KR Inaugural Address, Draft v.18, January 6, 2014mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/wabe/files/201401/Mayor...Inaugural(Address(Mayor(M.(Kasim(Reed(Page(1(Mayor&Kasim&Reed! InauguralAddress&(asprepared)&

Inaugural Address

Mayor M. Kasim Reed Page 1

Mayor Kasim Reed

Inaugural Address (as prepared)

Please check remarks against delivery.

January 6, 2014

From a City on a Hill to a Covenant of Responsibility

To my father Junius Reed and mother, Sylvia Reed. Thank you

for pouring so much of your lives into me and my brothers, so

that we could all be here together today. To my stepmother Dr.

Rogsbert Phillips Reed, and to my brothers, Charles, Carlton,

Tracy and my sister-‐in-‐law Crystal, thank you with all of my

heart.

To every resident of the City of Atlanta, thank you for, again,

putting your faith in my leadership and for giving me the

greatest privilege of my life, to serve as your Mayor -‐ I love

Atlanta and I want you to know that I never, never take you, or

your support or your vote -‐ for granted, and understand that

Inaugural Address


your trust, and your confidence is not a permanent condition,

but something that must be earned and protected every day.

To the Council President, Caesar Mitchell, members of the

Atlanta City Council – thank you for your commitment to the

public good. To newly-‐elected members Mary Norwood and

Andre Dickens – I look forward to working with you both. To

former members Aaron Watson and Lamar Willis – thank you

for your service.

To Chief Judge Herman Sloan and the members of the City of

Atlanta Municipal Court, you honor me by your presence and

your commitment to making Atlanta a more just city.

I want to personally acknowledge Mayor Massell, Mayor

Young, Mayor Campbell and Mayor Franklin for your collective

work which forms the foundation for me and all who hold this

office in the future. To the Jackson family, Mayor Jackson’s

memory is always with us.

Inaugural Address


To the members of the faith community who were so ably

represented today, to the Consular Corps, members of the civic

community, business community, particularly the Atlanta

Committee for Progress, distinguished public servants, good

friends, all Atlantans, Welcome.

To Mayors Willie Brown and Glendon Harris, thank you for

traveling such a long way to be with me.

I cannot stand here today without recognizing the members of

my team who worked tirelessly over the last four years to

deliver concrete results for you. To my senior team, to all of

my Commissioners – Thank You . . . .

Now, I want to start with a bit of good news. I want everyone

here to know that I got every text, call, and e-‐mail message

reminding me that President Lincoln’s second Inaugural

Address was only fourteen (14) minutes long. For those of you

who are advocates for brevity, message received.

Inaugural Address


Friends, four years ago we joined here together at a precarious

time for our great city. We faced numerous challenges to the

greatness of Atlanta-‐ to its financial security, to the safety of its

citizens and to the welfare of its most vulnerable. We met

amidst a financial crisis that challenged our nation and our

state in a way that had not been seen in generations. But

despite all of that it was still a moment of immense optimism –

optimism about what we could do together as a community to

meet those challenges, to overcome what divided us and to

make this city great. With that in mind, four years ago I stood

in front of you and asked you to join me on a journey, one that

we knew wasn’t going to be easy, but one we knew was

essential.

You did, and together we set out to climb the steep paths that

we knew were necessary if we were to make Atlanta that “City

on the Hill”. Once again, today I stand here with an equal sense

of excitement and enthusiasm as I begin my second term as

Mayor of our capital city.

Inaugural Address


Along that journey, we did great things together, important and

necessary things that steadied our city and made it stronger

and healthier. Together we embraced four pillars of

responsibility – the responsibility we have to address the

problems of our past, to meet the challenges of our present, to

embrace the opportunities of our future and to embrace one

another in our sacred responsibility as a community of caring

people.

First, embracing our responsibility to solve the problems of our

past, we restored fiscal stability to our city, closing a $48

million dollar budget gap in year one and growing our City’s

reserves from $7.4 million to more than $137 million, while

also undertaking a comprehensive pension reform that will

not only save the city $500 million over the next thirty (30)

years but also arrested a $1.5 billion unfunded liability that, if

left unaddressed, would have left our most vital resource, our

city’s workforce, vulnerable and insecure about their financial

futures. But unlike other places, where labor unions were

bashed and employees were vilified, we reasoned together and

Inaugural Address


found a way forward unanimously. Working with our federal

partners at the EPA we negotiated a thirteen-‐year extension of

our water and sewer consent decree, and eliminated the need

for our new water rate increases as a result. We have

improved the City’s bond rating from Standard and Poors,

Moodys, & Fitch in the general fund, water and sewer fund, and

aviation fund. We balanced the City’s budget every single year

in the worst economy in eighty years. Most recently, we

received an unqualified audit from KPMG, with no material

weaknesses in the finances of our City. Just importantly, we

accomplished all of this without raising your property taxes.

While other cities have turned away from the storm that is

being felt in underfunded pensions across America, the City of

Atlanta turned into it. And because we did what was hard and

recognized that just surviving leads to just surviving, we were

able to create savings which put our city on stable footing and

provided the seed-‐corn for critical investments which are

delivering a healthier harvest.

Inaugural Address


We immediately turned our focus to the most sacred

responsibility of any city leadership, the present safety of our

citizens. Over the past four years we reduced crime by 18

percent, hired more than 800 officers to bring the force to that

long sought-‐after goal of 2,000 and opened a video integration

center with more than 2,300 cameras to help reduce and solve

crime within our midst. But because we understand that it’s

not enough simply to be tough on crime, we also decided to be

smart on crime and identified the resources to open every

recreation center in the City of Atlanta. Turner Broadcasting

was the first company to step up and other businesses like

Coca-‐Cola and Wells Fargo have helped fund more than $5

million dollars in private philanthropy. What are the results?

Today not only do we have 33 recreation centers throughout

our City – we opened four (4) Centers of Hope in partnership

with The Boys & Girls Club of Atlanta, with six more on the

way. We now see more than 1000 young people during any

given week and teen crime has been reduced by more than

25% during the last four years.

Inaugural Address


In assuming our responsibility for the future, we let the world

know that Atlanta was open for business and together we

expanded economic opportunities for our city and our state.

The business community has responded to our stewardship by

voting with their feet, the Coca-‐Cola Company is moving its

Atlanta IT center downtown, AT&T is moving its Foundry to

the GA Tech campus, PulteGroup, one of the nation’s largest

homebuilders moved to Buckhead, Athena Health, Inc. is

moving to Ponce City Market in Midtown and Porsche Cars

North America is moving south to One Porsche Drive on the

Aerotropolis Campus. And if you are having dinner with a

friend from New York, and you are feeling a bit immodest, you

can remind them that the New York Stock Exchange was just

bought by Atlanta’s own Jeff Sprecher’s ICE. With the opening

of the Maynard H. Jackson Jr. International Terminal and the

strength of Delta Airlines, Hartsfield Jackson Airport remains

the number one passenger airport in the world. We are also

now among the top ten cargo airports in America. Working

with Arthur Blank and the Atlanta Falcons organization, we

will soon break ground on a world-‐class $1.2 billion dollar

Inaugural Address


stadium that will keep the Falcons in downtown for another

thirty years. All of these decisions mean that thousands of jobs

are coming back into the City, and we all know that the best

program for a person is a well paying job.

2014 is going to be an exciting year with the Atlanta Beltline

expanding westward with an $18 million dollar investment

from President Obama’s administration, along with the $47

million dollar grant that we previously won for the Atlanta

Streetcar. These investments will help us expand our ability to

host the 42 million guests who visited our City in 2012, the

largest number of visitors ever recorded and just 10 million

less than the City of New York, we will also see the opening of

the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in June, with

the College Football Hall of Fame opening in August.

We’ve also worked to make our City more tolerant, welcoming

and inclusive. We have come from a city four years ago whose

LGBT community was hurt and scarred by the City’s handling

Inaugural Address


of the Eagle raid to a city that just scored a perfect 100 in the

Municipal Equality Index of the Human Rights Campaign.

We are also going to be a welcoming city for immigrants and

foreign-‐born visitors. According to the latest census, Metro

Atlanta has the second-‐fastest growing foreign-‐born

population in the country, after Baltimore. Our international

community grew by almost 70% in the last decade alone. We

are going to act like it by embracing the hopes and dreams of

people all around the world. We should lead in this space

because inclusion is a part of our DNA and so many of these

individuals have talent that we need.

Finally, I agree with President Clinton’s notion that when we

choose cooperation over conflict – there is little we can’t

accomplish together. That’s why my commitment to

deepening the Port of Savannah has been unwavering. There is

no economic development effort that is more important to this

region and this state, and a bi-‐partisan approach with

Governor Deal, Senator Chambliss & Senator Isaakson has

Inaugural Address


moved this project along faster in three years, than it had

moved in the previous ten years. When we get this done, and

we will get it done, our City and our state will be well

positioned to be the dominant economy in the southeast. That

must be our goal and we will achieve it.

Let there be no doubt. I did not do these things – we did these

things together -‐ along our journey. And as a result, Atlanta is

stronger, safer and more secure than it has been for sometime.

But friends, our journey together is not yet finished, and today

I am asking you to continue on this path forward, with the

knowledge that the road ahead is different than the road

behind us and that our challenges are no less acute, and

perhaps they are even more profound. Our charge is to push

farther, climb higher, and pursue our vision of Atlanta as the

beacon of excellence we know it can be.

In pushing further, it’s clear see we are just beginning to

undertake our responsibility to the future, and that this

responsibility is, in many ways, the foundation of what we

Inaugural Address


endeavor to do together as citizens bound together in common

cause. The challenges we need to solve are no less complex

than the requirements of our past, but overcoming them is

required to achieve our success as a city and a region. People

have always believed in Atlanta as a place where anything is

possible, and our challenge is to continue to create a place

where families and innovators and entrepreneurs actually

come to make those dreams a reality.

After all of this, the central question becomes, what are we

going to do next, where does your passion lie.

While we have made some genuine progress in reducing crime,

please know that I understand we have more to do. And that’s

why we are going to double down on public safety, and

continue to make sure that our fire department remains fully

staffed with four men and women on every truck and that our

police department remains well-‐staffed and has the latest

equipment and technology. But today, I am also calling on our

county partners to their part.

Inaugural Address


Too often in the city of Atlanta, the women and men of the

Atlanta Police Department do their jobs and risk their lives as

they arrest criminals only to find that they are summarily

released. We must work together to bring an end to this

practice because the citizens of Atlanta pay the lion’s share of

the budget of Fulton County. It is not unreasonable to expect

that criminals who have been arrested and convicted 30 or 40

times should be placed in jail and remain there. To show that

it’s not about politics but about problem-‐solving, I am prepared

to begin a meaningful conversation about the use of the Atlanta

City Jail, if it means that we can remove people from our midst

who have opted out of the accepted norms of our community. I

am not talking about a young man or woman who has made a

mistake. I’m talking about someone who has been arrested and

convicted for serious crimes 20, 30, or 40 times. For that, there

is no excuse.

Inaugural Address


If we successfully partner in this effort, I believe we will

achieve our goal of reducing crime from 18 percent to 25

percent by the end of our second term.

But because I believe in the politics of the soft and hard, we

are also going to tackle the issue of incarceration and

recidivism. While I am proud of the work of our police officers,

I know that when we lock up our young men and women

without offering alternatives, we also lock up their potential.

We must say to them, “If you put the gun down, we’ll put a

book in your hands, we’ll put some work and a job in your

hands, we’ll put a paycheck in your hands. We’ll work with you

to put your future back in your hands.”

Prisoner re-‐entry is not simply a criminal justice issue nor is it

simply a racial or poverty issue -‐-‐-‐ it’s a human rights issue,

one that affects millions of individuals, families and

communities across Atlanta and the nation. It is a cycle that

contributes to the increasing unemployment, family

Inaugural Address


destabilization and a disruption of the economic and social

fabric of our city -‐-‐-‐ robbing us of ‘human capital’ that we

simply cannot afford to lose. It’s time for us to do something

about this –-‐-‐ and we are. Over the next 100 days, we are going

to take best practices from other cities and execute a plan

around this pressing issue.

Next, we still have some very large infrastructure challenges

we are compelled to address -‐-‐-‐ right away. As I stand here

right now, the city of Atlanta faces an infrastructure backlog of

more than $900 million. If we do not take this on, it will grow

to be $1.1 billion and then to $1.5 billion and soon -‐-‐-‐ as almost

occurred with our city’s pension system -‐-‐-‐ we will face a crisis

we cannot solve.

Therefore, over the next year, I am going to appoint a blue

ribbon panel, which will focus on eliminating waste within

municipal government to make our government even more

efficient and save more of your taxpayer dollars. This

commission will have full staff support and is a vital step in

Inaugural Address


preparing the city for a 2015 bond offering of $150 million to

$250 million that will not require a property tax increase on

our residents.

This bond referendum will expand our green spaces, and

improve our roads, bridges and sidewalks, and we are going to

ask the people of Atlanta for their full support. We are going to

make the most significant single investment in modern times

to improve the look, feel and experience of the city. Because we

are just getting started.

We must now also turn our attention to the human capital of

our city. Establishing Atlanta as a center of excellence in public

education must be an absolute essential focus, and as your

mayor, I want to help lead this city to a point where the phrase

“educated in Atlanta” is a statement of admiration spoken

across America. I commit to working with Atlanta School

Board and its new superintendent to make this ideal a reality.

Inaugural Address


We also need to invest in Atlanta’s growing reputation as a

technology hub. The City of Atlanta needs to retain 75 percent

of its tech graduates. I recently learned that 50 percent of

Georgia Tech grads stay in metropolitan Atlanta. These new

contributors to our workforce are disproportionately high

earners and create an ecosystem that attracts foreign and

domestic direct investment and capital into the city. If we grow

that by just 5 percent by year, we change Atlanta forever and

can compete against the leading cities of America and the

world.

But not every kid is going to go to Georgia Tech -‐-‐-‐ and that’s

okay. At the end of the day, every young person who desires a

post-‐secondary education should be able to get one -‐-‐-‐

regardless of income. And that brings me to the Kalamazoo

challenge, which is simply this: We should make it our goal that

in this decade that any child who graduates from an Atlanta

Public School with the grades to go to college should not be

denied the opportunity to go because they can’t afford it. They

do it in Kalamazoo; we ought to be able to do it in the City of

Inaugural Address


Atlanta. For those who doubt this is achievable, I would

remind them of the author who says impossible is not a fact.

It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. For

the sake of our children, we should dare, we should dare.

At this point in your tenure, you have a moment to reflect, and

people often ask you after four years what would you have

done differently. My response is an easy one, the

transportation referendum. There was an extraordinary

amount of good, honorable work done by many across party

lines. But in the shadow of that failure, eighteen elected

officials, black and white, Democrat and Republican, rural and

urban voted unanimously on a plan, and although the plan

failed, people are still sitting in traffic. I remember the night of

the referendum – every political consultant and friend I had

told me not to go down to the hotel after we loss. I went

anyway because so many people had worked so hard to move

the region forward, to move the state forward. I went because

I believe in the region. I said that night, and I will say it today,

that that campaign is not over yet. We have to get back at it

Inaugural Address


because the voters’ rejection of our approach does not absolve

us from having the responsibility, indeed the obligation to

solve a problem that represents one of the most grave threats

to all of our economic destinies. So will a future solution have

to be smaller, more modest? Perhaps so, but doing nothing

must not be the option.

We have a decision to make. Either we are going to be a region

or we are not. I believe that we must be a region. And if we

choose not to be – we are choosing to enter a period of decline,

because declining markets get declining investment and we

understand that capital goes where it is needed and stays

where it is well cared-‐for. So while I may wish the Atlanta

Braves had made a different decision, I will be at the game on

opening day rooting for the Braves and rooting for the region.

But let me be clear, the property now occupied by the Ted will

be remade in a fashion that never would have been possible

with the stadium at the center of it. Both the 55-‐acre site

which now hosts Turner Field and the 488-‐acre site at Fort

Inaugural Address


McPherson will serve as a powerful tool to insure that the city

will be able to provide affordable living options for all of our

citizens.

My advice is simple: believe in Atlanta. When we took office

four years ago, Lakewood Fairgrounds was a vacant parking

lot; now artists such as Denzel Washington are making movies

there on the motion picture campus of EUE Screen Gems, and

we now sit at the center of a growing multi-‐billion dollar

motion picture and television business. When we took office,

City Hall East was a 2 million square foot eyesore in the heart

of one of our most important corridors. Today, Jamestown

Properties is investing $200 million dollars in a new Ponce City

Market with hundreds of new jobs moving in; when we took

office, the Streets of Buckhead was two abandoned holes in the

ground of some of the most valuable real estate in the state.

Today, the construction crane, the official bird of the City of

Atlanta has returned and Dean Oliver of Oliver McMillan is

moving full steam ahead with a $500 million dollar

Inaugural Address


development there. . . . The same is going to be true of Turner

Field. Bet on Atlanta, it should be so, and it will be so.

Four years ago, you believed in me and I’ve tried not to let you

down. All we have to do is keep believing in each other, keep

leaning on each other, keep pushing each other and obstacle

after obstacle is going to fall at our collective feet and promise

will meet achievement again and again. Four years ago I asked

you to come with me on this journey. Today I stand here as a

friend who has his same shoulder to the same wheel as you,

encouraging you on. In the moments when your shoulders get

weary, remember that right on the other side of that feeling,

that’s where greatness, that’s where the City on a hill is, that’s

where we are going. . . Let’s go Atlanta. We are just getting

started.

May God’s blessings continue to be upon us.

END

Documents

KR Inaugural Address, Draft v.18, January 6, 2014mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/wabe/files/201401/Mayor...Inaugural(Address(Mayor(M.(Kasim(Reed(Page(1(Mayor&Kasim&Reed! InauguralAddress&(asprepared)&