    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
    [June 22, 1996]
    [Pages 955-961]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Cleveland, Ohio
    June 22, 1996

        Thank you very much, Mayor Rice. His speaking's improved now that
    he's getting so much practice out there on the stump. [Laughter] I'm
    delighted to be here with you. I thank you for your great year as
    president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. I'm looking forward to
    working with Mayor Daley this year. And I'm glad the Democrats are going
    to give him a little boost in the local economy in Chicago in a few
    weeks, try to get his term off to a good start.
        I want to say a special word of appreciation to the mayor of Chicago
    for the City Livability Awards that he presents every year at this
    conference, along with Phillip Rooney of Waste Management. I think
    that's a very good thing to do, and I've always been impressed with the
    achievements that earn the awards.

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        I'm delighted to be here with the other mayors on the platform:
    Mayor White and my longtime friend Mayor Helmke, Mayor Rhea. I was glad
    to see Congressman Stokes this morning and Congressman Sherrod Brown.
    And Reverend McMickle, I got prayed over from a distance; I thank you. I
    heard it and needed it more than the others here. I appreciate it very
    much. [Laughter]
        I enjoyed all of the music in advance, and I want you to know that
    Mayor Rice and I were out there trying to sing along with Glenn Burks. I
    didn't make the low notes, and he did. But I appreciated it very much.
        I want to thank Mayor Lanier from Houston for his hosting me
    yesterday in Houston. And we flew up today, and I know that he is the
    head of the Rebuild America Coalition; that's an important part of your
    efforts. And we're glad to work with him and looking forward to it.
        I also want to thank all the mayors here for the work you did
    yesterday on the Habitat house. I saw the picture in the local paper
    when I got here, and I think it's a wonderful thing that you did. I
    appreciate that. I'm sure that many of you know that I signed an
    appropriation this year for the first time ever to Habitat for Humanity
    so that they could buy larger tracts of land in our urban areas and
    build more houses at one time in one place. And I hope that that will
    enable a lot of you to cooperate with them and meet the housing needs of
    your people. And I think you sent a great message to America yesterday.
    And I thank you, Mayor White, for making that opportunity possible for
    them, and I thank all of you for doing it.
        I would like to say a special word of thanks, too, to Tom Cochran,
    because he works for you full time and he has to work with us. And I
    think sometimes we overlook--I know I was in the Governors' association
    and the attorney generals' association, and we showed up for our
    conferences and we got credit for whatever we were doing. Most of the
    time the staff had done it, and we just stood in the way of the camera.
    So I thank Tom Cochran for what he does every day for you as well.
        Mayor, I want to say thank you for welcoming us to Cleveland. I
    heard what you said outside about the remarkable progress of Cleveland,
    and I've had an opportunity to see a lot of it myself over the last
    several years. You remember, it wasn't so many years ago that I came
    here, I think, for the Democratic Leadership Council in the eighties and
    then when I was running for President. I have seen this remarkable
    city's turnaround under your leadership and with the partnership of the
    private sector and with the enormous spirit of the community here. I
    have been in all sections of this community, and I have loved every
    opportunity I have had to be here.
        I liked throwing out the ball at your stadium. Somebody told me
    Mayor Riley was going to throw the ball out tomorrow. Is that true?
    Mayor Riley can't throw a baseball. [Laughter] Better practice, Joe,
    wherever you are. [Laughter] And thank you for welcoming me to
    Charleston the other night.
        I also--I'll tell you one thing you can all do; you can go home and
    you can get one great story out of this conference. You can go home and
    tell everybody that, after all, Elvis is alive--[laughter]--in Cleveland
    at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He's packing them in as never before.
    [Laughter] I'm going to see how many times I can run that out before
    people figure out what I'm talking about. [Laughter]
        If I can get Willie Brown to laugh at my jokes, I'm doing well.
    [Laughter] I've got a real future in this business if I can do that.
        I'd like to begin on a serious note, if I might, now. I was thinking
    about Cleveland coming in here and the remarkable amount of partnership
    in reaching across the lines that too often divide us that made possible
    the revitalization of this city in the last few years. And I was
    thinking about all the different people that I had met over the years in
    Cleveland who had been, in my mind, heroes of this country of ours
    because of the work they've done in their churches, in their housing
    projects, on the streets trying to prevent crime, trying to help rebuild
    their communities. And it reminds me of what I've been doing the last
    couple of days.
        I'm sure some of you saw the press reports that Hillary and I were
    privileged to welcome the Olympic torch into the White House the other
    night. And it burned on the White House lawn for a night, and then we
    saw it off the next day. The torch was brought into the White House by a
    nun who had devoted her life to community service and by Dr. I. King
    Jordan, who is the president of Gallaudet University. He's the first
    deaf president of our Nation's deaf university. He's--I don't know how
    old King is, but he's a couple of years older than

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    I am, and this week he's going to run a 100-mile race. So he's in
    reasonably good shape as well. [Laughter]
        And then the next day, the people who brought the flame out of the
    place where it was sitting in the White House and then ran it out of the
    White House as we saw it off the next morning--it was a man named Lang
    Brown, who has devoted his life to trying to save the lives of troubled
    children. He's an African-American man of about, oh, I don't know, maybe
    a little older than I am. And he walked up the way at the White House
    there with 12 kids. They were white, Hispanic, African-American, all
    walks of life, kids who were in desperate trouble. He helped them to put
    their lives back together again. He spends his whole life doing that.
        One of the people that carried the Olympic torch is a 74-year-old
    woman in Nevada who has taken in, at a rather advanced age now, 100
    children who were abandoned. And she tried to give them their lives
    back. The young woman that carried the torch out of the White House was
    a young woman named Carla McGhee, who was a highly recruited high school
    basketball player. She went to the University of Tennessee, seemed
    destined for a streaking career. And she was in a terrible accident,
    almost died; her body was totally crushed. And by sheer dint of will she
    pulled herself back to the point where she recovered her mobility first
    and then she recovered her ability to play basketball. And within a
    couple of years she had gone back to the University of Tennessee and
    helped them to win a national championship. And now she's leading our
    women's Olympic basketball team. A miraculous story. And they were
    carrying this Olympic torch like--thousands and thousands of our fellow
    citizens have done that. That's the flame I want America to be
    remembered by.
        And then we've been bedeviled, as I heard someone mention, I think
    the pastor mentioned in the prayer, by another sort of flame. We've had
    more than a tripling of church burnings in our country in the last year
    and a half. That's the opposite side of the coin. But we still have some
    people in our country that give into what seems to be--if you look at
    Bosnia, if you look at the Middle East, if you look at Northern Ireland,
    if you look at the problems between the tribes in Burundi and Rwanda, it
    seems to be an almost universal impulse of human nature that there is
    this dark part of our soul that can be revved up so that we define
    ourselves not in terms of our common humanity and what we can do and
    what we can be for and what our good qualities are but in terms of who
    we can hate and who we can put down and who we can be different from.
    And that's really what the racially motivated impulses in the church
    burnings that have been racially driven represent. And it is the
    antithesis of everything that makes our American cities great.
        We've had an enormous number of black churches burned,
    unfortunately. We've also had at least one mosque and another Islamic
    center burned. We've had several synagogues desecrated in this country
    in the last couple of years. And unbelievably enough, we've--even though
    there haven't been as many of them, we've had a substantial increase in
    the number of white churches that have been burned. People are sort of
    looking at our houses of worship as targets now.
        And I just want to say to all of you that that's the opposite of
    what makes you successful as mayors. And it's also the opposite of what
    it means to be an American in the finest sense. A lot of these churches
    have been burned out in the country where people can't catch them, but
    there have also been burnings in sizable cities, in Knoxville and
    Sacramento and Tucson. And just this past Thursday, the Emmanual
    Christian Fellowship in Portland was added to the list of suspicious
    fires.
        So I just want to say to you, I want you to keep speaking out
    against this. I know that Mayor Menino has sponsored a resolution that
    you're going to pass, and I thank you for that. But this country has the
    largest number of houses of worship per capita of any nation in the
    world. We got started by people coming to our shores searching for
    religious liberty. It is the first amendment to the Constitution. And so
    I say to you, your lives and your successes are living examples of what
    is best in this country. You bring together people every day that are
    like those folks carrying the torch to Mayor Campbell's city. And I hope
    before you leave here you will issue the strongest possible statement
    saying this church burning is not America and we're not going to
    tolerate it. We're going to stand up to it.
        For nearly 4 years now, we have worked together on a strategy that I
    called in 1992 ``Putting People First.'' I ran for this job because

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    I wanted to see our country go into the 21st century with great vigor
    and purpose and determination, meeting our challenges and protecting our
    values in a way that would enable us to achieve three things: one, to
    keep the American dream of opportunity available for every person in
    this country who would assume the responsibility necessary to achieve
    it; two, to see this country come together as a community over all the
    lines of our diversity and not be divided; and three, because of this
    particular moment in history, to make sure that America continued to be
    the world's strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity.
        Now, while no one could say we solved all the problems in this
    country, and none of you would assert that you have done that in your
    cities, we are plainly better off than we were 4 years ago. We are
    clearly moving in the right direction. And the thing that has
    underpinned a lot of the successes that we have had in other areas has
    been the revitalization of the American economy.
        Our strategy was very straightforward: Cut the deficit in half so
    you can get interest rates down and the private sector can invest again
    and create jobs; continue to work to invest in our people, in their
    education, in their skills, in technology and research; expand trade so
    that America can sell more of its products and services abroad.
        Well, 4 years later we have had the deficit reduced, they say now,
    by more than 50 percent, from over $290 billion to about $130 billion by
    the end of this year. We have negotiated 200 separate trade agreements,
    and our trade is at an all-time high now. In the 21 areas we negotiated
    with Japan, American exports are up 85 percent in 3\1/2\ years. We have
    continued to expand opportunities in education. And to continue to
    invest, we have increased our investment in infrastructure by about 10
    percent while reducing the deficit, something that I know is important
    to all of you. And the American people have produced 9.7 million new
    jobs in 3\1/2\ years.
        Now, to give you some idea, I'm about to leave next week to go to
    the annual conference of the G-7, the big seven industrial nations, in
    Europe. The G-7 nations, in total in the last 3\1/2\ years, have
    produced 10 million jobs, 9.7 million in America. That's something to be
    proud of our fellow citizens for. They have done a good job. We've done
    a good job of bringing this country back.
        We also see that the welfare rolls have been reduced by 1.3 million.
    Food stamp rolls are down a million. The poverty rate has dropped for
    the first time in many years. And, thank goodness, for the first time in
    10 years, for the last 2 years average wages are finally going up again
    in America instead of going down. So we are moving in the right
    direction.
        We've also worked together on some other things. We passed the
    national service law, and I know a lot of you have made good use of the
    AmeriCorps volunteers. I want to thank Mayor Ashe for his willingness to
    serve on the AmeriCorps board; I'm going to appoint him formally next
    week.
        We passed some other very important legislation for America, the
    family and medical leave law. We now know from a bipartisan study that
    12 million Americans have taken advantage of the family and medical
    leave law in the last couple of years, to take a little time off when
    they had a family member sick or a baby born or an elderly parent in
    trouble, without losing their jobs. And it may be, in some ways, the
    most immediately impactful law that I've had the privilege to sign as
    President, because I hear--everywhere I go, people come up to me and
    talk to me about how their children were sick and they couldn't have
    taken care of them and kept their job if it hadn't been for that. So I
    feel good about that.
        I think we all know we've got more to do and that we can never,
    never succeed in getting opportunity to all of our people as we move
    into this information age in this global society unless we have a
    strategy to make sure that our cities are strong and vibrant. If
    America's cities can go into the 21st century flourishing, then America
    will do very well.
        We have sought to forge a partnership with you. Mayor Rice talked
    about it, talked about our early meetings, the accessibility of the
    Cabinet. I must tell you, I think it's been made a lot easier by this
    remarkable generation of mayors in the room. I was talking this morning
    about how I'm amazed that the mayors seem to get more and more and more
    talented and more innovative with each successive year. And I thank you.
    You're very easy to work with, practical, people-oriented, flexible,
    interested in solving problems and working and going forward. I also
    think it's been made a lot easier

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    because I have been privileged to have the service of the person I
    believe will go down in history as the finest HUD Secretary in the
    history of the United States, Henry Cisneros.
        We have worked to establish a comprehensive approach with you to
    deal with jobs issues; to deal with housing issues; to deal with
    environmental issues; to deal with the issues of education, the school-
    to-work program, expanded Head Start, aid to the public schools in
    Chapter 1; to deal with transportation issues. We've tried to put this
    program into our community empowerment agenda. And I want to thank the
    Vice President for the work he's done in leading that effort along with
    Henry. You have made it possible.
        We now have 105 communities that have qualified to be empowerment
    zones or enterprise communities. We have seen some remarkable
    transformations in those communities. Here in Cleveland, dozens of new
    businesses are moving into or expanding in the city zone. One of them is
    Bearings, a Fortune 1000 company that will build a new $28 million world
    headquarters here and employ more than 300 workers. Mayor White has
    taken action to make sure that the local workers will be trained for
    these jobs and for other jobs that will come into the zone, so that we
    won't have a purported advantage that doesn't really benefit the people
    it was supposed to benefit. So I'm pleased about that.
        We've got to build on our successes, and I have made some very
    specific proposals to the Congress which I intend to take into this
    campaign if they are not enacted in this session of Congress. First,
    I've asked Congress to create a second round of empowerment zones. My
    goal will be eventually to get to the point where we can have an
    empowerment zone of some scope in every community in the country that
    needs it. That's really what the rule ought to be, and if it works,
    we'll generate more investment, more jobs, more incomes, and there won't
    be any loss to the Treasury.
        So I think we have to keep going on this. This approach is working.
    And it's working because it requires the communities to come up with a
    strategy to make the most of the opportunity and then lets the
    communities drive their future, not some Federal rule or regulation.
        Second, as all of you know, I have asked Congress to enact a new $2
    billion incentive to encourage the cleanup and redevelopment of
    abandoned industrial sites, our so-called brownfields initiative. This
    one thing could do as much to bring jobs back to urban America as any
    other thing that we've talked about in a long time. And I want you,
    regardless of your party, to help me get this passed in Congress. This
    is good for America; it's good economics.
        Congressman Lou Stokes has been a leader in this effort. I want to
    thank him and Senator Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois; Congressman
    Charles Rangel of New York, who will be introducing the community
    empowerment legislation this week.
        We also fought to preserve the low-income housing credit. And I'm
    pleased that the Local Initiative Services Corporation, LISC, is
    prepared to announce that it has raised $410 million from corporations
    to build 8,500 housing units and create another 12,000 jobs. That will
    benefit a lot of your areas.
        We have to do more. Particularly, we have to recognize that there
    are places in our country where the free enterprise system simply hasn't
    reached yet. And we have got to do more to provide jobs and
    opportunities.
        I recently signed two Executive orders to address this issue. The
    first one created a new empowerment contracting program which will offer
    special incentives for Government contracting awards for companies that
    locate in distressed communities in all parts of America. I also signed
    an Executive order directing Federal agencies that are building
    facilities or relocating to give first priority to the historic
    districts of our central cities, instead of running away from them. The
    Government should be investing in America's future where it's most
    needed.
        I think one of the great success stories of urban America in the
    last couple of years is the success that so many of you have made in
    lowering the rate of crime and violence. And we have to build on it,
    because we are nowhere near where we need to be. But we are a lot better
    off than we were just a few years ago. I have tried to be a good partner
    in that regard. We have worked to help you put 100,000 new police
    officers on the street with the crime bill of 1994. I can tell you that
    we are ahead of schedule and under budget there. We have funded almost
    half of the 100,000 police already.
        The assault weapons ban is making a difference. The Brady bill is
    making a huge difference. We have now seen, since the Brady bill became
    law, 60,000--I'll say that again--

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    60,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers who were prevented from buying
    guns simply because we took a few days to check their eligibility. It
    was the right thing to do.
        We have worked to try to help communities give our children
    something to say yes to, to support your preventive programs and your
    role models that keep children out of drugs and gangs and violence in
    the first place. We cannot jail our way out of this crisis. We have to
    find ways to change the culture of America, to give more of our kids a
    chance to stay on the right path in the first place.
        All of you know that I have not had as much success as I wanted with
    this Congress in preserving the prevention aspect of the '94 crime bill.
    But all of you know, and so do your law enforcement officials know, that
    this is a critical aspect of the strategy. We need to do more in this
    area, not less. These programs can work. They save children's lives
    every single, solitary day. And again I say, I hope you will help me to
    bring some balance, more balance back into the approach that Congress is
    taking. We are fighting to preserve every single dollar for prevention
    we can, but we need all the help we can get.
        We have also tried to help cities to implement their own strategies.
    Long Beach, California, led the country in implementing the school
    uniform policy. They found that it reduced the vulnerability of their
    children to gangs and that it increased learning and reduced the dropout
    rate and it increased a sense of cohesion, that even the upper income
    kids wound up liking it because people began to be identified by what
    they were inside rather than what they were wearing outside. We helped
    them, and we have helped others now through the Justice Department, the
    Education Department, do that in a way that is legal and constitutional
    and avoids the hassles.
        We are supporting cities like New Orleans and many others that have
    curfew policies that have led to dramatic drops in the juvenile crime
    rate, to do so in a way that, at least based on anything that we can
    find through the Justice Department, is likely to be most effective and
    most positive.
        I see Mayor Pat Hays from North Little Rock out there. He's the
    first mayor, my mayor, that actually introduced a curfew policy. We had
    a terrible problem in his community. I think most of the mayors that
    have done it believe that it's a smart thing and a good thing to do. We
    want to make sure that, at least that if you're interested in it, you
    know what everyone's experience is, what seems to work best, and how to
    avoid any potential pitfalls that we have determined around the country.
        Here in Cleveland I know the murder rate has been down 12 percent in
    the last 2 years alone. We see this nationwide. And I guess one of the
    things that I want to make sure that all of us are doing together, and I
    would like to help on, is I want the folks back home to know that we can
    do something about the crime rate. I want people to believe that we can
    do something about the crime rate. It wasn't so very long ago that I
    think people had more or less given up. And that would be a terrible
    thing in this country. It would be a terrible thing. If people gave up
    on our ability to provide common security, then within 10 or 20 years
    those of us who could afford it would be living behind walls with our
    own private security systems and everybody else would be living in a
    jungle.
        So this crime issue is critical to the economic issue; it's critical
    to the welfare issue; it's critical to all these other issues. We have
    got to convince our people that in common we can bring the crime rate
    down, we can restore order and civility and decency and safety to our
    children's lives. And it's very, very important.
        Let me say that in the last few months especially, we have been very
    active in dealing with those who commit crimes against children,
    especially those who commit sexual offenses against children. And I
    wanted to mention that just a moment today.
        In the crime bill, we required every State to compile a registry of
    sex offenders and gave the States the power to notify communities about
    child sex offenders or violent sex offenders that moved into
    neighborhoods. And then last month I signed Megan's Law, to insist that
    States tell a community whenever a dangerous sexual predator is in the
    midst of the people. Too many children and their families have paid a
    terrible price because of what their parents didn't know. Megan's Law
    was named after a 7-year-old girl from New Jersey who was taken at the
    beginning of her life. And I believe it will help to prevent further
    Megans.
        But there is one other step we have to take. Senator Biden and
    Senator Gramm have introduced a bipartisan bill to develop a national

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    registry to track offenders and child molesters across the country. That
    is the right thing to do, but I believe we can move forward now. Today I
    directed the Attorney General to report back to me in 60 days with a
    plan to guarantee that police officers can get this information right
    away, to make sure that police officers in every State get the
    information they need from any State to track sex offenders. A police
    officer in Cleveland ought to know about somebody in Cleveland, whether
    the crime was committed in Los Angeles or New York. These things have to
    be shared, and we need a system to share it. So we are working very,
    very hard on that, and I hope you will support us in that endeavor as
    well.
        Let me just say one last thing about crime. Unless someone finds a
    magic formula to transform human nature, we will never eliminate crime
    completely from America. But we can go back to the time when it's the
    exception, not the rule. And I think that the test that I always say
    that I will follow is I will believe we're on the right side of the
    crime problem when I can turn on the evening news at night, and if the
    lead story is a horrible crime I'm absolutely shocked, instead of numb
    to it; I don't expect the lead story to be the biggest, latest crime
    story.
        So I say, again, you have proven--mayor after mayor, most of the
    mayors in this room have seen a drop in the crime rate for 3 or 4 years
    in a row now. And it's very important that our people believe we can do
    this. We cannot allow the people to believe that we cannot do this.
        I think the resurgence of our cities--and I predict to you that it
    will continue--driven by new economic strategies and more jobs coming
    in, driven by innovative housing strategies and more affordable
    housing--we're going to make Secretary Cisneros' goal: We're going to
    have more than two-thirds of the American people in their own homes by
    the end of this decade for the first time in American history. We're
    going to do that.
        The marrying of our attempts to improve the environment and to
    direct the economy--to develop the economy, as embodied in the
    brownfields initiative; the continued assault on crime; the continued
    commitment to invest in our infrastructure, these things will develop a
    strategy not only to rebuild urban America but to make America great as
    we move into the next century.
        The main thing I would say again, we have to have a vision. You have
    to imagine, what do you want this country to look like? When these
    children grow up and they're raising their children, I want this to be a
    country in a world that is so full of possibility it's unimaginable to
    us. But I want those possibilities available to every child who will
    work for them, without regard to their race or the station they start
    out in life or where they happen to live in the United States.
        And I want our diversity to be the crown jewel of our assets in the
    global society. I want us to revel in the racial and ethnic and
    religious diversity of America, and I want us to still be standing up
    for peace and freedom and prosperity for all the people of the world.
    And if you want that, you have to lead the way. And we have to do it by
    working together. When I look at this crowd I am very optimistic that
    that is the future that these children will have.
        Thank you very much, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 12:50 p.m. in the Cleveland Renaissance
    Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to the following U.S. Conference of
    Mayors officials: Mayor Norman B. Rice of Seattle, WA, outgoing
    president; Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago, IL, incoming president;
    Mayor Paul Helmke of Fort Wayne, IN, advisory board chair; Mayor Betty
    Jo Rhea of Rock Hill, SC, trustee; and J. Thomas Cochran, executive
    director. The President also referred to Phillip Rooney, president and
    CEO, WMX Technologies, Inc.; Rev. Marvin A. McMickle, who gave the
    invocation; Glenn Burks, who sang the national anthem; and Mayors
    Michael R. White of Cleveland, OH, Bob Lanier of Houston, TX, Joseph R.
    Riley, Jr., of Charleston, SC, Willie Brown of San Francisco, CA, Thomas
    Menino of Boston, MA, Bill Campbell of Atlanta, GA, and Victor Ashe of
    Knoxville, TN. The Executive orders of May 21 on empowerment contracting
    and on locating Federal facilities on historic properties in central
    cities are listed in Appendix D at the end of this volume.