Transcript: Mayor de Blasio Delivers Remarks at the United States Conference of Mayors Plenary Session

January 18, 2017

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, thank you so much, everyone. Thank you so much, Mick. I have to say, this is a very powerful, timely gathering as our nation is about to go through a profound change. And I am very, very happy to be here with my fellow mayors – Democrats and Republicans alike – in common cause. 

I think no one epitomizes that sense of common cause more than our president, Mick Cornett. I’ve got to tell you, over the last years working together, we have found tremendous common ground. We have worked together with so many of you to get a better highway bill that would allow us to do the work in our cities that our people need so desperately on infrastructure. And mayors from both parties worked together very productively to help move the Congress to a better highway bill. 

Mick and I have had the honor of working with so many of you and working on an initiative that has been the lead effort of my wife, Chirlane McCray, to focus on what we can do to improve the mental health of our citizens and to de-stigmatize an issue that is so fundamental and so human. Mick’s been doing extraordinary things in Oklahoma City on mental health and was kind enough to join us in New York City for a conference gathering mayors together from all over the country, again, in a bipartisan and purposeful way. 

But I also have to say, I have been honored to have a chance to really get to know Mick and to call him a friend, and to see the great work he’s doing in Oklahoma City. And as we start on this new era, I think our friendships, our common cause, our ability to not only get things done, but to get things done together is going to be one of the things that defines this moment. So, we are blessed to have a great man leading us in this moment. Let’s thank Mick Cornett for all he is doing.

[Applause]

I want to thank our colleagues up here – and all of them have done so much for the Conference of Mayors and for cities all over the country. Of course, Tom Cochran, thank you for what you’ve done for years to protect our cities and strengthen them; Mitch Landrieu; Steve Benjamin, Elizabeth Kautz – all great leaders of this organization. My fellow mayors who have made this organization strong, and that work all of them have done, and will be doing, is going to be evermore necessary. And to all my fellow mayors, we have a special obligation at this moment. I want to speak to you, having thought about this long and hard. I know everyone in this room has been thinking long and hard over the last couple of months of what this new era requires of us. 

I want to sound a hopeful note, not because I think it’s going to be easy, but because I think we have something that is particularly important and applicable to this moment – and I’ll just say this quickly. We all, when we get together, talk about that essential reality that we are the folks that, for a living, get things done. We all talk about it because it’s true. We all talk about it because we feel both the opportunity but also the weight of being the people in our cities who have to get things done every day – tangibly, specifically – for our people. 

Well, I want to talk about how that matters in this moment, because in a moment of a potential change – and certainly in a moment where a lot is uncertain – we are, in many ways, continuity. We are the facts on the ground. What we’re doing in our cities is the one thing we know will continue. And that becomes important for shaping the whole national reality. When I think about the work that all of you have done – and I’ve had such an honor of the last three years hearing the firsthand stories – and they inspire. 

When we get together, we’re always talking to each other about what each other is doing that we can borrow from. We never steal from each other, we borrow. And there’s such urgency and energy in those conversations. One of us has something that worked that they tried, the other ones all immediately want to take it, and borrow it, and try it on your city. Someone has got a bold new idea, we want to see if it might work in our town. If something didn’t necessarily work as we planned, we share it with each other to help the next person avoid the problem and figure out something better. There is a collegiality, and, again, I’ve seen it across region, across party – it’s powerful and it’s real. But it fits then nature of our work and the way we think about our work. What we have all been doing in these last years has changed the reality for lives of a majority of Americans. And we have – all of us – an understanding of what can happen in our nation’s capital and what cannot happen. We’ve known that regardless of who’s president, regardless of who’s in the Congress. We’ve always known that Washington is a place where some important things might happen – sometimes nothing happens – but we know that we have to keep going either way. We have to keep building. We have to keep creating. We have to find local partners. 

We’re going to keep doing that work regardless of the results of any election. We often have that same reality with our State capitols. So, there is a sense that I’ve seen growing in recent years – not that we, as mayors, and our cities are on their own, but that we show some real independence and sense of determining our own destiny, because we didn’t have a choice a lot of the time. We knew there wasn’t a lot of help necessary coming from other levels of government. We had to create – we had to live off the land. And so, we created, and, in each and every one of these cities, found a to build jobs, protect our environment, make sure people and families who had needs got serves – we did that, and that has created  reality from coast to coast.

Now, very quickly, I just want to wrap that together with this moment. Since we represent a majority of Americans, and since all of our work is already proceeding, and since we have established the facts on the ground and some of the things that have to happen – that’s going to be the continuity while a lot of other things hopefully get sorted out in Washington DC. But we understand that some things have to be protected in the meantime. For example, so many people in this room have worked so hard to heal the wounds of the past and to bring our communities and our police closer together. And even through there have been tough moments, and there’s been a lot of passion on these issues, when you look city by city, extraordinary work has happened. I’ve talked to so many of my fellow mayors, I’ve talked to police chiefs around the country – this work is happening every day to bind up the wounds of the past, to create deeper communication between police and communities, to find a way to create a partnership so everyone’s safer. That work has to continue regardless of any debates in Washington DC. 

We all feel it locally. We all understand how human and urgent it is. When you think about the health care of our people, it really, in a way, goes beyond the question of what anyone thinks about the Affordable Care Act and what should happen next with it. We know we have to find a way to make sure our people have health care coverage and families are healthy. And we know, if that doesn’t happen, it will fall to local governments to pick up the pieces. 

So, we’re going to keep creating. In the meantime, we can also provide a message to our colleagues in Washington – that whatever they do, they have to honestly account for what’s going to happen on the ground where we govern, what’s going to happen block by block, family by family.

[Applause]

And think about an issue like climate – you know, in our cities, a lot of us figured out years and years ago that we had to be agents and actors in the drama when it came to fighting climate change. We couldn’t just sit back and wait. We knew – not only our national government, other national governments were only going to go so far – but cities, more and more being the place where people live, there’s a lot we could do. And, you know, you see it all over the country – incredible innovations in cities, addressing climate change, with our own resources, in our own way. That has to continue, again, regardless of what happens in Washington. And you know what’s interesting about all of those areas I mentioned – bringing police and community together, making sure people have healthcare, protecting our environment, and addressing climate change. Those are all areas where we can find a lot of common ground and not just across party lines but with our business communities as well. And I think this is important because I’ve talked to plenty of business leaders who believe we have to address each and every one of those issues creatively on the ground and don’t want to see the progress we’ve made lost.

Three simple examples and they all link together because there’s been progress. We have – all of us – have moved the ball forward in creating a different and better relationship between police and community. We got more to do but there’s certainly so much evidence of the progress that’s been made.

We have made progress as a nation in getting more people healthcare. We have made progress on climate change. So much of that happened locally and those coalitions – our civic leaders, our business leaders, our elected officials, our labor leaders, our clergy – all of those coalitions that came together to do those things are alive and well at this very moment.

Again, regardless of what you feel as a result of the election, I’m saying something I hope transcends that. The work we’ve all been doing for years happened, continues to happen, will continue to happen, will frame the future of the country.

The final thing I want to say – and it harkens back to the work so many of us did together on the question of infrastructure. I know this will be a crucial priority for the Conference of Mayors. I know, for Nick, this will be an important part of the leadership he will provide. Again, we are entering into something unknown. We don’t know what’s going to come forward from the President and the Congress but we do know there’s an area where things didn’t get addressed the way it should've – it was infrastructure.

And every single one of us has been dealing with the results of that and every single one of us has been catching the china when it falls off the shelf. Right? How many times have you been at the meeting where we had to figure out a way to patch something up and keep something going that by any normal rights would have been a State or federal responsibility, and we would’ve expected help to come or more generous help to come? But we had to find the way to bridge the gap, and, lo-and-behold, every day that’s what we all do.

Maybe, just maybe there’s a moment to do something bigger and better. Maybe there’s a chance for some serious investment. We have to hold [inaudible] that hope but I would say with two simple conditions.

One – if this administration and this Congress actually wants to fix the infrastructure of the United States of America then you have to do it through cities and you have to do it through mayors.

[Applause]

We have to make sure whatever is developed recognizes that if the idea is speed and effectiveness and real impact on our people – there’s a place at the table for other actors as well but no where will the work get done as effectively and as quickly as if it is done through local control.

That’s something – I think that’s a message we can send strong and loud in a bipartisan fashion because we can prove it. Everyone in this room has achieved impressive results on the ground with limited resources. I think one thing that we all share in common is limited resources but we’ve gotten the job done and we can prove to our national government that we’re their best bet.

And the second condition [inaudible] is something my wife says to me all the time. It’s a great rule for living. She says, don’t tell, show me.  We’re all going to have an open hand to a plan that will truly fix our national infrastructure but we have to see the tangible reality. We have to see the specifics we can believe in. None of us is interested in a symbolic plan. We’re interested in fixing the roads and the bridges and the mass transit and the schools and the healthcare facilities that, right now, our people need in our cities.

So, it is a time when I think the role of mayors will be amplified. It’s a time where actual, tangible work is going to be more important than ever. And I just want to say to all of you – I take heart every time I gather with you because in good times and bad regardless of what is available, you produce. And that’s ultimately – whatever other way you want to look at this election – one thing you can interpret it fairly as being is that people want results, and results have resided more and more and more in our cities.

Let’s be an example, all of us, to our country that our governments are going to keep addressing these core issues regardless of the changes in winds. Either way we’re going to [inaudible] the answers on the ground. And if we do it well enough and we do it often enough and we do it together it will shape and frame the national reality. 

Thank you very much.