Good Morning!!
Thank you Neville Isdell for your introduction and thank you for your support of my administration and more importantly, the city of Atlanta. The Coca-Cola Company, your board and executives especially Ingrid Saunders Jones, have been Atlanta’s partners for many decades.
A special thank you to all who have come to share this morning with us.
I have been fascinated by Harriet Tubman and her incredible life, her courage and her commitment to a cause that was so resolute
that she was willing to risk her life—time and time again so that others could be free. It is mind boggling to me when you consider the challenges she must have faced as a woman committed to the freedom of generations of Americans she would never meet.
Most people know that in just 10 years, she made 19 dangerous trips back to lead more than 300 slaves to freedom. Harriet Tubman first escaped at the age of 27 because it was getting too difficult to sell her to a new owner, so she and two of her brothers ran away. Her brothers were afraid of the unknown dangers ahead, so they went back and convinced her to go back as well.
A short time later, she escaped again without her brothers…she remained free and over the next 10 years she went back time and time again to lead her family and hundreds of others to freedom.
Harriet Tubman felt a moral obligation to act. Her legacy is one of daring, courage and leadership. I draw inspiration from Harriet Tubman to tackle the challenges facing our city today.
Leadership was not an option or a choice to her, it was a plan.
Many of you may recall that at my first State of the City Business Breakfast in 2002, I focused my remarks on the City’s apparent financial challenges and the difficult days ahead that we were bound to face.
In those first 100 days, it was clear to me that leadership would not be an option. I would be required to make some difficult but necessary decisions.
Back then…. I asked for your help, your understanding, your support and your leadership to make this great city the best that it could be.
I asked you to join me in the “arena.”
I quoted President Theodore Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” speech delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1910.
He said,
“It is not the critic who counts; Not the man (or woman) who points out how strong the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man, (we know he would mean woman), who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood;
who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and at the worse, if he (or she) fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his (and her) place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
Many of you have been “in the arena”, “daring greatly”….. taking the risk to make this a better city…
We’ve tackled budget deficits, public distrust, flawed and bureaucratic business practices, costly infrastructure projects like the 5th runway and CSO and water consent decrees.
Shortage of funding for affordable housing and limited life saving options for the homeless
Many have helped, led and contributed to our accomplishments….
Members of every community like donors whose generosity brought the private collection of King Papers back to Atlanta, business leaders like Michael Russell and Pete Correll whose unselfish leadership has given new hope for a fully funded William Grady Hospital and vastly improved medical facilities for all who pass through the hospital’s doors, government partners in Fulton and Dekalb Counties who voted to extend their support for MARTA and transit and Atlanta Public Schools who have led educational reform and funding initiatives to move student performance to new levels of excellence and regional leaders who along with us struggle to find reasonable, sensible near term transportation and watershed solutions.
You,
We have chosen to stay in the arena, to dream, to plan
The Beltline
The Streetcar
The arts fund
The Civil and Human Rights Center
Last year at this breakfast we announced our dream for the Center
to capture the spirit of Atlanta, the tradition of non violent strategies for social change, the hope for a place and programs to extend and amplify this community’s commitment to teaching, preaching and living Martin King’s dream of celebration of human dignity, social justice and equality of opportunity.
Indeed we must and will move this plan to reality.
Today, on January 10, with 2 years left in my term I am once again asking you “to stay in the arena”…….“spend yourself for yet another worthy cause”
If Atlanta is to move from Good to Great as our forefathers and mothers dreamed….. then we must keep moving forward, we must expand the consensus for our dreams, we must climb new mountains.
We must build on our successes to conquer new challenges.
So while we inherited a city with deep structural issues, uneven and unreliable basic service delivery, severely neglected infrastructure and unfunded plans.
Today we have an unprecedented foundation for a Great City.
We are building a solid foundation for a great 21st century city,
a brave city, by investing our creativity, innovation, human and financial resources……..Atlanta can be a leader among American cities. .
If you’re counting------this is my seventh state of the city business address. During Theodore Roosevelt’s seventh state of the union address he said,
“We must show foresight, we must look ahead. As a nation we not only enjoy a wonderful measure of present prosperity but if this prosperity is used aright it is an earnest of future success such as no other nation will have. The reward of foresight for this Nation is great and easily foretold.
But there must be the look ahead, there must be a realization of the fact that to waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.”
In 2005 in Washington, DC, 141 mayors identified environmental sustainability as a critical factor for American cities; we signed the U.S. Mayor’s Climate Protection agreement charging ourselves with creating and implementing sustainability plans based on best global practices.
Now we add to our agenda for the future…the global movement to save the planet.
As you saw in the video, we are building a green sustainable city.
A city that uses the energy and resources it needs ever mindful of the limits of nature and our obligation to leave the earth in better condition than we inherited it….
We do this for our children… and we do this because it is the right thing to do.
Our city…………Atlanta should be a leader in the environmental “arena”.
Our strategy is simple.
- Get our own house in order first
- Focus on the green basics first- air, water, energy, waste reduction, recycling, etc.
- Action over planning
- Reach beyond city government walls as quickly as we can.
The good news is that this is a tremendous opportunity for the City to reduce its carbon emissions footprint.
Just as with our investment in water, sanitary sewer, drinking water and combined sewer overall system upgrades many of these projects are not sexy nor are they revolutionary.
They will most likely not get coverage in the local media…..these stories don’t fit the celebrity standards set for day-to-day coverage we see so much of today.
We won’t win awards or get pats on the back for this work, but we can be a part of a global movement to save the planet for our children and their children’s children.
With your help we can increase Atlanta’s “Competitive Advantage”,
With your help we can copy the best models and create new standards of excellence … We can reduce our carbon footprint by 20% by 2020; improve air, water quality and ensure water availability; enhance public health (after all Atlanta is number 1 for the incidence of Asthma); preserve and improve land quality, parks and green space and eliminate wasteful resource uses like the overconsumption of fossil fuels.
“The credit belongs to the man, (we know he would mean woman), who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds;”
We in Atlanta can make history
We can move our city to greatness……
We must “do the deeds”………commit ourselves to excellence,
be honest, innovate, create, and believe the impossible is possible….
In the tradition of Harriett Tubman, Theodore Roosevelt, Martin King and our other heroes and sheroes if we follow our hearts
commit our minds, have the courage of our convictions
and we band together in our characteristic Atlanta Way
we can build a great American city the likes of which we can barely imagine.
Come Go with me….
“The reward of foresight…. Is great and easily foretold”
Thank you