>> here in the comes weeks, you'll be hearing a lot. whether it's examining public employees and their relationships with the public p- the governments for which they work, pension systems, retiree health benefits, whether it's talking about new public health safety or working on issues as diverse as prisoner reentry like newark or assimilations into the cities and states, the institute is at the core of the policy debates taking place. you urge you to visit our web site, manhattaninstitute.org to learn more about what we are doing to share it with people and visit a new site that we've put up called publicsector publicsectorinc.org. that focuses on the union issues and hopefully it will be for you as well. now as majors and governors across the country battle -- and i use the word battle because that's what it turned into close enormous budget gaps while simultaneously delivering quality services. the need for innovative, but also bold leadership, it's unquestionable. now as the mayor of st. petersburg, the honor rick baker turned st. pete into a variable hub of vitality and civic pride. as you read the book and hear more, you'll get to know just what he did there. and the book seamless city once again is on sale when you walk in. i urge you to stop by and look at that. but first here to introduce him is the former chairman of the manhattan institute's own center for civic innovation, now a project of the center on state and local leadership, the honorable stephen goldsmith. if ever there was a public official that embodied thoughtful, helpful, and innovative policymaking, that's stephen goldsmith. he's currently the deputy mayor for operations here in newark. he has a simple mandate promulgated to create a city government for the 21st century that is smaller, more efficient and more cost effective. good luck with that. using the skills and commitment that the major gains while mayor of indianapolis from 1992 to 1999, deputy mayor has a remarkable playbook from which to work and which to share with us today and share with people like rick baker and others. under mayor goldsmith leadership, entire urban neighborhoods of indianapolis were revitalized. i believe it's over $400 million were recognized in savings, that was reinvested into the city and crime dropped. something that i think is remarkable, real authority was diffused down to community groups which is a real testament of the power of leadership. his record in indianapolis led him to be appointed by former president bush, as senior domestic policy advisor and later chair of the corporation on national and community service. we kept that position into the obama administration. that's a testament to the work that he did. but perhaps more than anything else, stephen goldsmith is a teacher. he believes that good leadership doesn't come just from the work of one, but the work of many. as the director of the innovations in american government program at harvard kennedy school of government, professor goldsmith shared his road map for reinviting american cities with countless leaders. i'll say i was one such student in his class, i believe in '05 and candidly it was a great course. undergraduate of 11 years, graduate of the law school of the university of michigan and the author of four books, two of which were published at the manhattan institute. 21st century city and "entrepreneurial city" he's a scholar and inspiration to rick baker who will share the relationship they have had. we are therefor honored to welcome stephen goldsmith to the stage. please join me. [applause] [applause] >> i would like to appear at manhattan. and the introduction is making me feel good about myself. thank you very much. i was wondering if you would go in and look and rated if it would be the same as what you said today. i'm not sure. i'm under the weather. pardon my voice, it's great to be here to introduce to you my friend, rick. i read the promotional material of what he did in st. petersburg. i'm aware of it. it feels a little bit -- where are you? it feels also bit, i don't want to insult you, it feels like i'm reading my own stuff. all right, rick. way to go. let my say a couple of quick things by the way of introduction. by the way the path he's taking is the path i took. it was promoted by manhattan and 21st century city which you were kind enough to assert that you read at one point in and time. it's been great to kind of watch the stories of cities over the last 20 years. we began -- i began as mayor of indianapolis with an expolice sate manhattan agenda, literally right. cities instead of being centers of pathology could be great places that celebrated the diversity and assets. this was a period of time as you remember where several of us coming into the early 90s took the large cities, not as large as this one, a series of problems and apply conservative principals to produce the results. to some extent we did that. one the things i noticed about rick and his book, particularly dear to my heart. cities are diverse places. if you can apply conservative principals, you can create opportunity forest all of your communities, all of your neighborhoods. and it's creation of opportunity in a seamless city that's particularly important. the other thing that i saw in rick's book that i thought was fascinating and i wish it was more well recognized across the country is you can cut cost and cut taxes and increase the quality of services. we are now in a debate across the country about how much pain we have to inflict on our citizens in order to right size our budgets. that is in many cases the false choice. rick put all of the things together in the city as crime dropped and economic development went up and urban neighborhoods responded and did exceptionally well in minority communities which one wouldn't expect. it's a great story, hear to tell you about it is mayor rick baker. proximate cause proximate cause >> thank you, mayor. you know, i've been excited about coming here today. i'm happy to be in new york city. what i'm excited is stephen goldsmith is going to be here. he's been one of my great mentors. when i was running for mayor in 2000, i wanted to learn about what other cities were doing. somebody had given me the copy of the book "21st century city" and i read it. i thought this looks like a good way to do it. i looked at the binder and it said it has been supported or published by manhattan. what's manhattan? this was before i think it was going to be as we are now. i called them. i said what else do you have? city guides and journals and sent me the entrepreneurial city. which mayor goldsmith ledded. and i really. that's about 100 page book. i think i took three days to go through it. because the first part of the book talked about -- well, it was written by great mayors on different issues that they had been involved with whether it was public safety or economic development or neighborhoods or whatever. and then in the back, it had a resource guide of each chapter. i was on the phone with the budget director. how did you do this? calling people around the country. it was a great opportunity for me to learn and the reason he recognized a lot of the stuff in my book, i stole most of it from him. it was a a -- i can't, you know, over state how important it is to have groups like the manhattan institute that are out there doing research and disseminating the people that are leading the cities and states around the country because you need to have that in order to progress. ideas -- jed bush is a good friend of mine. he says ideas are powerful things. and i think that is so true. somebody has to implement those ideas. you got to believe them enough to attack them and go after them. but you have to have the ideas. so i thank you, howard. and everybody at manhattan institute, steve, thank you so much for coming today. i appreciate that. well, my book is -- well, first -- i also want to -- i have to do it introduce my family -- i want to do this. my mother irene is here, who is still my great mentor and my family who shared this adventure with me. my wife, joyce, son jacob, and daughter, joanne. please welcome them. what is a "seamless city"? i think mayor goldsmith started out. it was a place where -- it's and aspiration. it's a place that you live in. you don't go from one part of the town to another park and cross the scene. it could be a road. you wind up coming into a different place. a place that you are not comfortable. you feel the need to reach over and lock your door. because it doesn't seem safe. there are broken windows and boarded up buildings, there doesn't seem to be the asemities. that's not the way the cities should be. too many of our cities are like that. so a city should -- you know, not all parts of the city are going to be the same. you are going to have some neighborhoods that have large houses and big lots. that's okay. other parts are going to have apartment complexes and duplexes. that's okay too. there are some things to be in common. they should be places where children can grow up safely. where they feel comfortable walking next door and going down to see their friend down the street. where there are the infrastructure looks okay. it's the streets and the walks. they look okay. where there are not drug dealers hanging out or prostitutes down the street. that's now how you and i would want to live and have our children grow up. i know we don't want any of our children to have to grow up in places like that. they should have a grocery store down the street and bank and library. they should have the amenities. all of the child should have the opportunity. there's no guarantee of results. but we should have opportunities to grow up and believe in the same dream that we believe and trying to instill in our city. that's the "seamless city" that's what it is about. it's hard to get to that. we have to work at it. it's important to get towards it. because america is the only going to be as great as it's urban centers are. mayor goldsmith helps lead the period. we had the suburbanization back. we lost ground. but we -- he helped lead that effort and that effort, i think, is still under way to try to build back our cities, make them great places again so that we can raise our families and then we will be attracted to our cities. that's what we want to try to do. i think it's important for our country. so "the seamless city" the book approaches it from two der spectives. it's talks about about -- in the book i talk about, i guess, the first city leadership and an approach to urban leadership to help bring our cities back across america. and at the same time, it provides a glimpse, i think, into the life of a major major - mayor of a large city. not as large as new york or chicago. one the cities. for those that aren't that familiar, it was the last -- when i took office it was the 68th largest of 15 or 20,000 cities in america. it's a big enough that it can provide some lessons. but it's frankly a small enough where it might be easier to get your arms around some of the challenges if you start to apply some ideas to make it work. so the second part of the city is the life of the mayor a little bit. because there's challenges that you have and there's opportunities that you have and a lot of people don't quite see the day to day life of a mayor. mayor goldsmith can testify how does it affect your family. i talk about that in my book. i've received some criticism for that. i think faith is a big part of all of us and i think that's important to see how it plays out. to we talk about those things. and it comes from the perspective of, of course, my experience which is in st. petersburg. but also from the perspective of a mayor. because the mayor is a leader of the city. the mayor is the one that needs to identify the path to take. and so i talk a lot about the job of a mayor. and the job of a mayor in my mind is three things, it's first you run the business of the city. big organization. both cities, mayor cities have hundreds of millions sometimes billions. lots of different departments, our city has 34 departments. you are doing everything with complete and fire and arc and water and sewer and sanitation and lot was other things. traffic and lots of other things. the -- but -- so you have to deal with all of those issues when you are running the business of the city. how do you deal with that? my first few days in office, after about three months, i noticed i wasn't getting any reports. and so i -- i take that back, i got the crime statistics and the rainfall level. now i had run a law firm before i came to the city. i thought, you know, don't you -- shouldn't i get reports? after three months? don't you get reports. they say no, you don't really get reports. we decided to start the process of developing a report for the mayor. it became a study of performance measures. and we called it the city score card. we got together with all of the departments and we want -- one at a time. took us a while. how is the water department, are we serving the city better this year than last year? they all said yes. how can we tell? how do i know? how do i demonstrate to the community that with are doing that? that became a remarkable discussion among us and the community of what do we want to know? we developed 160 performance measures. many have done this. i like ours. i wanted to do it a small enough number to be meaningful. some have thousands. thousands is too many. it doesn't help. you have to have enough to get a good feel. also all in graph form, similar graph and with bases. for instance, you can -- i can tell you that we took about 7.2 minutes to respond to a priority one police call when i was mayor. that's an important thing to know. when we left, it was about 5.6 minutes. well, if you are the waiting for that call, that's an important thing. that became one of our performance measures. our performance measures are designed to not just tell our mayor, but the community. we could also say how well to fix the sidewalk. what takes the longest. what is the biggest complaint? i would have thought it was crime, or traffic or speeding or something like that. it was sidewalk repair. i said how long does it take us to fix a sidewalk. nobody knew. we went out and checked. it took us 30 months. maybe that's why it's the number one complete. we went and analyzed and put a strike team together. that was the easy part. we got down now it takes about a week to fix a sidewalk. five days, six days. well, we did that potholes and how long does it take to fix a traffic light when the traffic light is also. we also did it with other schools. next to jeb bush, we measure our schools to see how schools go based on student achievement. we start measuring that. that's on the city square card as well. our fun balances, tax rates. one the driving forces as mayor goldsmith said was to reduce tax rates. we reduce five of the nine. we kept them flat. real state property which is the main tax. reduce them by almost 20% during the period of time. at the same time, we did improve service levels that required us to reduce the government size. the government went from -- we reduced the total number of employees by 10% in the city. which is not an easy thing to do. yet, we increase the number of police officers while we were doing that and the service levels were going up. we tried to do it in such a way not to harm the individual. we would freeze our budgets. by the last three years, we got the recession. we just froze our hiring all the time. we would be very judicial in what we hired. then when we eliminated positions, we move people around. we try to eliminate empty positions so that the least amount of people lost their jobs. some did. it wasn't that much compared to the total amount. running the business of the city is part of your job. your second job is dealing with the crisis. crisis for constant. as i say, some of them are natural made like hurricanes, some of them are manmade like crime. a lot of them are media made. you have to deal with all three. so it's -- you are constantly addressing the crises as they come about. as mayor of the city to try to keep the direction going. and we've -- we had in 2004, we had four hurricanes that were targeted as the eye going through st. petersburg at one time. our emergency operation center was activated virtually the whole three month period of time and you deal with those issues. lots of them. we talked about a lot of the crises that you go through and from the mayor's perspective and the book as well. so that's a -- that's the second part of the job. third part of the job is advancing your vision for the city. now it's interesting because that's why you run. you run because you want to do something. you run because you have a plan, you have a thought, you want to make the city better. yet quite often, a mayor can get so bogged down in doing the business. they are terrible. union issues, employee issues, or dealing with the crises as they come. you can get so bogged down that you never quite get to the point of advancing their vision or stopped in the middle of advancing the vision. you have to be very focused and your organization has to be focused at making sure you are continuing that forward momentum and path while you are dealing with a crises and dealing with the business as you are going forward. in our case, we had a five point plan which was the strategic plan for the city. to advance to vision. and i think every strategic plan is the mission. our mission was simple. it was the build the best city in america. we wanted st. petersburg to become the best. some say that's broad. you can really do that. my city is better than yours. my response to that was you have to have -- that should be the objective of any city in america. who is going to follow you if your mission is become the fourth best city in florida? [laughter] >> eighth best in america? nobody is going to follow you. people follow excellence. people are drawn to it. resources come to it. individuals start coming forward. people hear about it, i want to be part of that. out of stanford, the large research and development company, very big group. we were recruiting them to florida. curt is the head. he came and met with me. he said we're thinking about doing it here, here, here. what do you have to offer? i want to ask you what do you have to offer? how are you going to help us build the best city in america? his recent book that he's about to public, that's what got him to come. he wanted to be part of becoming the best city in america. so that has to be your mission in my opinion, everybody's. and then how do you do it? you do it by improving the quality of life of the people that live in the city every single day. every day, everybody in your organization, and in the city and not just -- not just the government, but the businesses and the civic organizations and faith organizations. everybody in the neighborhood. everybody involved in the enterprise should come in with the idea of how are we going to build and make the quality of life better. if everybody you are thinking about doing you go through that filter, then you say, is this going to make the quality of life better for the folks at st. pete or whatever city you live in? if the answer is yes, dough it. if the answer is no, even if anybody wants you to do it. so you run it through that filter. so in our case, that was our mission. and then we had five ways to get there. one is make it safer. improve public safety. number two is improve your neighborhoods. number three is anticipate in improving the schools. which was a radical idea. i'll tell you why. number four is economic development. the economic development has to be across the board. number five is improving city services and operations which i've talked about when i talked about running the business of the city. those were the five components. identify your five strategies. i promise you that every manager in the government could tell you the five principals. i promise you that. because everybody understood. that was our objective. public safety, we did a lot of things that mayor goldsmith and giuliani have talked about and try to add some of our own. we had a hard, hard focus on drug enforcement. drugs are the poison of america. they are just the absolute poison of america. they are the root of so many of our problems that you have to go after -- you can't just go after them by arresting people. although you have to do that. we did it very aggressively. but you also have to have opportunities for drug rehabilitation in your community and especially prostitution. i believe it has impacted our prostitution by drug treatment and job training for the women that were prostitutes. you hit the drug areas with then all of the other areas. what you do in schools and neighborhoods is going to impact the crime. certainly what you do in the poverty areas is going to impact the crime. when i was running for mayor, i said i'm going to have a special focus at the poorest part, we call it midtown. i want to lift. my people that were not for me would stand up and say you can't fix it until you get rid of the crime. my response to that is i don't think you get rid of the crime if you don't change the environment. you have to have an aggressive law enforcement. you also have to change some of the environments and some of the causes of why you got there. i don't think that's a liberal philosophy. i think that's real. that you have to -- you have to go after the crime and have strong law enforcement and also work on getting kids educated and work on changing the environment to some of the poorest areas, which we did. so public safety is number one, number two is neighbors. the public safety is number one. all of the others are in no particular order. neighbors, so we worked on improving the neighbors of our city. we built dog parks. my -- i tell the story, my first -- my first year we had two openings in a row. one was the library and the other was a dog park. and the library we had a great opening -- $3 million we were building. and we were -- had a ground breaking for it. we had a few folks come. not a big crowd. it was nice. we opened up a rib bob -- ribbon on the dog park. it cost $900,000. i had two hundred people show up. i'm think about please get these people out of neighborhood. these dog parks are popular and cheap. i'd like to get re-elected. it's a quality of life. it seems small, it's not. it's big. bicycle path. st. peter is building the largest bicycle path in the southeast united states. seems like a small thing. it's a big thing. i could promise you. we went from being rated in the mean streets, number one mean street in the country in 2000, we took office in 2001, to 2008 i was invited to the mean streets conference ass best tun around city because of the sidewalk efforts, we were taking two and a half years and because the bicycle path and other safety issues. it seems small. it's not. even quality of life is a big thing. playground policy. we committed to build a playground within a half mile walk of any child in the city. i think that's a big thing. i think that's a big thing. if you can walk with your child to a playground from your house in less than half a mile, you feel differently. you get to know your neighbors. you feel better. that seems small. it's a big one. we put two water slides at every one of the swimming pools and put them by 40% one summer. i did a lot of this with my children. they were four and five. they would tell me what to do. but they seem small, but they are not. neighborhoods are important. we are the first designated green city, by the way, in the state of florida. it's not a feel good thing, it's like a lead certification for cities. it's a serious program we went through. but it was all based on sound strategy. we did not do something unless we looked at what is the payback period for whatever we are doing. so i could tell you when we put led traffic lights, cost me $450,000. i saved $150,000 in electric cost a year. that's a three year pay back. 33% return. anybody should do that. anybody should do that. with every one of the energy saving. if the pay back period was at least 12 years or less, so i got at least an 8% return, we did it. that's how we did all of our green programs and because the first designated green city. the schools -- i got to go quickly. i'm running out of time. schools, we had an aggressive efforts. we don't run our schools. most cities don't. they have celebrated elected school boards. we need to help the schools. if you don't help the schools, you are not going to get businesses. you better be involved. we were focused on the schools. i could go through a series of programs. if somebody wants to ask me a question, talk about your school programs, i'll talk for a while. we wound up going from jeb bush started the program of grading our schools a, b, c, d, f. we went from 0 a schools to 16. we had a 260% increase in number of a and b schools based on standard achievement. we actually passed the suburbs with the urban schools. which is a hard, hard thing to do. you can be focused on the school. the book talked about it. i'd be glad to talk about it today if you'd like. fourth is economic development. i've already talked about this. so i'll end with this. when we approached economic development. you got to believe in economics. jobs and reports, you could do a lot of things, you could build great parks, great libraries. if people don't have jobs, you are not going to advance the city. you can't do it. you have to have jobs. your focus has to be on job development. there are two ways of looking at jobs. one is retention and the other is recruitment. most of us have this tendency, me included, to look at what's the next business i'm going to bring to town? but 80% of the new jobs in most communities next year are going to come from the existing companies in your community right now. so you got to focus on those. we did a lot in the permanent department. -- permitting department. there are structural issues and altitudal. you got to work on both of them. one the ways we did it, i won't talk about all of them, i had a 7:30 meeting in my office with anybody who has complained since i've been mayor. everybody is invited. the first couple of meetings that we had i would tell it was standing room only. it was room about half of the size. they were after me. then i had my staff around me. every time someone would scream, look at that. what about that? we worked at it. it was hard. union issues, attitudal issues, structural issues, we got to the point the last one was five or six. there were most of them were representative of the various contractors coming in to thank us for the permitting department. you have to make it easy for -- not easy. but yeah, make it easy for people to do business. but they still have to follow the rules and make it easy. you could still have and make them build beautiful buildings and park plans and all of that sort of stuff. most of them are glad. they don't want to have to waste six months of times to get through the process. you try to work with the businesses that you got, and then -- then you also try to recruit businesses as well. we recruited a lot. especially in the high-tech area. florida historically has had a construction city, agriculture, tourism, military as an industry, but we need to diversity it. right now when the nation has gone through the recession, we have really gone through the recession. because of our construction industry. we need to diversity. we're working on r&d and labs and bought sri. as a matter of fact, what i'm doing now, i work for the university of south florida. i'm heading of the innovation. our job is to try to put r&d companies and championships together. important to do. so we did that in general. we also worked on the downtown, anybody that went to downtown, st. pete, 20 years ago, and 15 years ago would see john avlon. he's got a -- walked with us during the whole process. and you'll see it's a remarkable different place that it was. sidewalk cafes, cultural amenities. very focused on the cultural. we set out to be number one on the cultural state of florida. everybody kind of snickered. last year "american living" magazine ranked us the number one city in america for under 5,000. because of the new daley museum and expansion of the fine arts, florida orchestra, lots of things. we brought a grand prix to st. petersburg. the indianapolis 500 is still the best race in the country. even tony george has has the honda grand prix in st. petersburg is second to indy. i want to close with midtown. we focused on the poorest part with the most effort. certainly on the first term and into the second term as well. why do you do that? why do you focus on the poorest part? people said why should i put money into the poorest part? people said that. you should do it for two reasons. number one, you do it because it's the right thing to do morally. because there are children that are growing up in this part of our community that you would not want to to very children grow up in that environment. you would not. that's not the children's fault. they are growing up in environment that is they should not go up in america in st. petersburg or anywhere. we need to work on that and change it. there's a second reason too. the second reason, it's better for you. because if right now we are pouring disproportionate amount of money to publi i ran for rejection of the chairman of the pinellas county in 2005. we won 90% of the vote. that will tell thaw they believed we turned that part of the community in a different direction. it's important to do. you cannot do -- you cannot do the rest of the city if it's in balance. if you are trying to do downtown, or bring jobs, or help your neighborhoods or whatever, and part of your community is lagging behind, you are not going to be able to advance it. thank you for having me. i look forward to your questions. >> folks now we're going to turn over to some q & a. i'd like to remind everyone that the question ends in a question mark. and please wait for the mike to come around. i'm going to take moderators prerogative and ask a quick question and mr. mayor will bring you up here. you would mention when you were talking about and articulating the third job of the mayor, being the articulation of vision for the city and recruiting others to be a bart -- part of that. you had touched on public employee union. could you talk about how you brought the unions on board and if you were unable to do so, how you dealt with that. especially right now when so many elected officials are facing that. >> well, you know, for the most part, the -- in our case, we had five union bargaining groups and three -- we had six bargaining groups and four unions in the city. we were dealing with that a lot, police fire and the blue and white color unions that you are working with. you know, i'm not going to say that's an easy process to go through. it's difficult process to go through. the motivations and i'm not -- this is not a criticism. their objective is to improve the benefits of the folks they represent. and while you certainly care about the employees of the city, i care deeply. i love it. i have many friends that are boys of the city and throughout the city. every level throughout the government. but that is not always -- that's not the objective of the city. the objective of the city is to improve the quality of the life of the people that live in the city. that means you have to have good services and taxes at a minimum or it's going to hard to move it forward. it means that you have to be able to balance the budget. sometimes that's going to be contrary to the union. sometimes we are able to put union agreements together. sometime we want to impass. it works both ways. i think you have to always remember the jobs of the city improve the quality of life of the people that live there. >> we'll bring a mike around. >> where were the cuts made that enabled you to balance the budget and you described a lot of things that cost money. there must have been some things, initiatives that involved cutting to enable you to put this package together? >> sure. the majority of cuts were personnel. if you take an average employee with benefits and costs and you multiply that times 300 which was the number that we ultimately -- positioned that we reduced, that's where the dollar amount that it came from. what were they doing was the question? did what they were doing cause you to impact services? over -- about about -- about haf the position reduction were management and supervisory. the other half would have been line oriented. so we did not go in -- you know, there's a response that you can get sometimes. i'm not going to say anybody that worked for me did. you can get this response. when you are the president, you have the department of interior reduce their budget by one percent. they do a press conference closing the facility. some of the great parks across the america. that's where the impact is going to be. people start screaming about that. well, we try not to do that. i'll tell you exactly the process that i used. i would ask every department to come back with 5, 7, 9% cuts. sometimes 5.79. depending on the year. i would have any cabinets and give them instructions led by the first deputy mayors, i would you to go through the cuts, identify the ones that had the least impact on services to the community. first of all win don't want to cut any police positions. beyond that, the at least impact on services. that means not closing down library and facility like that. and then i want the cabinet to go through without me and give me a list. then i would go through that list. and i would then circle the ones that i know politically are not things that i want to do for whatever reason. because it would impact the services and have a big response in the community. i would circle those and send them back. now you have a new number to come up with. then they would come up with that number. we would continue the process back and forth. the concept of 5% across the board is not a sound concept. that means that everybody is operating at the same efficiency level. which is not true. the trouble is when you are mayor, you have 3,000 people. it's hard to get into every budget. it's hard. so you have to have a process in place. that's the way we address the process. i will tell you while we did cut -- we had kind of a bell shaped term. i started with the end of the dot-com and the recession that followed. three or four good years and then the recession in '08 and '09. through the leveling of that, we were able to reduce tax rates and now i will also say that we did not have zero budgets or reduced budgets. one thing i had to do was increase police pay. the reason that i had to do it was the city in the pay was pyred as was the sheriff because they were paying so much more. i was not competitive. and before the recession, it was hard to get police officers. so we had to increase it to become competitive. that put a burden on my budget that we had to deal with in other ways. yes? >> mayor, did you have any successes in doing things that you were doing before, but doing them smarter? in terms of repairing streets and changing rules and regulations that allowed you just to be more efficient. >> i think there are a lot of categories like that. i think if you force a process in place, that -- well, let me just answer it directly. yes, probably the biggest thing, we invested heavily in computer technology. we went online for the complaint services and response service sos you could go online within -- by my third year and say my sidewalk is broken, here's the address. you'd get a number. online without a person. and you could go track how your sidewalk repair or pothole or the drug dealer on the corner or whatever it was that you were complaining about. we make it much more mechanized. we were careful in how we did it. because a computer conversion, as a lawyer, i've seen them and they can mess you up. we did okay. at the end of the day, i think that helps us save a lot function fallly. i think the way you approach it structural, the budget cutting, strives that. if they are looking to become a 3, 5, 7. they are forced to look at the individual department and say how am i going to do this without impacting services? some of them will. some are cooperative. some of them are not. then you make changes. you need to constantly -- i think you have to push that decision down to the people that know how to do it. >> if you could mention your name as well. >> steve sabbath from brew college. did you do anything in the way of privatization? public and private partnerships? >> i had a whole -- at the end of the last chapter about 1/3 of it talks about public and private partnerships. we did some privatization. we privatized. that allows us to do a park and people that had nurseries got jobs. we did that with management of the theater and some other facilities. so we did. we did a huge amount of public, private partnerships. our school program was a good example of that. we recruited 100 corporate partners to come in and work in the public schools. so every public school in the city had one or two private partners. they provide mentors, tutors, they would provide strategic help. they would sit down with the principal. and sometimes money for thing that is the schools needed that couldn't get -- one time it was a lawn mower. whatever it was, the corporation would come in. they were a big part of the turn around. our midtown effort. relied heavily. we had partners come in to help with the redeveloping the grocery store system in the heart which wound up being a big. turn around. we had to come in every step of the way. everything that we did, one company sent about half a million on sound in the inner city that we put in. we recruited businesses to be partners with us across the board. we did some direct privatization through -- actually i like governor -- mayor goldsmith's term, marketization where you are trying to instill the competitive forces into the bidding process. >> even though you didn't have direct control of the schools, schools are still in your top five list. >> they were. >> how did you help the schools improve without having direct control? >> thank you for asking the question. i would hoping somebody would. we did a lot in the schools. we supported a mentoring program that was actually started by actually called college scholarship. the program that was started by the pinellas county education. called doorways. doorways tells the child in a free or reduced school, okay, so it's low income child, that if you do certain things and maintain a c average from starting in sixth grade, sixth to 12th, if you maintain the c average, if your attendance and conduct, if you are drug free and crime free by the time you get to 12th grade, you have a four year. i call it an incentive to say good. so the way we did it. how did you finance it? no city money. it costs for a prepaid tuition skip -- scholarship for a sixth grader, cost $14,000. so the state has a program in florida called save. if you do it and buy a scholarship, they will pay for half. there's 7,000. and then i worked a deal with our local education foundation which is businesses in our community. i said how about if i raise 3500, will you match it? 3500. they said yes. then i worked with a deal with a private businessman in town and said if i raise 1750, will you give me 1750? he said yes. so then i could go to you. will you give me 1750, i'll send a kid to college for four years. then i flipped it to double, double, and doubled. we were able to provide the scholarship. all through private and did not use city money to fund them. at the end of the day, we keep statistics, everything i do, keep statistics. what is the average graduation rate from -- for a low income child in florida? i don't -- i've never been able to get a good statistic. i bet it's under 60%. our kids that -- by the time i left office, we had had three glasses of kids started at sixth grade. all three graduated at 93%. so if you can do that with the children, that's how you impact your crime rates, too, by the way in the long term. that's how you impact your overall environment of your community. so we gave out 1,000 of our scholarships while i was mayor. and that was one. as part of that, the mentoring. corporations and trained 1200 to mentor the kids identified by the teachers in our public schools. we did -- top apple award. i love the top apple award. it's incentive based. so we grade our schools in florida, but we don't give the principals any incentive to do good. and i know the state is working on that now. so what we did is we provided -- we created the top apple award. if earn a principal of a school that increased the letter grade from a b to a or c to b obeism top apple. we brought to the ceremony on tv, city council, school board, everybody, we gave you a marble apple with your name. then we give you a big banner like the ncaa that all of the schools are hanging in front of their school today. 2007 mayor top apple award winning. then the gift basket and dinner for two, weekend at the trade winds resort. great beach. we gave you $2500 cash bonus. it became an and -- an incentive. they decided to stay. how many are providing the setup. we did a lot of good things. are we done? >> we have time for one more quick question. >> how about a long question to a quick question? okay. i can do that. >> a bunch of questions and i'll ask them all at once what is the population of st. petersburg -- >> to the third one, i ran for reelection. the first term because we changed the charter was nine months. and my second term was four years. i was limited to two terms. i served the complete almost nine years. my term ended last year, 2010. the corruption issue if you are talking about internal governmental corruption. we had minor employees but no significant issues when i took office. i was going to say the newspaper always thinks everybody is core run. in general, we did not have corruption issues within the city. what was the third question? 250,000. oh, ethnic. it's about 20% african-american. it's got under 8% let's say eastern european also another maybe 3, 4, 5%. we'll find with the new census. but a good size southeast asia population and hispanic population as well. it's pretty mixed. >> let's have another round of applause. >> thank you. >> is there a nonfiction author or book you'd like to see featured on book tv? send us an e-mail at book booktv@c-span.org. >> what are you reading this summer? book tv wanted to know. >> visit booktv.org to see this and other summer reading lists. >> cynthia stuart was a mother in ohio, who was the mother of one child. 8-year-old nora. she lived with her partner, david prada in a farm house. she was a passionate photographer. she had after her daughter was born. she decided to document her daughter's life in great detail. she relished doing that and took pictures of nora all the time. by the time nora was eight, she had taken 35,000 photographs of nora. these are not digital. these are roles of films developed at the processing labs. all of those pictures were numbered and filed and archived in cardboard boxes in her dining room. stacked up. she wanted some day to put together a book. she was going to have a lot to chose from. on july 6th, 1999, cynthia scooped up 11 rolls and took them to have them developed. a few days later, ten of them rolls came back, one did not. she assumed the roll had been lost in the lab. she began calling the lab to track her down. it really upset her to ever lose a photograph. she knew some of them had pictures in the daughter in the bathtub. it didn't dawn on her to worry about that. she had taken photographs naked a long with all sorts of other pictures, most of them has been developed at the discount drug mart lab. a few weeks went by, august 11th, the police knocked on her door. they said they had her pictures down at the station. she was relieved. but they said there are serious questions about those pictures, ma'am. we want you to come down to the station. she completely willing to go. she thought there was nothing to hide and explain the photographs. she invited the police in and pointed out the boxes of photographs and explained what she did and she was a photographer. they didn't ask to see the photographs. when she consulted david, he insisted they get a lawyer before they went. so they informed the police that's what they would do. the police left. the next day they met with a lawyer, amy wertz. who was a specialist in family law. she explained what she thought was on the role and the photographs. she said i think what's likely to happen is if the police are concerned about these photographs enough they might pass them across to the prosecutor. if the prosecutor is concerned enough, he'll pass them along to children services. if they are concerned, they will send social worker out to the house and try to find out the intend. what did you plan to do with them? what are they about? she had cynthia write up a affidavit. six weeks went by. in the six weeks, they never returned, there was never a search warrant to ask to see the photographs, they never asked any other questions of the family. the county prosecutor did not contact the lawyer and ask further questions at the client and children services never showed up. everyone assumes the incident was over. everything had been taken care of. on september 28th, two sheriffs deputies came to the door and arrested cynthia. and took her to the county jail. david had to bail her out by butting a -- putting a $20,000 lien on their house. she was arrested on two felony charges. the first was a law in -- ohio law said you cannot take a photograph of a naked child. i saw someone's eyes go like this. that would make most of us felons; right? fortunate the law had been constrained by this ohio supreme court and the u.s. supreme court to cases where there was a lewd exhibition or photographic focus on the genitals. nudity was no longer going to be the standard by which the photographs would be judged. there had to be a lewd focus on the genitals. the second law was a law that prohibited the photographing of a child in a sexual performance. the photographs that cynthia had taken that day were taken after she and nora had been to photo exhibit at a local art gallery. there was one in the woman rising up out of the tub. nora asked if they could replicate the photograph. they had filled the bath with bubble bath. she had risen up from the water. but once -- and she had taken -- cynthia had taken photographs. once the water ran out, she continued taking photographs. she took a series of four in which she was rinsing off with the shower sprayers in her hand. she took one of her -- she rinsed off her head, neck, and the third the water was streaming towards her genital area which was ab cured. it was those last two photographs that the professor alleged was the child many a sexual act, performing a all act. that was the second felony charm. when it hit the newspaper, and it did big time. not