthiest new yorkers but it's necessary so we can start to address this crisis, particularly any area of education. we can do full day preaching and afterschool without additional investment and without new resources for our kids. on the question of wages and benefits it is the city's

responsibility. i've called for an end to subsidies to big companies the city gives the $130 million recently. i think the money would've been better spent on financial aid for cuny students of the get the kind of degrees that would give them jobs in the tech sector. that money would be better spent on loans for small businesses that can create jobs at the grassrootgrassroot s levels. those of the policies that actually address this and we need them now. >> mr. liu? >> talk about the subsidies, i think we have seen that the vast majority of these projects and developers and private corporations that give subsidies, they don't create the jobs they originally promised it's a what we're doing is we're shelling out billions the private corporations while neglecting to my students, while neglecting our afterschool programs and job training site. we need to keep the money in the hands of the city, the people of the city and about our own human capital so we can truly create

the jobs and give the people the opportunity that they need. speed would there be any room for subsidies? >> we would not subsidize corporations because the vast majority of jobs are being created by the private sector and it's only a small percentage of the easily favor, political connected companies that get the subsidies. let's level the playing field. let's give them a tax break and take the tax breaks away from the multi-billion dollars company. while we're at it let's talk about living wage in the city. living wage is something i've supported as the council and the comptroller and speaker quinn and mr. de blasio refused until the final days it was apparent is going to pass with or without the. bill thompson never even weighed in on issue. on the issue. i think you still against the living wage. people can stand up and talk with anything they want, you got to look at the record. my record is one of economic development and economic equality. it's not just that recovery.

it's about equity as well. >> mr. thompson mq and respond to? >> i would like to come back to something the public advocate indicated. when he talked about universal preachy. i support the universal preachy, and the reality is right now money is sent back to the state of new york each and every year. that's wrong. we need to correct that and we can redirect that money. the first thing, bill, when you look at things, your proposal is almost a tax in search of negative let's be honest about it would also support universal brigade but the only taxes i seem to remember you increasing when you're in the city council, 18.5% and property taxes and other taxes that seem to hit working new yorkers and middle-class new yorkers. let's be honest with the public tonight. let's tell the truth, bill. no more of the flip-flop or same things when it's politically convenient for you. >> mr. de blasio, quick respon

response. >> i guess bill thompson has not talked to public school parents lived. he said the public -- will that make a huge difference for the children? the answer is resounding yes. let's be clear. i have not heard mr. thompson that he has a plan to right now finance full day preaching for every child in the city and afterschool programs for every middle school child. i have submitted such a plan. not in search of her prom the it is addressing a very a problem that parents can find fully preachy for the kids and they can find afterschool programs to get the kids safe and help them learn better. parents in the city know we need this investment, and asking the wealthy do a little more is there and is just in terms of what we need to do for the future of our city. mr. thompson has not offered a plan that will provide this help for parents and children. >> we have to wrap up, thank you. >> do i get to talk at all?

spent there's a lot of hot air. i haven't talked in a while. what's going on? and i can talk, too, you know? [applause] >> do i have to just jump in? >> there's a lot of hot air. i want to talk to, you know. >> good evening again. a times reader e-mailed me this morning and said that in her opinion with the exception of the blizzard, she thought that mayor bloomberg and ray kelly have done a good job responding to crises, but she has no idea as to each of you would respond to a crisis. so let's just play along for a second. it's the summer of 2014. you're out of town on your first vacation as mayor. not in bermuda presumably. suddenly your that power is out, goes out in new york city and you're not sure why.

you think it's a blackout but you don't know. you don't know if it it is a natural disaster but it's difficult to get in touch with people and all you hear, second and perhaps is the power to be out for a few days. what do you do? mr. albanese, why don't we start with you? [laughter] >> thank you. first of all let me just come back to the question of inequality because i'm the only candidate -- >> if you can get back to later. there's going to be room for that. >> i'm also the first -- first living wage law in the city which paid speeches i understand that but in this case i think a lot of people i think quite trees as to how you might handle a crisis. we can talk about living wage later. >> first of all, i would rarely take a vacation. i would stay on the scene to make sure that things work perfectly.

i think that the city of new york had crisis almost on a daily basis. you have to be in touch. obviously, i will have a deputy mayor for operations who will be well-versed in dealing with crises. i sadly won't let what happened during the snowstorm take place where everybody was on vacation in new york city back in december. so i'm going to be working very hard. vacations will be very rare. i'm going to be in touch with my people on a regular basis. i if i leave the city for a couple of hours from we live in a very, very highly communicative society. so i will be hands-on costly. i will be in the neighborhood and i will respond to the emergency myself because it won't be too far from the city if i'm away from the seattle. >> mr. thompson, you talked in the past about being in france if i'm not mistaken during crown heights but i'd like to get you take what you been to but you've been out of office for a few years. what would you do? >> the first thing, i don't

think i'll be that far away but i don't think the mayor is going to leave me the plaintiff when he leaves office or so i will be within driving distance of the city. but part of this is also setting the protocols u of ahead of tim, making sure that we're ready that the office of emergency management, the deputy mayors, the number one, the deputy mayor is ready to go but i think those other things, it isn't waiting until a situation occurs. it's been great for the situation. i think that we've seen in the last 15 years almost everything has happened in new york city. we have to be ready for any emergency. that is planning, being ready ahead of time. that's understanding the protocols that lucky again. that's having the head of the fire department, police department first deputy mayors and others are all drilled and ready to go. that's what it's about. it's being ready ahead of time. >> mr. salgado? >> first of all, i haven't taken

a vacation out of the country for a while. the last vacation we got was in florida, and there was a storm and also an earthquake while i was on vacation that everybody was calling me. so we decided to drive back and actually it was good because i rain was coming. -- hurricane irene was coming. we went to the church and started to pray. the storm disappear. i believe in the. that's one thing we have to take for sure. [applause] first of all i haven't talked in a while so you have to bear with me. it is precisely this kind of socialist economic idea, the one that kills jobs. [inaudible] it didn't work in cuba. it didn't work in nicaragua. inevitably, this going to work in new york city. they are talking about taxing, taxing speech wait, wait, wait. if i may, i'm going to thank you

very much for that. let me put you over to mr. weiner for a manspeed is why? spent we're trying to stay on topic. >> i want to talk, too. [laughter] >> you can finish a answer quickly and then i will go to mr. weiner, if that's all right speak so i supersized to become socialist economic idea that kills jobs than were down to 1% or soon will be 0% like in cuba. went to make sure that people who are investing the money are doing so. everyone to end inequality we have to concentrate creating more jobs. in my neighborhood only five blocks we have over 20 different storefronts close because nobody want to go in business in new york city. everything is about tax, about violation and people, they need to work with to encourage the small business owner to continue doing what they're doing and went to let the people who are investing the money in the city to continue to do so so we create more jobs and we can in the inequality, economic and equality in the city.

>> mr. weiner community different perspective because you work in the federal government's i'm curious as to what kind of experience perhaps you would bring to handling a crisis or whether you do things differently from wha what these folks have sets of our? >> first of all, i know you're referring to a question got from one reader. a lot of people in city would skew the idea that the only time the mayor got it wrong. when the reading stories about how the marathon was going to continue and some people understate support that idea. it had a sense of -- i think it struck people to the corporate one thin thing i would use crean apartment in the city that's different. it's not the city talking down to people in all five boroughs. we have a sense of what goes on. when i propose and i will. when i proposed a number five is estimated that we take some of the power lines down around some of the one and to come home communities and put them underground so they don't get knocked out at every storm, people in southeast queens that floods when it rains for an hour now, they have floods, this notion the city isn't ready for stiff wind right now is

overstated, let alone a big emergency. we need a man that understands all five boroughs. we don't have that right now. with my we will do something else. every one of the committee board, then there will be there with his deputy, with this commission, with the people in charge to hear about the challenges before they arrive. we will not wait for an emergency and then tell people to go up to the theater. >> ms. quinn, tell us how you would respond in terms of who do you call, what would you do, what's your decision-making tree when it comes to something like the? >> first of all, if us out of the city, would come back immediately, blacker, whatever kind of disaster. if it was a disaster we could see coming, a storm or something like that, you would never leave in the first place. second is we know just about every kind of disaster we could face in the city. so as made one of the things i'm going to make sure is weird clear plans in place from a citywide perspective of how to

deal with them. but also plans broken down not just by borough, not just by neighbors but really sector within neighborhoods of folks who will be on the ground if something like this happens. we need to make sure every agency has its own plan and that we run tabletops on those plans over and over, so people are ready. the reader wrote about a blackout. but the truth is there's lots of other things that can happen, and we need to in advance the investing in the infrastructure that will prevent those. we need to get power lines underground. we need to fix up the city's sewer system, which is hundreds and hundreds of years out of date. we need to make sure we are moving to more alternative forms of energy so we're not such a drain on the grid every summer in the city. and it's critical to have both a first deputy mayor and a deputy mayor of operation and head of

office of emergency management, as relates to being on the job and clear and focused on crisis situations, but not least of all after you get out of it, you have to do a real the brief with your staff and with new yorkers. i would go out and have town hall meetings in communities to find out what works. >> thank you. that my swing this over the mr. liu for a second. look, i would like to get your take on what part of the mayors emergency plans you would keep and what you would scrap i guess. >> let me say that in any kind of a situation whether its ongoing or emergency, we do need a strong police commission, a strong fire commissioner a strong commission of emergency services. emergency management we need have these individuals in place but we also need to be able to communicate. that was the premise of your

question, what happened 50 mutations go down? the problem is this administration has spent the better part of a decade trying to come up with emergency 911 system. they spent $2 billion on this system and recently they had to revert back to paper and pencil to take out the emergency calls. that would not happen under my administration. in fact, the 911 system is something that i raise alarms early on in my tenure as comptrollcomptroll er. to say this was a project that was so mismanaged and overblown, a billion dollars in cost overruns and what do we have as a system that is usable? so infrastructure is right but you start with a communication system so you can communicate. your police commission governor fire commissioner, oem commission and also make sure they have on staff and to communicate with each other. communication is the number one priority in any kind of emergency situation and that is something that i will never let fall by the wayside.

>> [inaudible] spent the city didn't plan. we have a reactive government. for 10 years they were warned of a storm and did nothing. these people are ranting and raving and discuss it, they aree shocked, dismayed, outraged. they are the government. you got the comptroller, the speaker, you've got the public advocate. you've got a member of congress and their constantly outraged about the fact we didn't do any planning. >> i have got to say -- [talking over each other] >> gentlemen, please. >> they are constantly outraged spent we're going to move on. it's now time for the cross-examination what each candidate would get a chance to answer a question to one and one only of his or her opponent. thank you goes first. >> my question is for speaker quinn. look, tomorrow there's really historically important vote in

the city council. and after years of the overuse of stop and frisk and communities being alienated from the police because of discriminatory treatment, because of unconstitutional policing practices we have a chance tomorrow to take a major step in the right direction. the city council have a chance to override mayor bloomberg's vetoes the committee safety act. my question for speaker quinn is simple. previously voted against the ban on racial profiling by the nypd. you stood with mayor bloomberg against a ban on racial profile. will you tomorrow vote against the ban on racial profiling? >> let me first say that tomorrow at the city council something incredibly significant is going to happen. we're going to override the veto of legislation relating to stop and frisk. and these overrides are going to put an end, a huge step toward putting an end to unconstitutional stops. that couples with the court's

action in the work of activists all across the city. and unlike the public advocate who is good at telling other people what to do but not always so good at getting things done himself, i, tomorrow -- [applause] i come tomorrow, will put legislation in effect that will have permanent monitoring of our police department. for the young man i met and talked to today on the steps of city hall, the young manitoba on his way home from college, we we will be monitoring that's what doesn't happen again but let's also be clear about the fact as it relates to the fact i would argue the public advocate is misrepresented here tonight. racial profiling is illegal in the city of new york as it should becom be, and i support . but we will tomorrow is not to been racial profiling but it's to give individuals the opportunity to go to state court as well as federal court. we saw the great ruling in federal court last week. we know people can get redress

there. i am afraid and reasonable people can disagree that if we had to course involve we will get contradictory court decisions which will be tough for us to implement. but tomorrow, let me be clear, i'm the one on the stage that with my colleagues will put legislation in practice, something bill, you have not done. i will pass a law that will help us and unconstitutional stop, treated. [applause] >> there's a fundamental contradiction in speaker quinn position because she wants to keep ray kelly, the architect of stop and frisk as a police commission and she's opposed to the legal ban on racial profiling i just asked her what she going to vote yet again against the ban on racial profiling? i didn't hear a particularly

straightforward answer but i'm assuming the answer is yes, tomorrow she will vote against the ban on racial profile. as they make a decision about the future need to know, if you are actually going to vote against the local law that would help make sure the nypd stops profiling people of color in the programming? >> bill, you are again misrepresenting what this law is about. >> just answer the question. >> i want the watchers and viewers should know because you're misrepresenting it. racial profiling already is illegal as it should be. this law will allow folks to go to state court in addition to federal court. i think federal court is the right place as we saw with the judge's ruling pics i will not vote to give state court the ability to weigh in on our police department. it is appropriate in the federal court, but let's not misrepresent this to new yorkers. racial profiling is today by a law passed in a former city council illegal as it should become and the public advocate should stop misrepresenting that

fact. [cheers and applause] >> we've got our answer. >> by the way, by the way, the federal -- >> no, no, no. we are going to go in order, john liu. you are not going to disrupt the order to join all the other candidates were told in advance what this is going to be or. please, no more interruptions. >> my question is for mr. de blasio. [inaudible] i know christine quinn went after me. but two weeks after you're stuck -- [inaudible] and you say it's something that needs to be done in the city. for four years they have had that -- [inaudible] you are the public advocate. why didn't you advocate before this idea? >> look, i think what to do a lot in new york city right now to address the reality of immigrants among us who happen to me not documented.

but as hundreds of thousands of our neighbors, our friends, our coworkers and they need support, too. we finally have an opening for some real change. we need a dream act at the state level. we need a state to also act on driver's licenses. people should have an opportunity to get a driver's license if they qualify regardless of documentation status, and we should have a city id card for those who choose to use one, is the id card even folks were undocumented as has been unsuccessful in cities like san francisco and new haven. this package of changes would help to actually embrace and support people who are living here but are not being given the rights they deserve. we come unfortunate, can't even in washington, d.c. to be fair to immigrants, but new york city is the ultimate city of immigrants can lead the way. and be an example to the whole country. this is a moment where these things are finally possible and that's i believe we need to redouble our efforts to achieve them. let's respect and embrace everyone regardless of

documentation. >> my question is -- >> mr. dalbello come you can control the question. you cannot control the answer. bill thompson next. >> but he didn't answer my question. >> duly noted. next question. >> my question is the bill de blasio. bill, i think we all agree that stop and frisk is a series issue and needs to be confronted seriously. the ads that you just put up a few days ago talks about your the only one in new york city of all the candidates who will and the stop and frisk era, who and minority's being profiled. that just isn't true, bill. that just isn't to pick many other people on the stage, many of the candidates have come out and said that they also would eliminate stop and frisk. or that they would make sure that people are not profiled. bill, "the new york times" has reported that baghdad is enacted. why don't you take the ad down?

why don't you take the ad -- bill, and to be honest about it, i think it is important on this one. stop lying to the people of new york city. [applause] >> to end the crisis of stop and frisk, to end of this era were people of color who have been unfairly targeted and were unconstitutional practices were taking place, we have to do three things. we need a new police commissioner devoted to making changes we need. we need an independent, and that emphasize the word independent inspector general and we need a local man, a law in being racial profiling in new york city, banning racial profiling into your city. we need all three of those things. mr. thompson disagrees with the legislation that would give us an independent inspector general and that would ban, legally ban racial profile locally. ms. quinn disagrees as we heard a moment ago with the ban on racial profiling and wants to

keep ray kelly as police commissioner. my point is i am the only candidate who will do three things that will actually end the stop and frisk era. that is a fact and i stand by it. [applause] >> ms. quinn? >> my question is to comptroller thompson, and it's a follow up on the conversation we've been having so far. as you said, "the new york times" and others have characterized the public advocates and what he says he is the only one who wants to make changes and end wrongful stops interests, as misleading and inaccurate but i want to do if you're satisfied with the answer you just got? [laughter] [applause] >> thank you. tell you what, i want to say that i think -- >> errol louis is way too streetsmart to allow that one. >> i think your question is a

sense but it's nice to be popular. >> no, i'm not satisfied with the answer but i think if anything, and when you talk about your the only one, first, bill, i don't need legislation to i definitely don't need lectures from you on this issue and they don't need legislation to it takes a mayor with courage and conviction who will and stop and frisk him who will and racial profiling, who will stand up and make sure that there is a new police commissioner and we make sure that the way that stop and frisk is used does not violate people's constitutional rights. but this is just part of the pattern at a certain point when you look at the misstatement, that the discussion about the term limit issue. speaker quinn support the overturning of term limits and i disagree with strongly but in 2005 when you wanted to be the speaker of the new york city council you supported changing term limits through legislation. [applause] you were against, bill, you were against member items when you were there you were a huge beneficiary. i think this is a question you

need to go back and look at the tv show from years ago to tell the truth. it really is will the real bill de blasio please stand up. [cheers and applause] >> briefly, yes. >> you know, in, in professional wrestling they allow tag teams, so we're going to do that here, i will say this, it's very clear, it's very clear, and mr. thompson will remember the history clearly that i led the opposition to the mayor's proposal on term limits. ..

liu: for a long time the city was outsourcing all kinds of work. when i became comptroller, i'm very proud of the record i've established of saving $4 billion of taxpayer money, a record that's very clear, a record that the speaker doesn't have, and under bill thompson's watch we had this project that was supposed to go out, $63 million. by the time i took office as comptroller, it had hush roomed to $700 million. but what happened, bill? how did the bill get from $63 million to over $700 million in you're the one that cuts the checks. what happened there? thompson: well, john, that is, when you look at city time, it's an issue with the mayor's contract, it was something the mayor was focused on. i stayed on top of mayor

bloomberg and the budget director and pressured them and pushed them. the contract also has expanded in scope, as you well know, and that led to a lot of the escalation in cost. could i have done more? absolutely. could the mayor have done more? definitely. could the city could council in providing oversight done her, yes, they could have. a lot of things could have been done -- liu: my question is -- >> moderator: your point was made, mr. liu. sal albanese, your question. albanese: thank you. my question is for bill de e blasio. two of your staffers tweeted out kill the police. de blasio: that's not accurate right there. albanese: i wanted to know, was it the right decision that you didn't fire those staffers?

de blasio: you know, first of all -- albanese: yes or no, bill. de blasio: i have immense respect for nypd, and i believe, in fact, the nypd, many officers, commanders are looking forward to a day when we can bring police and community back together. i've heard from so many beat be cops, so many precinct commanders that the stop and frisk era and the quotas that went with it made it harder to do that which they were trained to do and gained information they needed to fight crime. so i have immense respect for the men and women of the nypd. they are the true heroes of this -- pgaball you have a funny way of showing it. tech deb today need policies that will show it. >> moderator: mr. wiener, your question. weiner: ms. quinn, i have a question ant the slush fund

scandal. we all know the facts, $5 million. you, yourself, admitted it was for your

quinn quinnquik quik did i when i bece speaker inherit a very problematic budget practice? yes. and i did exactly what you want a leader to do. when i found out about that problematic practice, i reported it to the authorities, and i asked them to investigate it. i stopped it, and then i retomorrow -- reformed the entire process relating to discretionary funds. reformed it in such a way it's now heralded by one of tonight's sponsors, citizens union, as one of the best way to distribute money to community groups. look, if you're mayor, we're all going to have no idea what problems are going to come across our desk. but what you want in a mayor is someone who admits a problem, asks for help, does an investigation, stops what's

wrong and fixes it, and that is what i did -- [cheers and applause] weiner: this notion that i cast aspersions, i assume you were being sarcastic saying i cast aspersions. three of your members went to jail on a scandal on your watch, and i asked a simple question so there's no last minute surprises. just say he was not included anywhere in that, and we're done. quinn: every bit of information has been turned over to the authorities. weiner: turn it over to the voters. turn it over to the citizens, speaker quinn. it's tear document. they paid for the lawyer. >> moderator: i think you're going to have to live with that answer for now, mr. wiener. i imagine there are members of the press and others who will probably follow up. [laughter] before we move on, though, i want to touch on something that

was in the press, and it involved the public advocate and his wife and christine quinn. and i wanted to give you an opportunity which you can decline, if you'd like, to maybe clear the air. there were some statements made during an interview that you and your wife were in about christine quinn. there was some back and fort about whether it was reported accurately or not, and there was an exchange of letters. a lot of confusion, basically. wanted to give you a minute. >> thank you very much. i literally have no idea what mr. wiener was just asking, and i want to say thank you to speaker quinn for his response to the question. the statement in the column in "the new york times" today, first of all, was a misquote. and if you look at the full and accurate quote, which has been published, my wife meant no offense. she was talking about substantive issues, like paid sick days, tax on the wealthy, and she simply disagreed with the approach that speaker quinn

has taken on that issue. i think it was a respectful and substantive statement based on the issues at the core of this campaign. and in the case of my wife's comment, it was from a parent speaking about what parenteds need in the city and are yearning to see that we haven't seen during the bloomberg years. so it was, i think, a respectful and substantive statement. >> moderator: ms. quinn. quinn: the comments, as they were fully reported and corrected by the columnist, are ones i've got to say i found very hurtful and upsetting because they basically raised the question of whether or not the fact that i don't have children is relevant to how hard i fight for families. now, first of all, i fight as hard as anyone in the city of new york for families and children. that's why next month we'll have mandatory kindergarten in the city of new york. [applause] but the real issue here is there are many reasons why some families have children and some

don't; medical reasons, financial reasons, professional reasons, personal reasons. my wife and i both lost our mothers when we were young girl, so the decision whether or not to have children is a deeply personal one, and and i just think -- and there's obviously attacks as we've seen tonight in this kind of political race, but raising someone's family, and we are blessed in new york to have families of all shapes and sizes. should never have happened, and it was very hurtful in my household. de blasio: i just ask people to look at the statement, look at the accurate statement which that has now been put out about new york times which is very clearly about speaker quinn opposing tax on the wealthy for -- >> moderator: okay, we've got it. de blasio: it's not personal, it's substantive. >> moderator: okay. let's have our lightning round. we'll start with anthony wiener, and the first question will be -- we'll ween yes/no, earl? is that how you do this? >> moderator: this will be,

yes. should all lick employees -- public employees be required to live in the city? weiner: no. de blasio: no,. thompson: no,. quinn: no, sal sal no. >> moderator: have you within to a baseball game this season? albanese: i have not this season. quinn: yes, once. thompson: no. >> moderator: this season? oh, no. [laughter] i got stopped by the police -- de blasio: no time for baseball this year, sad hi. >> moderator: mr. wiener? weiner: no. >> ms. quinn, have you ever texted while driving?

[laughter] quinn: no. >> moderator: mr. thompson? [laughter] thompson: yes, i have. i've stopped doing it, though. >> moderator: albanese: not in the last ten months, i have a driver. de blasio: my wife is sitting there, if i said, no, she'd throw me out of the house. >> moderator: mr. wiener? weiner: yes. [laughter] >>albanese: tough act to follow. [laughter] no. >> moderator: mr. liu. liu: i have, but i've never smoked pot.

[laughter] >> moderator: mr. thompson, do you have a metro card in your pocket? thompson: yes. yes, i do. >> moderator: mr. wiener. wean wean stand by. yes. >> moderator: have you ever taken a bus or subway without paying? >> no. >> no. >> no. >> no. >> no. >> yes, but i have my school bus pass. >> no. >> no. >> moderator: mr. de blasio. de blasio: will you live in gracie mansion? >> hell, yes. [laughter] >> yes. >> well, my wife and i, we love our house, but we'll be glad to

live in gracie mansion. >> i think it's a jinx to answer questions like that before you have the answer to move in. >> it's the people's home, yes. >> with me, my wife and my six children are going there. [applause] >> moderator: mr. wiener, if you had to have one of your rivals here on stage to work in your administration, who would it be and what job would you give them? we'll ween sal albanese in charge of early childhood development. >> who would i select? reverend -- [inaudible] >> for what job? >> chaplain. [laughter] >> moderator: mr. liu? liu: >> i think i'd be looking for all new faces. nobody many. >> moderator: ms. quinn. kip quinn bill thompson to make sure our minority-owned business work gets to the best level it

could. >> moderator: mr. thompson. thompson: i don't think i'm taking any jobs in any of the administrations. if there was, the reverend in the mayor's office of tate-based -- faith-based development. >> i'm going to offer a job to all of them, i don't know whether they're going to accept them. >> moderator: pick one and give them a job. >> i was going to say sal, but i don't like your proposal. >> in what job? >> ill also be looking for a brand new team. >> moderator: mr. albanese, do you support congestion pricing? albanese: yes. i have the fair tolling plan. i don't support the bloomberg measure. i did because it would have provided more out- >> moderator: ms. quinn. >> yes. >> did not approve be of mayor

bloomberg's proposal, no. >> moderator: mr. liu, have you taken a book out of a public library this year? lily i have, but it was for my son, joey. thompson: absolutely not. not this year. haven't had the chance. >> mr. salgado. >> i have a bookstore, that's my business. >> mr. thompson. mr. wiener? we'll ween no. >> moderator: should, mr. thompson, should you be free to drink a beer on your own stoop? thompson: yes. >> moderator: mr. salgado? >> no beer at all.

>> yes. >> yes, and in the park and on the beach too. [applause] >> yes. >> ms. quinn? >> yes. >> moderator: okay. let me ask one more. should helmets be hand for bike riders -- helmets be mandatory for bike riders? >> yes. >> it should be for city-sponsored program, and that's manager that will help us actually keep bike riders and pedestrians safe. >> moderator: ms. quinn? quinn: no. >> strongly encouraged but not mandatory. weiner: enough of a nanny state, no. >> moderator: thank you, candidates. let's get back to our central questions. the time is growing short, we're going to make sure that we do have time for closing statements, so if i interrupt, it is for that reason and that reason only. juan manuel. >> thank you.

four years from now, eight years from now, what's going to be your legacy? with the pedestrian plazas and bike lanes and with smoking-free areas, what would be your physical imprint in the skyline, on the streets of new york city? mr. thompson. >> thompson: i don't know that my priority -- i'd like to be remembered for education. and, obviously, if there's a physical part, it would be more schools and better, at least schools that are in better shape. but i want my legacy to be new york city's education system being better, that the achievement gap be closed at schools. if you want to talk physical plant, that schools red light closed any longer -- aren't closed any longer, that our young people are able to do college-level work -- >> so it would be, basically, school buildings? thompson: if it's a physical plant, i would say school buildings, but the truth is, it's education.

>> okay. mr. wiener? weiner: you know, "the new york times" did a valentine to the bloomberg administration how they've transformed the skyline by shiny, new market rate housing. those struggling to make it might not be things that go in glass edifices. this is a guy who wanted to build a stadium on the west side, who, frankly, dithered while ground zero didn't get developed. i think we have to save health care in the city, improve our schools, things that don't go into dioramas on the front page but are the things that citizens that can actually touch and see are real. most new yorkers watching this program will not be able to move into the market rate housing that mike bloomberg brags about. that's the problem. we need housing for them. i don't care if it's big or small. >> mr. salgado. >> i want to be remembered as a major who fought for all the inhabitants of new york city, especially those who are basically enslaved which are the

millions of latinos who are called illegal. i believe that slavery's not abolished. slavery has been transferred to my people. dr. martin luther king fought for his people, i want to be remembered for the latino guy who spoke with an accent who fought for his people as well. >> mr. liu. hu lew we know we have challenges, and we're going to have to change the way new york looks like. many of the changes we need are not about the appearance of the city. i want to be known as the mayor who created jobs. we have an unemployment rate that's higher, significantly higher than the national average. we have jobs that are being created, but for some reason the unemployment rate continues to go up, and it's not just because people are coming to new york. it's also because the jobs aren't going to new yorkers. so we need to fix this situation. we've got to bring down unemployment, we've also going to bring down unemployment

disparities because i'd like to be known not just as the ones who created the job, but also afforded opportunities to everybody across the city on a level playing field. equal opportunity is what we need to restore. >> mr. . alwanese. albanese: we should be the common sense city. i want to be remembered as somebody who put plans into place to make sure that the city can survive the next hundred years. our infrastructure has to be improved, we have to protect our shorelines, our power grids. that's not a very sex i thing that gets you votes, but it's very important. i want to prepare the city for the next hundred years. i wallet people to say he made the city a better place for us and our children in terms of infrastructure, in terms of schools and also treating people fairly. >> ms. quinn, how would be quinn new york after bloomberg new

york? kip quinn at the end of my eight years in office the host important thing will be to see that there's more people in the middle class than there are at the beginning of my term. that's one thing i'm going to want to fight for, more folks in the middle class. two, at the end of my eight years i wallet those folks to have 40,000 more apartments that the city's built that they can live in, and i'm going to take efforts to bring rent down to make sure middle class people can stay in new york city. i'm going to have focused and made the housing live bl so the 600,000 folks who live there are living in quality conditions, and i want to have lengthened our school day, stop spending $100 million a year on textbooks, start spending $100 million on tablets this schools and make new york climate change ready. >> any major change, mr. de blasio? on the skyline of the city? de blasio: again, the challenge of our times is crease

addressing the inequality of our city. it's not be about bulling luxury si condos. luxury condos are part of the pressure of closing down community hospitals. i want to build 200,000 units of affordable housing over the next ten years by striking a new balance with the real estate industry where the public's interest comes first rather than developers' interests. making sure that we tax the wealthy so we can actually get full-day pre-k and devote ourselves to early childhood education and after school. these are the types of policies that make sure we're a city that's actually not going to accept 46% of our people living at or near the poverty level. there's a lot we have to do, but the mayor of new york city has great tooled to do it with. my focus is on ending inequality in new york city. >> thank you. [applause] >> moderator: thanks very much. now it is time for closing statements. we're going to start with bill de blasi owrks.

please use the lights and try to keep it to a real 60 seconds. de blasio: in new york city right now were living a tale of two cities. almost half our people, 46, at or near the poverty level, and our middle class is disappearing. we need a real break from the bloomberg years. instead of more luxury condo, we need a plan for affordable housing, as i said, 200,000 units over the next ten years, and a plan to save community hospitals because health care has to be available locally. when you need the emergency room, you need to know it's nearby, and i would devote myself to protecting community hospitals. i'd end the stop and frisk era that has no unfairly targeted people of color. the bottom line is we can't keep living a tale of two cities. it has to end, and we can't leave any new yorker behind. that's what i will do as mayor of new york city. [applause] salgado: i'm not a politician, i'm just a new yorker who came to this position.

it is very difficult. i have been discriminated by political reasons and for economic reasons. quinnipiac university don't want to include me because they say they only include people who hold office before, yet they still have -- [inaudible] with 37% in the republican party. i believe it is essential for all new yorkers to actually come and serve in the government and then go back to the private sector. if we don't involve anyone to be able to do so, we are putting ourself in jeopardy. i believe that we have to stop stop and frisk. many of my policies have been endorsed by my colleagues. i hope if i don't become the next mayor, they stand by the promise. we have more than 987,000 latinos registered as democrat, and 15% of them come out to vote for me, it's going to be me and christine quinn in the runoff. [laughter] [applause] >> moderator: thank you. mr. thompson. thompson: two weks agoeadg

cos came andnt more than 80% of our black and latino students weren't performing on level, they weren't deemed, basically, by the scores as competent. and so many of our children it was clear, the education system budget suiting them -- wasn't suiting them, wasn't performing for our young people. i'm son of a new york city public schoolteacher. my mother taught for almost 30 be years. i believe that education is the greatest way that we can turn inequality around in the city of new york. i want to fix schools in the city, not close them. i want to make sure that we work with our principals and our teachers, not demonize them. i want to bring parents in and involve them in the school system so that it serves their children. i don't want to be the education mayor. it's not about me. i want to be, i want to make new york city the education city. it is about you, it is about our more than one million children and providing a better future

for each and every one of you. that's why i want to be the mayor of this city. [applause] >> moderator: thank you. ms. quinn? quinn: thank you. you know, my entire career i have fought and delivered for new yorkers, fought to help people get into the middle class and stay there. and that's what i'm going to do as mayor. i'm going to fight to improve our schools, to give every child the best shot they can have. i'm going to keep in the safest big city this america, because that's key, but i'm going to do it while also ending unconstitutional stop and terrorist being. i'm going to use the power of our neighborhoods for economic development to bring good jobs to every neighborhood, particularly those neighborhoods that have been left behind. and i'm going to take head on the affordability crisis, because we're not going to be a home for the middle class if people can't find homes and apartments they can afford. so i'm going to make sure we build new, affordable housing, improve the housing authority and get new york city power over its own rent laws. we are the greatest city in the

world, but we can be even greater when we create more opportunity for folks to move into the middle class. that's what i've done my entire career, delivered for new york, and that's what i'm going to do as mayor, and i ask for your vote tonight. thank you. [cheers and applause] >> moderator: mr. liu. liu: i'm an unlikely candidate for mayor. growing up here as an immigrant, going to public schools, getting my degree in mathematical physics, spending most of my adult career outside of government or politics. but i entered politics because i wanted to create change, i wanted to make a difference. and as city council member, as comptroller i'm very proud of my record, saving billions of dollars so that additional service cuts and reductions would not be necessary. be looking at our investment record, i'm very crowd of the last four fiscal years at 58% investment return on our pension funds and creating jobs by

accelerating our capital construction plans. i've talked about, and i intend to enact changes that are very progressive for the city of new york that level the playing field and include more people. i'm proud to be the consistently progressive candidate in this race, and i need your help -- [speaking spanish] [cheers and applause] >> moderator: gracias. mr. albanese. albanese: thank you. i'm very proud of the fact i'm the only candidate in this race that's not accepting money from lobbyists and developers. i can make these issues on the merits when i get there. but i have to make a statement about public safety because it's been politicized in this campaign. the fact of the matter is that we all agree that there were too many stops. the department has made headway.

stops have declined 30% in this city because of the great training that the department has received. and we're on the right track, and i'm concerned that my opponents in this race are doing things that are going to handcuff our police officers and cause them to sit around twiddling their thumbs. it is common sense that officers have the right, have the right to stop someone if they believe there's reasonable suspicion. and i don't think we should play politics with policemen in this city like we're doing in this campaign. i am horrified by the fact that all of my colleagues up here have demonized police officers. they've compared them to george zimmerman, a vigilante. it's not right. under an albanese administration, i am going to make sure that the city is safe, and we're going to protect civil liberties. thank you so much. >> moderator: thank you. mr. wiener. weiner: my fellow new yorkers, you get to decide what you want

in the next mayor, and if you want more of the same, you've got plenty of choices on this stage. but if you believe that we need a fighter for the middle class and someone who has a specific plan, here it is: we need to take 20% of all new houses and reserve it for the middle class, not just the poor. we need to cut down on wrong stops and frisks and protect police officers at the same time by requiring them to wear cameras on their lapel recording what they're doing. we need to have a single-payer health care in this city that restores jobs, covers everyone and also saves taxpayer money. we need to get back to basics in our schools and restore discipline so teachers can teach, students can learn. we need to pay teachers a little more if they're a master teacher to take the toughest assignments in the school system, something that some people have opposed. look, we need a real plan, we need specific, we need issues, we don't need more of the same. my name's anthony weiner, and i want to be your mayor. [applause] >> moderator: thank you. you know what? we have time for a short question. this'll be one of our lightning

round type responses, and we'll go right down the line. as mayor, if elected mayor, will you commit to making your location known to the public at all times, including weekends and vacations? >> yes, and i will not be in bermuda. >> yes. >> yes. >> yes. >> yes. >> yes. and i'll vacation in the rockaways. >> yes. >> moderator: okay. let me try another one. [laughter] if you could be mayor of another city anywhere, which would it be? >> the irish riviera, rockaway, new york. >> moderator: mr. albanese? >> chicago. >> i don't know of any other city like new york. >> moderator: ms. quinn? quinn: there is nowhere else. >> after new york city, who would want to be mayor of any other place? >> i am already the mayor of benson hurst, so i don't have to -- [laughter] >> if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, so i just

want to be major of -- mayor of this place. >> moderator: as you know, every year the budget process be features threats to cut very important city services including daycare centers, senior centers. if elected, what's one agency or service that you would want to make off limits baseline or by any other means? weiner: nothing would be off line from cutting waste. >> moderator: mr. albanese? albanese: parks. >> moderator: ms. quinn? quinn: you can't say there aren't cuts in any agency -- >> moderator: if you could take one out of the budget dance, which one would it be? quinn: i don't want to cut out where things aren't efficient, so you've got to look for those. >> we should end the budget dance first, and if there's an agency that should be left out, our seniors should be left out. >> moderator: mr. salgado. >> no cuts -- [inaudible] >> one area that's just morally

wrong to cut is services for homeless and runaway youth. >> moderator: okay. thank you very much, candidates. that's all the time we have for this debate. i'd like to thank the candidates for joining us tonight, and primary day is september 10th. the general election is on november 59, and another reminder, along with these debates the -- [inaudible] nonpartisan new york city voter guide that also produces a video voter guide has introduced a new mobile last form which makes the election and candidate information available at your fingertips. that's available at the board's web site, www.nyccfc.info. thanks so much for watching, have a great evening. [inaudible conversations]

>> several live events to tell you about this morning. the center for strategic and international studies is hosting federal and state officials to look at disaster recovery and preparedness. that's here on c-span2 at 9 eastern. at 10 eastern on c-span3, it's a forum on women and the civil rights movement hosted by several groups including the national council of negro women, the king center and planned parenthood. and a little bit later at 31 a.m. eastern -- 11 a.m. eastern, our companion network, c-span, will have coverage of health and human services secretary kathleen sebelius in philadelphia to discuss the new health care law and the latino community. >> want to see the loss of print journalism. i don't want to -- i am frustrated when i see the loss of so much sort of state and local journalism, covering

what's happening in city councils, what's happening on the ground because a lot of this national journalism isn't as good if you don't have that local journalism. a lot of what i do is watching, reading local and state stories, seeing what's happening at that level and figuring out how it's bubbling up through the national level. so if there aren't people on the ground doing that sort of work, again, i think national journalism suffers quite a bit. so i really hope that someone figures out a way how to keep that sustainable and keep those people in place. you know, we're going to see a lot more social media, i think, where people don't maybe go to the web sites of news outlets quite as much, but they simply see stories being shared by others, by what their friends are talking about, and news sort of goes that way rather than you go to these four web sites. >> from blogger at the center for american progress to managing editor at the huffington post, amanda terkel

sunday night on q&a. >> early on we said, okay, we have this 16-acre piece of land, we have to put something on it, or maybe nod. it was just an open ended what do we do with it. and everyone wanted a say in it. very quickly leaders promised a public process to receive public input, to generate a master plan. at the same time that that was going on, however, like i said before, you had larry silverstein, the developer who won the lease to the office space, you had pataki who was running the port authority, and they really believed in the importance of the commercial space that was destroyed. they wanted to make sure that lower manhattan remained an international financial hub. and they believed that in order for it to remain that reputation, they had to rebuild all of this commercial space. >> the controversy over the rebuilding on the site of the world trade center. elizabeth greenspan on the battle for ground zero, sunday night at 9 on "after words,"

part of booktv this weekend on c-span2. >> now, author charles murray discusses his book "coming apart: the state of white america 1968-2010." he spoke a few weeks ago at the annual western conservative summit. hosted by the colorado christian university centennial institute. from denver, this is a little less than a half hour. ♪ ♪ >> thanks very much. i can't tell you how depressing it is to be introduced, to be told preceding the introduction that the preceding speaker not only got a standing ovation, but people who are applauding a television screen in scottsdale, arizona. [laughter] however, there can't be just high points in any set of speeches, you have to have time to rest, and i'm going to give you that over the next 25 minutes. [laughter] i'm also going to say nothing whatsoever about republican

versus democratic politics. i figure you need a rest from that too. i'm going to talk instead about a very major problem that faces the country as a whole if we are to sustain the american project as we have historically known it. this is the thesis that i developed in the book called "coming apart," and i'm going to have to give you a very brief synopsis of it. but i want to get through that so i can deal with the topic that haley mentioned, what happens next? the thesis of "coming apart" is that over the last 50 years we have developed classes that are different in kind from anything that the united states has ever known before. we have always had rich people and poor people. the rich people and poor people have always lived in somewhat different parts of town and been separate in some kinds of ways, but we were united in our participation in basic american institutions in ways which have

changed over the last 50 years. let me give you an example. the one statistic that i find most important many trying to understand what's -- in trying to understand what's going on. and i'm going to put it in terms of just white americans. and the reason for that is that doing so clears away a lot of complications. nobody can say to himself or herself, well, murray's talking about things that are really mostly a problem in this community or that community. by talking about non-latino white americans, that is not a possible response. secondly, i'm going to talk about people who are in the prime of life, ages 30-49 years old. the time of life when people are married and having kids and getting ahead in the world. in 1960 if you talk about the white upper middle class -- that means educated in college and working if the professions or managerial jobs -- 94% of them were married. you will have very few

statistics in which you have that close to 100%. but if you take the white working class, meaning people with just a high school education and working in blue collar jobs or low-level service jobs, 84% of them were married. so it was a little bit less than the upper middle class but not that much. and the main thing is that communities were overwhelmingly organized on the basis of married couples with children. fast forward 50 years to 2010. 84% of whites in the upper middle class are still married. marriage is alive and well in the upper middle class. among the white working class, 48%. from 84 to 48% in 50 years. a minority of whites in the working class ages 30-49 are now married. that simple statistic all by itself has reverberations for a lot of other things going on in our society. and it's reflected in such

things as, for example, the change in the labor force behavior of white males ages 30-49. look, in 1960 if you were 30-49, you were male, and unless you were quadriplegic, you were supposed to be working or looking for work, and just about everybody was. as of 2008 before, before the recession hit, one out of eight white males ages 30-49 was not even in the labor force, not even looking for work, and moreover, that number had been rising through good times and bad including the boom times of the 1980s and 1990s. there's an easy explanation, by the way. among others, there are a variety of explanations. social science has now proved beyond a shadow of the doubt -- this will tell you the power of the sciences -- that marriage civilizes men. none of you knew that, did you? laugh a laugh and the fact is when men are not married, they don't tend to get buckled down

and get serious and get ahead in life. so the reduction in marriage is implicated in what happened there. there's also been a big reduction in religiosity. again can, the figure is one out of eight. this time it is now in white working class commitments only one out of eight persons says both that they have a strong affiliation with their faith and that today attend worship services almost once a week or more. one out of eight. when it's only one out of eight, you're not talking about a minority that still is a powerful voice in the community, you are increasingly talking about a minority who were seen as oddballs. in the white upper middle class, there has been reduction in religiosity, but not nearly as much, and you still have more than a quarter of people in the upper middle class who do have that kind of affiliation and participation in their faith. this has reverberations for still another important indicator, what the social scientists call social capital, and actually consists of

neighborliness and civic activism, it involves coaching little league teams and attending the pta and making sure that the little old lady across the street has her snow shoveled from the her walk during the winter. things like that. so we know that social capital is driven by a couple of things. it's driven by married couples who are trying to create an environment for their children, and it is driven by religion. in his famous book "bowling alone," robert putnam calculated that half of all social capital is directly religious in its origins, and there's a lot more that is generated by religious people because religious people are more active in secular forms of social capital than nonreligious people are. of so i'm talking about a series of ways in which the working class which has historically been the spine of american society has been crumbling. and this is not limited to statistics.

if you go down to a a working class neighborhood and watch what's going on, go into a bar and just drink a couple of beers and engage in conversation with people. and you will discover communities that are unraveling, that no longer function in the way that they once did, and the existence of this class, the growing class, poses a fundamental difference to historically the role that the working class played in this country. met me turn now to -- let me turn to the formation of the upper class. i'm not just referring to upper middle anymore. i'm talking about the people who run the country. and they are of two kinds. you have the important people in denver, colorado, or scottsdale, arizona, people who hold the important positions in corporations here, in the political structure, in the universities, people who run the tv stations and to forth. but if you're talking about the people who affect the nation's culture and politics and economy, those are almost all

concentrated in four areas of the country. the washington, d.c. area, the new york city area, los angeles air and more recently the fourth nexus of this kind of influence, silicon valley stretching from san francisco down to san jose. what has happened over the last 50 years has been the result of some good things that occurred. we got a lot better over the course of the 20th century in finding talented kids wherever they were and sending them off to college. that's a good thing. it also is true over the course of the 20th century that brains became much more valuable in the marketplace than they had been before, and people who had talent and got the education and the opportunities made a lot of money. ..

to understand the degree to which this culture exists. and now some the questions in the quiz were sort of strict social science things. have you ever lived at least a year in the neighborhood in which fewer% than 50% of your neighbors have college degrees? some of them are kind of mischievous questions. there's one question which said have you or your spouse in the course of the last year ever -- i asked that question because

the new upper class, you don't drink bud. you don't drink coors. you drink a beer made in like inch time i else. -- liechtenstein. [laughter] you just don't drink. there's another question, have you or your spouse ever purchased a pickup truck? but there are also important question such as this, have you ever walked on a factory floor? not worked. have you ever walked on a factory floor? because an awful lot of the kids who are now no longer kids that are in their 30s and '40s have never done that. have no idea what that is like. if i had to pick the most important question of all, i would say it is have you ever held a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day? if you have not held such a job, you don't get most of america.

you don't understand, you cannot empathize with life among people who have failed or still hold jobs or cause body parts to hurt at the end of the day. now, in a sense the problem posed by this new upper class, which increasingly exists in these four metropolitan areas i described, in one sense it's not so bad if they are people have risen to positions of great influence but grew up in a working-class family or in a middle-class family. because they still remember what that's like. you could put them off in greeley, colorado, small hours in the morning and they would be able to navigate and figure out what was going on. what is scary, a true phenomena has developed. one is that the people who are in these neighborhoods are no longer living in neighborhoods that are joined by normal once.

i'll use washington, d.c. as an example. if you start from downtown washington, d.c., and go west towards virginia and north toward maryland, you have 13 zip codes at which almost all of the movers and shakers in washington live. if you live in that part of downtown d.c., they live in georgetown or in bethesda, chevy chase. 13 zip codes in a. i've created an index that combined the median family income with zip codes with the percentage of adults with college degrees and i rank all the zip codes in the country from top to bottom. in these 13 zip codes that are all contiguous to each other in washington, d.c., 11 of them are not only in the top percent while zip codes in the country, 11 of them are in the top half of the top 1% of all zip codes, and the other two are in the

98%. but it's worse than that, because buffering beyond those are more zip codes that stretch it into virginia and maryland and encompass more than 1 million people, and they are in the top 5% of all zip codes. what i'm saying is that now, unlike 1960, if you're in washington and you're one of the people who runs the country, you are within a very large number of zip codes that contain people are pretty much like you and buffered from the rest of america. same is true of the areas around new york and los angeles and silicon valley. the second problem that's going on i is that increasing of the people who hold these positions are not people who grew up in working-class and middle-class neighborhoods. they are people who grew up in places like that who have gone to k-12 private schools or really good public schools. and probably the dumbest kid in the class was in the upper half of the intellectual distribution of this country.

why is that dangerous? it's dangerous because if you had no direct contact with half of the country in terms of that kind of balance, you are a little likely to start looking down on those other people. you have no way of knowing that you know what, the lowest people in the bottom half of the distribution can be funny and smart, and the best friend you could want to have to carry their own weight, and people that you would be proud to call friends. you have no way of knowing that. if you talk about why it is that we have bloomberg syndrome whereby mayor bloomberg thinks it's his job to protect us from drinking big sodas, part of it i think is kind of condescension of, that with -- within the new upper class about the capabilities of ordinary americans. but beyond that there is a fundamental problem which is that a whole lot of people who

are in cabinet positions or who are running financial institutions, or running television networks, all these other things that have such extraordinary effects on the culture and politics and economy of this country, they cannot empathize with the priorities of, let's say, truck drivers. that's not a problem if truck drivers can't empathize with the priorities of a cabinet officer or with a news anchor person. because the truck driver can't affect their life. the news anchor person and the cabinet officers can affect the life and do affect the life of truck drivers, and they had better know the personal experience some sense, about what that person's life is like, increasingly they do not. increasingly, something we have something worse that is going on. i've had the opportunity to speak to a lot of audiences, and

there's good news and bad news. the good news is that among the older members of the audience, the lead office, people who are members -- i say to them such things as to what extent are you systematically depriving your children of the experiences that made you who you are? i see lots of heads nodding, that's good but i've also found in audiences a lot of people who say yeah, we are members of the upper class, so what? what's wrong with that? and when you talk about how we are leaving touch with mainstream america, well, why should i want to be in touch with mainstream america? and that leads me to my reflections on the final topic i want to take up, what does this all mean. a central part of the american projects has been its fierce determination of americans of all socioeconomic classes to pretend they are part of the

middle class. there has been in this country a wonderful sense that you aren't supposed to get too big for your britches. those of you in this audience of a certain age will remember a time when executives who couldn't afford to get the most expensive car on the market would not buy them. would not buy cadillacs which used to be the standard of electric car. they wouldn't buy cadillacs. why wouldn't they buy cadillacs? does it would be too ostentatious. they would be showing off so they bought buicks instead. those of you of a certain age know that there was no such thing as a 20,000 square foot house or 12,000 square foot house, except in a very few small neighborhoods in surrounding new york city and everly hills california. because you wouldn't want to build a house like that because that would be unseemly. it would separate you from the rest of the population. you are, first of all, an american, not first of all a

member of the socioeconomic class. and to the extent that is disappearing, something very important about the way america has been. i'm afraid that haley oversold me when she said that i'm not one of these bloom into people. look, -- libertarians don't do solutions. this is -- [laughter] [applause] >> the whole point of being a libertarian is it's unnecessary to just leave us alone and the problems will take care of themselves. i will say this much. there is no political solution to the problems i've just described. and furthermore there is no partisan solution to the problems i've just described. there is going to have to be a kind of cultural reformation. people say what does that mean

and how can that happen? well, it happens because i write books about this, and that starts certain conversations. and other people start to talk about similar kinds of problems. sometimes in the confines of the family, sometimes in the plot of a sitcom on tv. by to the extent there's a sense in the population as a whole, if there are problems in people start to talk about them, he just can change. if you don't think things can change just look at american history. look, for example, the civil rights movement. we went from essentially a standing start in 1954 to the passage of the civil rights bill of 1964. in a decade. and the reason it was able to pass is not because you had these high-minded senators and members of the house of representatives who rose above the objections of their electorates who passed it. it passed because there had been a seachange, i see changed in

america's attitude for race and race relations. you can also look at the religious great awakening that have periodically been a part of our history. there was one in the 17 '30s and 17 \40{l1}s{l0}\'40{l1}s{l}) that laid a lot of the groundwork for the revolution. there was one in 1820s and 1830s that profoundly changed america's civic culture for the better. there was one in the 1870s and 1880s that laid much of the moral foundation for events that happened in the early part of the 20th century. america has historically had the capacity to transform itself. and people have tried to sell short the potential of the united states to do such things have often been proved wrong. what we need now is for americans, republicans and democrats alike, who shared a similar affection for allegiance to america's historic civic

culture, to ask themselves how much they really do treasure it. and to the extent they really do treasure it, the way that they ought to change their lives. i'm not asking for self-sacrifice here. i'm not asking for people to do things against their own interest on behalf of the rest of the country. that is really un-american but rather, i want them to rethink of what that self interest really is. for example, the new upper class has gotten really, really good at -- they do live in these high-end enclave. they take their kids to belize for scuba diving when they go on vacation. they don't travel on private jets. they travel first class. they have a lot of things going for them where they have a very pleasant lives, but they are pretty glossy. to what extent are they no longer invited to the community,

in which even problems have to be solved? to what extent is living in your very big house on your six acres of land and not having the least idea of who lives around you, to what extent does that day mutual life from meaning? to what extent has not been in touch with mainstream america make your life for? what can you do? well, instead of going to belize, pack the kids off to wisconsin and go fishing. bring them here to colorado and go to a dude ranch. a lot of dude ranch where bill gates goes but where ordinary americans go. or if you're going to insist on continuing going to aspen, don't fly there. get in the car and drive and stay at motel six and eat in diners. this sounds trivial. it's not really trivial, because if you have a frame of mind which says i don't want to be isolated anymore, things that you can do to change your life become available.

i want to change the moral outlook of the new upper class on the role as americans. the betting line on this, okay, if i had to bet significant portion of the murray retirement fund, i would bet, i would say that with very high probability, well, we have a greater than 50% probability within probably my lifetime of becoming just another social democracy. like the european social democracy, which has their very real class structure in which there's a lot more distention between french upper-class and german and belgian upperclassman is between the french upper-class and french quote peasants closed quote. that could happen. it's also possible that what we've had in this country,

historically, is exceptionally different way of living together. still commands the affection and allegiance which will draw large numbers of people who fight it out when they go to the polls on a variety of issues to change their behavior and change their ways of life. because that's the fundamental truth about american exceptionalism that we have forgotten. president obama famously answered the question about american exceptionalism when he first came to office by saying yes, i believe in american exceptionalism, just as i'm sure greeks believed in greek exceptionalism. he was wrong. american exceptionalism is not something we americans made up. american exceptionalism is something that all the world agreed existed and european commentators took the lead in the 19th century of talking about this unique civic culture that the united states had achieved.

what i want is for americans of all classes, but especially the upper-class to realize once again how exceptional that was, hoand how unique it was among te nations of the world, and how immeasurably precious. thank you very much. [applause] >> and we are live this morning at the center for strategic and international studies host a panel discussion on disaster recovery and preparedness. with her opening remarks from the department homeland security assistant secretary for policy, david heyman. we expect this to get under way in just a moment. this is live coverage on c-span2. [inaudible conversations]

>> excuse me. if everybody could take their seats, please. good morning. my name is stephanie kostro and i'd like to welcome you to csis but before we begin, if i could remind everyone to turn off or to silence their personal devices. i would appreciate it. again, thank you all for being here. i would also like to thank the department of homeland security for giving us this opportunity to collaborate with the him on s event and on this topic. in the last day or so csis has taken a particular interest in issues of disaster resilience.

i know a number of you have attended our past discussions and our disaster resilience series which cohosted with the pennington foundation of baton rouge, louisiana. for those of you interested in the series i would encourage you to visit our website, csis.org to learn more about those events including interviews and videos. natural disasters represent a significant challenge. on average we experience 10 severe weather events each year, exceeding $1 billion in damage. in the 1980s the annual average was only two such even events. in 2012 alone disastrous cost the u.s. an estimated $110 billion making it the second most costly year in disasters in recent decades. adjusting disasters and the cost goes will acquire us to -- our long-term efforts to build resilience for communities, businesses, government agencies and individuals are better

prepared for and can recover more quickly and more fully from natural disasters. to discuss how we can make building and resilient nation more effective and more of a priority, we're joined today by dissing bush panel of experts. first i would like to introduce david heyman who'll be living a few opening remarks. david isby assistant secretary for policy of the department of homeland security what he and his team provide thought leadership, policy development and decision analysis on a range of issues. users possible for developing and integrating dhs wide policies, plan, programs and strategies across all mission including disaster resilience. i would also like to note that david was the founding director of homeland security program here at csis were encoded acting director, so thank you for joining us, and welcome back. before david takes the stage i like to introduce our three speakers today. first i would like to welcome jane cage, the winner of the 2012 dhs rick rescorla -- i'm sorry if i'm butchering his last

name, national award for resilience. as chair of the citizens advisory coverage team in joplin, missouri, jane demonstrated extraordinary leadership in response to recovering efforts following the devastating tornado in may 2012, rather 2011. i'm confusing my years. after that on your the team was established to provide a forum between citizens and the city council as the community began to recover. jane cage creates a quote listening to joplin plan, which serveserve as the foundation ofe committee recovery effort in recognition of the role that the committee played in this massive effort, secretary napolitano chose to present the 2012 national award for resilience and ms. cage and the citizens of joplin. following her remarks we will hear from david coffin, associate administrator for policy at fema. david has been responsible for famous direction, the core committee approach to emergency

mission and its supporting doctrine, blocking the strategic foresight initiative in creating and holding a nine country multilateral working group on community resilience. finally, we have debra ball does the general counsel and senior vice president of public policy at the insurance institute for business and home safety was just served since 2008. prior to her work with is the day, she was the executive vice president of public policy management for the american insurance association where she developed and implemented halsey for federal and state public policy issue. without further ado, david heyman. [applause] >> thank you, stephanie, and my colleagues up here, and all of you, for welcoming me back to an old home, center for strategic and international studies, one of the greatest think tanks in america. and possibly the world. and i'm not biased. i see some familiar faces. one of the things that's great

but csis compared to my new job with homeland security is how close it is to starbucks. when secretary napolitano called me to offer the position and to be on their team, i thought long and hard about it because homeland security is a tough mission from its 20% of your playing defense. it's a great challenge, a lot of responsibility. identical organization from new organization. and i just moved up to the northern part of d.c. and my commute to csis became almost an hour with a double buses and things like that. and when she offered the job i said this is a hard decision, and then i thought about it. if you can keep -- it's a 10 minute commute, that's good. after seeing as i realize there was no starbucks up there, and some glad to be back here and i'll be going to starbucks after this discussion but anyway, we're here to talk about

resilience, and a lot of folks use that term. we hear the term frequently. it's got a lot of familiarity, but the question is what does it mean and how do we use it in a policy sense? what isn't resilience and out of each of us become more resilient? how do our communities become more resilient? this is the challenge we face at the beginning of the obama administration, and from a policy perspective you get a vision can you get your strategy and policy into a tech the organization to move that forward and your programs to follow. and that's in fact what we did. set out the national security strategy puts out the four key pillars of national security strategy and includes defense, diplomacy, development and security and resilience of the homeland. so resilience is in there. it's in the quadrennial review, it's one of the five missions that we promoted to accomplish

homeland security. homeland security, we have to prevent terrorism, secure our borders, administer our immigration laws as safeguard cyberspace, and the fifth one ensuring resilience against all hazards. so we put the framework out there, and the question is what of the policies and programs to do that? what are the organizations to do that? the president in his first directive created a resilience directorate on a national security staff. that was a critically important and integrated data, president, actually bush created that as well. and then second, at the department of homeland dignity, all the different parts of homeland security better day with resilience come together. but it turns out that even with the standards that we develop, the grants we put in place, the programs are put in place, it's still hard to do. you know, resilience is a

constant. everybody knows and a seat and they recognize it, but programmatically figure how to do a more resilient nature -- nation is a great challenge. so what we did, we said, if you know what it looks like, how do we model it? how do we model resilience? and how do we inspire resilience? it's one thing to have the ready.gov site that tells you think you need to do to be prepared and that's quickly important if you haven't done it, read this i come and get your kid, have your plan. stay in tune. but it's another thing to be inspired by an understand of resilience and that's what want to talk about today, modeling resilience and why we created the national resilience award. this is the first ever of its kind. i had the privilege of joining and stand with the people of joplin this past may at the second anniversary i guess of the tornado that devastated --

devastating tornado picking through there. and the people of joplin understand too well how difficult it is to be resilient, but they are a model of resilience. and as a testament of their strength and generosity and purpose, we come secretary announced and honor the people of joplin and jane cage with the first ever national resilience award. let me tell you about the rick rescorla award. rick rescorla, british american, dual citizen fought in vietnam, decorated hero in both countries. and lived his life in america, american citizen, security expert, and worked for morgan

stanley, was a bit of a character. everybody who knows him, loved him. and he, back in the '90s, before the 93 bombings of the world trade center, was worried about that, and petitioned a number of experts and officials to improve security of the world trade center. that bombing happened, and ever since then, he made a point of preparing his organization for future disasters. and he had them drill every month. he had different folks going into stairwells and running up and down them. he would be out there with his bullhorn coaching them along. and everyone, everyone somewhat laughed at it. he was always a character doing this, but he got to prepare. and on 9/11, every morgan

stanley employee survived, evacuated, largely because of their drilling and his efforts. all but five survived the attacks. the five who did not survive was rick rescorla and four at its security partners ar were goingp the second how to help others when the second tower fell. and so the award was created in his memory. he is a person of great character and conviction, and a model for preparedness and resilience. and so, this national award, we want to use it as a way of helping build a more secure and resilient nation. and the award weeds as follows, it is for superior leadership and innovation by a nongovernmental individual or organization who exemplifies the qualities and achievements of

rick rescorla emphasizing leadership and effective preparation, response and recovery in the face of disasters. and if you know what happened in joplin, small town in missouri, a hundred people lost their lives, tremendous devastation, but the community pulled together. and almost ad hoc way. jane cage who is here today, she was the chair of the citizens advice recovery team, and they recognize on their own that they could pull together and build and rebuild a better and more secure and resilient community. and they did so in ways that are pretty remarkable. for those of you that know, disaster recovery and response, some of the most challenging parts are housing and schools, and all of those things existed

in joplin. and what was remarkable is that, is that they chose to focus largely on getting their students back in school. this happened in may of 2011, and when the tornado hit on august -- when the students had to return in the fall to the school, the community and work together and they found a way to get all the students back, and business was as usual on day one, school, for all of us to of joplin. a remarkable achievement. it goes beyond the. the debris removal, the planning, the vision. and this was done in partnership with fema. the know was there. 820 employers were working there on the recovery. i talked to jane yesterday.

everyone other citizens who were dislocated in their homes, are back in their homes. if you about the difficult that is, it's an extraordinary accomplishment and the people of joplin should be commended. so this is a model of recovery, a model of resilience. there are many models across the country come and we want to just be able to tell the story so that others can learn. and, in fact, that's what happens. citizens in joplin have been able to help citizens and moore, oklahoma, who, two years almost to the day of the joplin disaster had a devastating tornado come through. and on that jane will talk about it today, but she's got a wonderful project that she's working on right now. are you going to talk about that? i'll just mention it so maybe get her to talk about it. but, you know, the stories, the

people of joplin and the one that took place there is one that we should all embrace and learn, and she's hoping to pull it together. i won't say more than the net. you can talk about that. but it was a great honor for the secretary of homeland security, myself for the department of homeland security, to give the first ever rescorla awar award o jane antithesis of joplin, recognizing the contribution in the aftermath of the devastating tornado from 2011. what i wanted to leave behind with you as a point of departure is the question of how we continue to build a more resilient nation. we are working with the center recovery report just came out this week and you'll see tremendous recommendations about how we build in resilience, how we build in the ability to

withstand better the disruptio disruptions, such as the floods of sandy. and we can do that with fortified standards. you here a little bit about that today. you hear about possibly about a program that we are piloting called resilient star, which is this notion that you can have a choice about which house you buy. you can buy the house that is built to fortified standards and know that it would be better in terms of facing a disaster than others them and you just need to have the concept of their like you do with energy star. we talk about that. but we can as a nation become more resilient but we have to do it person by person, family by family, community by community. jane is here to talk to you a little bit about the citizens of joplin and that community, which is a model of resilience, why we're proud to give them the first ever national resilience award to the next one will be

awarded in september. thank you, jane, for letting us on a you and your citizens and colleagues. at alternate over to jane cage, and thank you all for your time and attention today. [applause] >> good morning. first of all i would like to say that everybody works hard in joplin, not just me. so i'm certainly just the represented here at and unlike the other people on the panel i really don't have any credentials related to resilience. in real life i'm a small business woman who runs the technology company and then the kind of have a second life as a volunteer. so what i really have is just a practical expense of what happened in joplin. so, i don't have one set of experience but it seems like i have a lot of it. and in terms of rick rescorla, certain what he did in comparison to what i did in

joplin, which is facilitate a lot of meetings and heard a lot of cats, there's nothing in comparison. but i will take that i think we made some really great progress in joplin as a result of the tornado. the five seconds statistical mark, 161 lives lost, 18,000 cars destroyed, 7500 buildings damaged, 4000 of those destroyed. 3 million cubic yards of debris removed, larger than the world trade center disaster. we had a lot of damage in a really short time and it went through an older section of town, and all the way across our town. when the winds were at their highest speed over 200 miles an hour it was moving at its slowest. so i can tell you that i could go and stand and not see anything tolerant than i was for a long way. in any picture that you see, these to that slide through our

nothing in comparison to what it's like to stand on the ground. but theme us long-term recovery i arrived about a week after the tornado and that team led by steve, suggested a public official in joplin it would get its citizens have a role in the recovery. and i can do everyone was busy. the long-term recovery was really not on the list of priorities for our city manager and our fire chief and our police force and everyone else. so they gave that role to citizens and asked a bunch of us to come together. i would've done anything asked of me that not because everyone who live in joplin wanted to help. so with steve's help we formed the citizens advisory recovery team. and what that was was a group of citizens got together to imagine what joplin could be like after a disaster. we had a first meeting on june 30 them which was my birthday, such willing to give up my birthday to come to the public input meeting.

with the citizens me, been 12 days later with their help we held our first public input meeting. we had about 350 people come that night, and out of those 350 people, i saw a nurse at the internet at the hospital two months before who told me that she found her dog and a kitchen cabinet when her house was destroyed, and i looked around and i saw and met i knew it was a caregiver through -- at the home were all of them die. so that night was a way to give citizens an opportunity to stop looking around and start looking ahead. and so we asked for their input in the most basic of ways, and it was the sticky notes that we put up on boards around the room. we ended up that night with 1500 pieces of separate input, and with the help of fema we turned it into a booklet that we distributed everywhere. to raise awareness about recovery issues. we also asked for volunteers and had about 150 people that began

to work in those four sectors to help us take the input we received and develop priorities and themes. one month after that with another public input meeting and we said, this is what we think we've heard, help us choose priorities. we voted with the dots on board and read another public input meeting and we started to work from there. when i first became the chairman i couldn't understand why the fema people want to take me to much every other day. i thought, you know, i have other work to do and was my real job? but i start to understand and they gave me a book to read called fema, they'll long-term self-help recovery tracker i should have read the first day but it probably didn't read it until three weeks later out on the back porch. and i understood the process that we should work our way through. with that we are able to make we'll progress. so we developed a set of priorities. i went back to the public again for confirmation that we were on the right track.

we present it to our city council and they accepted it but we didn't stop there. we formed an implementation task force, and for all of you government types can be gaining another set of initials but i became the chairman of the cards. it made me more impressive in all of your eyes. and what we did was we brought another government word i know now, stakeholders, to the table. we brought the school board. we brought this detailed brought the chamber and we assigned all of the priorities out to each of those groups and try to set a timeline. after we worked on the strategies for the next steps we got all of those boards together in one meeting. which for us was a big story. i presented those implementations, asked for suggestions and ideas and every group adopted those. and by the fact that we become a long-term recovery plan for

joplin. so it's amazing that again i think in my opinion not from the top down but from the bottom up. that it came from a set of sticky notes, and from that we developed a plan that's become really a bellwether for everything that happens in joplin. related to recovery. hadley, a long way? yes. we don't have -- our high school, 11th and 12th graders meet in a shopping mall and an abandoned big box store. are middle schoolers needed an industrial park and a shell building the we have kind of a lego built hospital for one of our hospitals. what we can see in 2015, the school is not until 2014 to grab a lot of projects on the table but we have a long way to go. but i think what's made us unique is that in the days before the tornado, if you asked how to be resilient ready, it's that we knew each other. when i stepped in a meeting that night of 30 people or so, there wasn't a person around the room i couldn't name.

so it's committee leaders with work together many times. we trusted each other. it wasn't our first introduction. and that led us along way down the path, and as, you know, my roll, it's good for me because i don't have a dog in the fight. i don't get paid by anybody. i don't have any allegiance to any group of citizens. and that's a great position to be in from my perspective. but it lets me community with all of the other groups. everyone tells me the issues. sometimes i'm switzerland, in joplin. and unable to provide objective input in the background for them. so we are going a long way. later on i'm happy to answer any questions that you have, but i do think we're modeling. i hope you come and visit us one day in joplin. i think we are a great place to visit. maybe some of you will even want to move there someday. but if you come, come to the house for dinner and we'll talk all of it over, and you'll see what we've been doing. so with that i will turn over to

someone who knows a lot more about resilience than i do. >> so i would actually challenge that last statement pretty strongly. >> thank you. >> i like very much, as much as part of the doesn't like following your remarks, i like very much to place my comments in this conversation, because what you've done so nicely is paint a picture, a very rich picture full of the deep challenges facing a devastating community and the sources of strength by which that community came together to deal with those challenges. and it's incredibly impressive and it's incredibly instructive and i think you'll hear as i start to try to sketch some of the connective tissue between that very tangible set of images that you just convey to all of us, and broad picture of national policy that gave a talk

about. that's the space i would like to try to work and for governments to talk about how are we taking the policy concepts that david referenced in the national security strategy and the quadrennial -- qdr, and apply those concepts in ways that help more communities that face unfortunate circumstances deal with them in ways like you have in joplin. so, for me i think the most poignant piece of your remarks is a very clear reminder that in business of disaster measure it's easy to get lost in the language. we talk about emergency support function. we talk about mission assignments. we talk about debris removal and stuff that has to happen, and funding mechanisms and all project worksheets and all this other language. and it masks us from what's really at the center of all this, which is people. that disasters and disaster

management, disaster management is fundamentally about people. is inherently a social process. and if w we're not careful we could lose sight of that and get in our own way very easily in terms of how we foster building capability to recover from and to adapt from the crises. so at fema we tried to take the concept of resilience as an opportunity, and opportunity look in the mirror at ourselves and that our field of practice. and not to do that on our own, but to make that a collective conversation and a collective we evaluation. i was raised by two psychologists which explains most of what's wrong with me, and that is a long list that none of you would like to hear about, but i did get lease one bible lesson after that, which is taking a moment of change as an opportunity to step back and

reflect. and question the underlying assumptions. so the very first set of things would begin to do is have that conversation with ourselves, have that conversation with our colleagues across the enterprise. this is a very distributed field of practice. no one really works for anyone. it encompasses virtually every agency at every level of government, all sorts of players across the private industry space, nongovernmental organizations face, the civic organization, public. it is a wide swath of partners, of players, factors. and we began by stepping back and asking very foundational question, what does this really mean? what does successfully look like? what do communities that have coped with crisis, what are their stories and their lessons have to tell us? the multinational that was referenced earlier is build

around that comparative analysis looking at community expenses and price and different pressures and trying to derive comparative themes that can be useful from a policymaking standpoint. to spare you the 18 months of process in the middle of that, what that all spills down to is really a doctrinal refraining. in some people's view, a whole new approach him and other people's view, back to our roots. back to our base is but regardless, a set of principles that we can use to keep us grounded in that first order recognition that this is really all about people and about what will most effectively support people moving through very challenging times. so the principles are pretty simple. and i often just a couple minutes talking about them and then talking about some of the things that we've been trying to do to shift our practice as an agency, but also as a field to

support those principles. the first is almost self evident, except that it's not. and it's understand and meet the actual needs of the entire community. they are heavy dice is that -- biases that creep into language. who ever we are at the table. so this is very much about stepping back and making sure that all the voices are, in fact, at the table, that that full understanding of how the commute is really were, how social activities organized units on an everyday basis. who the underrepresented voices and groups are in those processes, and what the specific challenges and needs are that they may have and how that can be brought in to this process and into consideration in an important way. the best analogy that i've heard come out on that is communities are like dna. it's about complex. and what's more, unlike dna they are not at all static. they are constantly shifting and

changing. we need to purchase the in many different committees in our lives, commuters of practice, interest, faith, family networks, geographic communities, occasionally communities of circumstance, and yet all of those represent important mechanisms, avenues, and opportunities. the second is acknowledging that complexity is importance of engaging and empowering all parts of the committee, and thinking specifically about crossing sectors, about how this scratches across not just the governmental sector but the private sector and the civic sector as well. and what do we do to set conditions in a way that enabled and support emerging action, catholic leadership at a local level, a brilliant example of which is sitting to my left. support staff. sees that when it is happy because it is almost always happening.

the real challenge i instead beg will it happen in productive cooperation with government, or in opposition to what government is doing? we get plenty examples of both. with very different pathways on the back ends of disaster. seek out opportunities to build trust, and most importantly let public participation lead in setting fires. again, such a wonderful illustration in joplin. and the last is, it's helpful to think about the social environment in ways i can do we think about the building environment, physical economy. we are accountable with conversations about how we strengthen the resilience in our infrastructure systems, or think about risk reduction the physical infrastructure. we don't necessarily have that same set of dialogue in the same way with respect to social infrastructure. and yet what we would propose is that's exactly how we need to think about the social about it. we need to seek out, strengthen

and support the pillars of strengthen the communities on an everyday basis. the places people turning to the solve problems around everyday issues. because more often than not, those are the places they will turn in a moment of crisis as well. so, the value proposition that underpins all of this is the idea that a community centric approach to disaster management, that focus on strengthening and adapting those institutions, those points of strength, on the databases will offer more effective path to security and to resilience and one of the focus on what governmental action will deliver alone. that's really the core premise behind all of this, that disasters did not represent challenges to government. they represent challenges to society. that society is more than government. much, much, much more than government. government comprises 10% of the workforce. the capability base is so much broader outside.

what are we doing to find ways to productively engage that capability, either through direct action but more often to enabling the action of others. and working to support it, working with it. some of the things that we have underway, just to close this out so that you don't leave this conversation thinking that it's all theory and the practice, and in no particular order but for the past four years we have aggressively been rebuilding our relationship with many players in gauging new players in new ways. we have private sector participation in our own operation center, an indication on a whole host of operational issues that we never would have contemplated years past. working with broad range of organizations with whom we did not previously have established relationships, and working much more tightly with nongovernmental organizations, voluntary organizations, active in disaster, et cetera, and a

number of ways as well. we've launched a community resigns innovation challenge in partnership with the rockefeller foundation and the los angeles emergency preparedness foundation. very little money to run a national challenge. tremendous response. i think we put roughly $800,000 available through that program. we had well over 2000 applications from across the country, tremendous interest, and we made about 30 towards. the projects under the program are underway now. most recently, developing a real emphasis in our messaging to the public and our engagement in public affairs and a shift in the focus in our language and in our framing. moving beyond the considerable progress we've made in building awareness to focusing on building action, and motivating behavioral change. the frame for that is think about it is to prepare us on it,

but how do we get people to take an action? because taking one action increases the likelihood that they will take one more action so that includes a wide range of activities, and you all see that new messaging as an approach unveiled as we move into national preparedness month, but a real embodiment of some of the principles that we've been talking about before. so i'll maybe leave you with just a few simple truths, and then turn to my colleague to my right and our opportunity for discussion. almost always the public is the true first responder unseen. it's almost always first and foremost neighbors helping neighbors, bystanders helping each other. the disaster is just one variable in the equation. the disaster interacts with the social environment, the underlying social conditions the same way it interacts with the fiscal climate but when you think about how we work with those conditions and who is

working on issues in that space socially on every -- everyday basis. successful recovery is organic. and that's another word that i would use to describe the story that jane just told. that is a story of organically driven recovery. priority setting, et cetera, but organic from within. and again, this is all a social process. if we do not embrace these truths and think about what it means to administer programs in the context of them to provide support in times of need, in recognition of them, we will never make real progress. so thank you, and thank you, debra. >> thank you. and congratulations to jane in terms of winning is really important award. for those of you who hadn't really heard of rick rescorla, i would encourage you to read a

man this book the unthinkable about how people survive disasters. is a fast in both overall and there's about a chapter that's devoted to him and the work he did, serving on the day when he lost his life, but also in terms of anticipation and preparation. and that is such a theme i think of what we are here about. and certainly, your work really doesn't compare to his, but it's vitally important, and you know, it's certainly a model for us to go forward. so congratulations on that. i'm with you insurance institute for business and home safety. we are a 501(c)(3) organization that supported by the insurance and reinsurance organizations, and we do engineering physical testing, scientific testing and communication that's directed at making individuals and businesses better prepared for a variety of events that may come their way. when we say disaster, it could

be a big national disaster. it can be a fire in the building to its a disaster if it affects you is the way we look at things. i was reading the hurricane sandy recovery port earlier this week and it was an interesting phrase that i thought described us quite nicely. although it wasn't intended to do that. it said promoting resilience building through innovative ideas and a thorough understanding of current and future risk of we like to think that's what we do. act with a hurricane can report said we building, but in so far as would like to get to the point where we don't need to do rebuilding because we build a by the firstly, i would like to focus a little bit more directly on the. i usually have some really razzle dazzle videos that if one says who -- the format doesn't allow that so you're stuck with me. i'm going to talk little bit about the razzle dazzle that we do and what we are trying to accomplish. and we have a brand-new research

center to i guess it's celebrating its third anniversary in south carolina where we actually blow down buildings and we burned buildings and we deluged buildings and we apply all sorts of other hail to buildings. the idea is to better understand vulnerability and to identify ways to do better in the future. and when we built that facility, we realized that if we had this scientific center in the middle of nowhere, and believe me, it is in the middle of nowhere, and no one knew about it, you know, we be educating ourselves but we couldn't be making a difference. so we developed in -- it was a three-year strategic plan. i think we quickly realized it was a three stage strategic plan of how do we take that research and changed society can make it more resilient? the first step is getting people to pay attention to what we're doing. and thank you all today for paying attention, but on a broader thing we do a lot of communications, a lot of video that really captures, gets on tv

a lot. people say, wow, that shows something. then getting them to change their mind to want to make changes that make them more resilient, to want to have a stronger growth instead of stronger granite countertops. and ultimately to use all of those individuals to transform society so that we as a society accomplish the things that you are trying to do. so that's sort of the plant and we can talk about it a little later. and so we at iibhs, we have our circles come we take research and lab and try to sort of transform that through communication and ultimately, to come up with better building codes. people who want to go about building codes and financials might of our fortified program that we're working on with dhs in terms of resilient star. that's a voluntary program, make people want it. ..

>> we're trying to improve modeling so that the modelers do a better job of understanding risk. we're trying to reduce losses. we talk in insurance terms about the loss exceedence curve, those happen a lot all the way down to the ones that don't happen very often but are very, very severe; the hurricane sandies, the

joplin tornadoes. so we're trying to reduce losses for all of those types of events. and ultimately, to focus on the priorities of what are the things that really are causing property loss and are causing people to be displaced from their homes and businesses to shut down. for us, that means getting the roof right, because roofs are implicated in a huge number of losses both to the property and the stuff that's inside and the people that are inside. and so a lot of the testing that we're doing is really focusing on that. but we're here in washington, so we have to talk a little bit about politics, and we like to think about the bipartisan benefits of mitigation. i've been at ibhs about five years, and during that time there certainly has been a switch in the house. there's been a switch in sort of the way that politics are dealing with these things, and, you know, first we thought, um, 2009 switch really in washington, what are the resonant themes. and we talked about mitigation

being the 99% solution, although i don't think they were quite talking about the 99%, because it helps everybody. vulnerable populations especially being helped by things you can do like better standards and going green and building strong. how mitigation and the environment really do work hand in hand. well, that looked like we had a little pit of a switch in the house, and there was a little bit of a change in tone, so we wanted to still talk about these issues but in ways that made sense to people who were making the decisions, and we realize mitigation also encourages personal responsibility. fiscal restraint over the long term. spend a dollar now, save a lot of hundred later. and be related to that, this concept of generation aleck bity. we're doing this for our children, our grandchildren so they don't inherit shodding building and the costs that are associated with that. and we sort of had those theme, and then we kw, there's some levers that really unite all these things. what about first responder

safety? who's against first responder safety? nobody. who's against economic growth? nobody. who's against leveraging federal investments? nobody. so it really does all work together, and we just have to find the right words for the right audiences and deal with the right political pressures so that we can really transform our society as we've indicated. so what are some of the public policy implications? the work that we do, showing it so publicly we think provides better credibility so that when we're fighting for better codes and standards we have really the oomph to do that because no one will question it once they've seen that in the laboratory. a lot of our guidelines are being adopted by federal, local and state agencies. we've seen in this with a number of dhs rams -- programs in the gulf in particular, a fortified standard was incorporated in terms of some of the grant money that's going there, and public/private partnerships which were referenced and more

specifically the reference was made to the combination of the ibhs fortified standard and the dhs resilient star. that's another type of example not at the local level but, hopefully, trickling down to the local level of a public/private partnership. and as i mentioned, going green and building strong, making sure it all works together so, as i said, we're dealing with risk today and risk as we anticipate that it might happen in the future. so i'm going to stop now so we have time for questions, but thank you all for listening to me and not just watching my video. so thank you very much. [laughter] >> i'd like to thank all of our panel bists. it's always amazing to me in forums like this where i sit here at csis which is a deep thinking think tank, and we like to take a step back, and a lot of us have prior government service or practitioner service, but we sit here, and then when you come to events like this, and i am just so inspired to hear about the wealth of experience and the perspectives that you all bring. i also would like to add my

congratulations to jane and the city of joplin for this award. but, you know, in the last, say, 8 months -- 18 months, csis has had the foundation on community resilience series. and one thing that i've noticed is, you know, recurring themes are innovation, public/private partnership. i was so glad to hear the chamber of commerce involved. but in addition, you know, talking about -- thank you -- legislative reform, and we think about the homeowners protection act which is in the house right now looking at things about standards and taking models and taking them a step further so innovation, public/private partnership and reform, i think, all wrong in this -- all belong in this. and because today i'd like to make it about this community, i'm not going to ask think questions. the way we're going to structure the q and a is i'm going to ask someone to bring a ohioan,

please -- a microphone, we're going to take three questions at a time. so do we have any people with questions? i'd like to come to gentleman in the floral shirt first. >> love that shirt. >> it's an awesome shirt. please, sir. >> yes. brett mitchell, renaissance institute. i lived through andrew some years ago, and the people of miami head a saint out of fema. you guys were absolutely fabulous. then comes katrina, and we have a disaster. joplin, is there something that has happened a, some kind of evolution in those years that have brought it back to being effective? >> thanks. i'd like to direct that question to david, but if we could have -- there's a gentleman in a ball cap up here, please? >> i'm andre, and i'm the partner and chief representative in vietnam for the interstate traveler company.

we've -- [inaudible] solar-powered vehicle, and we're, and we want to fund it as we get a prototype funded by public/private partnerships. and i just want to say that one of the things i most admire about all your presentations is the method logical rigor of analyzing independent variables that bear on the equation. and so could you just give an example of a public/private partnership arrangement that has worked for you this one of these situations? >> thanks. i might ask jane to address that question given your experience. and there's a gentleman in the back of the room, please. >> hi, robert -- [inaudible] international investor. my question concerns reparations. since we're talking about the gamut here of natural disasters and even terrorism, why is it that in some instances -- notably 9/11 and even most

recently in the boston bombings -- there was an immediate step up to have reparations for the victims and the victims' families, but i don't see any such call for natural disasters very off. and it -- very often. and it seems to me that the suffering is every bit as great. so i wonder if you could talk about the effectiveness of reparations, if any of you ever get engaged in that, and whether it makes sense that it be maybe dealt out in a more uniform manner. >> thanks. i'll actually ask all of you to comment on that briefly. but for the first question, david? >> so the short answer is there's a lot that's changed over that trajectory. the agency has changed considerably, as has the field of practice from the early '90s when andrew hit in florida through to katrina in 2005 and yet again to today. we have seen huge statutory changes on a couple of occasions

over that trajectory, huge changes at fema in terms of fema's size, capability base, etc., but also importantly at the state level and the local level in emergency management organizations at those levels. and a real evolution in focus. in the early '90s, you were coming out of the civil defense area, the principal area, and into a time where we were focusing much more heavily on natural hazards and andrew being one of the key things to catapult that, and then when 9/11 you see the introduction of terrorism into the picture in a new way, although by no means the first experience with it. and the creation of the department of homeland security and fema's incorporation into it. and then post-katrina a very significant set of reforms yet again in the management reform act. there's no single answer to that picture except to say that the

statutory architecture has shifted over time as has the focus and the investment in capabilities within the field. and you have a network system that's working. and so when you're talking about different kinds of events affecting different areas of the country, these are all inherently police powers. they're reserved to the states and to the people under our constitution, and so you are operating through and in support of different infrastructure setups in each of those states. and so those all come into bear as well. so i fear that's not a great answer for you, but i'll leave it at that. >> jane, if you could talk a little bit about a public/private partnership that you've experienced in job -- joplin. >> sure. you know, for the sake of modesty, i don't want to give up my third share of initials, the mdrt. [laughter] and so we realized that it was certainly beyond our capacity to recover joplin with the resources that we had within the

city, so we contracted with a master developer to look at innovative ways we could bring together public and private be partnerships. and the one that's come to wear, at least to date, is that we had an outdated library that wasn't in the recovery zone but be felt like we needed to move it there to be able to increase its size and increase the people able to get to it. but we really couldn't afford it as part of it, so we worked with the master developer and also the economic development administration. so we're about to build a combination first-run movie theater and library in the same building. the library on the first floor, the movie theater on the top floor. we had $40 million from eda to seed the project, and then we had the rest of the money raised locally and through private development to make that prompt happen. that project happen. >> that's fantastic. i personally in d.c. would like to have a library/movie theater. but, jane, if you ever want to move to d.c., your command of

acronyms will make you fit right in. [laughter] >> thank you. >> now, on the final question, does anyone want to take a stab at compensation and kind of in the aftermath? and i might actually ask debra to give your perspective on -- i know you're, you know, sponsored by insurance industry, so this is a topic that you probably are overly familiar with. >> well, not really with respect to reparations as you've -- it's an excellent question, and we are a humane society, and we always want to alleviate suffering when we can. and this is just a personal view, this is not an area where ibhs deal cans with, but i know one of the challenges we also face, and i've read some of the work that's been done at resources for the future on sort of how do you balance post-disaster alleviation whether, you know, the different types of aid against not providing disincentives for preparation. and i think in the case of 9/11

or the marathon bombing it's just not an issue, i mean, you know, that there isn't -- these are people for the most part, you know, we're talking about severe injuries or deaths, you know, people away from their homes at the time, and you don't really run into the same issues that you have when you're talking about an event that results in both property damage certainly in the case of joplin, loss of life, injuries. but i think it gets a little bit more complicated with some of these natural disasters because they do bring in other dimensions. you asked an excellent question, and i'm just trying to answer it. i don't know that's the right answer, but, you know, you look at those, the two events that you mentioned, and, um -- >> [inaudible] >> well, you know, and a tremendous amount of aid did go out to katrina in a variety of ways. it took a lot longer, and it was a much more sustained, you know,

recovery, and i'd like to use that term for recovery in progress. i think it's probably the right term. but i think that when you have a natural disaster over a wider cede area, it does bring in additional dimensions. i think it makes us less humane as a society, but i think it, it's not quite as concentrated. please disagree with me, other panelists, if you think i've gotten that wrong. >> no, i think the nuance that i'd add to that is the different legal frameworks. and i'd bring in deepwater horizon as another example of a different legal framework n. the cases of terrorism, in the cases of natural disasters where declarations have been made by president and in the cases of terrorist attack, there is support provided under a different set of mechanisms, but they are different legal frameworks, they're different legal distinctions. the claims filed under deepwater

horizon, the first order payment is the responsible party because that's the legal framework that's set up in that context. it's a different legal framework for natural hazards where there is public assistance provided to the affected communities, and there is individual assistance provided to qualifying homeowners and survivors, and there are other means of support. but those are different, different mechanisms. the thing that i wouldn't lose sight of, however, that cuts across all of those is there's huge, broad-based grassroots support. the overwhelming majority of financial aid in the aftermath of the triple disaster in japan was by private citizens and ngos. and you see that same effect happening here. look at the huge sums of money that came through private donation and ngo networks in different ways in each of those events that i just referenced. and then most