as delivered

[Applause]

MAYOR GIULIANI: Thank you very much . . . and thank you very much, Speaker Vallone.

Thank you all very much for being here and thank you for rescheduling it. This is my last State of the City speech, and, actually, it's a State of the City speech that I wasn't sure last year at this time that I was going to give. I wasn't sure that I'd be Mayor for another year. And I must say, from the time that I decided to remain as Mayor, it has been like a gift to have another year as Mayor of the City of New York. This is maybe the second toughest job in the world. I'm not sure that it is, but it's got to be one of the most rewarding, one of the most fulfilling, and one of the most wonderful jobs in the world, mostly because of all of the people of the City of New York who work together so well.

So I want to begin by thanking them: the Deputy Mayors that I'm very, very fortunate to have serving in my Administration; the Commissioners that you all see here, who have worked very, very hard; and some of the former Deputy Mayors and Commissioners who have all done a wonderful job of turning the City around and making it a very different City than when I gave my first State of the City speech.

I want to thank Speaker Vallone and the City Council. Everything that we've been able to accomplish required approval, and often compromise and a change in plan, but the City Council worked with us and I want to thank you. The other partners in government, the Public Advocate Mark Green, the Comptroller Alan Hevesi, the Borough Presidents-It's been a team effort, but the team effort goes way beyond us. We're the ones who get to sit up here, but we must remember all those 200,000-plus people who work in the streets and in the hospitals and in the schools, and in all the facilities of the City of New York.

The reason I put off the State of the City Speech was because a firefighter, Firefighter Gregg McLoughlin, died last week and his funeral, today, took place at noon. He comes from a family in which his father was a Battalion Chief and his brother is a firefighter. These are the kinds of people on whose backs we're really carried-meaning we elected officials and public officials. The same thing is true with sanitation worker Ed DeMarco, whose funeral is going to take place tomorrow. He, also, on the same day, tragically, had a heart attack.

So, if we may, I'd like to start with just a moment of silent prayer for them, for their families, and really for all the people who work for the City of New York who've given their lives and sacrificed so much to help us. If we can just take a moment to think about them.

[Pause]

Thank you very much. I know their families will appreciate that very, very much.

Last year, we had a big photograph back here, it was a photograph of Times Square on New Year's Eve, the millennium New Year's. This year, I'm going to show you some pictures in this thing [pointing to slide projector] and we're going to try to go modern-age. That's what Times Square looked like the day of New Year's Eve. [Indicating]

That's what it looked like. This is where the whole world was going to celebrate New Year's.

Now, this is what it looked like the day after. [Indicating]

Do you know why? Because of our Sanitation Department, that's why.

[Applause]

The work of all of the people who work for the City of New York is enormously important and there's no one area of work that's more important than any other. But when I was thinking back over the State of the City speeches I've given, I was thinking about what is the purpose of the State of the City speech. And the purpose of the State of the City speech, I believe, is not just to tell you that the City is in good shape or bad shape-it's to set an agenda for the future, for what are we going to get accomplished.

Now, we have just a year. The City has a lot longer to get things accomplished, but my Administration has one more year to get things accomplished. And what I did, in order to prepare for this, was to go back over my prior State of the City speeches to see what we accomplished, and also what we didn't accomplish.

Going back to my first State of the City speech in 1994, in that speech we promised to balance the City budget by closing a $2.3 billion shortfall. We did that with the help of the City Council. We promised to reduce taxes dramatically, and we've reduced them now by about $2.4 billion, again, with the help of the City Council, the State Legislature and Governor Pataki. We promised to get illegal guns off the street, and we did in a major effort. So, yes, we accomplished that, though maybe we didn't completely accomplish it.

In 1995, we promised to advocate for more block granting of federal and state money, and now we have the TANF [Temporary Assistance to Needy Families] grant that's bringing us a lot of money, so we accomplished that.

What we didn't accomplish was correcting funding formulas with Albany and with Washington, D.C. We still send a lot more money to Albany than we get back. We still send an enormous amount more money to Washington than we get back.

In 1996, we promised to create ACS, the Administration for Children's Services, and we did that. We promised to create school-based budgeting and that was accomplished. We called for police control over school safety and we did that, and we called for the elimination of sales tax on clothing purchases. Well, we haven't completely accomplished it yet, because we said we wanted the tax eliminated on purchases of $500 or less and the state has done it for $110 or less. And also in 1996, not yet accomplished, we called for the abolition of the Board of Education.

In 1997, we said we would establish Project Read, Project Smart Schools, and Project Arts. We've restored the arts programs to all of the schools. All of those have been accomplished or they're in progress. We said we would incorporate complaints of police misconduct into CompStat, and we have. And the result is that the restraint of the Police Department each year has increased dramatically. Things have gotten a lot better, so that last year we had the lowest number of police shootings ever in the history of the Police Department. We called for police control over school safety for a second time, and finally accomplished it. Not yet accomplished - abolish the Board of Education.

[Laughter]

You see a theme?

In 1998, we called for converting welfare offices into job centers, a strategy to reform CUNY, to end social promotion, to end principal tenure-all that's been done. We promised to renovate City Hall Park-you can go look at it yourself, it looks great. Columbus Circle, Jazz at Lincoln Center-all that's in progress. Merit pay for ACS workers, that's been done. Extending the school year from 180 to 200 days, that hasn't been done. And abolishing the Board of Education.

[Laughter]

And then in '99, creating HealthPass, ending the Port Authority lease over JFK and La Guardia Airport, I'll explain to you how we're going to get that done a little bit later. And, of course, not yet accomplished, abolishing the Board of Education.

And finally last year, the HealthStat announcement, the infrared cameras for the Fire Department, $110 million redevelopment for Kingsbridge Armory, creating high tech districts in Brooklyn, Long Island City, the Fordham section of the Bronx, seizure of cars of reckless drivers. Not yet accomplished, abolishing the Board of Education.

So, the purpose of that is to show you that a State of the City speech doesn't accomplish all of the things that you want to accomplish. And there were a lot of other things that were accomplished and a lot of other things that weren't. The idea of it is to set a direction for the City, because it challenges you, your administration, the City Council, and everyone else to get things done.

I believe the revival of the City, a reform of the City, the renaissance of the City-whatever you want to call it-begins with public safety. That's the place where it all starts. This City was too dangerous. This City was a city in which people were worried too much about whether they were going to live or die. And the places of the most poverty were the places where people were the most afraid of living or dying, or being intimidated or being hurt. That has changed dramatically. I have illustrated it many different ways, and recently I thought of one other way to do it.

When I came into office in 1993, there were 8,259 felonies per week in the City of New York. Those are the seven major felonies that get reported to the FBI. In the last year that we just finished, there were 3,556 felonies. In other words, there were 4,703 felonies less per week in the City of New York. That's 4,703 people who weren't mugged, weren't raped, weren't killed, weren't robbed, didn't have their cars stolen. We just multiply that out by a year and you can see that at the core of the change is the massive change in public safety, and the fact that people can exercise the most important civil right. I announced in the first State of the City speech that safety was our most important civil right, because if you aren't safe, then nothing else works. That's still a work in progress. It's not something that has been completely accomplished and it's not something that you can easily completely accomplish.

Last year, we had a number of terrible crimes that took place in the City of New York. Probably the one that we'll remember the most, as we look back on last year, was the murder, the execution that took place at Wendy's. Two criminals went into Wendy's and shot seven people killing five people, and wounding the others. These were horrible, horrible murders.

But what emerges from that murder? Well, first of all, Craig Godineaux had been put out on parole three times. He had been convicted of drug dealing; he was put out on parole. He was convicted of robbery; he was put out on parole. Then he was convicted of criminal possession of a relatively small amount of drugs. Do you want to know why we arrest people with small amounts of drugs? Go look at Craig Godineaux, go look at his criminal record, and then go look at what he did. Just ten months after he was let out on parole-a parole that shouldn't exist-he engaged in this murder.

Also, his accomplice, John Taylor, had two warrants for his arrest. Had we arrested him, and had Godineaux not gotten parole, maybe we could have avoided those five murders and two shootings.

We're going to ask, again, that the State Legislature and the Governor do away with parole for all people convicted of felonies. The idea that a drug crime isn't a crime of violence is a sad, sad, mistaken idea-it is. If you get convicted of a drug crime, you should serve your sentence for a drug crime. You shouldn't be paroled the way Craig Godineaux was paroled.

But beyond that, there's something that we can do here in New York City. There's something that we can do immediately. We can take all of the warrants that we have-111,000 warrants, can you believe that? We have 111,000 warrants; 26,000 for felonies. We take those and we can have the Police Department engage in a massive effort to arrest all of those people that are wanted on those warrants.

We're going to take an additional 600 police officers and assign them just to that function, in addition to the 600 that we already have. Because we're going to try to catch every single one of the people who are responsible, first of all, for the 26,000 felony warrants, and then as many of the misdemeanor warrants as we can do, in an effort to drive the crime rate down, to see if we can reduce the 3,500 or so felonies that occur, per week, in the City of New York. Every crime that we stop represents a person who's going to live, a person who can go about exercising their right as a free citizen of the United States.

And the second thing that we're going to do is expand our Parole Absconder Task Force. We're going to take our police officers and we're going to go search for the people who are on parole who have violated parole, because unfortunately, they cause a disproportionate amount of our crime.

And the third thing that we're going to do in order to bring that crime rate down is, we're going to concentrate on property crime. Property crime makes up 67 percent of the crimes that we have to deal with now in the City of New York. So we are going to look at the precincts in this City that have the most property crime, and put together a task force that concentrates on property crime.

Last year, in the first two weeks of the year, crime went up. The Police Department brought crime down last year. Throughout most of America, crime didn't go down, but it did here because of Operation Condor. So this year, we're going to try these three other additional programs to see if we can accomplish the impossible, which is to bring crime down again after seven years in a row of doing it. The Police Department accomplished the impossible last year, so we'll try to do it again this year.

[Applause]

Thank you.

But there's another way to do that. There's another way to accomplish that. And it's a way that we began about two or three years ago, and we have to continue today. And that's to make ourselves much more proficient in being able to analyze DNA, being able to figure out how we can use it to investigate more crimes.

Last year we promised that we would build a state-of-the-art laboratory for analyzing DNA. And that's the state-of-the-art laboratory and that's where it's going to be, at the site of Bellevue Hospital. By the way, that's 23 chromosomes and 23 chromosomes. [Indicating slide]

I also now promote books. But this is a very, very good book. [Holding up the book Genome]

You should all read this book. It's a very simple description of the genome-I can understand it. If I can understand it, anybody can understand it. And the most important thing is our Police Department can understand it, because it requires an understanding of the genome, and the way in which DNA works, in order to utilize this technology very, very effectively.

I want to tell you about two cases involving DNA, so you get the point of what I'm talking about and why it's so important.

Vincent Johnson. Vincent Johnson was arrested a few months ago for five sexual assaults, strangulations and murders. Vincent Johnson was suspected of these murders, of these sexual assaults. When he came into the police precinct to be questioned, when he was outside, a detective in Brooklyn North, Detective Steven Feely . . . . come on, clap for him . . .

[Applause]

Listen to this. Detective Feely noticed that on the way in, Johnson spit on the ground like that. I'll illustrate.

[Illustrating]

Then the police questioned him and he refused to submit to a DNA sample. But the detective went out and he collected the spit off the ground. And they went and had it tested by the medical examiner. The DNA in the spit matched the DNA of the person who was engaged in five murders and five assaults, and Johnson got arrested for it. We solved five murders and we took him off the street. Who knows how many more women he would have assaulted, beaten, or killed?

Now, this is why it's worth building that DNA laboratory, and making certain that we have the ability to accomplish state-of-the-art DNA analysis.

The second case, in case you need one other, is equally amazing and it just was in the newspapers over the weekend. A criminal by the name of Troy Brown has just been arrested for stabbing and killing two people in an Astoria grocery in December. When Troy Brown was engaged in the killing, during the stabbing, he cut himself. And when he was being questioned by the police he had a bandage on his hand. And rather than asking whether he'd submit to DNA testing, which people refused, the police officers very, very kindly said, "Can we have your bandage redressed?" Which they did. They took off one bandage and they put on a new bandage. And they took the old bandage and they gave it to the laboratory. And when it was tested in the laboratory, the DNA on the bandage matched the DNA of the man who stabbed and killed the two people in the Astoria grocery store. He's been arrested for it. God willing, he'll be convicted of it. And this is a person who had 14 prior arrests and convictions. This was a crime machine taken off the street, again, because of DNA.

Right now we analyze more DNA in our Medical Examiner's office than anyplace else in the country-twice as much as the FBI does. So we're ahead of the curve, but we're not far enough ahead of the curve.

Last year we sent out for analysis, at the recommendation of then Police Commissioner Safir, all of the rape kits that we had. We have gotten those analyzed - or most of them - and we're going to continue to do that. And we're going to make sure that we stay ahead of this and we're going to do everything we can to get this laboratory built so that New York can stay ahead of the curve, and we can continue to use DNA as a way of reducing crime. We're also going to increase Operation Condor so we have more units out in the street to try to reduce crime.

And one other thing that has proved very, very helpful to us is the use of cameras in housing developments. We have cameras now in a number of housing developments, but we need to put more in. So we're going to put cameras in five more housing developments over the next year. This was very, very controversial when we first started to do it, but the reality is, do you know who wants the cameras in the housing developments? Do you know who wants them in overwhelming numbers? The people who live there. When I go to housing developments, I'm asked about it all the time, and we're criticized for not putting enough in.

Now think about this, because I know everybody thinks about the civil liberties part of cameras in housing developments. How many people live in a co-op, a condominium? Anybody want to admit they do? I used to, I used to live in one. It was an expensive one. We can admit it, right? Are there cameras in your co-op and condominiums? Yes, right, there are cameras. Why are they there? To protect you.

Well, aren't people who are middle income and poor entitled to the same protection that you get in your rich condominium and co-op?

[Applause]

Aren't they more likely to be the victim of a crime than you are? Of course they are. And the purpose of our government is to try to make sure that everybody's safe-rich people, middle class people, poor people. Sometimes, maybe we have to rethink some of the ways in which we look at these civil liberties issues, because maybe some of our thinking has become irrational, and not relevant to the most important civil liberty, which is to be alive and to be able to function for yourself and for your family. So we'll put in cameras in five more developments, and we know that will bring crime down quite dramatically.

There are a number of other innovations that have taken place in the last four or five years. But one that I think that may be one of the most important, but that doesn't get enough attention, is the creation of the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management-what we call OEM. They've helped to manage our way through the West Nile Virus, the blackout in Washington Heights, several severe weather emergencies, including the most recent one that we just talked about, and then a whole host of other things. You can't believe all the preparation they do for possible terrorist threats, possible terrorist acts, all of which we hope never happen, but none of which we were really prepared for back in 1994 or 1995, except in the most rudimentary way. And the Office of Emergency Management has accomplished that.

One of the things that I'm going to ask for as part of the Charter revision-and I'll give you a whole outline of the things that we'll ask for-is that OEM be made a Charter Agency, because it's something that the City should have permanently. The City should permanently be required to think about, in advance, how to deal with emergencies, rather than deal with them as they're happening, so we can save more lives and help more people. And we'll try to organize an international conference in October in which we try to institutionalize everything that we've learned about emergency management, so that it can be part of the City for the future and then can be improved on by future administrations.

Last year, I announced the infrared cameras for our Fire Department, the greatest Fire Department on Earth. We've now purchased a lot of those infrared cameras and our Fire Department is using them to search out areas where there's smoke, to search out areas where they can more effectively deal with fire. Now, this year, we're going to do something about sudden cardiac arrest. There are about 5,000 of those in New York City every year. And when I first became Mayor, we did a number of things to try to address that. We trained a lot of our firefighters as first responders, which we didn't do in the past, so they can get there and resuscitate somebody quickly. We made EMS part of the Fire Department so they could coordinate that response quickly. And we gave defibrillators to our firefighters and to a number of our Police Officers.

It's now time to get defibrillators all throughout the City of New York. And I'm going to show you that even an idiot, namely me, can work one of these things.

[Holding it up] This is a defibrillator. This is what it looks likes. It's as simple to use as this. Now, we did practice a little.

[Demonstrating]

Rudy, would you hold this.

DEPUTY MAYOR WASHINGTON: Sure.

MAYOR GIULIANI: These are the pads. You just take them off. [Placing pads on Deputy Mayor Coles] You put one up here, you put one over there. Now watch.

Rudy, just hold it, nothing's going to happen to you. Take it easy, relax. I'll explain this in a minute, now, here it goes. Now, here, it's going to tell you everything to do. This is idiot-proof, watch.

DEFIBRILLATOR PROVIDES AUDIBLE INSTRUCTIONS: "Apply pads to patient's bare chest."

MAYOR GIULIANI: I did that.

DEFIBRILLATOR PROVIDES AUDIBLE INSTRUCTIONS: "Plug in pads connector next to flashing light, analyzing heart rhythm."

MAYOR GIULIANI: Okay.

DEFIBRILLATOR PROVIDES AUDIBLE INSTRUCTIONS: "Do not touch the patient."

MAYOR GIULIANI: Do not touch the patient, you hear this?

DEFIBRILLATOR PROVIDES AUDIBLE INSTRUCTIONS: "Shock advise."

MAYOR GIULIANI: Shock advise, okay.

DEFIBRILLATOR PROVIDES AUDIBLE INSTRUCTIONS: "Shocking, stay clear of patient. Deliver shock. Analyzing heart rhythm, do not touch the patient."

MAYOR GIULIANI: The other thing that it tells you is, "Analyzing heart rhythm." This guy could be dead by now, come on.

[Laughter]

DEFIBRILLATOR PROVIDES AUDIBLE INSTRUCTIONS: "No shock advised."

MAYOR GIULIANI: No shock advised.

DEFIBRILLATOR PROVIDES AUDIBLE INSTRUCTIONS: "Check airway. Check breathing. Check pulse. If needed, begin CPR."

MAYOR GIULIANI: No, CPR, that part we're not going to do.

Now, we're going to order 2,000 of these, and we're going to put them in City buildings. We're going to put them in the Municipal Building, we're going to put them in office buildings, we're going to put them in the senior centers, and this way we can train someone, at least a few people in each one of the buildings, on how to use it, in places where we get large numbers of people. This is foolproof. In other words, when you put these pads on, if the person is in cardiac arrest, it will then apply a shock. If, however, the person is not, if there's a heartbeat, then it doesn't work. And it's been used thousands and thousands of times. And the rate of success in which a life is saved is quite impressive.

Last year, for example, in using the more professional model, the Fire Department saved over 770 lives in New York City. That's 770 people that before the Fire Department had these defibrillators who would be dead-they wouldn't be here now.

It was a little funny watching it. I imagine it isn't so funny when it's for real. But the reality is that this is very, very simple. You take it, you put the pads in the two places intended, you put it on, and you wait for it to tell you what to do. If you have to apply the shock, you touch that, if you don't, you just pull it off and do CPR-obviously, calling EMS at the same time, calling 911 at the same time. Which gets me to another thing that we should do.

We need something in addition to 911. 47% of the calls that we get on 911 are not emergency calls. Think of what that means for the emergency caller. It's overwhelming the system with calls that didn't have to go into 911 and it has to have an impact on our response time. It has to mean that our response time is increased, because we're not getting the emergency calls out fast enough.

Some cities, including Baltimore, have gone to a system of 311-911 for life threatening emergencies, for crimes and for fires, and 311 for less essential emergencies. And it's going to take a while to do that, but we should begin the process of doing that now. We should begin the process of analyzing it, organizing it. It'll take a few years to get there, but if we don't start now, then it's going to take even more than a few years. So I think that's something that can help an awful lot in increasing the ability of the City to respond to medical emergencies.

And, finally, another thing that we want to do comes out of the experience with the Police Department, and that is to take the CompStat program that has been so successful in the Police Department, and that we've used with HealthStat, and try to apply it to other departments-to the Department of Transportation, that's already doing it, to the Fire Department, that's already in the process of doing it, and then to a number of other departments. I'm going to ask Debra Kurtz-who, at Correction, developed the TEAMS [Total Efficiency Accountability Management System] program along with Commissioner Kerik, who was then the Correction Commissioner-and Geoff Hess and Vinny La Padula to organize that effort, so that we can have CompStat going in each one of these agencies, because it can be very, very valuable.

If making a city safe is the single most important thing you can do, equally important is making sure that children get the highest quality education possible. Because ultimately, the future of the City depends on how decent, how well educated, how enterprising, how conscientious the people who are working for and running this City 20 or 30 years from now will be.

Now, for me, I believe the way to approach the educational system of the City of New York is on two tracks, from two perspectives. And some of this is my own personal belief, from my own experience. I think you have to do everything you can to help the children that are getting an education, all of them, in the City of New York-all of the children in the public schools, all the children in the private schools, all the children in the parochial schools. They're all citizens of the City of New York. And I don't know which one of them is going to make the next great advance in science, or be a great artist, or be a great singer, or whatever. I don't know which one of those schools they'll come from, or where the future Mayors of the City are going to come from. All of our schools are important.

So I think the first thing that you have to do is make sure that you're doing the most you can with the system that is educating its 1 million children. I believe-I honestly believe, it's not political, it's not posturing-I just honestly believe that the system is a flawed system. It doesn't work. It's not organized to work effectively. It's not organized to be accountable.

So why do I get frustrated with it and why do I appear to get angry at it? I'll tell you why. Because I feel bad for the children that aren't getting a good education. Some things we have time to reform. So you take five or ten years to reform them, big deal. For a kid you don't get five or ten years to reform an educational system. If you don't do it fast, then that kid is not going to get a good education. You can't go back and redo it, for most of them.

So I feel really bad that we haven't made the fundamental reforms in New York City that we should be making. At the same time, we should be doing everything that we can to enhance the system as it exists. It's a difficult two-tier track.

So let me tell you what we're going to do with the system. And I respect very, very much the work that's being done in the school system, by the people who work so hard and are doing the very best, I believe, with a flawed system. I think Chancellor Levy is doing an excellent job within a system in which it's very difficult to achieve the kind of accomplishments that I would like to see happen. And I believe that the people working with him, Judy Rizzo-who has worked with Chancellor Levy and worked with Chancellor Crew-I think she's a hero, and I think she's done an excellent job within a system that isn't working.

So first let me talk about what we can do to make the system work, and then a few ideas on how to change it. I want you to look at this, not from the point of view of criticism-because it's not criticism in particular of our own school system-it's a criticism of every school system in the United States of America. These are recent tests of 8th grade students.

[Pointing toward slide showing results of Third International Math and Science Study]

In the Third International Math and Science Study conducted in 1999, the United States ranked 18th in science and 19th in math. The United States ranked behind Latvia, Belgium, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan in math, and we ranked behind Finland, the Czech Republic, Australia, Netherlands, South Korea in science. New York City is no different. We can't rank that far down in math and science for too long and remain the competitive nation that we've been over the last 100, 200 years. We've got to do something about this. So let's try to do something here in New York.

In consultation with the Chancellor, what we're going to start doing is we're going to try to expand the school week one more day. We're going to use Saturdays and Sundays, depending on religious observances and availability of teachers and school buildings. We're going to expand the number of science classes, have them on Saturdays and Sundays, so that we make sure that the children who need help in science get help in science.

We think we'll be able, through Project Science, to reach 45,000 students, and to give them three or four hours of additional science instruction per week, the way we did with Project Read a couple of years ago, and we did that during the school day, at the end of the day. But now we'll be doing it on Saturdays and Sundays, and have rather major utilization of our schools over the weekend.

We should also do this for English. Randy Mastro, the Chancellor and a number of people working with them did a wonderful job in trying to analyze what we can do with bilingual education to make it more effective, both in the long-term and practically, what we can do right now. And I think the idea of giving parents an option of whether to enroll their children in English immersion or bilingual education-I think practically that's the best that we can do right now, and I think it will make a lot of advances.

But another thing that we can do, maybe to jump-start that, is on Saturdays and Sundays, let's bring these students in on a Saturday and Sunday in our underutilized school buildings, and let's teach them English. Ultimately, this is also meant to try to create a ladder out. I mean, you have to learn English. The only way you're really going to be successful or give yourself the best chance of being successful in this country is if you become as proficient as possible in English. So hopefully, we can reach another 45,000 to 46,000 students that way, and make sure that they receive the kind of education that they deserve.

The other thing that we'll do to try to enhance reading and literacy, in addition to continuing the programs that I believe have shown some real success, is, at the suggestion of the Chancellor, to put classroom libraries in all our classrooms, from K through 8. That's about 21,000 classrooms. It will reach about 700,000 students. There will be about 300 books in each classroom, so that the students, when they're sitting in class and being taught, will have books all around them-books that they can touch, books that they can read.

[Applause]

Based on two teachers and my mother, I developed a lifelong, absolute avid passion for reading. I even like-I don't know if you do-I like to smell books.

This is a good book. I'm getting nothing from pushing this book. But you want to be surrounded by books. You want to be in a situation in which you have books around you and books can really mean something for you.

One of the programs that we started last year, and I see Bob Tisch here-first of all, congratulations to the Giants, yesterday…

[Applause]

I like that "NY" on the side of their helmet now. They had a great game yesterday.

[Pointing to picture of field pre-renovation]

…This is what the Port Richmond High School's baseball, football, soccer fields and track look like right now, as we speak.

[Pointing to picture of field post-renovation]

And that is what most of our high school athletic facilities look like as a result of a program started by Bob and Richard Kahn, and a number of others, in which they raised money and we match it with City money. They are in the process of renovating seven fields, and one of them is done. Let me show you what that looks like, to show you the difference, at the George Washington High School. That's the difference.

[Applause]

Now, what we're going to do is put in the money, and have them raise the additional amount, together, as part of their collaborative effort. There are 52 fields in the City of New York. Seven are already being renovated. Now, we will do all the rest of those fields, so in the course of this year, next year-maybe this will take two years, maybe it will take three. But over the next year, two years, three years, all the fields can look like this. And think about it this way-because this is very much like Project Arts, when we brought the arts education back into the public schools. We've trained about 800 or 900 more teachers. We've reached every classroom now. The Board of Education did wonderful work on that, so did Schuyler Chapin and our Department of Cultural Affairs. They worked very, very collaboratively together.

Think about it this way. You can reach a child in many different ways. Some children love music. Some children love the visual arts. Some children love to play football. Some children love to play basketball. Some children love to run track. Some children are going to enjoy science. Some children are going to enjoy reading. We have to try to access them, get to them, reach them in any way that we can. We're not going to reach all the kids this way, but we can reach a lot of the kids this way.

Renovating these fields is an important investment in their future. So for those who say, "Well, you should be investing the money in academics alone," we invest a lot of money in that, $11 billion annually. So it's worth investing money in this as well.

[Applause]

So those are the programs that we're going to do to enhance instruction. In addition, we're going to expand summer school, so that we build on the work that's been done over the last year to end social promotion. We'll expand summer school to reach another 50,000 students.

Also, another major turnaround in the City is the School Construction Authority. The School Construction Authority was-I have to always be careful because I was going to say "a disaster." But the School Construction Authority wasn't doing a really good job. See, that's a better way. The new Rudy should say it that way.

The School Construction Authority wasn't doing such a good job.

[A voice from the audience]

MAYOR GIULIANI: Was it a disaster?

[A voice from the audience]

MAYOR GIULIANI: I can't say that. The old Rudy would say, "It was a disaster."

However, the school construction authority has gone through a major, major change. Howard Wilson and Milo Riverso and a number of other -where's Howard? Is he here or is he out building a school? There he is, back there.

[Applause]

The School Construction Authority couldn't get things done on time. Now they're really on schedule and they are ready, willing and able to do more projects. So we're going to add 12 more schools, move them up. Schools that wouldn't be done normally until two or three years from now, sometimes four years from now, we're going to move them all up to this year-accelerate all of that money in the capital budget that is stretched out over a four- or five-year period. It's about $360 million. We're going to try to bring it all into this year and do 12 more schools right now, so that we try to overcome the overcrowding problem as quickly as possible, and have modern facilities, beautiful facilities for our students.

Thank you, Howard, for doing it.

[Applause]

Also, is Billy Thompson, here? Did he show up?

Billy where are you? We made a deal. Well, we made a deal, I think I can say this-"deal"-with the President of the Board. The deal is that we're going to sell 110 Livingston Street and the two buildings that operate with it. We should be able to get a lot of money for them, and we're going to find another headquarters, a new building. In this new building we'll put a high school and we'll have a new headquarters for the Board of Education. And it should be a smaller building, less people. But that's good-yeah, you can clap for that.

[Applause]

But it also should be a beautiful building. I have a philosophy that's reflected, I hope, in the courthouses that we've built during my administration. They should be dignified buildings. When you walk into the Board of Education or you walk into a courthouse, or walk into a precinct-another thing that we're going to do is have a precinct modernization program. We're going to invest a substantial amount of money in fixing up our precincts. When people go into a police precinct or into a Board of Education, or into a Fire Department headquarters like the one we've built, they should feel elevated. They should feel that "important things happen here."

So, sure, it should be a smaller building, because I would like to see the bureaucracy reduced, but it should be a beautiful building. It should be a modern building, it should be a smart building, and it should be a state-of-the-art building. And the sale of the three buildings that exist should bring enough money to accomplish that.

Nothing is more important than our schools being safe. You can't teach in an environment in which children are frightened, teachers are frightened, and crime takes place, so we're going to hire 800 more school security agents. We're going to hire 400 more school crossing guards. The Chancellor has agreed to now create three more Second Opportunity Schools, which we had agreed upon about three years ago, but only one was built.

And the Board also has another very, very good idea. We're going to create in each school a suspension center-which altogether will be able to accommodate about 45,000 students. Because something irrational happens, right now, in schools. If a child acts in an aggressive way, or if a child hits another child, or a child keeps making noise in school, or keeps interrupting, or the kind of thing you might remember doing, you would be sent to detention for, right? I used to spend loads of time in detention. Sometime I'll tell you about it. I learned some of my best stuff in detention.

Now, sometimes the children are just like suspended for two days or three days or four days. They don't come to school. Now, enterprising New York City kids can figure this out. Right? Half my high school education could have been gone with this one. You make some noise in school, and then the teacher throws you out and you don't have to come to school for three days.

So, now, instead of that, for the more minor infractions, you'll go to a school suspension center. For the major ones you'll go to one of the SOS schools. But teachers now have the ability to suspend you and throw you out of class based on state law, so they need the ability to do that, not because we want to stigmatize or hurt the child who's acting improperly or maybe sometimes even illegally, but because there are other children in the classroom and they have to learn, too. And you've got to separate the child who's creating the problem. So I think that will be a major, major advance in what we're trying to do.

Now, I said there are two parts to this and I don't want to spend a lot of time on this, but I just have to say this. I believe that our City is failing our children in a very, very fundamental way. The New York City public school system used to be the ladder out of poverty. It used to be the way a poor child, whose parents very often didn't speak English, or spoke very poor English, or had no education themselves, could step on the ladder and start climbing up and literally achieve the American dream, which means that you can rise to the level of your talent. But you need education to do that.

We are failing the poor children of New York City today, not all of them, but too many of them, because we're not providing that kind of education broadly. And just patching up the system and doing the things I announced isn't going to make our public schools once again a ladder out of poverty. And I would not be telling you honestly what's in my heart if I told you anything other than that.

That's why I believe we have to revolutionize the system. And when I said we should blow it up or whatever, what I'm trying to say to you is, you're hurting these kids, you really are, and lots of them. This is not the major ladder out of poverty that it used to be, you're fooling yourself if you think it is. And if you think the reforms I just announced, which I believe in-and they're going to help-if you think this is going to make it into a ladder out of poverty like it used to be, it's not.

You've got to have the courage to really change it. You've got to have the courage to do what they did in Chicago-do away with the Board of Education.

[Applause]

Do away with all the Boards, all of them. No big Board, no little Board, no Boards, very few bureaucrats, very few. The money should go to the kids.

[Applause]

We should do what they're doing in Milwaukee. We should. We should have the courage to do what they do in Milwaukee. When I leave being Mayor a year from now, probably my greatest disappointment is that I wasn't able to convince all of you to do what they're doing in Milwaukee. Here's what they're doing in Milwaukee, just to remind you, and I have another way around it, so that's why I'm going to remind you of it.

The poorest 20 percent of the parents have the same choice as the richest parents. Now, I can afford to send my children to private school. Many of you can afford to do that. But my children shouldn't be getting a better education just because I have more money than someone else. That isn't right, that isn't American. In a country that says that education is a right-and that's what Brown v. Board of Education said, right? It's a constitutional right, a good education. Then you should not be deprived of a good education because you don't have enough money to afford the education you want for a child.

In a country that says that a woman's right to choose is constitutionally protected, and in a state that says that that right to choose should not be deprived of a woman who's too poor to exercise that right-here, the 168,000 parents who wanted scholarships for their children to go to a school other than the one the government required, mandated them to send their child to-those parents are being deprived of freedom in a sense that we mean it in America. And probably the most important kind of freedom, the freedom that they want for their child, maybe in a way that we don't even understand anymore, because we're too removed from it - some of us, right? - the freedom to be able to get out of poverty. That's what they're saying to us.

Ted Forstmann offered 2,500 scholarships, in New York City, to enable low-income parents to send their children to private or parochial school. 168,000 parents of kids in New York City public schools were desperate for those scholarships. And we're saying, "No, you can't have that choice for your child, because you're too poor to have that choice."

I believe this is a major civil rights issue. And I think it's going to be the one that defines a lot of the discussion in the next four or five years. And I can't seem to be able to figure out how to work it through the New York City Council-everybody has a right to have a different view of this, I respect that-or the New York State Legislature.

But here's something the federal government can do with a new President, who believes in vouchers. They can take the Title I money that we get, about $460 million, and they can convert it by putting more money into it, they can convert it into vouchers. So that parents who have children in Title I schools can get a voucher can opt the child out of that school and go select another school. It wouldn't involve the State Legislature having to do anything. It wouldn't involve the state constitutional provisions on church and state. And we need competition, that's what we need.

Our school system is going to function better if we allow competition in the school system, and we're not afraid of it. And I believe that this will not hurt the public school system. I believe it will save the public school system. The more competition that exists, the more effective the system, ultimately, will be.

So I know there are people who strongly disagree with this, but I hope you understand that I strongly believe in it. And it comes out of the best I can do in figuring out how we can do a lot more for our children than we've done in the past. So I'm going to continue to fight for it and fight for it as hard as I can.

[Applause]

Another success story that I think is really wonderful is CUNY. A lot of the State of the City speeches that I gave around 1996 and 1997 were about CUNY and the problems at CUNY. And I believe that Herman Badillo and Matt Goldstein and all of the people that are working on reforming CUNY-they're doing an absolutely great job of turning it around. So what I'd like to do is to encourage that effort by making more of an investment in CUNY. My administration has mostly made non-investments in CUNY, in an effort to spur them to do more. Well, they are doing more.

So we want to invest more in CUNY, so that they can hire more full-time faculty, because the full-time faculty is down pretty low. And so that we can expand the College Now Program that's going on between CUNY and the Board of Education, in which they send people from CUNY, professors from CUNY, into the high schools to teach the students, to get them ready for college. So now we can expand it, I hope, with the new resources to all of the high schools, so that we can continue that effort and reinforce it.

Another area of great success that happened because of a combination of a good idea and an absolutely great person is the Administration for Children's Services.

[Applause]

The Administration for Children's Services is an agency that is devoted to helping the children who are most in need in the City. It used to be the Child Welfare Agency, and it was part of the Human Resources Administration, an agency that did welfare - it didn't help children as well as it should. We separated ACS from the Human Resources Administration, and that was a good idea. That's a system that was designed to make helping children accountable. But like all of these things, it's not just a system that has produced change; it's the people.

And in this case, Nick Scoppetta agreed to become the first, and so far only, Commissioner of the Administration for Children's Services. And they have saved, I believe, hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of children. They've professionalized the work force. They have merit pay for caseworkers. They have more education for caseworkers. They have caseloads down to reasonable levels. And all of that - all of those are wonderful statistics. But the main thing that they've done is that they've helped enormous numbers of children. They've increased adoptions to about 20,000 so far, and last year they had about 4,000. Probably the most important thing you can do for a child is to find a permanent home for them. And each year, Nick and ACS do innovative, creative, and new things to try to increase the number of adoptions.

I was talking before about how a building should reflect the importance of what you're doing, like a new Board of Education should reflect the importance of what goes on in the Board of Education. Here's the new building for the Administration for Children's Services, which had an official opening a few months ago, but actually is going to start to function toward the end of the month. It's really a beautiful building and I want you to see it.

It's on the site of the old Bellevue Hospital. It's a Stanford White building, and it's been renovated in a beautiful way. And hopefully the children who come in here will feel what Nick and ACS are trying to do for them, which is love them, care for them, let them know they're important, and let them know that despite what they've been through, there's a lot of hope for them in the future.

We'll also increase, hopefully, the number of foster parents, by doing a major foster parent drive-increasing not just the number, but also the quality of foster parents. We've got to keep trying to do that. The number of foster children is down by 11,000 or 12,000, but still not every child can find an adoptive home. So at the same time, we will try very, very hard to increase the quality of foster parents-although we have some really wonderful ones, who are doing an absolutely terrific job.

Last year we announced a new health program called HealthStat. HealthStat is something that we're going to continue to push as much as we possibly can. Here's the whole purpose of HealthStat. While everybody is trying to figure out how to create universal health insurance, we have somewhere around 300,000 children in New York City, who, if we could reach them, can sign up for health insurance. Right now, if we just reach them, if we get to them, they can sign up for Child Health Plus-they're eligible for it, they just don't know it. And then there are adults eligible for other programs.

Now we've signed up 76,000 children and adults as a result of this. We took about 20 New York City agencies, and we organized them at the Office of Emergency Management, the way we organize for a snowstorm or a hurricane, or if a blackout occurs, or whatever, because it is the same kind of an emergency. And we got tremendous help from all of the agencies. You'd be surprised-they were in competition with each other. The Board of Education has also embraced this in a very big way and has done a wonderful job.

But you wouldn't expect that the Department of Correction is one of the leaders in signing up children in HealthStat, right? You wouldn't think of that. But they are, because they do come in contact with a lot of people who have children, who deserve to have health coverage. And the Department of Correction has done a wonderful job in this.

Norman Seabrook is looking at me here, which reminds me that the Department deserves separate mention for the unbelievable job that they do in making our jails models for the rest of the country.

[Applause]

I visited on New Year's Day, Norman, and I went to the Punitive Segregation Unit. I did this a couple of New Years's ago, as well. When I walk through, they don't clap for me like here. And the funny thing is when I went three years ago, they called me the same name then that they did this year. But you should all go to Rikers Island.

[Laughter]

As a visit, as a visit. And you should see the remarkable job that they do - I didn't think it was possible. And our Correction Officers, like our Sanitation Workers and Police Officers, and like our Firefighters and our teachers, and all of the people who work for the City-they're really special people and they do an absolutely great job.

[Applause]

But back to HealthStat. I'm not satisfied with the results. We started off with about 320,000 kids. We've signed up 76,000 so far. But there are a lot of kids out there right now who need health insurance, and we haven't gotten it to them, so we're not doing our job. So we're going to need to reemphasize, redouble our efforts. We're doing everything we can, and we need your help.

We're going to do a bonus program. Since the schools can get to the most kids, we're going to offer $25,000 to any school that signs up 70 percent of the kids who are eligible for HealthStat. And the principal and the teachers can use it for any educational purpose that they want.

[Applause]

And if they sign up 100 percent of the kids, we'll make it $50,000.

[Applause]

This is the phone number, right there, 1 (888) NYC-6116.

And these are the results that they've had so far: 74,000 children enrolled, 4,000,000 contacts with families, and 71,000 referrals to community-based providers. So they've done a terrific job. We've had tremendous help from the Greater Hospital Association and from Dennis Rivera and 1199, all of whom have cosponsored much of this with us, in reaching these children. But anything you can think of, any new thing that you can think of to help do this . . . Mark [Green], you've been enormously helpful, I want to thank you. And a lot of people have been trying to help sign up the children.

And all of you-this is an effort that the entire community can share in and we can get it done.

There are two other health projects that I would like to mention, two other things that I think can be enormously helpful.

We have a very, very big study of cancer called the New York City Cancer Project going on, which will bring in about 300,000 people, so that we can study the genetic causes and environmental causes of cancer in the largest urban population in the United States.

I would like to also have our City hospitals cooperate with CAP-Cure, which does the most effective work on research for prostate cancer, because we're a population-and obviously I'm personally affected by it-but we're a population that's going to be more affected by it than most others. Prostate cancer affects African-American males twice as often as it does white males, and it's more fatal-that's just the reality. And the fact is that CAP Cure can offer a lot in terms of treatment, and it can offer a lot in terms of earlier detection, education, right in the communities that need it most. So we are going to help them reach those groups.

And the second thing that we should do is look at heart disease-because with all of the discussion of cancer, which of course is very dangerous and kills lots of people, cardiac disease is still the biggest killer. So we're going to try to do a major study that looks at compliance and the use of drugs, and making sure that people take them, in order to increase people's awareness of how they should take care of themselves, so they don't become the victim of a heart attack.

I had a chart here, my welfare reduction chart-I carry it with me all over the place; I do; I carry it around. I don't have it right here, but I usually have it, because, we have reduced the number of people on welfare, now, more than the population of just about any city you can think of. I think we've reduced it to about 550,000 fewer people on welfare. That's important, and it's important to keep it that way. The best way to keep it that way is through jobs.

The first year that I gave my State of the City speech, the City had only found 9,215 jobs for people on welfare. Last year we found 119,340 jobs for people on welfare, and our goal for this year is 125,000 jobs. We have to continue to reduce welfare, we have to do it by finding jobs for people. We have 17 job centers-we should have 32, but for a court order, which I believe is a mistake. It's a mistake, because it's stopping us from doing the thing that we have to do to really keep people off welfare, which is to get them jobs, and we're going to face a crisis this year.

I believe a few years ago we would have thought this would be a much bigger crisis. The Federal Welfare Reform Law that was passed by Congress five years ago and signed by the President, allowed welfare for only five years, remember? Five years. We have 46,000 people in New York City about to face that time limit, and I think maybe five years ago, we thought it was going to be more like about 400,000. So it's not nearly as bad or as difficult as we thought it might be, but 46,000 people are still a lot of people.

So what we're going to do is to try to reach out to the people who are in the last year of eligibility, and we are going to try and put them in a work program. We're going to try to find work for them. We're going to subsidize it, add some money to it so that they can make some salaries, have them in a program for six months. That actually will extend their eligibility eventually, but they would have to then go back and reapply.

What we're trying to do is to find every way we can to get them into work before they get themselves into a situation where there's going to be no federal welfare for them, and just whatever is available under the state safety net. So, in addition to the 125,000 jobs that we'll find for people, we're going to make certain that as many people as possible have jobs.

The Human Resources Administration and Jason Turner have accomplished a miracle that is unappreciated in certain parts of the City, because of the political thinking that goes on.

[Applause]

550,000 fewer people dependent on the government . . . It's not good to be dependent on the government. It is much better to be working. And we're a City that has many, many fewer people dependent on the government, and many more poor people working, than we've had in a long, long time. That's a beautiful thing to do. That's a good thing to do. That's a kind thing to do.

[Applause]

Housing. I've got a deal that I want to make. Remember I was talking about books before. This is another good book. It's called "Reducing the Cost of New Housing Construction in New York City." It's a report to the New York City Partnership, the New York City Housing Partnership and HPD [Housing Preservation and Development], and it's prepared by the New York University School of Law Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. It's an excellent book, but I can't summarize the whole thing now. But the basic thrust-[pointing] there's the guy who wrote it. Can I get a signed copy?

[Laughter]

It's a good book. What it talks about is how expensive it is to build housing in the City of New York, for poor people, for middle-income people, for rich people, for everybody-and construction costs are enormously high. We have built a lot of housing in New York City. We have in the past, in the Koch Administration, in the Dinkins Administration. In my Administration we've done 65,000 new homes or rehabilitated homes. We spent or we're scheduled to spend another $1.5 billion on housing, and we spend probably at least that much, if not more. So we spend about $3 billion. But we've got to reduce the cost of housing. There are specific things that I think we can do. And I think we can add about $1.2 billion to the amount of money that we can spend on housing, and convert an enormous amount of additional housing for poor people-and for affordable housing, mostly for poor people, if not all. But it's not worth doing it unless we change things.

I want to make a deal, Peter [Vallone]. Is it okay if we make a deal? The deal is this: we'll put $1.2 billion into more housing if we can accomplish what it says in this book or most of it. "Removing organized crime from the industry by passing the reform bill to create licensing for construction," that's one.

"Rezoning vacant manufacturing land for commercial and residential use," that's two.

"Reforming the building code, reforming the Department of Buildings," I'm going to explain how we'll do that.

And "Reducing the number of red tape reviews for housing plans." Mainly, we really have to get organized crime out of the construction industry . . . we have to, we really do.

[Applause]

I have to reform the Buildings Department, and I regret that I didn't do it earlier. I should have done it earlier. The Buildings Department needs to be reformed and we're going to do that. The Buildings Department will continue to deal with construction and construction permits. We will attempt to implement the recommendation in this book, which is to take all of those permits that you have to get, for environmental use, for land use, and try to get it down to one permit, so you don't have to go through an endless process so the cost of building goes up. We'll try to reduce it to one and simplify it.

But then the follow-up safety inspections should be done by a new civilian component of the Fire Department. And I'll tell you why. It's real simple, it goes back to my old days. I used to investigate and prosecute a lot of people for corruption in inspections. Civilians will do inspections more rigorously and they'll do it more honestly, and that's why they should be there. Now, the building industry and the construction industry aren't going to like this, but we'll straighten things out and we'll cut down a lot of the corruption that now goes on.

District Attorney Morganthau estimates-it's in this book-that we add about 20 percent to the cost of construction in New York City because of organized crime and dishonesty. 20 percent is a lot. If we got it out of Fulton Fish Market . . . if we were able to get it out of the waste carting industry, we can get this-not just organized crime but all these practices in which you pay extra money for this. You know, a lot of it has to do with our not reforming a lot of these codes, particularly the Buildings Code. So I really hope that we're able to accomplish that, Peter, and I think working together we'll be able to do it. I think it would be something that would be enormously effective.

[Applause]

And then if we do, the other part of it is, we can build probably 10,000 to 12,000 more units over and above what we're presently talking about. When I came into office, there were 1,862 vacant buildings in New York City. That number is presently down to 133. So HPD has done tremendous work-1,862 down to 133 vacant buildings that do not now have a plan for reconstruction. There are about 600 others that are in some phase of reconstruction. So we can take those 133 buildings, we can put the money in, and we can build more units all throughout the City in most of the areas that you can think of.

We can also increase what I call our "Anchor Program." This is the $1.2 billion program that I'm talking about. The Anchor Program attempts to do the following: rather than just putting housing in a neighborhood, you want to put housing and business in a neighborhood. You don't just want to put up big, big developments, and then have nothing there-no businesses, no work, no services. So what we try to do, is build what we call "Anchor Projects," where we have commercial development that goes along with new housing units. So we'll add another 3,000 units and another 800,000 square feet of commercial space to this program if we can bring about these reforms. And it should be the biggest influx of money into housing in a short period in a very long time in the City, and help a lot of people to get affordable housing who otherwise would not be able to get it.

[Applause]

Now, I'm going to run through this really quick, because it's getting late, and there's a couple of more pictures that I want to show you that are nicer.

But, I said a couple of days ago that we should have a Charter Revision Commission. The purpose of the Charter Revision Commission is to try to put into place good government measures and some of the things that we've learned as part of our experience in this Administration. These are the things that I'm going to ask them to look at; they can do it, not do it, or add things to it. But this is some of our thinking so far.

First of all, I believe the City Charter should require the Police Department to report the crime statistics twice a year. The Mayor is required to put out a Management Report twice a year, but it doesn't really say about what. The City Charter should require the Police Commissioner to report to the people of the City where the City is with regard to the seven index crimes that are reported to the FBI. The reason for that is, we don't want the City to fall back into the old practice of not reporting that until six months after the year was over. It's too late six months after the year is over to do anything about crime. And one of the things that we have brought to the City is using crime statistics, not just as a historical matter, but in order to reduce crime.

What happened to crime this week? Last week there were 2,977 felony crimes in New York City. We look at it every single week. And when it goes up, as it did at the beginning of last year, we can do something about it right away instead of six months later. Last year, we found out about an increase right away and we instituted Operation Condor and crime went down. So every six months, twice a year, the Police Commissioner should put all those numbers out so that people can look at it and he can look at it and she can look at it and figure out what are we doing about it. If robbery is going up, what are we going to do about robbery? If grand larceny is going up, what are we going do about it? That's accountability, and we should continue that and it should be part of the future of the City.

I mentioned already the Office of Emergency Management and the Administration for Children's Services. I believe we should merge HRA and the Department of Employment and make HRA into an employment agency, primarily, which is what it has been the last of couple of years. It should continue in that direction. Merge the Department of Health and the Department of Mental Health. Require a budget stabilization account, streamline the contracting procedures, institutionalize progress in domestic violence by having a Domestic Violence Office required by the City Charter.

Now, this is the part that I've been looking forward to. See that, can you all see that? That's Coney Island. That's what Coney Island looked like when I was a kid.

[Laughter]

That's me there, that's Howard Golden up there. There's Herb Berman, he's a little younger. That's what it used to look like.

It was a great place, it was a place known throughout the world, and it fell on hard times. We want it to be something very special, again, in the future, because I think it can be a source of a tremendous number of jobs and real vitality for the City. That's why we pushed very hard for this baseball field. I know people love to ridicule me about baseball fields, I like to build them all over. Actually, I do.

[Laughter]

But look at that, isn't that a beautiful baseball field? Look at that.

[Applause]

The Mets' minor league team, the Brooklyn Cyclones, are going to play there starting in July, or late June, right? See that, it's a foul ball if you hit it to the parachute jump, but that should be an anchor like the investment that Disney made in the new Amsterdam Theater was on 42nd Street. It was an anchor to the rest of 42nd Street, which helped turn the area from what it was then, to what it is now-which I don't have to tell you, is absolutely beautiful. To kind of push this stadium along as an anchor for Coney Island, there are a couple of more things that we can do.

One of the things that we're proposing is a building right here, right across from the baseball stadium.

[Indicating]

There's the baseball stadium. Right across here, put in a baseball museum. And we have Ralph Branca here, right here. There's Ralph Branca and we have Joe Pignatano.

[Applause]

Joe caught the last ball thrown at Ebbets Field; isn't that right? He came in and caught, and you caught the last ball that was actually thrown at Ebbets Field. So I think there should be some kind of Hall of Fame there-maybe a New York Sports Hall of Fame, or a Brooklyn Dodger Hall of Fame, I think.

[Applause]

But let's get it first and then we'll fight over it. But I think a Brooklyn Dodger Hall of Fame would be great.

And then the aquarium-which is right here. It seems to me that what we can do with the aquarium-they want to expand and modernize-is we can put a substantial amount of money with them into a major expansion of the aquarium. There will be 57 percent more dolphins. Have we got a chart for that?

[Laughter]

[Indicating] But then if you expand the aquarium here, if you have the baseball stadium there, you have the sport museum here.

We work together with the Coney Island LDC [Local Development Corporation], which I want all of you to cooperate with, and the Borough President and Herb, and maybe what we can do is, finally, a sportsplex.

And one final dream I have-it's just a dream, and we're going to look at properties here-is a resort hotel, somewhere along here. I'm serious. A really nice resort hotel, with some tennis courts and people can use the beach. This is what we should be trying to do with Coney Island. I mean, it's a dream, but the dream is a lot more concrete now than it was before with that baseball stadium there. And then we'll also have a film festival there this summer. And I want to use this stadium and the one in Staten Island for concerts. I mean, can you imagine?

[Applause]

Beverly, wouldn't that be a nice place for a concert? Beverly Sils, right there, right?

[Applause]

Now if you don't want to have your concert there, we could also have it in Staten Island, which I'm going to show you in a little while.

The other thing that I would like us to do is Brooklyn Bridge Park. Last year we said that we would invest money in a Brooklyn Bridge Park and the other day, the Governor put $80 million into expanding the Brooklyn Bridge Park. So what we want to do right now, so that we get this started, is take this area here [indicating], which is the main street parking lot, and actually begin to build the park. We've put in about 60 or $65 million, the State has put in about 80 or $85 million, and by putting in just a little bit more, we can get this park started right now. And the idea of the park is to have it begin up here around the Manhattan Bridge and come all the way down here. Also, when we announced this-I'm going to put the Governor's name in my press release.

[Laughter]

Come on, you've got to have some fun.

In Queens, there are several projects-Willets Point, which is where we want to do an urban development project, which is long overdue . . . Long Island City, which we want to rezone, as we want to rezone a lot of the City. Part of that study that I mentioned requires rezoning the City, so you can take advantage of a lot of the old industrial and manufacturing areas for residences. We want to be able to do that. And the Flushing Meadows Pool and Skating Rink. This is a $30 million project. It will have a pool, a beautiful skating facility, right in Flushing, which is an area that has really developed dramatically.

This is the Staten Island Baseball Stadium.

[Applause]

That's also going to be open in June, with the Staten Island Yankees, who won the championship last year, playing in this stadium. Can you imagine trying to hit a home run to the World Trade Center?

[Indicating]

Look at that, unbelievable. Another nice place for concerts, right, Beverly? Three Tenors, or something like that, right? It would be a great place for a concert. Look at that backdrop. I can see the CDs now . . . you can sell them. So we're going to try to get concerts there as well.

We're also going to modernize the St. George Theatre right nearby, so that along with the museum that's going to be there, the new ferry terminal that will be right next to this, we'll rejuvenate this whole area of St. George and Staten Island. The purpose of these baseball fields is not just to play baseball. The purpose of it is to bring thousands of people in and economically redevelop a community, because we can do that, particularly communities that need help.

The Bronx River-we're going to spend $11 million to try to make sure that we can continue the redevelopment of the Bronx River, so that it is beautiful. The Kingsbridge Armory project we're going to go through with.

And there's one other project that I haven't told anybody about for the Bronx. There's one project that I haven't told anybody about. So Adam's going to get real upset with me. We should do something else for the Bronx, because we haven't done enough for the Bronx. We've done a lot for Staten Island, and we've done a lot for Brooklyn and we've done a lot for Queens, and we've done a lot in Manhattan, as you'll see very quickly when I finish up. But there's something else we should do for the Bronx.

[Applause]

I believe the thing that we should do for the Bronx is a military academy. I think New York City should build a high school military academy, and I think we should try to do it in conjunction with the United States Military and the Board of Education, and see if we can build a place in which 1,000 or 1,200 kids from New York City schools could be trained in a military academy, and then move on into the ROTC, move on to West Point, move on to Annapolis, move on to the Air Force Academy. And I think it should be a beautiful campus, and I think it should be one that reestablishes for a lot of young people that service in the military is an honorable and decent thing to do.

[Applause]

And I have a few sites in mind, if you'll work with me in trying to figure out where to put it. And I believe it can get support from the Department of Defense, if we want to do this. And I think the Bronx will be a wonderful place to put it.

[Indicating]

Oh, yes, you thought you weren't going to see this here, right? You thought that you weren't going to see the West Side of Manhattan? But I don't give up. The West Side of Manhattan should become a sports mecca. Because the West Side of Manhattan as a sport mecca would bring hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars into the City of New York. It will ignite the whole place the way Lincoln Center has ignited the Upper West Side in Manhattan. And, basically, the plan is this: to extend the Javits Convention Center two or three blocks north.

To build a stadium here on the railyards that would be, yes, a football field, but most importantly an indoor convention center. You cannot hold conventions in the City of New York of any size. We lose hundreds of millions of dollars in convention business, and we should build a convention center here in which you can play football, but in which you can have 100, 150, 200 events a year that will employ thousands and thousands of people.

And then I would like to see if we could convince Madison Square Garden to move to this site. And that site where Madison Square Garden is now can be redeveloped. And we'll work with the MTA to move the 7 line over. All of this can be done. The financing is there to do it-it can be done, it should be done. And it would be an excellent site for the Olympics in the year 2012, and make us real contenders for getting the Olympics, if we're willing to make this kind of commitment as a City. So we'll work very hard to try to make that happen.

[Applause]

Last year we announced that we would rebuild East River Park. This year or the end of last year, we lost a very fine man, John Lindsay, who gave a great deal of himself to the City of New York. He worked very hard on behalf of the City of New York, both as a Congressman and as a Mayor. He did many things to help the City during maybe one of its worst periods. He showed a lot of personal courage and it probably took a lot out of him to do what he did. That's why the East River Park, I think, should be named the John Lindsay Park. I asked Mrs. Lindsay this morning whether she thought this was the right thing to do and she did.

[Applause]

New York City creates the culture of America and much of the culture of the world. And there are many things that contribute to that. Our great museums are expanding, like the new Guggenheim Museum, which is going to be a wonderful new project for the City.

The Fulton Fish Market is going to move to the Hunts Point Market, providing 1,100 more jobs. And then the area will be an absolutely terrific area of development for the City of New York, with the Guggenheim being at the heart of it. And we've asked Thomas Krens of the Guggenheim Museum, Lou Colletti, Ed Malloy of the Building and Construction Trades Council, Theodore Roosevelt IV, Carl Weisbrod, Robert Rauchenberg, and many others to be part of the Committee to make sure that we get this done.

But in addition to creating new things, like the Guggenheim, we're also going to expand the public library. The central circulating branch of the library on 41st Street. There it is.

[Indicating]

See, isn't that beautiful? We're going to expand it by 136,000 square feet, right on 41st Street. It will allow for an information center for health, it will allow for expanded use of on-line services. There'll be many thousands of more books. And it will be a real addition to the skyline.

In addition, there's the Brooklyn Academy of Music, BAM. BAM has been like Lincoln Center, which I'm going to finish with-I promise, Beverly. BAM has been an absolutely superb addition to the cultural life of the City of New York-for opera, for drama, for dance-and they are engaged in and have organized a good deal of this already. They're engaged in trying to create a 24-hour cultural center right in the middle of Downtown Brooklyn, and they deserve a lot of support and a lot of help. This is the area that I'm talking about.

[Indicating]

The Mark Morris Dance Theater is almost ready to open. The Strand Theatre renovation is about to begin. There's the BAM Opera House. So we're going to work with them, to try and invest in BAM, proportionate to the investment that the City has made in Lincoln Center, The Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Natural History and some of the other great cultural institutions, because this is a wonderful cultural institution already. And with the appropriate amount of City support, this can be another part of our cultural life that can continue to grow.

And I would ask you to look at this just in two ways, for the future. Yes, I appreciate opera and I appreciate music, and I appreciate drama, and what that does for our culture is immeasurable. But I'd like you just to think about it as a business for a moment, because this is a tremendous industry for the City of New York. This is one of our most important industries. We employ hundreds of thousands of people in the cultural entertainment industry. And therefore, if we invest $50 or $60 million, which sounds like a lot of money-a great deal of money-right in BAM, so that they can expand their projects more quickly, we're going to make that back in the same way that we do when we invest in other businesses like the Mercantile Exchange or the New York Stock Exchange. So we will work with them to do this, and I just want to explain it to people who maybe might not support doing something like this.

Finally, Lincoln Center. Lincoln Center is a treasure that presently exists-the Metropolitan Opera House, Avery Fisher Hall, The Julliard School, and so many other parts of it. One of the things that I'm going to be proudest of when I leave here is holding up the deal for the Coliseum because we wanted a performing arts center as part of the Columbus Circle Project, and that ultimately became Jazz at Lincoln Center. And that will expand Lincoln Center some blocks, down to 59th Street.

But Lincoln Center is getting old. The buildings are not state-of-the-art. And it needs a massive infusion of money in order to remain state-of-the-art. The New York Opera Company and the ballet companies that perform in the New York State Theater need better accommodations, more modern accommodations. The Philharmonic Hall needs to be rebuilt. I believe we should have another opera house, another opera house in which the New York City Opera can perform and also the Metropolitan Opera can perform smaller chamber operas or smaller, more intimate operas. It would be wonderful for the cultural life of the City, and it would be a tremendous investment in the City. And I'm really looking forward this year to making sure that we get the plan started. It's a big plan. It's a $1.5 billion plan to fix up Lincoln Center. The City has traditionally invested about 18 percent of the cost. That's a lot of money, but it's really worth it. And I want to work with Gordon and with Beverly, and with all of you, to get that accomplished.

So I probably missed a few things and I missed a few people that I should thank. This is going to be a wonderful year. I think that this is an opportunity to accomplish, in the last year, maybe more things than we accomplished in the last seven.

I feel-well, since we're talking about opera, I feel like Giuseppe Verdi did when he sat down and wrote "Falstaff." "Falstaff" was his last opera, he wrote it when he was 80. I'm not 80. But he put in it thousands of themes, like all these things that he had in his head that he didn't get to develop in other operas, he stuck it all in "Falstaff." If you listen to it, it's really magnificent. It sounds more like a Mozart opera than a Verdi or Puccini opera.

The last year, let's try to get as much done as we possibly can, and see if we can fulfill the promise that I made when I got inaugurated the second time. And I don't believe that I accomplished any of this on my own. I push it, I'm a cheerleader for it, sometimes I'm an organizer of it, but I need your help. I need the help of all these people here that work in my administration. I need the help of my Deputy Mayors and the Chancellor. I need the help of the City Council, and all of you who are in government.

And there are probably things I haven't thought of, but let's take advantage of preparing the City for the best way possible for the transition next year. And it's quite possible, but not absolutely possible, that the next Mayor of New York City is sitting in the room here.

[Applause]

What are you clapping about? You're a Republican.

[A voice from the audience]

Tom Ognibene, okay, alright.

We're going to try to conduct ourselves this year so we get all of these things accomplished, like all those accomplishments from the other State of the City speeches that we've gotten done. I'm going to try get as many of them as accomplished as possible, maybe we'll add a few more as the year goes along.

It's going to be a very active year. It's going to be a very aggressive year and a very active one, because I just have one more year to contribute whatever unique thing I can contribute to the City in my Administration. And we're going to try to have as good a year as possible. And then, as Fiorello La Guardia - the Mayor that I will never exceed, and I don't believe anyone else ever will in terms of accomplishment - as La Guardia said, we're going to turn the City over, better, not worse than we found it.

Thank you and God bless you.