    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
    [September 9, 1993]
    [Pages 1458-1460]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Community in Cleveland
    September 9, 1993

        The President. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. It is great
    to be back in Cleveland. I've never had a bad day in Cleveland.
    [Laughter] But I felt so good about coming here today that I wore a
    necktie I bought in Cleveland the last time I was here.
        I want to say first how very grateful I am to all of you for being
    here, how much I appreciate----

    [At this point, audience members interrupted the President's remarks.]

        The President. I can't hear. Can you hear me?
        Audience members. Yes!
        The President. Well, I can't hear them, and you can hear me, so
    that's good.
        Let me say, first of all, I want to thank Senator Glenn, Congressman
    Stokes, and Congressman Hoke for coming down from Washington with us. I
    want to tell you that Senator Glenn especially is going to have a big
    role in passing these Government savings initiatives we proposed because
    he's the chairman of the Government Operations Committee. So if we want
    it to operate, he has to help us make it operate. And I'm grateful for
    his support. I thank the Congressmen for being here.
        And Mayor White, I'm delighted to be back here and glad you had
    somebody out there screaming you were the best mayor. That's good.
    [Laughter] I also want to acknowledge attorney general Lee Fisher and
    your State treasurer, Mary Ellen Withrow, two good friends of our
    administration in this effort.
        Let me say as briefly as I can what all this celebration is about
    from the point of view of the Federal Government. We give the State and
    local governments over $220 billion of your tax money every year. That
    means that you give it to us; we turn it around and give it to the
    States and the cities. If we make a mess of it, we waste a lot of your
    money; and if we don't do it right, the mayors and the Governors, the
    city councils, the county commissioners can't do what you hired them to
    do.
        So a huge part of this National Performance Review, in attempting to
    make the Government work better at less cost, has to involve a better
    relationship between the National Government and the States and the
    local government. If we don't do it, then nothing we do in Washington
    will overcome the things that you don't have happen here at the local
    level.
        There's a real slogan now going around, and I think a lot of slogans
    aren't any good, but this one is appropriate for our time. It is: Think
    globally, but act locally. What does that mean? It means my job is to
    tell you as President what the sweeping problems and challenges of our
    age are and to help us to deal with all this change that's happening, to
    help make the changes our friends and not our enemies, and to talk about
    them in terms of big things, like providing affordable health care or
    bringing the deficit down or opening new opportunities for

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    jobs through trade or reinventing the Government. But it has to mean
    something to you here. It has to mean a job in that store or better
    services or better housing or safer streets. It has to mean something
    where you live.
        I've said many times we've got a lot of deficits in this country.
    We've got a budget deficit and an investment deficit and a performance
    deficit in the Government. But you all know we've also got a trust
    deficit, where people no longer really believe that anything we do in
    Washington can change their lives for the better in Cleveland. And I
    believe that is clearly wrong.
        These three Cabinet members who came here today have something in
    common with me and with the Mayor. Two of them, Secretary Pena, the
    Secretary of Transportation, and Secretary Cisneros, the Secretary of
    Housing and Urban Development, were mayors. The Secretary of Education,
    Secretary Riley, was the Governor of South Carolina. We believe we have
    to reinvent Government and reinvent education and make it work. And we
    think Washington has often gotten in the way instead of helping. So we
    are here to tell you what we intend to do to change the way the National
    Government works, so you can have more shopping centers like this, more
    safe streets, more housing projects, more people working. That's what
    this is all about.
        Now, to do that we propose to do a number of things, but I'll just
    mention three of them. The first thing we want to do is to say, if a
    mayor like Mike White has got an idea like this, and they need a little
    money to make it go, they ought not to have to hire somebody to go
    through Washington's file after file after file of hundreds and hundreds
    of grants and figure out if we can somehow write some little grant
    proposal that goes through all these hoops and clears all these
    bureaucrats and gets the money. We spend a fortune, literally billions
    of dollars--to be exact, we spend $19 billion a year of your money
    administering the $220 billion of Federal grants. I don't know whether
    you think that's right or not; that strikes me as a waste of money.
        So what are we going to do about it? The first thing we're going to
    do is to give the States, the counties, and the cities the right to
    design what we call bottoms-up initiatives. In other words, you decide
    what it is you need, tell us what you need, and if it's in a grant
    proposal that's anywhere under $10 million or over $10 million if you
    get approval for it, we will design something to give you the money you
    need instead of you having to figure out how to walk through the hoops
    of all the rules and regulations of the hundreds and hundreds of grants
    in the Federal Government. It will make a difference.
        The second thing we're going to do is to do something that the
    States have been asking for for years, and that is to take 55 of these
    big grant programs and break them down into six big ones, so that we
    will have more flexibility. Instead of worrying about every little last
    detail, if you've got something you want to do in transportation, you
    ought to be able to get it from a transportation program. If you have
    something you want to do in the environment or highway safety or water
    quality or education or defense conversion, we want to help you do that
    without you having to figure out how to comply with all these rules and
    regulations. We think that you know what needs to be done to change the
    way your schools operate.
        In the States that have lost lots of jobs from defense conversions,
    they know what they can do to retrain people to find new jobs, in what
    areas, better than people in Washington do. Why should they have to
    figure out how to comply with five or six or seven or eight different
    programs just to do it? So that's the second thing we're going to do.
        The third thing we're going to do is to try to have the National
    Government operate on problems of people in Cleveland and Dallas and
    Seattle and Tampa and you name it, just the way this city government
    did, cooperating with the county government to figure out how to move
    all the property that made the shopping center and so many of the
    housing efforts and other things possible.
        I am going today, as soon as I finish talking, to sit down here and
    sign a new order to my Cabinet to create a community enterprise board
    from the Cabinet, not a domestic policy group to tell people what to do
    but a community enterprise board. What is the practical impact of that?
    It will be for us to identify neighborhoods in trouble all across
    America. They will say what they want done. Then my Cabinet will sit
    down and work together and figure out how to do it, not how to tell them
    how to comply with our rules but how to do what people need done at the
    local level.
        Now, we know that by doing this, just by

    [[Page 1460]]

    eliminating a lot of the rulemakings, a lot of the regulations, a lot of
    the paperwork, we will actually save billions of dollars over the next 5
    years. But guess what? The States and the localities will actually get
    more money more quickly, with fewer strings attached, more able to solve
    the problems that the people have identified.
        We are dealing globally with a big problem: Government's not
    working, and Government must be a partner with the private sector in
    order to revitalize our economy. That's the big problem. We are dealing
    locally. You get to decide how to solve the problem. As long as you
    don't waste the money and you're willing to be accountable for it, you
    decide. You define the future. And we'll have a lot more projects like
    this. That's the significance of what we're doing here today.
        Let me say finally that we have a lot of work still to be done, but
    this administration is committed to changing America and to making
    America friendly to the changes that are going on in the world so that
    we can win in the face of change. Some days I wake up and I wish I could
    tell you, let me be President and I'll make it the way it was 10 or 20
    or 30 years ago. You know better than to think anybody can do that. All
    these changes that are rifling through the world are going to happen
    whether we want them to or not. The test for us is whether we can win in
    the face of change instead of lose in the face of change, whether change
    will be our friend or our enemy.
        And there can be no Government program that works to solve these
    problems unless you trust the Government, unless the Government
    performs, unless we repeal the problems of the past and face the future
    with confidence. And we have to be willing to change before we can ask
    any of you to change. So today in Cleveland, we are signaling a new era
    in the relationship with the National, the State, and the local
    governments to help make more projects like this possible. That's our
    commitment to change, and we're going to see it through.
        Thank you and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 12:33 p.m. at the Church Square Shopping
    Center.