[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1998, Book I)]
[June 19, 1998]
[Pages 989-994]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Teleconference Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session With the
United States Conference of Mayors
June 19, 1998

    President Clinton. Thank you very much, Mayor Helmke, for all your wonderful introductions. I 
hope they didn't hurt you too much. This one won't cause you as much 
trouble as the last one did.
    Seriously, I want to thank you for your fine leadership of the 
mayors this year. And Mayor Corradini, I 
look forward to working with you over the next year. I also want to say 
hello to your advisory board chair, Mayor Webb, who

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joined me at the White House this week when we honored the Broncos 
together for winning the Super Bowl. And hello to your executive 
director, Tom Cochran, who does a great 
job for you day-in and day-out here with us.
    Let me also congratulate my good friend Jerry Abramson on his award for distinguished public service. 
Jerry, I'll always be grateful to you for a lot of things--for your 
friendship, your support, and especially for your leadership for the 
1994 crime bill. All across America, neighborhoods are now safer because 
of the community police officers you helped to put on the street. You 
have really made a difference. I congratulate you and thank you again.
    And I have some good news about one of your alumni, the former mayor 
of Laredo, Saul Ramirez. Last year at 
this meeting I announced his nomination for Assistant Secretary at HUD. 
Well, I'm giving him a promotion and nominating him now to be the 
agency's new Deputy Secretary. Congratulations to him and to you.
    This is the third time we've been able to get together just this 
year, and I'm only sorry that I can't join you in person. I know that 
I'll be well represented by members of my Cabinet, including our great 
HUD Secretary, Andrew Cuomo. I send 
greetings also to you from Mickey Ibarra, 
who's with me here and who runs the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs 
and works hard for you. His Deputy, Lynn Cutler, 
is stranded in an airport, but she'll soon be in Reno to represent the 
White House. And I'm proud that senior representatives from a total of 
22 Federal agencies are attending your conference. You can tell from the 
breadth and depth from the team I've sent that my administration is more 
committed than ever to working with you to help our great cities thrive 
and reach their fullest potential.
    Last week a number of you were able to join me here at the White 
House as I signed a transportation bill that will help cities to build 
and modernize roads, bridges, and transit systems for the 21st century. 
It encourages mass transit, protects the environment, expands 
opportunities to disadvantaged businesses, and moves more people from 
welfare to work with transportation assistance. Thank you for helping me 
pass this law.
    In no small part because of the innovation, commitment, and hard 
work of America's mayors, our cities are revitalized, reenergized, and 
back in business. The second annual ``State of the Cities'' report, 
which Secretary Cuomo will share with you in 
much greater detail later, shows that unemployment, crime, poverty 
rates, all are down and falling in our central cities. New job growth 
and homeownership rates are up and climbing. Our downtowns are coming 
back as centers of tourism and entertainment. The state of our cities is 
strong, and I thank you for leading this renaissance.
    America is enjoying the strongest economy in a generation, an era of 
sunlit prosperity and abundant opportunity, but we cannot afford to sit 
back and bask in the glow. Instead, we must make the most of this rare 
moment in our history and ensure that our economic renaissance touches 
every corner of every community.
    As the ``State of the Cities'' report shows, cities still face 
critical opportunity gaps when it comes to jobs, to education, and to 
housing. If we're going to lift even more people out of poverty and 
bring more middle class families back to our cities, we must do 
everything we can to close these opportunity gaps. The way we will close 
our opportunity gaps is with the new vision of government.
    Over the past 5\1/2\ years, we've moved beyond the false debate 
between those who said government could solve all our problems and those 
who said government was the problem. Our new vision has been of 
government as partner with business, community groups, and individual 
citizens. It's been a vision of government as catalyst to bring the 
spark of private enterprise to our hardest-pressed neighborhoods. 
Whether it's putting more police officers on the streets to fight crime 
or offering tax incentives to lure businesses back to abandoned 
downtowns or providing small business loans to inner-city residents, our 
goal has been to empower people with the tools to make the most of their 
own lives.
    Secretary Cuomo's new streamlined HUD, 
which David Osborne has called the most 
exciting reinvention in a decade, epitomizes this vision. Along with the 
Vice President, who chairs my Community 
Empowerment Board, I am committed to helping HUD and other Federal 
agencies work even better for you. And I ask you to support our expanded 
community empowerment agenda, that reflects our new approach to filling 
the opportunity gaps in, for our cities.
    First, we can fill in the jobs gap and bring more businesses and 
credit to our central cities

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by launching a second round of empowerment zones, renewing community 
development financial institutions, and supporting HUD's Community 
Empowerment Fund. I ask you to tell Congress that America needs 50,000 
new welfare-to-work housing vouchers to help hard-working people 
successfully move off welfare by moving closer to their jobs. And I hope 
you'll work with me to ensure all Americans get the child care 
assistance they need to be good parents and good workers.
    Second, we can begin closing the education gap by helping school 
districts modernize and build 5,000 schools, hiring more teachers, 
reducing class sizes in the earliest grades, and creating education 
opportunity zones to help poorer school districts make the tough reforms 
they need to improve.
    Third, we will bridge the housing gap by strengthening our efforts 
to fight housing discrimination, raising FHA loan limits, creating more 
section 8 housing vouchers, helping families with good rental histories 
turn rent checks into mortgage payments, and expanding the low income 
housing tax credit. This tax credit now has the support of a majority of 
Members in the House and the Senate. Let's call on Congress to pass the 
bill right away.
    Finally, I ask for your help on another critical issue for cities: 
making sure that the 2000 census is as accurate as possible. As you 
know, census statistics help to determine how much Federal aid your 
communities receive for roads, WIC, Head Start, job training, and other 
services. Because of an undercount of inner-city residents in the last 
census, many of you were shortchanged when it came to Federal funds. We 
must make sure it doesn't happen again. The scientists agree: 
Statistical sampling is the most accurate and most cost-effective way to 
get a full and fair count of our people in the year 2000. Let's work 
together to ensure that we use this method in the next census.
    All these are tough challenges, but I know that if we work together, 
we can meet them. Last year in San Francisco, we set ourselves a 
challenge of helping 1,000 police officers buy and move into homes in 
the communities they serve. Well, I'm proud to announce that the Officer 
Next Door program has met the challenge. Later today, Secretary 
Cuomo will present the program's 1,000th key 
to Deputy Mark Burgess, a key that will unlock 
the door to his new home in Salt Lake City. With citizens like Deputy 
Burgess who are taking active stakes in our community, and with your 
continued leadership, I know the best is yet to come for America's 
cities.
    Throughout our history, our cities have always been the face America 
shows the world. Visitors have gotten their first taste of America--our 
energy, ingenuity, and promise--through our great cities. They've always 
been the gateway to opportunity for millions of Americans, places where 
new immigrants have worked hard, built thriving communities, and 
achieved the American dream. We can, and we will, make sure that dream 
thrives in our cities well into the 21st century.
    Thank you for all you do, and thank you for working with me.
    Mayor Paul Helmke of Fort Wayne, IN. Thank 
you, Mr. President. I understand that you have time for a few questions 
from some of the mayors. I had a few folks I know that wanted to ask you 
questions.

Millennium Activities

    Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston, MA. Mr. 
President, the millennium is up in 2 years. A lot of cities are 
preparing for the millennium as we go forward. What is your vision? What 
do you think that this country should be doing with the new millennium 
when it comes in the year 2000?
    President Clinton. Tom, first let me say that I'm very sorry about 
the floods in Boston. I know our FEMA people are there, and I hope they 
will all work out of it and dry out of it together.
    Let me say to all of you, I think every mayor in America should be 
heavily involved in celebrating the millennium. And I hope that as a 
group you will be in close touch with Ellen Lovell, who is running this project for the First Lady and for 
me, so that we can coordinate what we're doing. I think our vision 
should be the one that Hillary has 
articulated: We should honor the past and imagine the future. That means 
to me that, at a minimum, every city should find someplace in the city 
important to your city's history and heritage and make sure that you 
have restored it or protected it or enhanced it for all future 
generations.
    Second, I think every city should identify some great opportunity 
that you believe is there for your people in the new century, and 
elevate

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that opportunity, highlight it, literally enshrine it as a mission of 
your city for the future.
    And thirdly, of course, I think there should be a great celebration 
on New Year's Eve 1999/2000, that all the cities in the country 
participate in, that is tied in with a national celebration and that 
involves as many Americans as humanly possible.

Education Initiatives

    Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago, IL. 
Mr. President, where are we on achieving your education goals, whether 
it's smaller classrooms or school construction or after-school programs? 
How can we as an organization be more helpful to you?
    President Clinton. Well, you can do a lot. Let me deal with each of 
them in turn.
    The only part of the education program that is imperiled by the 
present setback to the tobacco bill is the funds that we wanted to give 
the States which would enable them to distribute them to communities to 
hire the teachers necessary to reduce class size to an average of 18 in 
the first 3 grades.
    The school construction initiative, which would allow us to build or 
repair 5,000 schools, is still very much alive; it's in my budget; the 
Congress can approve it. There is some bipartisan support for it. And so 
I think if the mayors, particularly the Republicans and the Democrats 
together, could really press this, then when we get down to the 
appropriations in the month of July and in the month of September, we've 
got a good chance to get the construction money out. And that would make 
a huge difference, not only in repairing a lot of older schools that 
need to be repaired but in providing the needed classroom space, without 
which we can't have the smaller class sizes.
    On the after-school funds, we have funds in both the Justice 
Department budget and in the Education Department budget; it's just 
going to be a question of fighting for those things and making sure that 
they're priorities in the Congress, just as they are priorities for you 
and for me.
    And again, there shouldn't be any politics in this. The evidence is 
so overwhelming--as you know, in Chicago, where you have tens of 
thousands of kids eating three meals a day in the schools, that this 
increases learning and lowers juvenile crime--that I would think that 
the cities that have had good experiences with these programs could take 
the lead.
    But again I say that if the Republican and Democratic mayors could 
do this together and say, this is a grassroots American issue, this has 
nothing to do with partisan politics, that this part of the President's 
budget should prevail, then I think we have a good chance to win.
    So I'd say on two out of three we're in good shape. Whether the 
States get some more money that then can be used for aid to education to 
hire those extra teachers depends on whether we can get the tobacco 
legislation back on track. I'm still hopeful that we can. Anything you 
can do to encourage Congress not on this point, but on the larger point, 
to pass legislation to protect our children from the dangers of tobacco 
and pass something comprehensive that will have credibility in the 
public health community, that we know will work, will make us closer to 
that goal as well.

Violence in Schools

    Mayor Lee R. Clancey of Cedar Rapids, IA. 
Mr. President, I have a question that's a side issue related to 
education concerns. In the next couple of weeks, I'm going to be hosting 
a meeting with city and school officials on the issue of school violence 
and how we can prevent it, how we can cope with it, what we can do to 
address it. And I know it's an issue that concerns many of us in our 
cities. What is being done at the Federal level, and do you have any 
suggestions for us to take back to our community?
    President Clinton. Well, let me first of all, Mayor, say that I applaud you for doing this, all of you, and I 
applaud your leadership in doing it. I think the first thing I would say 
is, that in the last couple of years when we've had all these horrible 
instances of school violence and killing in our schools, we should not 
lose sight of the fact that, ironically, that has occurred when we've 
finally seen the first drop in juvenile crime in many, many years.
    So I think it's important to keep pushing the larger issue of the 
after-school funds and the other kinds of programs that we've seen work 
so well in Boston and elsewhere to drive juvenile crime down.
    Then I think we have to say, no matter how low we get juvenile 
crime, we're going to be at risk of these violent instances in schools 
because there will always be a small number of children who will be 
profoundly disturbed,

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where some incident at home or at school can set them off, and they live 
in a culture where the access to guns is too easy and where they're too 
exposed from their earliest years to repeated barrages of almost casual 
violence in the media that they see. So, too many children become numb 
to violence and, I think, take guns in their hands and pull the 
triggers, often without really feeling and knowing the consequences.
    Now, there are, I believe, two things that we can do at the Federal 
level that we're working on. First, as I said when I was in Springfield, 
Oregon, I've asked the Attorney General and the Secretary of Education 
to prepare a manual to train teachers, parents, and hopefully other 
students as well, on early warning signs of children in trouble, so that 
we'll be better at picking this up.
    In every case where we've had a killing over the last year, there 
have been some indication that there was something wrong with the young 
person involved, that something has happened, or the young person said 
something or friends knew something, that did not lead to preemptive 
action. So I think we need to really focus on this prevention.
    Secondly, we're going to be working on what can be done to get some 
more police officers out there in and around the schools, just as we 
have on the streets.
    Thirdly, there is a big debate going on in Springfield, Oregon, and 
in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and I'm sure in all the other communities about 
what can be done if children are found in trouble, to try to do 
something before they go over the edge.
    The two Senators from Oregon have introduced legislation which would require of any 
child who was sent home from school because he or she had a gun in 
school--and there were 6,100 children who had guns in schools and had 
the guns taken away and were sent home because of our zero tolerance for 
guns in schools just last year. The Senators think that--their 
legislation, I think, calls for some sort of mandatory 72-hour 
examination period, including a psychiatric exam.
    Whether this is everything that should be done, exactly what should 
be done, or not is something we're going to debate up here. But it's not 
too soon for every mayor and every school leader in the country to 
determine what should be done if a case occurs like the case in 
Springfield, Oregon, where the young man 
who is now charged with all these killings was sent home the day before 
with a gun in the school.
    Now, presently that's about all that happens, because most cities 
and most school districts don't have a system for dealing with that. I 
think you should make sure that your schools do have a system--and maybe 
not just when a person is found with a gun and sent home but when 
threats are made or when people say they're going to do something--maybe 
unspecific threats but give evidence of that. We need some sort of 
intervention that can get these kids analyzed and then get them quickly 
to some sort of comprehensive program if necessary, to try to give them 
the help they need and to take them out of the pressure-cooker situation 
for a couple of days in the hope that this can be avoided.
    I believe that we can do a lot more on the prevention front. And we 
now know, just looking at the facts of all these cases, that there were 
significant early warnings in at least several of them that might have 
permitted, with the right kind of intervention, circumstances to develop 
that would have avoided the tragedies.
    So that's what I would ask you to look at. Everybody should know: 
What does your school district do with a child that makes a threat? What 
does your school district do with a child that has a gun? Does the 
school have a system where they encourage other kids to talk to 
responsible adults if they hear some child making a threat? Most of 
these children, if they could just get 4 or 5 or 6 years down the road, 
would look back in horror that they ever entertained such a thought--if 
we can avoid it happening in the first place.
    So I think we can do better. We're determined to do our part. And 
after you have your meeting, if the mayors and the others from whom you 
hear have any other ideas, for goodness' sakes, give them to us. This is 
something we've got to do more on.
    Mayor Helmke. I want to thank you, Mr. 
President. I know your time is short, but we appreciate you taking the 
time this afternoon to talk to us and taking the time again this past 
year. You've worked collaboratively with us, consistently with us. We 
know you're concerned about the city issues and you're always willing to 
listen to us and we thank you for that.
    In particular, I wanted to thank you for working closely with us 
this last year while I've been

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president of the mayors group. It's been an experience, and we 
appreciate all of your efforts this past year. And you've outlined a 
number of things that we need to continue to work with in the future, 
and we plan to do that with you, too.
    So again, thank you very much. We thank you or all of your efforts 
and for your staff members and Cabinet officers that are here, too. 
Thank you, Mr. President.
    President Clinton. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. 
Thank you all, and I'll turn it over to Secretary Cuomo and the rest of our crowd. Have a great meeting.

Note: The President spoke by satellite at 5:20 p.m. from Room 459 of the 
Old Executive Office Building to the meeting in Reno, NV. In his 
remarks, he referred to Mayor Paul Helmke of Fort Wayne, IN, president, 
Mayor Deedee Corradini of Salt Lake City, UT, president-elect, and J. 
Thomas Cochran, executive director, U.S. Conference of Mayors; Mayor 
Wellington E. Webb of Denver, CO; Mayor Jerry E. Abramson of Louisville, 
KY; and David Osborne, president, Public Strategies Group, Inc.