[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
[January 29, 1999]
[Pages 123-130]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the United States Conference of Mayors
January 29, 1999

    Thank you very much for the wonderful welcome. I want to say I'm 
just as glad to see you as you apparently are to be here. [Laughter] 
Just looking at you reminds me of why we do what we do. And I thank you 
so much for your work.
    I'd like to thank Secretary Cuomo for 
his fine remarks, and Secretary Herman, who 
will have remarks in a moment, and Mayor Corradini for your leadership.
    Because this is my only opportunity, I believe, today to see the 
press and to speak with them and with the American people, I hope you 
will forgive me because I need to make a couple of remarks about some 
developments in Kosovo at the beginning.

Kosovo

    You remember that 2 weeks ago there was a massacre in the village of 
Racak. After that, we insisted that the Serbian authorities stop their 
repression and meet their commitments. Today Secretary 
Albright forged an agreement with our 
Contact Group allies, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Russia, 
on a common diplomatic strategy to achieve compliance with the rules of 
the international community. With our Allies in NATO, we stand ready to 
back that strategy with the threat of force.
    Our goal is not merely to respond to the recent atrocities in Kosovo 
but to help resolve the conflict so that the violence can end for good. 
The Contact Group has now approved the terms of an interim agreement 
that would do just that, by protecting the rights of all the people of 
Kosovo and giving them the self-government they clearly deserve.
    Both sides now have an opportunity to stop a war that neither side 
can win and to start building a better future for all the people by 
peaceful means. To that end, the international community has sent a 
clear message to the authorities in Belgrade: The time for denial and 
delay is past. NATO is united and ready to act if you don't.

Domestic Agenda

    I want to thank, again, Mayor Corradini, Mayor Webb, Mayor 
Coles for greeting me. Like Deedee, I want to 
say how much I appreciate the work that Mickey Ibarra and Lynn Cutler do to bring 
the mayors and the White House together to give us, I think, a virtually 
unprecedented working relationship. And I intend to keep it going.
    I want to thank all the members of the Cabinet and the 
administration who are here. There is a stunning array--the whole 
Government is here on the front row. I hope there is no emergency in any 
Department today while we are all here. [Laughter] I feel rather badly 
about this; they've probably heard this speech a hundred times before. 
But I thank them. I think their presence here is evidence of the 
seriousness with which we take our responsibilities to work with you.
    I also want to thank Mayor Corradini 
for her leadership on the census. I know we may have some questions 
about that later, but just let me say the Supreme Court struck down the 
use of sampling for congressional apportionment among the States. It 
reaffirmed our use of these scientific methods for other purposes. We 
remain committed to making the 2000 census both accurate and fair, and 
we are working very hard, as--Secretary Daley is working very hard to try to determine how we can best 
do that and have the most useful and accurate census we can.
    You know, one of the reasons I ran for President 7 years ago is to 
do something about the then-condition of our cities. I also was 
encouraged by what I saw as I visited cities in 1991 and 1992 and I saw, 
even with the country in pretty bad shape, there were places where 
people were actually solving problems, where hope had returned because 
change was occurring. And I believed then, as I said in my first

[[Page 124]]

Inaugural, that there is nothing wrong with this country that can't be 
fixed by what is right with our country. I have always believed that, 
and you have proved that that is right.
    Now, since 1993 we have worked together, as I have said thousands of 
times, to create an America in which there is opportunity for all of our 
citizens, responsibility from all our citizens, and a community that 
includes all our citizens. No group of Americans is more committed to 
that than our mayors.
    We've had a strategy for the new economy: to balance the budget, to 
invest in our people, to sell more of our goods and services around the 
world. We balanced the budget for the first time in nearly 30 years and 
still almost doubled our investment in education and training. The 
strategy has helped to steer our Nation through some tough global 
currents. And as you know, our economy is doing very well.
    This morning we received more good news about the American economy. 
I can now report that in the fourth quarter of 1998, our economy grew at 
5.6 percent. For the entire year, the growth rate was 3.9 percent, 
giving us the longest peacetime expansion in the history of the United 
States with the lowest peacetime unemployment rate since 1957.
    I remember after I was elected, we were sitting around the table at 
the Governor's Mansion in Little Rock arguing about our economic 
strategy. And I had all these folks come in from around the country, and 
they said, ``Now, Mr. President, you just cannot grow the economy at 
more than 2\1/2\ percent for more than a year or two without having 
uncontrollable inflation.'' And I said, ``Well, I'm not an economist, 
but I know what technology is doing, and I don't believe that.'' And at 
least for 6 years, it hasn't been so. The American people have proved 
that through productivity and hard work, we can grow the economy, reduce 
unemployment, and if we do the right things, by the way, we can also 
improve the environment, not destroy it. So this is an encouraging 
thing.
    Today we're releasing an interim state of the cities report that 
tells the story of economic growth in the cities. Unemployment in our 
central cities has fallen by 40 percent since 1992; 4 of our largest 10 
cities have cut their unemployment rates in half. We have the highest 
real wage growth in two decades; the lowest African-American and 
Hispanic unemployment rates since such things were first measured in 
1972; average family income up by $3,500; the lowest crime rate in, now, 
about 26 years, and a drop in our cities that averages 27 percent.
    All of you in this room should be proud of what you have done, and 
I'm proud of what we've been able to do together. But I would like to 
reiterate today, in terms specific to the cities and our urban agenda, 
the general point that I made at the State of the Union Address. The 
present prosperity is an opportunity and a responsibility to make sure 
that opportunity and prosperity reaches every person in every corner of 
this country, into every neighborhood in every city of this country.
    If we cannot do this now, with what some people believe is the 
strongest overall economy in our history, believe me, we will never get 
around to doing the job. And so I think we should all be very up front 
and say: This is a dynamic economy; you don't ever stand still in it; if 
you don't keep going in one direction, before you know it you'll be 
going in the other. And so what is our clear responsibility is also in 
the self-interest of all our citizens. And I hope you can talk to people 
about that in all your communities.
    This is not a time to say, isn't this wonderful, and let's take 
another vacation. This is a time to say all these things that I bet you 
everybody in this room has talked about and worried about, wrung your 
hands about, probably for decades before you ever showed up in city 
government. It's finally a time that we can deal with these challenges. 
And that's what I have tried to construct a budget to help you do.
    Secretary Cuomo sort of brushed by the 
remarkable role that HUD has played in the last 6 years, not only in 
helping you to grow the American dream in our cities but also to 
reinvent the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to make it 
smaller and able to invest more and have a bigger impact out there where 
people live.
    David Osborne, the intellectual godfather 
of this whole REGO movement, said that HUD is a model of reinvention in 
the nineties. The balanced budget that I will submit to Congress will 
increase the overall HUD budget by $2\1/2\ billion, to $28 billion. It 
will support HUD's community empowerment fund: 100,000 new vouchers to 
make housing more affordable; dozens of other innovative steps. I want 
you to support this in the Congress. We have to have

[[Page 125]]

votes from Members on both sides of the aisle in both Houses to pass the 
HUD budget.
    But if we're going to reach every person in every corner of every 
city, we have to do more, and Mayor Corradini mentioned some of the 
things, but I'd like to run over them with you.
    First, we have to create more economic opportunity. The best poverty 
program, the best anticrime program, the best urban program is still a 
job for every person who will work. We've created now 31 empowerment 
zones to bring the spark of private enterprise to inner cities. The Vice 
President announced the 20 newest zones earlier this month. I will ask 
Congress to fully fund this round to help support another 90,000 jobs.
    We created a network of community development financial 
institutions, and we now propose increasing the investment in that. We 
strengthened and streamlined the Community Reinvestment Act, encouraging 
banks--just since we've been here--to make over $1 trillion in financial 
commitments. Since the CRA became law in 1975, 95 percent of all the 
commitments made under it have been made since 1993.
    And I hope you noticed that during this period our banks have not 
gone broke. [Laughter] I bet the town banker is doing pretty well where 
you live in a big city or a small town. And yet, unbelievably enough, 
when we are proving it is working, the Community Reinvestment Act is 
under fire again.
    Again, this ought not be a political deal. Every American has an 
interest in seeing that every economic opportunity in every community is 
seized. And if it is a good investment, it's a good investment. The 
banks are not going broke; they're doing well. The Community 
Reinvestment Act is a good thing. I hope you will help us protect it and 
support it. Now, even so, capital still bypasses a lot of areas where 
it's most needed.
    I said in the State of the Union, I'd like to say again, today the 
largest pool of ready untapped investment opportunity and new customers 
is not overseas; it's in our backyard, in Harlem or Watts or Appalachia, 
even our Native American reservations. According to a recent Harvard 
Business School study, underdeveloped communities in America still 
control more than $85 billion a year in purchasing power. That's more 
than the entire retail market of Mexico, our second largest trading 
partner.
    So I have proposed an initiative to bring jobs and opportunity to 
the new markets here at home. We should write into law a new markets tax 
credit: $1 billion of tax credits over 5 years, worth 25 percent of the 
amount of equity placed in investment funds, community development 
banks, and other investment vehicles targeted for these untapped 
markets.
    We should create ``American Private Investment Companies,'' modeled 
on the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, that would provide for 
guarantees of a portion of private equity investment of up to $1\1/2\ 
billion a year over the next 5 years. We should create new market 
venture capital firms to bring capital and technical assistance to small 
businesses in distressed areas.
    Thousands, literally thousands and thousands of opportunities--of 
entrepreneurs in this country just need a little capital and a little 
guidance to expand their businesses and to create new jobs. All told, 
this new markets initiative will bring $15 billion in new private sector 
investment, our most significant opportunity in years to break the cycle 
of poverty and joblessness in the neighborhoods where unemployment is 
still too high, and that 5.6 percent does not mean anything. I ask you 
to help me make sure it means something from now on to every American in 
every community.
    We have to do more. I announced in the State of the Union that 
welfare is at its lowest level in three decades. Caseloads have been cut 
nearly in half. That's the good news. The bad news is that the remaining 
number of people on welfare who are able-bodied and who are required 
under the law to seek work will very often be harder to place, at least 
in terms of either their educational level, their skills level, or their 
difficulty in getting transportation to work, or perhaps they have more 
children, and therefore it's more difficult to support child care.
    And yet we have seen evidence--I think either Secretary Shalala or 
Janet Yellen in one of the weekly economic reports quoted a report to me 
recently which said that we had some evidence now that even hard-to-
place--people that you would type as hard-to-place welfare recipients--
are actually being placed, being trained, and doing quite well, thank 
you, where the unemployment rate is low and the markets are so tight 
that employers had to be out and

[[Page 126]]

train them and provide the kinds of tools necessary to give them a 
chance to go to work.
    So again I say, I think it is very important that no public official 
get up here and disempower hundreds of thousands of Americans by saying, 
``Well, now we have creamed everybody off the top, and these other 
folks, we'll just have to give up on them.'' If we had time, I'd have my 
mayor here, my new mayor, come up here 
and tell you his life story. Thank God nobody gave up on him.
    So I ask you to help me pass this provision of my budget, which 
would help us to give another 200,000 people the dignity of work, and 
reinforce the new markets initiative by making sure people are actually 
able to work if we can get the investment opportunities to them.
    We have to do more to clean up abandoned industrial sites and 
redevelop them. My balanced budget proposes an abandoned buildings 
initiative that will help you accelerate your efforts to clean up 
brownfields and deal with sites with old and unused buildings and turn 
them into places of opportunity.
    Now, every one of these initiatives will require Democrats and 
Republicans to work together to get through Congress. And every one 
requires Congress to act; I do not write the checks in America. 
[Laughter] So I need your help, across party lines. These things should 
be American initiatives. They relate to human potential and private 
initiative and private sector investment.
    Second, we have to do more to keep our cities safer. I thank the 
mayor for what she said about your position on drug testing. I don't 
think people ought to be paroled in the first place unless they've been 
tested and they're drug-free. And I believe when they're on parole, if 
they had a drug problem in the first place, they should be tested and 
should have to stay drug-free to stay out of prison, because I think it 
will keep your cities safer.
    You look at the numbers that the Attorney General gives me all the 
time, just look at the Federal prison system and the way that it's grown 
and the number of people there who are there because of drug-related 
offenses, and the numbers are bigger and the percentages are worse in 
State facilities. And I despaired for a long time--I ran a big prison 
system when I was a Governor for 12 years, and I dramatically increased 
the size of it. And every year I got sicker and sicker to see great 
world-class facilities being built according to Federal court guidelines 
for my prisoners, while my kids were going to school in second-class 
facilities, many of which were too old even to be hooked up to the 
Internet.
    But the point I want to make is this: I don't favor putting people 
in inhumane conditions, but I think we're wasting our time if we think 
we can keep jailing our way out of this situation in the same old way. 
That's the point I'm trying to make. And we'll have more to say about 
that later. But let's begin with first things first, with this drug 
testing initiative.
    Secondly, with, I think, the superb partnership between the Justice 
Department and the local communities, we're going to achieve our goal 
this year of those 100,000 community police, under budget and ahead of 
schedule. I wish I had a list of everything everybody who ever voted 
against that bill in 1994 said. ``Oh, this will never work.'' ``Oh, what 
will happen?'' ``Oh, the mayors will hate you for doing this.'' ``Oh, 
how can you do this?'' I wish I had a list of all that stuff. [Laughter] 
The people that were opposed to that, they practically swole up and died 
when it was passed. You would have thought it was the worst thing that 
ever happened. [Laughter]
    And I am so grateful to you for what you have done with the police 
program. We worked with you all the way, you and your law enforcement 
officials. I'm going to give a 21st century crime bill to Congress that 
will focus on, now, how we can make our communities even safer.
    It's fine to say that crime is at a 30-year low. If you're a victim, 
it's still too high. And no one really believes that the United States, 
compared to other countries, is a safe country yet. We still have more 
to do. And no one seriously believes that we can really get private 
investment into all those places that have been left behind until we get 
the crime rate down. So part of it involves the drug strategy. Part of 
it involves, I believe, more police resources deployed in the toughest 
areas. And the budget we have will help our communities to hire or 
redeploy somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 police.
    And we had the 100,000 number down quite good, we thought, and we 
were being conservative, and now we know we're going to get there ahead 
of schedule and under budget. The reason I give you this rather flexible 
number--and I said up to 50,000 in the State of the Union--

[[Page 127]]

is, obviously, it depends upon where those toughest neighborhoods are, 
and what the cost per police will be in the neighborhoods where they're 
deployed. Obviously, you know from the other program, we'll do our best 
to create the largest number of police possible as quickly as possible 
to do this.
    We also want to enlist probation and parole officers, school 
officials, faith-based organizations in active attempts to prevent crime 
in the first place. We want to give your police more high-tech tools to 
fight crime, from digital mug shots to crime-mapping computers in squad 
cars. For years, we have seen--you can see in any movie, drug dealers 
using pagers, scam artists using the Internet, gangs with high-tech 
weapons. I think the police ought to have access to the same technology 
that their adversaries do.
    I also thank you for what you're doing to take guns out of the hands 
of criminals, and I ask you not to relent. There is still almost--and 
it's still bewildering to me--but there is almost a culture war still 
going on out their over all these issues. I ask for your support as we 
seek to restore the 5-day waiting period for buying a handgun, to extend 
the Brady bill to violent juveniles, to pass legislation to require 
child safety trigger locks. These are three things we can do to save 
lives. No one is trying to stop anybody from their legitimate right to 
hunt or have weapons, but we need to pass these bills. And I ask for 
your support.
    The third thing we need to do is keep working on these schools. Now, 
as all of you know, we not only have the most diverse student population 
in history, with one in five of our children with--I'll say it again--
one in five of our children in school from immigrant families. We have 
53 million kids in school, the largest number ever. Secretary Riley 
loves to say that number and then to look at me and say, ``Well, you 
baby boomers are not the largest generation.'' [Laughter] And I think 
that's good because when all those kids get out of school, there will be 
more of them than us and they'll be able to support me in my old age 
better. [Laughter] I hope. [Laughter]
    Now, there are a lot of good things going on in our schools. I've 
been in the schools in some of the communities here present. Test scores 
are up across the Nation. But I'll just--I'll give you one--I don't want 
to bore you with statistics, because I could talk about education all 
day long, but I just want you to think about one thing. What does it say 
to you that on these international tests, comparing the performance of 
our children in math and science, our kids--a representative sample of 
our kids, by race, by income, by region--a representative sample rank at 
the top of the world on the 4th grade test, drop to the middle in the 
8th grade, and are near the bottom in the 12th grade?
    These children are not dumb. The system is failing them, not the 
other way around. And I think it's important for us to recognize that. 
Although you've got all of these dedicated teachers out there, you've 
got schools where everyone is succeeding, where they're all doing well 
on these exams, where they're all going to college.
    Dick Riley and I have been working for 
more than 20 years together on education now, and I always told him--I 
always considered--to me the most frustrating thing to me about working 
in education is that every single problem has been solved by somebody 
somewhere. And we have simply got to do a better job of replicating 
success.
    We need to finish the job of hiring 100,000 teachers to have class 
size smaller in the early grades, or we'll start losing the ground we've 
gained, with all these kids coming into school and all the teachers 
retiring. So we made a big downpayment on 100,000 teachers last year. We 
need to continue that. We ought to pass the bill that would enable you 
to build or modernize 5,000 schools. That's very important.
    Again, I say we should--we have to reauthorize the Elementary and 
Secondary Education Act this year. And I'm going to propose a dramatic 
change, and it will be very controversial, maybe right across the 
political spectrum, because I think that we now know what works. We know 
that there are great schools in every State in this country; we know--
I've been in city after city, including this one, where I have been 
blown away by the performance of some schools, even as I get dismayed by 
the overall numbers. It is time the United States Government started 
investing in what is working and stopped investing in what is not.
    I am quite sure I'll hear the same thing I heard when we passed the 
crime bill, you know, ``You're trying to decide what they do at the 
local level.'' That is not true. The crime bill, as all of you know, 
was, in effect, written by your local police chiefs and prosecutors and 
mayors. They came to us, and they said, ``This

[[Page 128]]

is what works.'' And Senator Biden and 
others put together a bill that reflected what you were telling us.
    There is nothing in this ``Educational Accountability Act'' that we 
have not been told at high decibel levels by local educational leaders 
over and over and over again. And I ask you, if you know--and every one 
of you know this is true--if you know that every problem in American 
education has been solved by somebody somewhere, and you know there are 
certain common elements to the solution, just as there have to be--and 
you when you run your cities--a tailor-made construction of it, 
depending on the facts--but if you know there are common elements, how 
in the world can you keep giving people a check whether those elements 
are there or not? If you know that we're not spending as much money as 
we should in education, how in the world can you justify not spending 
the money we are spending as well as possible? This is very serious.
    Now, you can help us to pass this. But I think it is absolutely 
imperative that we say: no social promotion; quick action to turn around 
failing schools; qualified teachers; report cards on schools; discipline 
codes; don't say that kids are failures, fix the system. That's why--
Deedee mentioned this--we want to triple the funds that you get for the 
after-school programs, more investment for the summer school programs.
    We know these things work. We know they work. We know they work in 
the poorest neighborhoods. We know they work in circumstances where 
people say that you can never turn these schools around. We know they 
work. We have no conceivable excuse for continuing to invest in what 
doesn't work and for not investing in what does. I implore you to help 
me pass a different way of sending Federal funds to invest in our 
children's future that will work.
    I also ask you to help me pass the rest of the budget so we can hook 
up every classroom and library to the Internet. We're going to start 
getting the E-rate that we fought so hard for, so our classrooms, even 
in the poor neighborhoods, and libraries can afford to hook up to the 
Internet; to support the America Reads program--we now have 1,000 
colleges with young people out in our grade schools helping kids learn 
to read; to support our GEAR UP program--we've got mentors now going 
into middle schools not only to tutor and mentor our children but to get 
them to start thinking about going to college and to start telling them 
when they're in middle school, ``Look, here's what the law is. Here's 
what aid you can get. Here's what the scholarships are. Here's what the 
Pell grants are. You've got to start thinking about going to college.''
    I see Mayor Rendell back there; this 
whole thing was the brainchild of Congressman Chaka Fattah from Philadelphia. And he and I were together with 
Chaka and a bunch of young kids from the inner city not very long ago, 
just sitting around drinking a Coke with them. Every single one of these 
kids wanted to go to college, every one of them, and intended to go and 
believe they could go. And we need to do that everywhere in America.
    Fourth, I'd like to talk just briefly about the preservation 
challenge you all face. I talked about this at some length in the State 
of the Union, but we're losing 7,000 acres of green space and farmland 
every single day. So I have proposed this billion-dollar livability 
agenda to help you save open space, ease traffic congestion, grow in 
ways that enhance the quality of lives of your citizens, including the 
Better America bonds. Carol Browner was telling me yesterday you kind of 
like those Better America bonds; it's a tax cut to leverage $9\1/2\ 
billion in private investment to clean up brownfields, to have clean 
air, and to do some other things that I think you know will be very 
important. So I hope you'll help us to pass it. I hope you'll support 
our billion-dollar lands legacy initiative, to preserve places of 
natural beauty all across this country, from the most remote wilderness 
to the nearest city park.
    Now, if we can continue in this direction, in expanding economic 
opportunity and improving education and fighting crime, in making our 
communities more livable, we can do better. Even though times are good, 
we can do better. We can do much better. And we can reach all those 
neighborhoods and all those people to whom these statistics don't mean a 
thing because they haven't felt them. And it's in everyone else's 
interest because that's how we'll keep the overall American economy 
growing.
    Let me just say, parenthetically, I hope you will all support my 
proposal to set aside the surplus till we fix Social Security and 
Medicare at the same time, not all of it but most of it--and to do 
something that we never think about in America, which is paying down 
some

[[Page 129]]

of the debt. The reason I want to do that, especially now, is, you know 
about all this turmoil overseas; you know how a lot of countries are 
being punished for having big deficits; you know what will happen if we 
have to have--either they start having terrible inflation problems or 
have to have astronomical interest rates. They won't be able to buy as 
many of our products, and we'll have to develop more within our country.
    If we fix Social Security and Medicare and do it by actually saving 
money until we need it, so while we're saving it, we're paying down the 
debt, that will keep our interest rates low, and it will free up money 
that people in the private sector would otherwise spend buying 
Government debt, to invest in your cities and in your neighborhoods.
    So this is a very important part of this whole economic strategy. If 
the world economy resumes growing, we'll grow even faster. If the world 
economy--and about half the world is in a recession now--if the world 
economy stays in trouble, we have to find ways to keep growing, and one 
of the ways we can do it is to free up more private sector money for 
private sector investment to create jobs. So I hope you will support 
that as well. It will have a direct impact on your economic well-being, 
as well as, obviously, it is of concern because you want your seniors to 
do well and to be--this generation of seniors is fine, but you want them 
to do well in the future also.
    Let me just make one last point. I know the First Lady is coming over here to talk later today about 
the millennium. We established this White House Millennium Council as an 
inspiration for communities and individuals. We've done a lot of things 
here. We've helped to save the Star-Spangled Banner and Thomas Edison's 
home and other things around the country.
    We've had these White House Millennium Evenings; they've been 
utterly fascinating. The famous physicist Stephen Hawking came over from 
England and talked to us about the nature of time and black holes in the 
universe and all these things we'd find out in the 21st century that I 
could barely understand. It was fascinating. We had, early this week, we 
had two historians of religion come and talk about what the millennium 
meant to people from a philosophical and religious sense 1,000 years ago 
and what it might mean today. Wynton Marsalis came and conducted a 
seminar on the history of jazz and how it embodied this last century and 
what it might mean for the next century. These things have been 
fascinating. But the millennium will never have its full meaning to us 
unless it is played out in every single community.
    Now, I know most of you are planning to do something, but I would 
urge you to plan more than a celebration on New Year's Eve. You will all 
be invited by her to receive national 
designation as millennium communities by launching projects to save your 
history, honor your arts and humanities, prepare your children for the 
new century. I hope you will do that.
    Often, when a century turns, it marks a turning point in how people 
see themselves in the world. Maybe all we do is catch up to what's 
already going on, but it gives us a chance to sort of stop and think and 
try to see patterns in our existence. If you look at the turn of the 
last century, we now see that it was a time of enormous creation and 
identification by cities: the world's first Columbian Exposition in 
Chicago; the unification of the five boroughs of New York; the 
rebuilding of San Francisco after the earthquake. In the early years of 
the 20th century, America really became a melting pot.
    I heard a fascinating story with a friend of mine the other day. 
Both his sets of grandparents were Italian immigrants, and his 
grandfather died right after he came over here, leaving his grandmother 
homeless with five children, including his mother, the youngest of the 
children. And we were talking about this incredible dilemma his mother 
faced because there were homes for orphans but no places for five kids 
with a single mother, and how at the last moment, when they were 
destitute, she was rescued by this community church in Philadelphia. It 
was a very moving story.
    But we now have this in our consciousness, and we know that the 20th 
century basically was the urbanizing, the industrializing of America, a 
new wave of immigrants coming in, and how we had to meet those 
challenges. And this time gives us a time to think again. We can create 
the community of our dreams in this country at the turn of this century. 
And the magnitude of the moment is heightened by the fact that it is 
also the turn of a millennium.
    But we must not see our present prosperity from the perspective of 
self-satisfaction. We should say, thank goodness we happen to be in 
positions of responsibility, when we have an

[[Page 130]]

opportunity the people who came before us never had.
    Do you know how many people were mayors of your cities or who held 
the office of President, in this century, who would have given 
anything--anything--to have had the chance to do what is right before 
our eyes? I think we ought to do it.
    Thank you very much.

Note. The President spoke at 9:50 a.m. in the East Room at the White 
House. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor Deedee Corradini of Salt 
Lake City, UT; Mayor Wellington E. Webb of Denver, CO; Mayor Brent Coles 
of Boise, ID; Mayor Edward G. Rendell of Philadelphia, PA; author and 
public management consultant David Osborne; and Mayor Anthony A. 
Williams of Washington, DC.