2004 State of the City Address

Pride, Progress, Potential

Thank you Councilor Cummins and principal (Timothy) Whalen. And welcome to all of you this evening for the state of the city here at my alma mater, Manzano High School. I chose this venue as a personal homecoming of sorts, and because all the priorities of this administration tie in so fundamentally with the progress of our children and youth.

It is clear, just from walking onto campus, that Manzano is still a school with a great deal of pride. Such a spirit shows itself from the upkeep and cleanliness of the campus to the way I see students conducting themselves here and in the community. And congratulations, by the way, on shutting down St. Pius 21 to 7 at homecoming last week. My daughter Martinique is a cheerleader there and she was not amused.

The city of Albuquerque is also moving forward with a positive outlook, a great deal of pride in where it is we come from and a lot of optimism about where we go from here.

Tomorrow we will open our brand new heritage farm, right behind the Botanic Garden. It will give us, as well as visitors from all over the world, a fascinating glimpse of what we were like in the year 1800 and it promises to be an exciting new amenity for Albuquerque.

Indeed, I see a rising spirit across our entire city. Our streets are getting cleaner, our graffiti and other vandalism rates are down, our beautification projects are coming along, and we have a whole host of new world class amenities, from our Biopark to Isotopes park, and from Explora to the nearly complete balloon museum.

I believe that positive outlook and hometown pride are contagious. And as much as we do to fix things up on the back end, the real key for our future rests in sparking that home-town pride in our young people.

For you parents here tonight, that means your little ones, just starting out in school. For you young people, it means showing your little brother or sister how to put trash in its place, and standing up against graffiti, gangs or anything else that would detract from your potential.

In addition to our graffiti hotline, the war on weeds and our project to rid neighborhoods of junked cars as well as other initiatives, the City Council and I have a magnificent, year-long celebration in the works to commemorate our 300th birthday, our tri-centennial. And I want to thank the city council for their cooperation and partnership.

The festivities are set to begin in April of next year, and will continue through

April of 2006. From dance to theater, and from art to pure history, we will celebrate our past and envision our destiny.

In addition to our increasing pride, this year has witnessed increasing progress in each of the areas I promised the citizens of Albuquerque I would focus on:

In the area of public safety, our crime rates continue to drop nearly across the board and show no signs of reversing the trend. In fact, our homicide rate is roughly half what it has been. That’s an amazing statistic, and one success I very much mean to build on. Our police also have a homicide case resolution rate of over 80%, well beyond the 53% average for the rest of the country.

I attribute much of our recent crime fighting success to a focus on community policing and a concerted effort to increase the size of our police force to a thousand officers and beyond.

Right now we have about 970 sworn officers. That’s an increase of 13% since I returned to office, and our next goal is to reach one thousand officers by February of next year and we are well on track.

These days, and this evening, Albuquerque is a safer city.

I also want to highlight the successes of our safe city strike force, which literally deprives criminal activity of habitat by going after deadbeat landlords and property owners. And I want to emphasize the fact that a record number of perpetrators are locked up in our jail these days, thanks to the good work of our police and our corrections officers.

We are now also much safer today from the threat of wild land Bosque fires rampaging through the heart of our city, thanks to our highly skilled and dedicated fire department and to our collaborative restoration work this last year to clear out dense foliage, obsolete jetty jacks, and to restore native vegetation.

Our work in clearing the Bosque is essentially complete. Our work in replanting is just beginning.

And we have started to make real progress in terms of taking better care of animals. I firmly believe that anyone who would mistreat an animal is likely capable of doing the same to the most vulnerable among us, so this is a bell-weather of sorts for the overall health of our community.

The rate at which adoptable pets find homes from the Albuquerque shelter is on the increase. And Albuquerque led the way in passing a Scooby’s law to protect children, pets and wildlife from highly poisonous antifreeze. We also managed to get the state municipal league and the national conference of mayors to pass resolutions of support on this straightforward, readily addressable issue. This upcoming legislative session we must demand that the state follow our lead.

And as proud as I am of our progress in decreasing our euthanasia rates, we still are scandalously inadequate. I pledge to you this evening that I will continue to work with the council and activist community to stop the senseless slaughter of adoptable pets.

This year has been one of accelerated progress on a number of key fronts, including our long-term water supply. Finally, after 40 years in the making, we are utilizing the San Juan Chama water in our city. Today, it waters some of our public spaces in the northern part of the city. And soon, it will also augment our drinking water supply, as we have finally broken ground on a treatment facility that will ultimately be the source for 70% of our future water needs.

This, in tandem with the community’s record breaking achievements in water conservation, gives our precious aquifer much needed relief and puts our city’s long-term water prospects on par with those of any other typical American city. The citizens of our community, you, your neighbors and everyone else, who has found ways to cut back on water waste, have made such an enormous difference and I couldn’t be more proud of you. We have tonight met the 30% water use reduction goal that we set 10 years ago (and we’ve done it ahead of schedule).

We of course can and will do even better. But anyone who says Albuquerque’s economic future is limited by water, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

This brings me to the third big promise of my administration, that of greater economic opportunity for ourselves and for our children.

Parents, I know you agree with me that our children shouldn’t have to leave the state to find great jobs and terrific opportunity when they graduate. The American dream should always be an option for them, right here in Albuquerque.

That’s why I support smart, planned and coordinated growth. Not only does well paced and planned growth provide jobs, the houses that are built give families just starting out a way to afford to buy their own home and to start building on their dreams and to secure their own futures.

Indeed, in a USA Today article recently, Albuquerque was highlighted as a city that had found economic traction – even during a national recession – in the area of new home construction. It seems that on a monthly basis, Albuquerque finds itself near the top of all the right lists, from productivity to cost of doing business – from creativity to quality of life.

Of course we face a question of balance that needs careful consideration. If we grow without direction, we tend to get too far out ahead of infrastructure’s capacity to keep up.

But on the other hand, if government does too much to dictate development within our borders, we really only accelerate the rate at which much less coordinated growth takes place just outside our borders.

In addition to maintaining that balance and coordinating our growth, we are also now breathing new life into well thought out and executed infill. Our uptown project, currently under construction, is our largest infill project in our history.

Our downtown revitalization has been called the quickest such turn-around in recent memory. If you haven’t visited the new restaurants and shops, or taken in a movie in the heart of our city recently, you’re really missing out.

We also have exciting new enterprises and economic initiatives in town: Eclipse, Javelin, Tempur-pedic, uptown redevelopment, and Mesa Del Sol, among others. At the same time, we have begun emerging among the leading economic and cultural contenders in national publications and studies.

The cultural tempo in our emerging amenities like downtown, the museums and our amazing zoo is another source of excitement and anticipation. Down at city hall we call this beautiful row of city treasures the String of Pearls, and the luster just keeps getting brighter.

This year, even as the Albuquerque Museum was undergoing a renovation and expansion, we broke records with showings such as the acclaimed Millet to Matisse exhibit. And as we prepare for the kickoff of our tri-centennial celebration in April, even better things are still to come.

In addition to new growth and infill, there is also a revitalization of existing neighborhoods underway. The safe city strike force I mentioned earlier is doing so much to shut down havens for criminal activity, that it is actually giving neighborhoods that have long been plagued by crime a new start. Every time we shut down a substandard unit that was harboring criminal activity, we see the prospects improve dramatically for the other 19 houses on the block.

And when we shut down and demolish a notorious saloon like the Blue Spruce, we give rise to possibilities in the community like the new International Marketplace on Central at Louisiana. This is yet another place in town where, if you haven’t checked it out, you don’t know what you’re missing.

In our neighborhood by neighborhood people to people constituent service outreach sessions we have begun bringing the departmental management of city services out to where people live. And in addition to gathering great input, it has given us a better feel for the tempo and fabric of our community. I refuse to have our municipal government hidden from the public. Rather, we will engage our residents and neighborhoods to better understand the direction and action they want.

Of course, we have not had our bumper crop of progress without our share of growing pains this year. One area where Albuquerqueans have been patient is in facing detours. For those who have been redirected by orange barrels this year, only to find that the road you were detoured onto also had work going on, I want to say two things. First, please be patient. Some work has been caused not only by road improvements but by replacement of severely antiquated water lines.

Second, the seeming whirlwind of activity won’t stay at this pace for too much longer. And when it subsides we will not only have better roads, but fewer of those water main breaks that sometimes come with extreme summer and winter weather. This is our home. We simply must invest in its maintenance.

When you combine the project to replace and modernize our water infrastructure with the fact that some road projects need to happen before state or federal funding windows close, the strain on the commute has sometimes been particularly difficult.

So I have brought together every operation that might need to re-route a road or block a lane in order to hammer out a better coordinated plan and schedule. We have also initiated a campaign to better communicate this work, so it is not a surprise to you as you work to get through a busy day.

I could go on in great detail about many other aspects of our banner year in Albuquerque, and a few of the ways in which we have been accomplishing things and making history are listed in your program. But I also want to talk tonight about our potential, and in particular your potential.

35 years ago I was a student right here at Manzano high school, with all the dreams and trepidations that come with having your whole life ahead of you and a lot of tough choices to make along the way. I want to share a couple of stories of my youth here at Manzano with the students present this evening. I recall to this day a visit with a particular counselor who will go unnamed. He told me that I was not college material and that I needed to pursue vocational education. And I want to tell each of the students here this evening, don’t ever let a grownup tell you that you cannot have your dream. But I also want to tell you a small story about Larry Taylor, the director of student activities here in 1970. You see, I was a rebel. I was organizing against dress codes, curfews and the war. I refused to join student government or otherwise participate in the traditional activities of high school life. And I will never forget Mr. Taylor stopping me one day by the cafeteria and asking if he could nominate me for Boys State. He said that he saw leadership potential and that he thought I had what it takes. I will tell you this evening that I declined the invitation -- I was far too radical for such a traditional activity. But in one moment Mr. Taylor validated me as a person, Larry Taylor has since passed away but I want to publicly honor his memory. He taught me that you didn’t have to go along to get along and that you could chart your own path in this great American society. Tonight, as back then, I am steadfastly committed to being an agent of change. And I encourage our young people to never settle for the status quo and to never stop trying to improve you’re your community.

In addition saluting Mr. Taylor, I want to emulate him a bit by tying the part of my speech about Albuquerque’s possibilities going forward to the potential of our students.

As much as I want to see us continue our progress for safer streets, better jobs and even greater strides in areas such as water conservation, the fact of the matter is that our youth are the ones who will really drive our success. You young citizens of today will fill the jobs of the new creative class economy tomorrow, some of you might join the ranks of APD or become teachers to make a real difference on the streets and schools of Albuquerque, and it is you who will fill the leadership positions, make the tough choices and chart the vision for our future in the years and decades to come. This is one reason why I make it a point to visit a school or get together with a classroom of students each week that school is in session.

Like me, you no doubt have heard the words of those who have nothing positive to say. But I also hope that, like me, there is someone in your life who believes you’ve got great potential, that you can succeed and that you will make a positive difference for our community and our world. I believe in you.

I want to add to that good word, that note of encouragement, and say to you tonight that it is better to listen to those who dare you to dream and challenge you to action.

Meanwhile, as you complete your studies or begin your college work, here are some of the things in our realm of possibilities for the nearer term.

Albuquerque is making great strides as an attractive place for industries such as aviation and movie making (both film and digital). We continue to attract Hollywood projects here even as we move toward the type of capabilities that could make us an essentially self contained movie industry town.

We also have a host of possibilities and up and coming projects in fields such as nano-technology and supercomputing.

In the area where public safety meets results oriented social services, we have recently initiated something called assertive community treatment so that even the toughest to reach and serve of the mentally ill homeless might now have a shot at getting off the streets and into a successful recovery program.

We are coupling this with a housing voucher program for the homeless that we believe will leverage our success, and we are also working toward partnerships with the state and federal governments for these innovative programs that will lead to matched funding on a one-to-one and even near three-to-one basis.

In Santa Fe this year, we will be pursuing legislation to allow us to enact a reasonable curfew ordinance. We simply need to be able to protect young people better than we can when they are out on the streets at any hour of the night. I implore you this evening, demand of your legislators our right to protect our children.

And it’s not just young people I aim to protect. . If you wait tables, your job is already hard enough without having to be exposed to toxic clouds of second hand smoke. And our healthcare system has already been strained to the brink by the long term consequences of this tragic, highly addictive habit. When we enacted a smoking ban in restaurants, there were dire projections of economic devastation. It didn’t happen. Rather, restaurants became healthier places for everyone. Tonight, the time is now to take Albuquerque’s smoking ban ordinance statewide and I will work to make that a chief priority of the city of Albuquerque.

Just yesterday, we received word that we had been selected as the host city for the 2006 international crime-stoppers convention, which will be coming to town on September 29, exactly two years from today. And it seems a fitting occasion, since we are making great strides in public safety and since the crime stopper program was born right here in Albuquerque.

In addition to great amenities and facilities, the transformation of the Bosque into a central park of sorts that both offers greater recreational activities and more closely reflects our historically natural environment is now in the works.

Nestled within the Bosque is our beautiful Biopark, another key element of our string of pearls. The light rail I envision connecting much of our town already now connects this place to our zoo and to Tingley beach, which is currently being restored.

While I intend to pursue multi-modal transportation that includes light rail connecting various parts of our city together, we have also brought in a ‘pilot’ version of light rail in the form of rapid bus.

One of our new hybrid-electric rapid buses is parked out front tonight for your review. These vehicles not only have great capacity, they will also have automated traffic signal prioritization so that they can move swiftly and conveniently from one part of town to another.

They will serve only major bus stops and there will be rapid buses along their designated routes every few minutes, making them the rough equivalent of a metro train, and a key element in our smart, planned growth strategy.

Following our recent sports and recreation summit, we are working up a master plan to add to our inventory and better utilize our array of facilities. We cannot afford any longer to under-serve the recreational needs of our families. Such a course is bad for our health and ignores the vast economic potential of Albuquerque as a destination spot for health and recreation enthusiasts.

In the area of our water future, by the year 2014, we have a goal of reducing our water use to 150 gallons per person per day. Since we have made our goals to date, and have more innovations and incentives in the works, there is no reason we should not be able meet this ambitious target.

Don’t be surprised if, in the future, we tap methane gas from our landfills to power high efficiency water desalination plants that produce clean drinking water from the aquifer to our west that is presently too salty to use.

There are many other innovations in store for our community, but at some point the torch will be passed off to your generation and it will be you who set the goals, agenda and the vision.

Meanwhile, my priorities between now and then will be to make our community an ever safer place to work and grow, to make our city one where good jobs are plentiful and the American dream is readily attainable, and where we ensure that an enhanced quality of life is viable for generations to come.

My fellow Albuquerqueans, if we take pride in our accomplishments as a city, support the progress we are making right now, and build on our future potential by supporting our young citizens, then we will be properly honoring those who have come before and we will be making great new history together for generations to come. The greatness of Albuquerque is in each of you and is bounded only by our dreams and dedication to work hard together to realize them.

Thank you again for coming tonight, and for the support you have shown me and the city council as we pursue a great vision and positive agenda for our beloved city.