2/22/2000 Media Contact: Steve Campbell,  317-327-NEWS Jo Lynn Garing,  317-327-NEWS

2000 State of the City Address

Fighting crime

"Public safety" is a simple term with a world of deep meaning. It is protection from guns and drugs and random acts of violence. It is freedom to walk outdoors in your neighborhood without feeling afraid. It is confidence that allows you to invest in a home, a block, a neighborhood, a city.
   
In seven weeks, I have spent a lot of time with police officers and community groups. At one meeting, I listened to residents describe the gunfire that riddled their streets on New Year's Eve - an improvement, they said, over years past - because this time, at least, there were breaks in the noise. Well that just isn't good enough.

 Community policing

It is time we made community policing really work in Indianapolis. We must make sure our police officers are involved with our neighborhoods, working closely with the citizens they serve. Our people need to know who their police officers are, and our police officers need to view solving neighborhood problems as part of the job description. Some of the groundwork for this has already been laid - we have neighborhoods and we have police officers who want to make community policing work. We just need to put them together.
  
Public safety means much more than just arrest statistics. That's one reason Public Safety Director Robert Turner and I chose Jerry Barker as our new police chief. A Vietnam veteran and Purple Heart recipient with over 30 years in IPD, Chief Barker has spent the past five-and-a-half years as the Deputy Chief for the West District. There, he perfected his approach of putting the interests of the neighborhoods first. In fact, Westsiders appreciate him so much, they told me when I was campaigning, "whatever you do, don't take Jerry Barker away from us." Well, we're not taking him away from the Westside; we're simply sharing him and his philosophy with the rest of our city.
   
With the leadership of an experienced and successful police veteran as our Public Safety Director, a police chief with a record of achievement in crime fighting and crime prevention, and a new fire chief, Louis Dezelan, who will bring his professionalism and experience to a department that has been performing very well, public safety for the people of Indianapolis has never been in better hands. And that’s a good thing, because in many ways the challenges have never been greater.

 Crack and Methamphetamine

Part of the goal of community policing must be to cut off crime at the roots. We will fight the existing illegal drug trade and respond to the methamphetamine threat before it becomes a full-blown crisis.
  
General Barry McCaffrey, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, has called methamphetamine - or "meth" - "the worst drug to ever hit America." Think about that - worse than heroin, worse than cocaine, worse, even, than crack. And meth is a relatively easy drug to make. We need extra training for our officers about meth so they can recognize the signs of its manufacture and use. And I will continue to be an advocate in the state legislature this session for tougher laws regulating the possession of the precursor chemicals used to make meth. The tragedy of crack cocaine cannot-- and will not-- be repeated in this city. I simply won't stand for it.

In our quest to fight violence on the streets, we cannot forget that for some of our citizens, violence begins at home. That is why we must give our full support to the new domestic violence unit in our police department, which will be housed with the Julian Center on North Meridian Street. But government alone cannot stop domestic violence. The larger community must help too. That's why I am committed to drawing attention to this issue - to encourage our religious institutions, our employers, and our community centers to provide information and education about domestic violence, stalking, and other related crimes.
   
A couple weeks ago, I visited the Salvation Army's Ruth Lilly Social Service Center. The Center provides beds and other resources for homeless and abused women and their children. Like the Julian Center, the Salvation Army’s social service center is working hard to break the cycle of abuse for the women and children who must go there. It's giving victims the job training and the life skills they need to escape abusive situations for good, and it's teaching their children about peace-making skills. But I also learned that - despite its recent renovation - the social service center still lacks sufficient room for all the women and children who need its services. To be the city we want to be, we must reach out and help victims of domestic violence learn to thrive. We need more shelter space and more life skills programs for domestic violence victims. And we need early intervention to try to steer first-time abusers away from a path that so often leads to shattered families and even violent death. I am committed to working with our dedicated social services community to help make that happen.

 Violent video games

 Not every child experiences a home filled with violence, but in this day and age every American child grows up in a culture of violence. Movies, prime time television, song lyrics and video games give our children a de-sensitizing overdose of uncivilized behavior. Shortly, I will be asking the city-county council to consider an ordinance prohibiting violent video games from property the city controls and restricting underage children’s access to the most violent video games in arcades unless they are accompanied by a parent or guardian. It’s a small step toward re-claiming parental control over the kinds of virtual horrors that influence so many of our kids today. But it’s a step that we are taking, together, as a community.

 The police and firefighter pension problem

Some have questioned my call to add 200 police officers to the IPD force. They point to 1999 and say that crime is down in all categories. They note that it is not cheap to increase the size of the force by 20%. Both these things are true. But think about what we have discussed tonight.
  
Ask Chief Barker-- real neighborhood-focused policing takes more personnel. People in our neighborhoods don’t hold rallies to cheer their police officers and hug them at community events if their only experience with the police is being pulled over for a burned out tail light! We need a more visible and engaged police presence in the neighborhoods; we need officers at schools and community gatherings; we need patrols on foot and on bicycles and in patrol cars; we need officers to investigate crime - and we need officers to pull over the people with burned out tail lights. This cannot be done with a force that is no bigger today than it was in 1970!
   
We must meet the looming methamphetamine crisis head on. We knew crack cocaine was coming in the early 1990s, but we didn’t gear up. We persisted in our traditional view that Indianapolis was a safe city. The result: While murder totals dropped in virtually every major city in the 90s, we set homicide records in four of the five years before 1999.
    
Domestic violence is a unique kind of crime. I called last year for at least ten of my 200 new officers to be assigned to a domestic violence unit. To the credit of Mayor Goldsmith and Chief Zunk, they later created the unit with even more officers than I proposed. And Prosecutor Scott Newman added a prosecutor from his staff to the Julian Center location. These officers came from somewhere! That means we must add officers to IPD just to stay even in every other area.
   
Adding these officers will cost money, but we can do it if we have our priorities straight. Unfortunately, it has become clear that we have a gaping hole in our police and fire budgets for the year 2001 and beyond due to a shortfall in our anticipated property tax revenues for police and firefighter pensions.
   
As many of you know, our review of the city's financial situation this January revealed that by 2001 these pension funds face a $10 million shortfall. If unaddressed, this shortfall will grow to $22 million by the end of 2002. The city already sets aside money to cover the pensions of public safety officers who joined the force after 1977, so the shortfall won't go on forever. But for the next several decades, we will have this problem on our hands.
    
So how did this problem start? Well, since about 1992, the city stopped adding money to a special fund used to cover the pension shortfall. At the same time, the number of pre-1977 retirees began to increase. After the previous administration’s use of $8 million from the special fund to balance the budget for the year 2000, the special fund is entirely depleted.
  
Let me allay, here and now, any fears that those entitled to these pensions may have: There is NO CHANCE that the city will default on these payments. That is simply not an option. Our men and women in uniform risk their lives every day for our safety, and their pensions will never be in jeopardy - at least as long as I am mayor of our city!
  
Unfortunately, the part of the city budget that goes to cover police and firefighter pensions is the same part of the budget that pays for ongoing police and fire operations, including additional resources needed for public safety. We will meet our pension obligations, and we will also find a way to pay for the additional public safety resources we need. And it is important to do both without raising taxes. Raising taxes may sound like an easy answer, but if we want to avoid the urban death spiral that so many other American cities have experienced, we cannot give individuals and businesses an incentive to leave our city.
  
Needless to say, it’s going to take creativity and sacrifice to get this done. When I worked for Governor Bayh in the early 1990s, I found the issue of the state providing local police and fire pension relief an incomparably dull subject. Today, I find it more fascinating than a best-selling novel. I think about it more than my next vacation. If I find someone willing to engage in a long conversation about it, I’m apt to forget to eat dinner or to go home to sleep. I love Indiana state government more than I ever knew.
   
State assistance is certainly the most vitally important component of a solution to our financial challenges in public safety, but we will also seek out federal grants and other sources of outside funding. We must be true to the retired men and women who served us yesterday and also be true to the neighborhoods we serve today.

Now, we owe another obligation - an obligation to our young people. They deserve nothing less than excellence from our system of public education. The schools of Marion County face many difficulties. We have all heard about this year's ISTEP scores and the number of students in Marion County who may not graduate this year. But the graduation qualifying exam is challenging our schools in a way they have never been challenged before. And it is challenging us as a state and a city to face up to whether we adequately support our schools.
  
Do they deserve our support? Let me tell you about some of what I've seen in our schools and in our community in the past seven weeks.
  
First of all, I am convinced there is a thirst in our community when it comes to public education. A thirst for positive messages, even as a deluge of negativity - of bad press - engulfs our schools. Certainly we can always find things to criticize, and I am an advocate for fundamental school reforms such as passage by the General Assembly of charter schools legislation, but I am here to tell you that there are many positive things going on in our public schools.
  
I visited IPS School 14 in my first week in office to read a story to a class of second graders. While I was there, I spoke about the challenges School 14 faces. It has a turnover rate of nearly 100%. That means that a teacher looking at his class in June will see a different group of students than he saw in August at the start of the year. Not everyone leaves; but many children move schools two or three or more times during the school year. Imagine the challenge that presents for the teachers, the administrators, the parents, and most of all the kids. And yet this school has seen a dramatic rise in reading test scores recently because of an intensive reading program designed especially for urban schools.
   
All over Marion County we find students, teachers and administrators committed to achievement. While we need to bring to the table our best minds and our most creative problem solvers to help improve our schools, we also need to focus on the successes that are occurring every day. Because it is by emulating these success stories - not by dwelling on failure - that we can make lasting improvements to our school systems as a whole.
   
That's why I visited Northwest High School after the recent test results came out. Actually, I went there for three reasons. Two of those reasons were two Northwest seniors, neither of whom had passed the graduation qualifying exam on their previous attempts. But with the intensive help of family members and some very special teachers, both of those students passed the exam this fall. Both will graduate this spring . . . with a diploma that means something! I honored them for their accomplishments, but also to convince others never to give up, never to accept that you can’t do it, never to stop fighting.
  
I mentioned that I honored three students at Northwest. The third student was an underclassman, who received a perfect score on the math section of the graduation test - on his first try!
   
There are important lessons in these success stories. First, let’s not "write off" the students who have not yet passed the graduation qualifying exam. Their schools haven't written them off, and neither should we. Second, sometimes it takes more to succeed than just the student attending the regular class schedule. It takes a father who goes to the library and checks out books and studies every night with his daughter. It takes a mother who says, "The television stays off until I see that your homework is complete." It takes a teacher who helps a student with low self-esteem learn to believe in himself. It takes a principal who knows her students, who praises them, and calls them by name.
   
And it takes employers who understand the importance of parental involvement in a child’s education. That is why I have requested that the Department of Administration of the City of Indianapolis design and implement a flex-time policy for city employees - all city employees - who want to volunteer in their children’s schools, attend field trips with their children, or attend parent/teacher conferences. One day each semester, city employees will be able to spend time at their children’s schools during regular working hours, provided they make the time up earlier or later.
  
Now, in spite of much controversy, we have chosen to use standardized tests as a means of assessing a child’s progress in learning the basics. But test success alone don't produce good people prepared to take their rightful place in a civilized society. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, "We must remember that education is not enough. Intelligence plus character-- that is the true goal of education."
   
Unfortunately, some recent studies show that "character" in our schools is sorely lacking. That cheating and stealing are on the rise. The school shootings of recent years tend to confirm a grim picture.
   
I firmly believe that character education begins at home. But we cannot forget about character when we enter the classroom. Teachers can't teach and children can't learn when values stay outside the schoolhouse door. Schools need to reinforce the time-honored principles of honesty, respect, responsibility, caring, courage and self-discipline.
  
Character education works. A survey of Maryland schools found major improvements in discipline and attendance in schools that introduced character education programs. I support character education in the classroom, and I am committed to seeking out and praising examples of programs that teach good character. To that end, I've already instituted my Character Counts medal to recognize schools, students, teachers, administrators and programs that exemplify these values.
   
Let me tell you a bit about my first honoree, Lawrence Township's Brook Park Elementary School. As part of Lawrence Township's "Caring about Character" initiative, Brook Park has incorporated character education into all aspects of students' education. Each day, students recite the school's Character Pledge, as well as a life skill message that a student writes and presents. Through service projects, "community circles," and other special events, Brook Park teaches students to respect each other and themselves. It's hard to believe these values won't affect how the students conduct themselves outside the classroom as well.
   
Last week I gave my second Character Counts medal to Wayne Township’s mentoring program that pairs exemplary Ben Davis High School seniors with students from Maplewood Elementary School. At the presentation, high schoolers and fifth-graders spoke about what the program meant to them. I was gratified to learn that the high schoolers not only enjoyed being mentors, but they felt they had learned important life lessons from the younger students as well. As an American writer once said, "We cannot hold a torch to light another's path without brightening our own."
  
Creating a positive environment for public education, encouraging character education. It's simple really - we identify success, shine a spotlight on it, and encourage our schools to create more of it. And we work in partnership with our schools to achieve common objectives for our children. We create a positive atmosphere in which real educational growth can occur in our garden of concern.

A city devoted to its neighborhoods

The place where our concerns about public safety and about education move from the general to the personal is in our neighborhoods. From the streets you drive to work in the morning to the street lamps lighting your way home at night, neighborhood conditions affect all of us in the most basic and important ways. That's why I am committed to attending neighborhood meetings and hearing your concerns. It's why I've appointed a Deputy Mayor and an Assistant Deputy Mayor, both of whom will be devoted full-time to addressing neighborhood needs. It is also why the new Director of the Department of Metropolitan Development will be revamping the Mayor's Action Center, making sure it works as efficiently and effectively as possible.
  
Better code enforcement will be a priority in my administration. We will devote the resources that it takes. That includes cracking down on negligent, absentee landlords. With the deputy mayor and the assistant deputy mayor for neighborhoods working with the Department of Metropolitan Development and the city's office of corporation counsel, we are going to prosecute irresponsible, absentee landlords, and get them in compliance with the law or get them out of the business.
   
Snow removal is another of those basic quality-of-life services that people who pay property taxes rightfully feel entitled to. I can't tell you how many times people have come up to me in the past few weeks and said, "This is the first time I've seen a snowplow on my street in years." As many of you know, we've made a commitment to plow more residential streets this winter, and if my informal survey means anything, people like it. If so, don’t give me the credit. It belongs to the men and women who are out on the plows at 3:00 a.m. and the many others who support them through the long days and nights of a snowfight. I want to once again thank them for keeping our schools open, for getting us to work, and for protecting our lives.
  
Neighborhood services are important; rebuilding some of our most challenged neighborhoods can be a matter of life and death. We have a chance to stabilize and eventually increase property values, provide home ownership opportunities, and increase our city’s housing stock in the King Park Home Ownership Zone. This is one of twelve federally designated home ownership zones in the country. If we can successfully put together all the pieces of this complicated puzzle, it can serve as a model for residential redevelopment throughout the city. But it will require cooperation among neighborhood associations, community development corporations, city, state and federal agencies and many players from the private sector to make it work. This important project has my full attention and that of my administration.

Mid-field terminal

Another mission requiring our community's full commitment is connecting our city by direct air links to more places in America and the world. There may be no more important step to take to advance economic development - especially high-tech development - in central Indiana. We will be engaged in discussions about the mid-field terminal project at Indianapolis International Airport in the coming weeks. If the green light is given, this project could be one of the most significant steps forward for our community this generation.

 Bridging racial, cultural and religious lines

The quality of life in our neighborhoods and the economic health of our city are the barometers for the quality of life in Indianapolis as a whole. Our quality of life is diminished when we allow perceived barriers to divide us along racial, religious or cultural lines. If we want to be a world-class city, we must celebrate diversity.
  
A few weeks ago, I attended a reception for the International School of Indianapolis to honor French dignitaries. At that reception were residents of our city who hail from every corner of the globe. Indianapolis may be the Crossroads of America, but here in the heart of our vast country, our burgeoning international community really makes us the Crossroads of the World. We need to appreciate that diversity, and the richness it adds to our home.
   
The race relations summit I hosted in January was a big step in the right direction. There, we brought together people from all walks of life in our city - over 900 people in all - to talk about issues such as workplace diversity, hate crimes, and self-esteem in our young people. I learned many new things, listening to the panelists and keynote speakers, and many of the participants have shared with me that they did as well. The summit also provided me with more information about what our citizens want from the city to help to improve race relations, and we are developing an action agenda as a result of the summit.
   
Diversity isn't only something I talk about. It's something I do. I am proud to say that we have today the most diverse city leadership cabinet in our city's history. We have a tremendous talent pool in Indianapolis, and we must tap into all of it to find the leaders we need in this new millenium.
   
Part of that talent pool comes from our growing Latino community. I gathered recently with some of our Latino community leaders to announce the creation of the city's first Commission on Latino Affairs. The Commission members will work with me to help ease the transition into the mainstream of life in Indianapolis for our rapidly growing Latino community. We have a choice in our city: We can welcome new community members into the fold, or we can turn away in indifference, or worse yet, intolerance. Let's be sure we respond in the true tradition of America - and with our special brand of Hoosier hospitality - finding space in our city, and in our hearts, for all who come here, just as other Hoosiers, and other Americans, found space in their hearts for us.

Valuing the arts in Indianapolis

Expanding the importance of the arts and culture in our city is another way to enrich our lives. We have many wonderful arts groups, museums and cultural activities in our city, but our public funding for the arts lags behind other cities of comparable size. Increased funding for the arts and culture is a wise investment in our city's future and it will be part of my budget proposal later this year.
   
The arts make our city a more attractive destination for tourists and they help with our economic development efforts. In fact, when it comes to attracting and retaining businesses in the coveted high-tech arena, quality of life issues become very important. Arts and culture can be vital measures of the quality of life of a community when these business decisions are made. But, ultimately, we should seek an even more vibrant environment for the arts and culture for its intangible benefits. The arts spark our imagination and inspire our creativity. In an unquantifiable way, like sports, they simply make life more interesting and more meaningful.

 Conclusion

 So, all in all, the state of our city is good and getting better. But the challenges of achieving greatness are many and will demand the utmost from us in creativity and cooperation. I look forward to working with our city-county council in the spirit of creativity and cooperation and I look forward to serving the people of Indianapolis with every ounce of my energy and with my deepest and most sincere commitment.

Thank you.

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