Executive Director's Column

President Elizabeth Kautz and Her Family
As U.S.Mayor goes to press, our prayers and thoughts are with our President, Burnsville Mayor Elizabeth Kautz, and her family as David, her husband of 43 years, struggles for his life. We received word last week that his health took a turn for the worse in his battle to survive aggressive cancer that was in remission until now. I appreciate your calls and reaching out to give her support at this very sad time for her.
While she goes through this tragic experience, it has not prevented her discussing the work of the Conference and the work goes forward.
This week, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter came to Washington to represent The Conference of Mayors as our Second Vice President to advocate passage of The Local Jobs for America Act. The jobs bill that has been a priority of Conference President Elizabeth Kautz’s 2010 Metro Agenda would provide direct grants to cities with populations of more than 50,000. Smaller cities would apply through the states, very similar to the HUD CDBG block grant program.
The National League of Cities, The National Association of Counties, and the Conference of Mayors are strongly united on this legislation. Together, we released a survey of 214 cities and 56 counties, which states that they will cut full time positions over 2010 and 2011. We appreciate the collaborative efforts of NLC, NACo, and USCM staff working together. It was good to have Don Borut, NLC Executive Director and Larry Naake, NACo Executive Director, there with me as the three of us stood together for local governments throughout our nation that are facing the economic challenges in this jobless economic recovery.
The legislation would provide $75 billion over two years to save jobs through retention or hiring.
The question is, will Congress wake up and recognize the lack of jobs and the ripple of frustration the unemployment causes throughout the neighborhoods and streets of our cities and counties.
Mayor Nutter repeated his story of how Philadelphians approach him with the question and plea for a decent job. Mayor Nutter says people who are without a job do not care about the deficit. He says they just want to work.
As Congress returns from the hot summer of 2010, they will have heard and seen the anger of their constituents and it is our hope that the mood will motivate Congress to act as they face the ballot box in November.
Over this recess, as your members of Congress visit their home states and districts, it is most important that you urge them to support The Local Jobs for America Act. We need your help to move Congress to act before the November elections.
100th Anniversary of The National Urban LeagueConference Second Vice President Mayor Nutter of Philadelphia represented Mayor Kautz and the Conference as he joined with National Urban League President and CEO Marc Morial to cut the ribbon opening a most dynamic exhibition showing the 100 years of progress of this organization.
At the opening plenary session, Mayor Nutter talked about the partnership between The U.S. Conference of Mayors and the National Urban League.
Following Mayor Nutter was a Past President of the Urban League, Vernon Jordan. Vernon gave one of the best speeches I have ever heard on the state of Black America in 2010. He used as his text Charles Dickens, the best of times, and the worst of times. He cited statistics on the progress of Black America. And then he cited the figures on the present state of Black America. One statistic is that we now have more black men in prison than we have in college. It was a remarkable speech – teaching us of our history and his challenging us to the future was as good as I have heard in many years – quite a contrast to the present political atmosphere when so many don’t want to talk about racial issues while we are living with these issues every day.
Certainly the race issue has dominated the news over the past week or so. This was caused when Mrs. Shirley Sherrod of the Department of Agriculture got an email while she was driving asking her to pull over and resign or fire herself. All of this was based on a doctored video that was shown on national television depicting her presentation to a NAACP meeting. The White House, The NAACP, and The Department of Agriculture all reacted to a blogger’s doctored video. President Reagan used to say we must trust and verify. In today’s lack of true journalism in America, the word trust is not in play. You must verify, verify, verify.
With Mrs. Sherrod, all have apologized and the flap may be over. They have offered her a job and apologized. The latest is that she is suing the blogger. Good for her.
This incident, which involves a blogger creating his own facts through a doctored video, is nothing new to mayors. Long before this national incident, we have pointed out that this kind of maliciousness goes on every day in some city in America. The blogger-based recall campaign, such as the one in Akron that attempted to take out a 36 year public service veteran, Akron Mayor Don Plusquellic proved to be a losing campaign. The Akron recall campaign, full of allegations against Mayor Plusquellic from a bloggers site proved to be a losing campaign. Plusquellic prevailed winning by a resounding 74 percent vote. But Mayor Plusquellic had to live with a blogger who created his own graphic on the internet where they packed it full of inconsistent facts about Mayor Plusquellic’s travel expenses, political statements, and other allegations.
There have been other blogger-based recall efforts, more defamation, more lies, and with the internet you don’t know what’s real and what’s unreal.
We have all got to take the time to question the garbage we get about people with the bloggers over the internet. Someone said the case of Mrs. Sherrod and the Agriculture Department was a teachable moment for all of us.
It won’t be a teachable moment until we all realize you can’t believe anything the bloggers put out there until it is verified. Let’s hope this national incident helps put us on a new path of recognizing the difference between truths and lies. We have to question almost everything we see on the internet now. There’s not much true journalism left in America. We have to verify and we have to challenge those who continue to besmirch innocent people.
USCM Fall Leadership Meeting September 22 to 24President Kautz will preside over our Fall Leadership Meeting here in Washington at the St. Regis Hotel September 22 to 24. We urge Leadership Mayors and others to join us. There are issues before Congress and our continuing work with The Obama Administration on a number of issues.
Register now. Contact Carol Edwards at 202-861-6747 or cedwards@usmayors.org.
Have a good summer and let’s hope the heat, which is scorching the nation will soon be gone. One year it was real hot. I called Mayor Joe Riley down in Charleston and asked him how hot it was down there. He said, “Tom, it’s too hot to even read down here!” Stay cool and I hope to see many of you in September here in Washington.

Executive Director's Column

The summer of 2010 continues here in Washington with the BP oil gusher dominating the news. But there is the announcement today that the nation’s deficit is at one trillion dollars. President Obama’s Deficit Commission Chairs, Former Senator Alan Simpson and former Clinton aide Erskine Bowles, carried the concern about the deficit to the Governors’ Annual Meeting this past week in Boston.
Deficit talk is something we have heard before and when we have heard it in the past, it sometimes means that there will be proposals to cut domestic spending. We must be ready to defend out current priority programs such as CDBG if the budget cutters start a move to cut our programs.
This atmosphere will require mayors to focus and develop a political strategy to protect CDBG and other key domestic programs from deficit hawks that are already starting to circle above us.
At our Leadership Meeting in September here in Washington, President Kautz will discuss this challenge and together our leadership team will adopt and implement a strategy to protect our federal funding that is needed more than ever during this economic downturn.
National HIV/AIDS StrategyThis week, the Administration announced its own National HIV/AIDS Strategy. It was 30 years ago when the AIDS epidemic hit America and it was the mayors who stood up to educate and do their best to change human behavior by discussing the need for safe sex practices. No one wanted to discuss the issue back then. There was great fear. It was a defining moment of The U.S. Conference of Mayors as we led the way to provide awareness and understanding. Everyone then thought that the AIDS issue only affected our cities but the fact was that when rural and suburban residents got AIDS they came to our cities to be treated. The movie star Rock Hudson’s death was key to President Reagan being aware of this epidemic. Reagan’s Surgeon General C. Everett Coop worked with our mayors and urged them to be vocal and to support sex education for children at the age of nine.
In 1988 at our Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City, we had the AIDS quilt displayed and a person dying of AIDS came and addressed the mayors.
In the 2003, I, along with our USCM President Hempstead Mayor James Garner, led a delegation of mayors to South Africa, Namibia, Swaziland, and Uganda to share best practices with African mayors. It was a four-nation tour with four teams of American mayors hitting each of the nations.
This week’s announcement from the Administration encourages statewide HIV/AIDS plans. From the announcement and what I watched on C'span, I do hope mayors and their health officers will be involved. We can help the Administration with this effort. We have a history and it is a fact this issue is, and continues to be, a priority for cities. We applaud the announcement this week and want to know about how we can help the Administration develop their state plans to ensure that cities, both large and small, are included in the development of this new national plan.
USCM Leadership Meeting, September 22-24, Washington, D.C.President Kautz, Vice President Villaraigosa, and 2nd Vice President Nutter all need our leadership mayors to be with us here in DC, September 22-24.
Mid-term elections will be before us, budget cutters will be in front of us and a consensus on transportation and immigration policy and the fate of our energy block grants will require your renewed focus and new political energy to help our President as she leads us forward.
Please arrange your schedule to be with us September 22 to 24. You are needed here now more than ever. Together we can make a difference for our cities and the people all of you serve.