i will never forget in east baltimore a little girl about 12 years old came up to the microphone and she said mr. mayor, my name is amber. there are so many drug dealers and addicted people in my neighborhood that people in the newspaper refer to my neighborhood as zombie land. i want to know if you know they call my neighborhood zombie land and i want to know if you are doing something about it. the question that she asked of me was really a question that she was asking of all of us. do we know and are we doing something about it? because behind all of our data there are real people living their lives shouldering their

struggles, working hard every day to give their children a better future and they deserve a government that works. thanks very much. [applause] thank you. [inaudible conversations]

>> you guys are very quiet. let me begin by introducing myself. i am bill galston senior fellow in government studies here brookings institution and i want to congratulate the governor on his speech. i cannot imagine a more appropriate speech to be delivered under the aegis of the center for effective public management and government studies here at brookings. let me also out on a personal note that if you could find a way of bringing 48-hour pothole guarantees to washington d.c. i would follow you to the end of the earth. [laughter] and set with 500,000 other people. that caught my attention. >> it's hard to do in the middle of the summer.

i am informed there's a little bit of wiggle room on the backend so we have close to happen our or the question and answer. math. let me tell you what the plan is. i'm going to ask you one question and then i'm going to turn to the audience first taking four or five press questions and then moving on to this very large and interested standing room audience that is gathered to hear you talk. if there's time at the end i will wrap it with a question and if not i want. so let me begin with my question. as you know, there is a pretty long history of trying to bring effective goal-based performance measures to the federal government and to bring it more in line with the sorts of governance that you talked about in baltimore and in the state of

maryland. i think it's fair to say that those efforts have met with incomplete success and a level of current trusting government reflects that. so what is your analysis of why these prior efforts haven't gotten the job done and how do you think your approach would have a higher chance of actually being able to bring goals and effective performance measures to federal government? >> i think it's important to realize that the ability to actually collect this data and to do it in real time is a relatively recent panoma non-. 15 years ago like 90% of their requests for service came in on paper in the city of baltimore so the internet gis and intel

spreadsheets and those sorts of things, they were relatively recent technology in terms of making our government work but i think one of the great variables in all of this is leadership commitment. there are many many mayors who visited our city and saw how nice it looked and how effective it was and they love the picture picture. but they lacked the commitment when they got home to actually do it every day because it does require the leader not to shop with a megaphone from the top of the organizational triangle that requires you to be in the center of the search for truth and to be there constantly as a presence in the middle of you will of a collaborative bull -- collaborative circle. mayors have taken this a lot easier than governors. there is more and more

literature coming out on the jumper in our book called government that works where he traces this. mayors embrace of person i think it's because the work of mayors do is very visible that they never enjoy some sort of information situational event knowing what was going on six months before the public. everybody knows whether their cities are becoming cleaner and safer some mayors have been embracing this first. there are a lot of governors that are now heading in this direction. there have been some points in the federal government where it has kind of popped up their. the recovery reinvestment act was a good example but the great variable here is really executive commitment. you need the executive whether it's a mayor government or president committed to this mop 11 off press conference for a nice announcement. he or she has to be committed to this thing a new way and a new

method of executive management. >> thank you very much governor and i will now turn to the press questions. i believe most of the press is in this sector so if you want to raise your hand and identify yourselves. let's wait for the mac -- microphone. sorry, should've said that. do we have another one? >> you think congress should fast-tracked the transpacific partnership? >> i think they should read it first and i think we have to be very careful about lowering our standards whether environmental standards or whether it's how we

treat workers just in the interest of getting a trade deal done for the sake of a trade deal i think when we enter into trade deals should be with a view towards guests bringing down barriers that bringing up the standards and i think we should consider very carefully and not in a precipitous way that proposed agreement. >> this is an open government question. would you have any objection to releasing your e-mail in your tenure as governor of maryland? >> i don't know. i have many times as you know from having covered state government for many years in anapolis answered as we abide by all of our state rules on e-mails and many times turned over e-mails in response to foia

even though some powerful language may have caused my mother great embarrassment. we will abide by what others -- whatever foia we have to turnover. we have a retention policy and unless there is an open foia we generally would hold on to those for a certain number of weeks and then delete them or purge them from our system. but we always have abided abided by whatever the state law was on that and i rely on my legal counsel to do that. >> there's also no archiving requirement in maryland on e-mails deleted archive a ton of states that operational menus for all of you to peruse for eight years. >> i understand there's a press question in the back.

>> i am annie from the "boston globe." i have a question related to the chairs question. you believe under the auspices of good government that an initial -- an official should use a personal e-mail or account for duties? >> i am not an expert on federal requirements for state requirements. frankly i'm a little sick of the e-mail drama but in our state whether you used a personal e-mail or a public e-mail or a carrier pigeon it was all at public record subject of disclosure and response to foia. you are not going to ask me about e-mails are you?

>> the message he brought here today governor comes to something you want to share with a national audience as a presidential candidate? >> i'm seriously considering running in 2016 and i believe that if we want to continue to heal our economy and heal our democracy we are going to have to make our government work and we are going to have to do a better job of making our government perform for the dollars that people pay. i think those three things all go together. there is not a doubt in my mind that this is the new way of governing and getting things done. you see it emanating out of the last 15 years up from cities to states and this is our federal government should operate in some entrepreneurial department departments of the federal government are already operating this way. but it is coming just as sure of

the rising tide of expectations. americans under 40 see their banks being able to operate in secure and responsible ways. they see it in retailers and they want their government to actually work and perform and function so yes i would want to talk about this whenever i can. >> i believe david milbank is a question for you. >> governor milbank from the post. this sounds like traffic stuff you're talking about perhaps it may not fire up the democratic primary electorate. how do you propose to do that? >> i will be giving a number of talks over the course of these next couple of months including a discussion about how to make our economy work again for all of us or at least the majority of us which wages declining for 12 years in a row it's hard for us to say that our job is done. we are creating jobs again that

we need to get wages going up. there are many many challenges as i alluded to at the beginning of these remarks and i appreciate brookings have an interest in effective governance and performance management which is why i came here to give this particular talk. in order to make the big challenges we face whether the security challenges, whether it's climate change or whether it's fixing what is still not working in our economy is going to require a government that works. i think people are actually far more interested in a functioning government in effective governance and people with executive experience than we might give them credit for. >> the last press question and again moved to the audience questions. >> governor hoar you? forgive me an e-mail question to

put it more directly were you satisfied with secretary clintons response yesterday which i assume you saw that she and her attorneys personally went through her cache of some 50,000 e-mails and determined on their own which ones were personal and which ones were government and turn that portion over to the state department. do you think there's a public interest in having an independent person or some other entity figure out whether all the proper e-mails were scooped up? >> jeff i respect your interest in this issue. and i didn't watch the press conference yesterday so i don't know. i will leave that to you to figure out. i didn't watch it because i was working. [laughter] that seems like an excellent note.

this does allow me to stand up. it's been my experience that the people in the back get short shrift at that brookings i'm going to reverse the usual procedure and start back there. there's a gentleman on the isle. that's right. >> good morning governor. my name is james moore a fellow at the department of urban development. you spoke about having real-time statistics on fighting crime. did ewart administration also measure community policing, police training and building trust for citizens and communities? >> thank you. our whole campaign in 1999 james was all about community policing policing compstat and a zero tolerance policing policies that

we had a robust conversation 1999 about all of that. our strategy was that we needed to improve the effectiveness of our police. we need to do a better job of policing our police which include some of those things you mentioned, training random integrity stings, beefing up internal affairs. we staffed for the first time with independent detectives are relatively new civilian review board and we put the money and to give them their own protection so they could investigate take cases. we tracked openly and reported regularly a number of courtesy complaints and excessive force and those sorts of things. the third part of that strategy was to intervene early in their lives as young people. a better job of policing our police and intervening in the lives of young people. and we put the numbers out there all the time.

we put out a big plan and we took the plan all around the city. we did town hall after town hall after town hall in every single district. when that incident happened is they do and if they will no profession is above bad incidents are bad actors. we address it in a forthright way. and we continue to put those numbers out there more openly and transparently than we ever have before. i guess some of the strongest proof that we were able to maintain that his precious consensus and that basic level of trust was in the fact that in that first campaign after these discussions we want every single council district including two

of my opponents which were the two hardest hit areas by crime and even with a much increased police effort and the rolling back of drug market and a heightened level of enforcement i was reelected with 88% of the vote. four years later. so look, there is no issue around which there is greater fear and pain in america over our racial divisions probably than around the issue of public safety. there is just no substitute for leaders raining into the centers of those fears and leading the conversation and the dialogue and making these institutions of policing and policing the police more open and transparent. >> thank you. there is a hand right there.

i can't tell who's hand it is but i'm certainly willing to recognize. >> ken snyder with the government coalition and a resident of maryland. my question is what is your definition on a high-value dataset and specifically does it include politically sensitive data? this is an in-depth problem all over the country and the governors and mayors open up their datasets. it tends to be a significant issue when it comes to politically sensitive data and to motivate the question to provide two examples three of the questioners to the press asked about the e-mail and he responded to the psychoin. our state -- state e-mail is responsive to public information act. that is not quite true with the way it sounds. i will motivate that in my district we have a billion-dollar school district. they rotate the archive every 30

days. the public information act is 30 days. >> i'm going to have to cut you off. >> the point is you can't actually use the e-mail in such a situation and this type of loophole is widespread in maryland with a whole variety of businesses. >> maryland was named a leader in the open data movement. i think they received an award from somebody that watches this and matches these things. i always look at open data in the operations of our government as genies that needed to be released from the bottle and it was my hope that as much data as we could get out there and open up there would be very hard once people start using it to see

whether they might be with the riverkeepers organization or pta or advocates for whatever, more responsive policing. it would be hard to put those genies back in the bottle so we were a leader in the open data movement. i hope that my successor has kept that going and we also got better at a laying it or putting it out there in ways that people, that it wasn't so dizzying and it was making it easier for people to use it and manipulated and create charts and graphs and all those things and all of that is still in evolution. on the e-mail stuff we had a retention policy but if there was a foia filed we held onto those and turned them over. we don't have an archiving requirement and it is an open

question of public policy all across the country. how long should governments remain? 90 days, two days, three weeks? and open an interesting question in the age of electronic information sharing. >> i think the most important information though is really about the operations and i thought that was where you were going with your question. i've seen the looks by veteran mayors when they saw the citistat room and saw they were going to have to own their last five years of service putting it all on line. i could almost see the looks in on people's eyes saying we have got to get out of here. but the newly-elected mayors really have fresh opportunities and these men and women when they first come in partaking the bar to constantly higher-level. i think it's also wide you are seeing people moving back to cities. nobody wants to live in a place that is becoming more dirty

more dangerous and more violent. conversely while cities become more livable when they become safer pc under people moving back to them and cities are starting to function in people vote with their feet. it's not merely coincidental that people are returning to the states particularly younger people because they see that governments are being run in a more personally responsible and transparent way. >> the woman in the red dress right there. >> hi. i marry him and i'm with the data quality campaign. we have talked a lot about crime and education. what kind of measures did you take to address graduation rates post-secondary success and which have the right outcome and did you have success in graduation rates in maryland during your term as governor? >> yes, we did.

we had success in raising graduation rates. we also had tremendous success in getting more of our students to take stem related ap exams and to pass them. in fact i think a greater percentage a greater percentage of students in maryland have taken stem related ap exams than any other state in the country. a lot of rendition and this can be found on a great on line blog blog. it's called letters to the people of maryland and you can find it on tom burr. there's a whole section in their that has the strategies that we have pursued on education and the metrics that we looked at to drive up graduation rates ap success and on the post-secondary peace we

increased acting by 37% the number of associate degrees that were awarded compared to the benchmarks in 2006 and all of this is on there as well. we did it by a number of different strategies. each of these goals by the way we developed a delivery plan for achieving those goals and that delivery plan would lay out the leading actions that we needed to take in concert to drive towards those goals. so when schools we greatly increased responding for schools, elementary but we also went four years in a row without a penny's increase to college tuition and did a better job than any state but montana over those eight years in holding down the cost of in-state tuition. we have provided better training for a lot of our high school teachers particularly in the stem field.

we have greatly increased the readiness of kids entering kindergarten to actually learn but all of this is laid out and letters to the people of maryland. i read about four blog entries a day over the last 20 days of my service and is 380 exciting pages. >> governor as i promised i would reserve the last question for myself and i would ask the audience after governor o'malley has finished answering my question to remain seated while he was able to exit the room expeditiously. he has generously given us time for which we are grateful. governor let me just preface my question by repeating something that i told you when we were chatting. namely that i did work for about

two and a half years for bill clinton's white house. in that connection a statement that you made a couple of weeks ago touches on your vision of leadership and many other things besides and i would like to give you a chance to comment on your comment. you said triangulation is not a strategy that will move america forward. history celebrates profiles of courage, not profiles of convenience. interesting choice of words under the circumstances. so let me ask you very directly is it your view that the country does not move forward during bill clinton's term's? >> it's my view that our country can only move forward now on the power of our principles as people and whether you are

talking about foreign-policy leadership, we should always be leading with our principles rather than expedience when it comes to leadership here at home home, when it comes to immigration, when it comes to the need for continued reform on wall street and instead of offering up dodd-frank light so as not to offend any democratic party loyalists in manhattan. i think we need to continue this job and we need to do it on the principles that unite us as a people. windows refugee kids risked starvation and all sorts of suffering to arrive at our doorsteps we should stick to our principles and treat them as the generation and compassionate people that we are, people whose

enduring symbol is not above our statue of liberty. that is what i mean when we say that the triangulation on not allow us to solve our problems. splitting the difference between the way things have always been done and some extremist view of the way things might be is not going to bring us forward. we have to be clear about our principles as a people. we have to have enough faith in the american people to speak the truth about the challenges we face and what needs to be done in order to overcome that. that is what i meant by that. >> thank you very much for that answer and for your appearance here at brookings today. [applause] >> thank you all. ..