[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 37, Number 3 (Monday, January 22, 2001)]
[Pages 132-136]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the United States Conference of Mayors

January 16, 2001

    Mayor Coles, thank you very much. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I 
want to thank Secretary Cuomo and Mickey Ibarra for the wonderful job 
they have done. And I thank Secretary Herman and Director Aida Alvarez. 
Secretary Riley, thank you for being here. We have the Acting Director 
of our Office of National Drug Control Policy, Ed Jurith; Zina Pierre 
and others here who have worked with you. I thank Lynn Cutler, I see out 
there. And I thank Ellen Lovell, the head of the First Lady's millennial 
effort, who brought a lot of projects to a lot of communities across 
this country. And all the others who have worked with you.
    I also want to say a special word of thanks to Mayor Coles. We 
always hear a lot of talk in Washington about bipartisanship, but if we 
look to America's mayors, we actually see it. Maybe because Fiorella 
LaGuardia was right when he said, ``There was no Republican or 
Democratic way to pick up the garbage. You either pick it up or you 
don't.'' [Laughter] I thank you Mayor Coles.
    I also want to thank some of the other officials of the various 
organizations who are here. Mayor Morial, thank you; Mayor Menino, thank 
you. Executive Director Tom Cochran, thank you. Thank you Wellington 
Webb for the award, for all the good times we had in Denver over the 
last several years.
    It's been a real joy for me to welcome the U.S. Conference of Mayors 
here, and I am very proud of the partnership that we have formed. The 
record has already been established, in terms of the rebound of 
America's cities. I would like to make today, a different point, one 
that I rarely read in the retrospectives now being written about the 
last 8 years. Whether they're favorable or critical, even the favorable 
ones sometimes, I rarely read it. They say, oh this was--let's take the 
best case ones-- ``You know, Clinton


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got rid of the deficit, and he's paying the debt down, and we've got a 
healthy economy again.'' There was one big idea, America would be 
connected to the world through networks of trade in an interdependent 
world, and we would stay ahead of the curve. Or the critical ones, they 
just read the polls that came out for little things like school 
uniforms. I might say, parenthetically, that school districts that have 
them don't think they're little things.
    But they missed the whole point, which is that for 8 years, we have 
had a partnership that focused on working together and that took policy 
seriously. That is, the thing that made all this work was beyond party 
and beyond the vast gulf between the White House and your house, is we 
actually believed there is a real connection in people's lives between 
the ideas you adopt, how you put them into practice, and then how people 
wind up living.
    And one of the things that really has always bothered me about 
Washington, and I must say, I live without--I mean, I leave without 
having changed that very much, is that I think the public enterprise 
matters. I'm proud to have been in public life for over 25 years. And I 
believe that people of good will, who are more interested in the impact 
of their actions on other people's lives than whether they are 
increasing their own power and position. Whether they're Republicans or 
Democrats, liberals or conservatives, those people can work together. If 
what drives you is, what is the impact of what you do on other people 
for the better, everybody that's motivated by that, without regard to 
party or philosophy, can work together.
    But to get that done, we have to first of all, expect the fact that 
ideas matter and that how you turn ideas into policies matter, and then 
you've got to keep score. People are either better off or they're not. 
And the reason I loved working with the mayors--apart from the fact that 
I thought it was fun to visit your communities, and I always liked 
getting out there where I got to see so-called real people--is that I 
knew you felt that. I knew you were out there thinking ideas matter. I 
knew you were out there keeping score on yourselves.
    And there's hardly a mayor here who's community I haven't visited at 
one time or another. And I just want to tell you how profoundly grateful 
I am for what you do. Because I think if we hadn't had the partnership 
we had, it is quite doubtful that we would have the 22\1/2\ million more 
jobs, 35 million people now taking advantage of the family leave law, 
interestingly enough. It didn't hurt the economy like the people who 
were against it said it would.
    The other thing I'm quite proud of is that the poverty rate has gone 
down to a 20-year low. In the last 3 years, the lowest 20 percent of 
working people have had the highest percentage increase in their income. 
I figured if we could get the economy going again that we'd create more 
millionaires. It turned out the economy created a lot more billionaires 
too. But the real test, it seems to me, is whether all the people that 
are working get a fair reward for their efforts. And while I think a lot 
more needs to be done in that regard, it is good to see, for the first 
time in 30 years, the rising tide lifting all boats again.
    I think it's worth pointing out here that the cities did lead the 
way. Incomes have risen faster in the cities than in the suburbs. 
Nationally, poverty is down 20 percent since 1993; it's down 23 percent 
in America's cities. So all of you can be very proud of what you have 
done. And I want to thank you for what you have done.
    I want to thank you for the work you did in crime and urge you to 
try to maintain that partnership. You know, we wrote a crime bill in 
1994 based on what mayors, police chiefs, police on the street, and 
prosecutors at the local level told us would work. They said, ``Do this; 
this will work.'' And we put 100,000 police on the street, did those 
other things, passed the Brady law and 611,000 felons, fugitives, and 
stalkers have not been able to get handguns, and the crime rate is at a 
25-year low. In many urban areas, it's even lower than that.
    And now we're in the process of putting the second group of 50,000 
more police on the street, concentrated in the areas of highest crime 
and greatest difficulty. So it worked. You proved it worked.
    You worked with the Vice President to make sure the empowerment zone 
program worked, the program to clean up brownfields

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in urban areas, and I thank you for that. And I thank you for the input 
you had on the new markets initiative, and how we expanded the 
empowerment zones more, and then had some general tax incentives to 
invest in urban areas so that you didn't have to compete to get an 
empowerment zone or an enterprise community to get some of the benefits 
that I think ought to flow to anybody in the country not fully 
participating in our Nation's economic recovery now. So I thank you for 
all that.
    I thank you for the work you did with us on welfare and housing. I 
thank you for the work you have done with us on health care. We had the 
number of people without health insurance going down in our country for 
the first time in a dozen years, thanks to the Children's Health 
Insurance Program, which is flowing money into a lot of urban areas in a 
way that is absolutely critical to your hospitals and your public health 
clinics.
    I thank you for the work you have done with us on education, for the 
support you've given us to try to hire 100,000 more teachers to lower 
the classes in early grades, and for the support you've given--many of 
you very vocally--for funds to repair or modernize schools.
    For the first time since World War II, this Congress gave us over a 
billion dollars to provide emergency repairs in schools all across the 
country. And in many, many of our cities, the average school building is 
over 50 years old. So this is something that you're going to be able to 
take advantage of. And I urge you to keep going with that and keep 
pushing it until we have more money, because, believe me, a billion 
dollars--I remember when I was a boy, Everett Dirksen said, ``You can 
take a billion dollars here and a billion dollars there, and pretty soon 
you're talking about real money.'' And it is real money, but it's 
nowhere nearly enough for what we should do for our schools.
    I thank you--and Mayor Webb mentioned this earlier today--for the 
support you gave us to continue Federal funding for the arts. One of the 
things that I was totally mystified by when we had, 5 years ago, this 
sort of war on Federal funding for the arts that came out, is that it 
seemed to me that the people that were conducting the war may have had 
some poster project or another that they thought they could inflame 
public opinion about, but they had no idea how many community art 
centers out there were running educational programs for kids in their 
own schools, that the cities could not possibly afford to run on their 
own without this supporting help.
    You helped us put the real face of NEA and our funding in the minds 
of the people doing it. And this year, of course, we actually got an 
increase. So I feel that two of our major initiatives here were 
validated. I felt that what the Vice President did--and thank you, Alvin 
Brown--on the empowerment zones and the enterprise communities was also 
ratified when we adopted this big new markets initiative. So I thank you 
for that. And thank you for what you've done.
    Now, let's just look ahead for a minute here. One of the things that 
I think is most important about our cities, and I see it everywhere, is 
the way people who come into vibrant cities basically naturally incline 
toward an attitude of interdependence, and they have a high comfort 
level, much higher comfort level, living with people who are different 
from them. And since I believe that's the biggest challenge facing 
people all over the world today, I think that the cities that succeed 
actually have something profoundly important to show the rest of our 
Nation and the world.
    And I think when you just live close to one another and you have to 
share a lot of things, like whether it's a subway ride or waiting at a 
bus stop or some other more basic facility, you just naturally develop a 
different attitude toward your fellow human beings, and politics becomes 
a matter of practical cooperation. And I think that's what we need to 
continue to work on. So I think the cities are very, very important in 
that regard.
    And on the Martin Luther King holiday, yesterday, I released a 
report to the Congress, the last report I will issue on race, under our 
One America initiative. And I had some very specific recommendations in 
there that I hope the next administration and the next Congress will 
embrace--this Congress now; they're already meeting. And I would urge 
you to look at that, and if you agree, I hope you will help to get it 
done.

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    Because I really believe we've got a lot more work to do in 
education, particularly in modernizing these facilities and making sure 
all these urban schools are hooked up to the Internet. I think we've got 
a lot more work to do in terms of economic empowerment of people and 
places that are left behind. And it offers an enormous opportunity for 
the cities of our Nation to have an alliance with rural areas and Native 
American communities, so that you can't be pitted one against another.
    I think there are still a lot of things that have to be done in the 
way of dealing fairly with immigrant populations coming to our country--
so that we have the capacity to have laws and enforce them so that we 
don't wind up rewarding one group of immigrants over another, and the 
people that get the shaft are those that loyally waited in line for 
their time to be able to come to the United States and do what should be 
done. But on the other hand, I don't think we can afford to be treating 
some groups of immigrants different than others under the law either.
    That's why I've supported the ``Latino Fairness Act'' in the 
Congress last time. I'm real sorry we didn't pass it. It's about the 
only thing we wanted to pass we didn't. So I hope you will help with 
that.
    I think we've got a real--we need to really give a lot more thought 
than we have to our imprisonment policies--how long people are in jail, 
what are they going to jail for, and what do they do when they get out. 
Nearly everybody that goes to jail gets out. I think it is time that we 
change, as a matter of national policy, the idea that you have to have a 
Presidential pardon or a Governor's pardon before you can get your vote 
back. I think if you pay a price, you go to jail, you get out, then 
you're on probation a while, then your sentence is discharged--why 
shouldn't you get your vote back? You think about it.
    One of the big controversies in the recent election in Florida was 
the review of people to see if they had criminal records, which disabled 
them from voting. And then you had a lot of other people agitated 
because they were apparently--maybe not intentionally, just 
accidentally--purged from the rolls, because they had the same names or 
similar names as those people who did.
    But if--look, I've been doing this for 25 years now, since I was 
attorney general in my home State. Nearly everybody that goes to prison 
gets out. And when they get out, all the rest of us want them to do 
well, go to work, pay taxes, and not commit another crime, right?
    Why should we make them go through the incredible gyration of trying 
to figure out how to get a pardon? And all the systems are different. 
And I can tell you, I'm sitting here--I've got just a few days left, and 
I'm trying to go over all these request for clemency, and it's almost 
impossible to deal with them all in a fair way, to give due concern to 
the attention of law enforcement as well as the people who are pleading 
their case. And I just don't see what that's got to do with this.
    It seems to me--we changed the law in Arkansas 24 years ago--if you 
finish your sentence, you go sign up to vote, nobody has to get a pardon 
anymore. But I dare say, most people in Arkansas don't know that, 
because in most States they haven't done it, and we haven't done it at 
the national level.
    These are just things I want you to think about, because I think the 
cities have got to continue to be the focus of building one America. And 
we've got to try to figure out how we're going to deal with the 
outstanding issues we've got.
    Let me just mention, finally, that I am very grateful for the 
environmental support I've had from the mayors and the funding that we 
got last time, for the first time in history, under this lands legacy 
initiative, to have a permanent source of funding to set aside precious 
lands. And I just want to reemphasize to all of you, it is not just to 
protect the watershed around the Grand Canyon; it may be to protect the 
little square block park in some neighborhood, where that's the only 
green space your kids will ever see.
    So I urge you, as I leave office, to make full use of this 
legislation that was passed last year to provide a permanent funding 
screen, to help you set aside green spaces in your communities. And 
understand, it is not just about the big open spaces or the big places 
or some big project, like the Everglades; it's about what's in your 
neighborhoods. We want this bill, this whole bill. The whole idea

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of this was to balance our concern for the big chunks of land and 
resources that had to be preserved, and the need to provide some 
environmental balance and access to nature to all of our kids and 
families in urban America, as well. So I urge you, when you work in this 
coming year, to make sure that your cities are a part of that 
initiative.
    Well, I've already said more than I meant to. I thank you for the 
award. I thank you for the work we've done to put this country in good 
shape. The 8 years passed in a flash, but I enjoyed it very much. And I 
particularly enjoyed working with the mayors. All of you who have 
welcomed me to your communities, I thank you for that. And I hope that 
you will do what you can to keep America on a positive track. Together 
we proved that good economics was good social policy, that you could be 
fiscally responsible and reduce poverty, that you could have an urban 
policy that actually helped the rest of the country, too. You did that. 
You should be very proud.
    But I think that the biggest rewards of our efforts of the last 8 
years are still out there. And if ever I can help any of you to do 
what's right by your people in the future, I will certainly do it. I 
thank you, and I feel better about my country knowing that you're 
staying behind to keep up the fight.
    God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 3:24 p.m. in the East Room at the White 
House. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor Brent Coles of Boise, ID, 
president, Mayor Wellington Webb of Denver, CO, past president, and J. 
Thomas Cochran, executive director, U.S. Conference of Mayors; Mayors 
Marc Morial of New Orleans, LA, and Thomas Menino of Boston, MA; and 
Alvin Brown, Senior Adviser to the Vice President for Urban Affairs. 
Prior to his remarks, the President was presented with the U.S. 
Conference of Mayors ``Distinguished Public Service Award.''