Maryland Municipal League Keynote Address
June 24, 2008
Introduction
It's a great joy and privilege to be with all of you – the importance of the jobs that you do to our neighbors and to our State can not be overstated.
I'm joined here by a number of members of the O'Malley/Brown Administration. First and foremost among whom is our Lt. Governor, Anthony Brown (Applause). And could the various members of the O'Malley/Brown Administration please stand and let me acknowledge your good work – any Secretaries who are with us tonight (Applause). Thank you all very much.
The Governor of Pennsylvania Ed Rendell gave me two bits of great advice. It's advice that I've recalled and remembered time and time again. One of them was to make every decision as if you're not running for reelection. And the other was to make sure that you surround yourself with the best people you can possibly find.
So I hope you're finding the men and women who lead the O'Malley/Brown Administration to be people who do return your calls and try to help you solve problems and support you in the important work that you're doing in your community.
During the years that I was Mayor of Baltimore, I was fond of a story that I once heard about former President Lyndon Baines Johnson. When the protesters were outside his windows and things were going very poorly with the war and it seemed like the whole world was crashing in around him, I'm told that President Johnson turned to a close aide and he said, you know, whenever I feel overwhelmed by this job I just thank the Lord that at least I'm not a big city mayor (Laughter).
You're always on when you're mayor and people know whether what you're doing is working or whether it's not working. Communication is not as important as action when you're mayor. And I have a tremendous amount of respect for the job that you do. It's not easy -- especially in these difficult times when the foreclosure crisis and the economic downturn, the value of the dollar, the pain at the pump, the pain at the grocery line are hitting all of us and they're hitting your neighbors and all of you are feeling it acutely.
I saw on CNN yesterday a story about how States and cities all across the country are facing some of their biggest budget challenges that they've ever faced in 20 or 30 years. They talked about those sorts of cascading down cuts that may result in 45,000 people across the country that are public sector employees being laid off by municipalities, counties and States.
The U.S. Conference of Mayors is reporting that economic growth in our cities is about half of what it has been in recent years. And State government in other parts of the country are now facing that sort of tidal wave of red ink that all of us were forced to confront in our State more recently.
I want to thank everybody with MML for backing up our Delegates and our Senators. You honored a couple of them tonight. Speaker of the House Mike Busch and Delegate Maggie McIntosh were two really, really courageous people in that General Assembly. And there were a lot of others, too, who bit the bullet at the State level so that we wouldn't just stand aside and let the budget deficit roll down and make your jobs harder.
There's a routine by Groucho Marx -- he's in a very exclusive restaurant, white table cloth, with a guest, and the waiter puts the check in front of him, and Groucho Marx looks at the check and he passes it to his guest and he says, "This check is an outrage, I wouldn't pay it if I were you" (Laughter).
Well, in a way, that's what we've been doing for the last seven years in our country and for the four prior years in our State -- although the person we were passing the check to wasn't a guest at our table, it was the next generation and people in future years.
I made a couple of declarations the last time we were together, just a year ago, as we were facing this challenge that was coming up.
And I said, first, that we were going to increase -- not decrease, not rob, not divert -- but increase the dollars that we put into the transportation trust fund so that we can do a better job of delivering on the forgotten promise of smart growth. That is, investments in infrastructure, in roads, in mass transit, in main streets and all of those things that are so very important to all of you.
And the second goal, promise, declaration that I made to all of you that morning one year ago was that we would not just let this cascade and roll down on you. That we would bite the bullet, we would face that $1.7 billion at the State level. That is, for the most part, what we have been able to do, and I thank you for helping us do it.
Because we understand how important your work is, we are doing all that we can at the State level to support you and to support your important work.
Since Lieutenant Governor Brown and I had the honor to be able to take office and serve the great people of our State, if one is to include the big increase in investments that are public education through Thornton ramp-up and also through school construction, we have, in just 16 months, been able to increase by $4 billion the amount of money that comes from the State governments to county and other local governments.
$4 billion more -- that's about a 47 percent increase over our predecessor. And we are working very hard, believing as Dr. King taught us, that we are all caught “in an inescapable network of mutuality,” that we're “tied in a single web of destiny.” And that destiny is going to be a brighter one and a better one for our kids, if we continue to hold onto that forgotten American value of fiscal responsibility.
Let me give you some good news. The rate of job creation in the State of Maryland over the last year has been four times what the rate of job creation has been in the nation as a whole.
You want to hear some more good news? Let me give you some more good news. Exports at the Port of Baltimore are up 32 percent over what they were at the same time a year ago.
People, Partnerships, and the Politics of Posterity
Our unemployment rate -- while it is up, as it is in every State in the nation -- is still about 30 percent less than it is as a nation overall. And that's good news.
My friends, we are going to climb out of this national downturn more quickly than other States and it's because we have the courage and the strength to invest in our priorities, to invest in our future, to invest in our children's future and to practice the politics of posterity.
The politics of posterity. None of us came to Ocean City for the weather today. We came here because we believe that what we do is important and we can learn from one another, because of the values that we share.
A great thing about being a mayor is that there's no Democratic or Republican way to pick up the trash, is there? Or to keep your streets safe. There's no Democratic or Republican way to make sure your main streets have decent lighting -- they either do or they don't. And there's nothing partisan about it. It's about effective government. It's about the politics of posterity -- the politics that says we want to do this not just for ourselves, but for the future of our towns, our cities, and our families. And each of us has a responsibility to make it so.
This tradition, which is so deeply ingrained in the human spirit, has been a part of the character of our State since its founding. The politics of posterity.
The Safer Future All of Us Prefer
I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the greatest obligation that we have, any of us that hold a public office, and that is our obligation to make our neighborhoods safer places. Not to put up the surrender flag to gangs, or to drug violence, or to those who would have us live in fear, but to make our State safer.
Our biggest goals in this administration are to strengthen and grow the ranks of our middle class, to improve public safety and public education, and thereby to expand opportunity.
I wanted, as I conclude, to just focus a little bit on public safety. We have the ability, through the decisions and the choices we make, to actually fight back and make our State a much better and safer place.
Robert Kennedy once said very eloquently that “no nation hiding behind locked doors is free, for it is imprisoned by its own fear. No nation whose citizens fear to walk their own streets is healthy, for in isolation lies the poisoning of public participation.”
When we took office, we had a backlog of some 24,000 DNA samples that should have been taken from people that were convicted of violent crimes, and for years were never taken from them. Because we believe that we can make a difference in making our streets safer, we put on a tremendous effort, thanks to our State Police, led by Col. Terry Sheriden and also Secretary Gary Maynard and our Department of Corrections, and we knocked out that backlog of 24,000 DNA samples.
Legislation was passed this year to allow us to take samples from those that are arrested, as well, not waiting until conviction.
In 2007, because we knocked out that backlog, there were 287 matches of DNA evidence to solve crimes in Maryland, many of them on cold cases or rapes, murders (Applause). Many of them on cold cases of rapes or murders or other things that otherwise wouldn’t have been solved. That otherwise these predators would still be on the street. Who can put a price tag on that? Who can put a value on that? Sparing somebody that horrible tragedy in their family.
It was because of partnerships, though, that we were able to do this -- something that all of you understand in your own towns and cities, the State, local, and Federal officials actually working in concert. At the State level we take the samples and we analyze them. At the Federal level they match them against the FBI’s database, then when the hits come back we forward them on to local police departments or municipal police departments and, thereby, make our State a safer place by overcoming the barriers that have traditionally separated local, State and Federal.
Because of the important work that you do, and because of its centrality to making our State a safer place, we have also been able to award 688 GOCCP -- that’s the Governor’s Office of Crime Control and Prevention -- grants in the last year totaling nearly $49 million.
Despite difficult times, a downturn in the economy doesn’t give any of us a pass on improving public safety.
We’ve contracted with a great organization I wanted to share with you and I hope you’ll take it home and talk to your chiefs about how to implement it. It is a group called Crime Reports.com -- a commercial enterprise which allows local law enforcement agencies to upload crime data and share information not only with themselves, but with citizens, so that they can become engaged in this battle for a safer Maryland.
Our Administration has provided also $18 million more in public safety aid to local authorities versus the prior administration. That’s an increase of 11 percent. And why?
Because we prefer a safer future. And that’s why we have been able to create partnerships to prevent gun violence and other violent crime on a regional basis.
Because of that safer future that we prefer, we have launched an initiative to do a much better job of gathering gang intelligence as it comes in and out of our prisons and relay that back to local police departments.
Because of the safer future that we prefer, we have created a Violence Prevention Unit at our Department of Parole and Probation to hone in on that tiny kernel of about 1,200 repeat violent offender predators that the second they slip up, they should give up their privilege to be back on the streets. And we should not wait until a murderer or a rapist murders or rapes again before we protect the public from people that we know are ticking time bombs out there.
Because of the safer future that we prefer, we’ve also launched the Capital City Safe Streets Initiative with the City of Annapolis and local community organizations, inspired also by and encouraged by Speaker Busch.
Because of the safe future that we all prefer, we boosted drug treatment by $10 million. We have also eliminated parole for child sex offenders with Jessica’s Law and invested $2 million in doing a better job of monitoring child sex predators.
Because of the safer future that all of us prefer, we’re partnering with Hopkins and Washington College and local law enforcement agencies to provide ComStat On Demand. What is that? That is the computer pin mapping that by now virtually every smart department should have, law enforcement agency should have, so that you can recognize the trends before it hits the newspapers and get on it early.
I plead with you, help us to do this. If your chief does not yet have the ability to tell you on a weekly, timely basis at least where the crime is happening and how they’re deploying to prevent it, then please call Kristen Mahoney at our Office of Crime Control and Prevention. When we say ComStat On Demand, we’ll provide the ComStat, the training and the technical support, but you’ve got to demand it. And we want to help you do it.
Those are some of the things that we’ve been able to do together.
Conclusion
My friends, the great historian Arnold Toynbee once wrote that “true growth is the ability of a society to transfer increasing amounts of energy and attention from the material side of life to the nonmaterial side and, thereby, to advance its culture, its capacity for compassion, its sense of community, and the strength of its democracy.”
I think that’s what each and every one of you does every day. And I thank you for making us a stronger Maryland and a better Maryland. And I look forward, along with Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown and everyone in this administration, to doing everything in our power to back you up, as you have backed us up in making the tough decisions up front for that better future that all of us prefer.
Thank you all very, very much (Applause).
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