Executive Director's Column

Forty years ago on April 22, 1970, we witnessed the largest human public demonstration in the history of America when 20 million people stood up on Earth Day and created a grassroots political movement that changed, at that time, the way federal political and governmental system views and treats our nation’s environment.
Some say this movement was sparked even earlier by a shy Pennsylvania woman scientist, Rachel Carson, who wrote her book Silent Spring. There was controversy when she raised serious questions about the destructive and biological harm caused by the way chemicals were used on our farmland and in our high density populated cities. Her book caused an uproar. The industries came out strong attempting to discredit her. At a White House press conference when asked his thoughts on Carson and her book, President Kennedy supported her. She testified before Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee and the 1963 Kennedy report largely backed up and supported Carson’s claims. Due to her writings and her advocacy, the current national policy of handling pesticides was reversed. The spark was lit and the environment was strengthened as we moved to the 1970s after her death in 1964. She has to be given notice and credit before we get to Earth Day 1970. And President Kennedy too. He believed in science and he knew she was right and he, along with his Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, one of the greatest environmentalists of our political history, stood together in those historical days.
Earth Day 1970Forty years ago, after the grass roots movements of civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War, there emerged the environmental movement and we saw a young student leader and environmental activist named Denis Hayes join up with a Senator from Wisconsin, Gaylord Nelson. It was Hayes who had the vision to place the environmental issue into the body politic. And it was Nelson who had thoughts of how to implement the vision with teach-ins in all our schools. Senator Nelson reached out to Republican Environmentalist Congressman Pete McCloskey of California and they co-chaired this great event.
Three million American citizens turned out for Earth Day 1970 and it was a shocker to the political world. In New York City, Mayor John Lindsay closed Fifth Avenue. He along with mayors and I, shoulder to shoulder, with thousands marched down Fifth Avenue. It was a great experience. Mayor Lindsay was chair of our Legislative Action Committee. Part of our urban and national agenda was to push for passage of air and water anti-pollution environmental laws that we lobbied along with other national, state and local groups, to push them through Congress and to President Nixon’s desk for signature and enactment.
Earth Day 1970 was a serious political event. It wasn’t just placards, t'shirts, chants, and screams. It was a political movement. Washington felt the pressure and rose to the occasion. There was not inertia as it is today. In a strong bi-partisan manner, Washington acted.
After the demonstrations were over, the movement turned toward elective politics. The movement, led by Hayes, came up with a list of the most anti-environmental members of the House and the dubbed twelve Congressmen as “The Dirty Dozen.” Grassroots efforts were strong against the Dirty Dozen. Seven of the twelve Congressmen were defeated, including a powerful chairman. When Congress returned that year, Speaker Albert and Congressional leaders knew that Earth Day ‘70 had been transformed into a more political machine geared toward elective and legislative politics. Senator Ed Muskie championed the Clean Water Act. The Environmental Protection Agency was created. Federal laws were passed right and left and Nixon signed them all. Many people still do not accept how President Nixon supported and signed such historic environmental laws during his first term before Watergate hit him.
President Carter’s environmental record is probably as strong as any other President since Teddy Roosevelt. Many political observers feel President Carter’s style and the way he asked people to give up something, to deprive themselves in order to save the planet did not motivate enough. Americans wanted alternatives. They didn’t want to sacrifice. Inflation was high, gas lines were long, American hostages were locked up and blindfolded in Iran. The body politic was in a bad mood. But Carter persevered he gave the nation his MEOW speech, moral equivalent of war, for energy and environment.
He put solar panels on the White House and turned off the night lights at the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials to conserve energy. President Reagan came in, turned the night lights on, removed the solar panels and thus opulence was in.
Through the years we find President Clinton and Vice President Gore doing more for the environment after they left office.
Today it could be better. The Cap and Trade Legislation is dead in the water and an alternative energy bill is being introduced by Senators Kerry of Massachusetts, Lieberman of Connecticut and Graham of South Carolina. The details will evolve and change in order to get enough Senate votes.
The big meeting in Copenhagen last December was a bust for national governments.
The fact is that the cities of America are leading the nation on the whole question of climate protection. We have 1036 cities signed on to the United States Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. And in other nations, mayors are leading their nations. Conference President Elizabeth Kautz took our message to Brussels and Stockholm last fall. European mayors have joined with USA mayors, and are pushing their central governments to be more active on climate issues.
We fought hard to get the energy block grants into the stimulus package passed by Congress and signed by President Obama last year. The stimulus money is just now hitting our cities and mayors will continue to lead the way. These funds that we fought so hard to get will be seed money mayors and cities need as we continue to leverage, create jobs, and make a difference throughout America.
Recently Conference President Burnsville Mayor Elizabeth Kautz led a group to meet with Energy Secretary Chu and we believe this is a new beginning with the mayors of America working with the Energy Department as we did when HUD was created with our big push in 1965. Our goal is to work with The Energy Department. We seek a partnership with our federal government and President Kautz is leading the way. We have optimism and hope as we follow up with DOE to strengthen our partnership.
Today, in Washington while there is inertia in some places and confusion in other places, mayors and cities are leading the way using every tool that we have to get things done.
Every day I hear and see of another mayor out there with a new idea backed up by actions. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a mayor that makes the founders of earth day proud.
Currently Mayor Bloomberg is trying to reduce the carbon footprint of his city by turning the 13,237 yellow taxi cabs “green” with a rule requiring taxi cab owners to buy hybrid or other fuel efficient cars whenever they retire their current vehicles. The current taxi fleet is responsible for 580,000 metric tons of carbon emissions – the same amount as an entire town of 30,000 people according to Mayor Bloomberg. The rule would save 34 million of gallons of gasoline a year, reduce New York City’s carbon footprint, and our dependence on foreign oil. A federal judge struck down the rule finding that the federal laws cited prohibits cities and states from setting their own fuel efficiency standards. Mayor Bloomberg wrote in the Washington Post, “Only in Washington could a Clean Air Act prevent efforts to create clean air!” He goes further and says, “The Federal impulse to standardize must be balanced by the local need to customize.” Mayor Bloomberg says that since taxis are regulated locally, cities should have the authority to set emission standards for them.
Mayor Bloomberg is urging mayors and local governments to support the Green Taxis Act, supported by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Representative Jerrod Nadler
Today the nation’s mayors, The United States Conference of Mayors, support Mayor Bloomberg on this legislation. It would allow local governments to take a local step that would give us the opportunity to make sound decisions for our cities and expand the market of hybrid and fuel efficient vehicles.
Mayor Bloomberg and New York City’s green taxi initiative is another example of a smart climate change policy that pushes a smart economic policy.
Yes, cities are leading the nation on these efforts and Congress must support us and not stop us from doing the smart thing when it comes to climate change as we go forward.
Earth Day 1970 to Earth Day 2010 - it’s not the same political atmosphere for national action but there’s one thing for sure, cities have not stopped leading the way for smarter transportation, housing, energy, and health policies that affect our planet and our people. Together we will continue to push the federal government for a national consensus in Washington that will produce smarter climate centered, job producing measures and incentives. Meantime, we follow Mayor Bloomberg’s lead. We’ll do it one step at a time. Mayors are not waiting for Washington to act. The taxi cab issue, the fleet issue, not exactly global, but with thousands of green fleets - it will be worth it until there is a consensus like we had following the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970 - forty years ago. We have made progress since then. We must find the consensus today we had back then, and if any group is leading the way toward a consensus, it’s the mayors like Bloomberg and others who are out there every day finding consensus and getting it done on the streets and in the neighborhoods of the cities of America.

Executive Director's Column

April 16

Washington, DC

Poland

The plane crash in Smolensk, Russia killing President Lech and First Lady Maria Kaczynski is sad and unbelievable. The political, military, parliamentary, financial, and academic leaders are all gone. My immediate thought on April 10th was to call Ambassador Ashe, our past President and former Knoxville Mayor. He said it would be in this country as if Air Force One, loaded with our leadership, crashed and killed them all. He is right.

Poland’s loss today devastates the Polish people because the place of the plane crash where the national elite died, Smolensk, Russia, is less than twenty miles from the Katyn Woods where starting on April 4, 1940, 22,000 of the Polish national elite were killed seventy years ago. These were not only soldiers. Doctors, clergy, professors, business leaders, the national elite leadership were shot individually by Russian secret police with a bullet in the back of the head. Thousands were shot on the edges of open pits and fell dead on top of their comrades.

Once again, the national elite leadership of the Polish people are taken away - instantly. The young and the old grieve together, but the old grieve deeper because their dynamic and precious leaders have been killed, twice now in the same place, only twelve miles apart in the month of April.

The other person who perished was Anna Walentynowicz. She was the “Rosa Parks” of the rebellion at the Gdansk shipyard in August of 1980. She was a crane operator, and when she wasn’t operating the crane she was handing out unofficial union newspapers. Her firing was the defining moment that jolted the workers to strike and lead the way to the legalization of Solidarity, the first trade union in the communist bloc. At the same time, Lech Kaczynski was a law student and advisor to Solidarity. When the communists cracked down with the martial law, both Ms. Walentynowicz and Mr. Kaczynski were jailed without a trial. Afterwards, throughout the 80’s the two of them worked with thousands in underground resistance. In the new Democratic Poland Kaczynski would go on to become President and she was an outside critic.

Marjorie Castle, author of Triggering Communist Collapse, writes beautifully about how these two national figures boarded a small plane to perish together just a few miles from where others of national stature in life died seventy years ago. Castle writes “the irony can not be understated” and she goes further to point out that the lesser well-known names in the passenger manifest includes relatives and descendants of the Polish leaders who died seventy years earlier. These individuals spent decades working to reveal the nature of those deaths, which was methodical execution by Russian security police and not by the Nazis.

The methodical killing of 22,000 in April of 1940 and the plane crash with the national leaders in April of 2010, in the same place, only twelve miles apart, has caused former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski to call Smolensk and its environs ”a cursed place.” And Castle writes, “Smolensk will be a curse word for generations of Poles, yet unborn.”

Our Connection

The U.S Conference of Mayors has a long friendship with the Polish people and with Polish local and national leaders. I was invited in 1989 to witness the first municipal elections since the 1930s. Thousands of local officials were elected. It was indeed a celebration of democracy. The Solidarity leader who became President of the new Poland, Lech Walesa, came to Washington after he was elected and Guy Smith and I met with him at the National Press Club.

In October of 1990 with our government’s support, the Conference organized a delegation of mayors led by Conference President York Mayor Bill Althaus to conduct Mayors Leadership institutes in three cities Warsaw, Krakow, and Rzeszow. The conference fielded three additional delegations in 2004, 2006, and in 2007 and we held our first ever …outside the USA… International Mayors Institute on City Design.

We are so proud of the distinguished service of former Conference President and former Knoxville Mayor Victor Ashe, our former Polish Ambassador who led and accompanied our 2007 mayoral mission to the Presidential Palace to spend time with the late President Kaczynski, who was the mayor of Warsaw before he was President. Mayors present will remember much of the enjoyable dialogue with him was about his being a mayor and it was so good to hear a President who understood the role of a mayor because he had lived it.

Polish allies, and observers, students and historians all know how strong the people of Poland are. They have survival in their DNA. They will grieve and have pain. They have an abiding faith that runs deep and it centers them. They have been persecuted, killed, destroyed, and almost annihilated throughout ancient and modern history. But they will survive and be even stronger. May God bless Poland during this most painful period as He gives them strength to be even stronger, remembering their great leaders and determined people. And soon - just as sure as the sun comes up tomorrow morning, they will wipe away their tears and march on. Then the heroic saga of Poland and her people, rich in history, with its ups and downs, goes on to fill the pages of the future.

Statement on The National Mourning of Poland and the Loss of President Lech Kaczynski, First Lady Maria Kaczynski, and National Leaders of Poland

Washington, D.C. -- On behalf of nation’s mayors and The United States Conference of Mayors, CEO and Executive Director Tom Cochran offers heartfelt condolences to the Polish people and its leaders upon the tragic loss of President Lech Kaczynski.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors has a long friendship with the Polish people and with Polish local, regional, and national leaders. The more than ten million Americans of Polish ancestry living in the United States have contributed greatly to American cities and to our nation.

As an organization, the Conference of Mayors has had a cherished friendship with Poland over many years and especially since 1989. Conference CEO and Executive Director Tom Cochran was invited to Poland as an election observer in June 1989, and gladly contributed to oversight of that important election, the first democratic election in Poland since the 1930's.

In October 1990, with U.S. government support, the Conference of Mayors organized a delegation of mayors to conduct Mayors Leadership Institutes with newly-elected Polish mayors in Warsaw, Krakow, and Rzeszow. The Conference fielded three additional delegations to Poland -- in 2004, 2006, and in 2007. In 2007, the Conference held its historic first-ever – outside the United States -- International Mayors Institute on City Design, bringing together U.S. and Polish mayors to share best practices on design and to learn from each other.

The Conference of Mayors is proud of the distinguished service of Former Conference President and Mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee, Ambassador Victor Ashe, who was sworn in as Ambassador to Poland in June 2004 and served until February 2009. During the Conference of Mayors' 2007 Mayoral Mission to Poland, Ambassador Ashe accompanied the delegation to the Presidential Palace to meet with President Lech Kaczynski.

During that meeting, the U.S. Conference of Mayors delegation had a productive exchange with the President. His strong intellect and convictions, strength of character, and fierce patriotism were, as always, evident. The U.S. mayors also shared observations with the President about his having been a mayor himself, enjoying the President's remarks about his tenure as mayor of Warsaw, elected in 2002 and serving until 2005.

Poland is a country that produces giants of science, literature, music, politics, economics, and all other areas-- Jozef Konrad Korzenlowski (Joseph Conrad), Ignacy Paderewski, Maria Sklodowska (Madame Curie), Fryderyk Chopin. Adam Micklewicz, Zbigniew Brzeziinski, Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), and countless others.

Lech Kaczynski, teacher, thinker, scholar, visionary, organizer, public servant, patriot, Mayor of Warsaw, and President of Poland, will be always respected remembered, and revered for his unflinching and dedicated service to his people, to his city, and to his country.

The United States Conference of Mayors joins with Poland and the world in mourning the tragic loss of the national military, political, and economic leaders of Poland, of Maria Kaczynski, the First Lady of Poland, and of President Lech Kaczynski.

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Released to American and International Press, Mayor Ryszard Grobelny, Mayor of Poznan, Poland and President, Polish Cities Association and Warsaw Mayor Hanna Growkiewicz-Waltz

Executive Director's Column

April 2, 2010

Washington (DC)

Tenacity, Strength, Courage – Leadership

“We will go through the gate. If the gate is closed, we will go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we will pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we will parachute in.”

Who said this? General George Patton in World War II? Field Marshall Montgomery, leading the British Forces? General DeGaulle leading the French resistance to recover France from the Nazis?

None of the above.

The quote is from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The last sentence of the quote reads, “But we are going to get health care reform passed.”

She never gave up. Her healthcare legislation had passed the House on November 7. The Senate passed it on December 24 after a month of debate.

On January 19, the Washington political world was turned upside down with the election of Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts to replace Senator Ted Kennedy, thus denying Democrats the 60 votes needed for a supermajority.

Washington seemed stymied on the healthcare bill after Scott Brown was elected. Press reports and political observers also indicated thatthere was wavering on the health care legislation from some in the White House and Congress.

But Speaker Pelosi never wavered. It seems that after the going got tough, she was the toughest. The daughter and sister of both Mayor D’Alesandros, Tommy Jr. and Tommy III, then made the “we will go through the gate” statement.

And while it is true that President Obama hit the road and called and met with over 60 members, and he deserves credit, it is Speaker Pelosi who stood at that critical moment and gave the leadership what they needed to go forward to victory.

Time and time again, she has stood with our mayors and our cities. She has been with us on key urban programs from day one. And working with Trenton Mayor Doug Palmer in 2007, she supported and pushed our energy block grants. She said at our Winter Meeting she supports multi-year funding for our energy block grants.

We need more leaders like her. If you have the votes, and she can count, she is willing to go for it one way or the other. She wants to get things done.The mayors once again thank her for her leadership and we know we can count on her during one of the most turbulent periods in our history.

Words of Hate

During the House vote, while some were celebrating, others, including me, were disturbed, and I still am as the rhetoric of hate continues from both the right and left and even from some moderates. Civil debate is whatmakes America the open democratic country it is. But we have to be careful in the power that many elected people have with one fringe group or another because the “nutwings” are out there. There are too many guns in this country just out there, unaccounted for, and in the hands of those who might snap and start shooting at people and we could have more bloodshed.

Since 1963, and the mood of Dallas at that time, forewarned by attacks on Adlai Stevenson, my mind went back there as I watched TV covering the verbal abuses hurled at Congressman John Lewis and the spitting upon Congressman Cleaver, the former Mayor of Kansas City.

Two things that we have now that we didn’t have in years past, more guns in the hands of criminals, mentally ill, and youth. Plus we have 24/7 television that repeats, and repeats, and repeats which drives some people to do strange, mysterious and deadly things. It’s scary. It’s not a dream. Violence in America is not a bad dream. You don’t wake up when it’s over and it’s gone. You wish you could but you can’t. Violence, guns, and yes – hate, still exist in America. We must talk about it. We must discuss it with our children and our grandchildren. And we must hold our elected officials up to condemn and take action. It’s not to be tolerated, or laughed at, or excused.

What we need is a Summit on Civility and Tolerance. What a great country! What a weak country if we let one small group or any elected individual or any other leader to endorse lawless violence against another citizen in this nation. While we are going through whatever we are going through right now with the tea party, the coffee party or any other party of any other liquid we drink, kool-aid, coca-cola, lemonade, beer, vodka, black jack, bottled or even tap water... let’s all condemn violence and threatening language and just hope that the country cools down and nobody gets killed.