as delivered

And that's the first point that really is important. The reason that the City of New York had its best year in a very long time in 1998 is because of all of the work of everybody in the City, starting with the Speaker of the City Council, who has been an exceptional leader… all of the elected officials, who work very, very well together… the people who run the different agencies of New York City: the Chancellor, the Board of Education, the Police Commissioner, the Deputy Mayors, all of the other commissioners that you see here. We're very, very fortunate to have an enormously strong team, much stronger than I think sometimes people realize in the daily analysis of one thing that goes wrong or another thing that goes wrong. Sometimes they miss the overriding story of enormously effective people who are working for the good of the City.

And that's why we had a year last year in which murder was the lowest that it's been since the 60s. Let me see if I can give you another way to illustrate that, because there are so many different ways to illustrate these things, to get a sense of the impact of this. I see Rabbi Hecht here and, just looking at him and thinking about Crown Heights - in Crown Heights in five years there's been a reduction of murder of 89 percent. I just want you to step back and think of what 89 percent means. The reduction throughout the City has been 70 percent. And the year that we had last year had New York City with less murders than Chicago, which was unthinkable a few years ago, and it had people thinking of the City of New York all throughout the world. Yesterday I spoke with people from Milan, where they're having a serious crime problem. They want to come to New York City to find out about how to reduce crime in Berlin, in Milan, in South America, and other parts of the world. It's really been at the core of a lot of what's happened.

But last year was also a year in which we grew by more jobs than at any time since 1951. Last year was a year in which we had more tourists than ever before: 33 million, 34 million. Last year was a year in which we started to aggressively acquire businesses rather than just retain them. And I think last year was a year in which it was accepted that New York City was the world's premiere city. And now it's our job to make sure that that happens when the millennium comes around and continues.

So let me start with the subject that probably has the biggest impact on the future, and that's the subject of education. And then we'll talk about each one of the areas and talk about how we build on the success that we've had and challenge ourselves to do some things that maybe people thought in the past we couldn't do. Most of what we've accomplished are things that people thought we couldn't do. So there's no reason why we can't do more things that people think cannot be done.

In the area of education the change is absolutely remarkable. It would be impossible to have achieved this much change I think in most people's thinking four or five years ago. What Chancellor Crew and his team have done within the incredible constraints of a system and sometimes a bureaucracy that resists change is absolutely remarkable. And as somebody who tries to study change and figure out how to bring it about, I'm a real admirer of what they've been able to accomplish. U.S. News & World Report a few weeks ago did an analysis of the best schools in America. Nine of the top high schools are in New York City. Nobody else is even close to nine high schools. Large, large percentages of schools that are mentioned there as among the best schools and very good schools are in New York City. So at the top of the list is New York City. When we discuss Chicago, as I will a little bit later… as we discuss Milwaukee, which we'll do a little bit later, and other places that are doing innovative things that we can learn from, the fact is that overall our system is better than theirs, and doing better, and educating more young people more effectively.

There's got to be a way to talk about change in which you do not diminish the tremendous contributions that are being made by the Chancellor, his team, the teachers, the principals, the parents, the students. At the same time, we can do better. Just like we can in crime. No one would think of diminishing the contribution of the New York Police Department - the best in the country. But we can still do better, and we can still look at other cities and borrow things from them. In education what we've tried to do starting three years ago is not just to throw money into education, which I think was part of the problem of the past. The whole debate was $7 billion, $8 billion, $9 billion - it's up to $10 billion and more now. What we tried to do with the help of the Chancellor and in partnership with him and the Board is to put money behind initiatives that were strategic - that had results, like Project Read. We took a lot of money and decided that we would give children 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 hours more in reading instruction than they were getting so that we could get their reading scores up. Rather than just put another $100 million in the system we put the money behind something strategic, something that could accomplish something, something that you could measure, and if you were doing it wrong you could change it. Well we've now had a year-and-a-half of experience with Project Read and the children who have been enrolled in that program - there have been 133,000 of them, so it's had a big impact - and the children who are enrolled in the intensive reading program, where they get the most help and the most instruction, their reading scores have gone up 60 percent more than the average increase in reading scores, and the whole system has gone up throughout the City. So what do we know from that? We know it works. We know that, if we put money behind giving children more reading instruction - it isn't going to happen with every child, but with most children we're going to get a big increase in their reading scores. So that's a program that we should continue, that's a program that we should expand, that's a program that we should expand beyond the schools to the housing developments as the Chancellor and the Housing Authority have done. And then when we have future debates, or our successors have future debates, they have something to really learn from, and something to use and to grow with.

The same thing is true with arts education. Rather than putting $50 million or $60 million or $70 million more into the schools we put money into the schools two years ago to rectify a mistake of the far distant past. The mistake was taking arts education out of the schools in the first place. Now we've put them back, and I wanted to let you know the progress that the Board has made, because it's tremendous. 830 schools now have arts programs. That's virtually 80 percent of the system. The rest will by the end of this year. There are 750 new teachers that have been hired in the last year-and-a-half to teach the arts in the schools. They've been reestablished as a required and necessary program in the schools. And just think of what that means now and what it means in the future. It means children now will be exposed to music, they'll be exposed to dance - hopefully they'll learn how to dance better than me - they'll be exposed to all of the arts: to painting, to sculpture, to photography. And who knows if that isn't the way to access a child and bring them into the educational system the way sports can be, or other forms of interesting children in thinking, feeling, understanding, and relating to themselves? It's a tremendous contribution. It goes unnoticed. I notice it, and I want to thank the Board for making it happen so quickly. You know, government has this reputation that if you start a program it goes on for ten years. 830 schools in a year-and-a-half is more than anyone could possibly have expected.

The same thing is true with computers. Instead of just saying more money for the schools, we said that we have to make our children better able to deal with the high-technology age that is upon us and is certainly going to be even more intense in the year 2000, 2005, and 2010. 17,000 computers have been put in, 13,000 more computers will be in by the end of this school year or by August. You couldn't possibly have done more than that in the period of time that we're talking about.

In seating capacity we had an eight or ten year deficit: more students, fewer seats, more students, fewer seats. In the last three years, three-and-a-half years, we've produced 90,000 additional seats. The last two years we're producing more seats than students. And then there's the School Construction Authority, which needs reform - and I want to thank Governor Pataki very, very much for advocating and supporting a reform of the SCA that will allow us to make the progress there happen a lot faster. But I can't ignore the fact that Milo Riverso and Howard Wilson, who have been turning around the SCA, have really changed things dramatically. Ten years ago it used to take the school system ten years - ten years - to get a new school. Five years ago it used to take four to five years to get a new school. Every school in the last two years has been delivered within two years. Every single one has been delivered within budget, which is maybe even a bigger miracle. The last 30,000 seats were delivered in somewhat less than two years. And the last school was done in 17 months. And a lot of that is because of the management changes they've made: four out of six new vice-presidents, about a 60 percent turnover of staff, and a very different atmosphere now. It's very much like the atmosphere of the Board - an atmosphere of accountability rather than, "hey, we're just here and we can take forever." I think we can improve on that when we have mayoral accountability for that system so that we can make sure that we do even better and we achieve even more. Because giving our children a modern school system is enormously important. The capital program that we have, and the capital program that the Board announced, is very, very ambitious - but it should be. Because we should have a school system in which we have modern, decent schools for our kids. The City has committed to investing over $6 billion in that program - the program that at the outer end gets up to about $11 billion. Here we need help. We need help from the state, we need help from the federal government, and we should get that help, and on a proportionate basis. And if we got that help on a proportionate basis then that program could become a reality. And I want to thank the Speaker for making suggestions about how the City can fund its contribution. I want to assure him that we're going to work with him to make that happen so that our schools can plan to continue this growth process and be able to count on it.

And there are many, many other things that are happening in our school system that are very, very exciting. And the present Board, the Chancellor, City Hall, and the whole operation works together better than I think it has in over a decade, going back maybe to the period of Robert Wagner, Jr. and Frank Macchiarola and Ed Koch, which probably was a period of time in which we really had the last sustained period of really good, solid, coherent working relationship between the Board, the Chancellor, and City Hall. And we're going to continue that.

But we can't count on that. The reason that happened has nothing to do with the structure, it has nothing to do with the governance. It's in spite of all that. It happened because very good, strong personal relationships have developed, and an understanding that if we don't figure out a way to get along then we hurt the kids. The history of this has been very bad. The governance structure in this system does not work, and it should be changed. I guess maybe the best way to describe the change is that a school system should have very little concern about Board, politics, politicians, structures and everything else. A school system should be about schools. And the more of all that stuff we can remove the better off the kids are going to be. If we could do away with all Boards - no more Boards for schools - that would be a lot of money that we'd save, a lot of time and effort we would save, that could go directly into the schools. So what I would like to see, as I have said before, I think for three or four years - but a lot of these things take three or four years to accomplish. Don't lose faith. We're not going to accomplish everything I talk about today in one year. We talked about school security and the police taking over school security. It took three to four years. We did it this year. These things take a little while. But maybe we can get this done this year. We should do away with the central Board as we know it. We should do away with the local boards.

We should look to Chicago. Chicago is trying to learn from us a better way to reduce crime. We should learn from them something they did that's enormously exciting. I was there this summer, I think it was in May, I met with the people in the school system. This is an enormously exciting change: a Commissioner of Education appointed by the Mayor with the advice and consent of the City Council. After all, we're the ones who do the budget now for the Board and therefore we have the most involvement in it ultimately. And the Mayor's choice has to be approved by the City Council. So it isn't just the Mayor, it isn't just the City Council. It's both. Then there should be as little bureaucratic structure as possible, with all the emphasis on the schools.

If we have a Board, and I think we should have one, then the Board should be like a corporate board, like the way a great international corporation would have a board: a board that clearly doesn't micromanage, a board that looks to the CEO - namely the Chancellor - to run the school system on a day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year basis. But it's a value-added board. A great corporation selects people for their board who bring more business to the corporation, expand markets, come up with new ideas, create better public relations, reach out to other industries that they might consider acquiring and growing into. Our school system could do all of that and more. Our school system could have a board that would create the relationships between schools and businesses as effectively as Chancellor Crew would like to do. It could help us get better public relations for the school system, so that the good things that are happening are known. It could help us reach out to other countries and be more international in our approach. There are tremendously exciting opportunities of what we can do if there's the political will to restructure the Board to basically fit the new personal relationships and political relationships that we've developed. And that would be a way to make the change that we've brought about permanent, and succeed me, succeed the Chancellor, succeed the Speaker, and all of us.

I think the charter school legislation gives us tremendous opportunities for change. And I can tell you from my discussions with the Chancellor that he's going to take that legislation and he's going to use it in ways that I'm not even sure were envisioned, to really be very, very aggressive about introducing another opportunity for alternatives and change. We should not be afraid of alternatives for our school system. What he has in mind, and he'll describe this in more detail but I'm very glad he shared it with me because it helps us present a picture and agenda for the future, is first of all to take one district and make it into a charter district. To expand the school year in that district, to expand the school day in that district - which we should do, by the way, for the entire system. We should reiterate our support for a proposal to expand the school year by one month and to expand the school day, because our children are not in school long enough or continuously enough to make our educational system competitive with a lot of the rest of the world. But with the charter district we can do that. We can expand the school day, we can expand the school year, we can allow these schools to operate - all of them in that district - as charter schools and frankly see how they do in comparison to the other districts, and then probably change it, or change whatever we have to change so that it can work better throughout the City.

But charter schools are not the single answer to the school system, and neither is the next thing that I'm going to propose. But it's an alternative that in good conscience we should make available to the children of this City. Milwaukee, like Chicago, is doing something innovative. It's doing something that we should not be afraid of. If I could create a pill for people to take in this City that removed fears of new ideas and that stopped them from killing new ideas before the idea had a chance to grow. Even if you don't agree with the idea, give it a chance to grow. Maybe it'll fail of its own weight. But don't kill it before it even gets a chance to grow. The system that they put in place in Milwaukee, which I believe is called the Parental Choice Program, says that for about 15 percent of the parents who are slightly above the poverty line, I think it's 175 percent over the poverty line, only those parents would qualify, that they get a voucher. And they can select any school that they want in the City of Milwaukee that their kid's qualified for. And therefore there are a group of public schools, a group of private schools, and a group of religious schools that are included in this. And then the parents select. Nobody knows yet how that's working. Advocates say it's working well. People who oppose it will find all kinds of reasons why it isn't working. It makes a lot of sense though, doesn't it? To create that kind of competition.

It would make sense to do that with a school district - one school district in the City, and see if it works. See if we give poorer parents the same opportunity to make choices about their children's education that the richest and the most affluent parents in New York City have, let's see if that doesn't work to really energize that school district and help to create another alternative and more competition for the school system. Now I know people will be very concerned about the religious aspect of it. Let me tell you how they do it in Milwaukee, which has been upheld as legal and constitutional by the highest court in Wisconsin. What they do is the parents make the choice. The children are not in anyway required to take religious education in the school that's selected. And the schools have to promise that they won't do that. And then that is monitored and overseen by the Commissioner of Education and the Board of Education. So if I'm a parent, I get a voucher, and I select a Jewish parochial school, or Protestant or Catholic or Muslim, but I'm not of that religion, or I'm of no religion, then the school has to allow my child not to be involved in that, not to be exposed to that - only to be exposed to the secular part of the education. And I'm making the choice for my child. I'm making the choice that I want my child in that system.

The other thing that it does is it does something that we desperately have to do: it ties parents to the education of their children. It gets them to start making choices about their children, like the Schools Choice Scholarship program does. And that's something that we have to find innovative and new ways to do more of. So I hope the Board and the Chancellor this year work very, very hard to find the right district to do this in the spirit of trying to make it work. And I hope people who for all different reasons oppose this - some on a matter of principle, some for other reasons - I wish they would just suspend judgment on it for a few years. Let's see if it works. If it doesn't work it's going to fall of its own weight. If it does work, along with charter schools, along with the other changes that are being made in the system, along with the accountability that's being put in place, maybe we can have the courage to present another alternative to our children.

We have to also continue our efforts at the same time - as I said, there's no one idea and no one thought that can ever really answer all of the problems and all of the issues that exist in a system of a million children - we have got to do away with principal tenure. I can't think of anything that's more important realistically and symbolically for this system. There is a big debate going on in this country. I've been in different parts of the country this year. If there's one debate that's going on all over, it's about our school system. And charters are part of it, vouchers are part of it, these are all sub-parts. Here's the major debate that's going on: is it a job system or a school system. We've got to decide. We've got to decide what is more important. Is the protection of jobs more important than the educational performance indicated by that school, teacher, principal, and everyone else, or is the increased performance of the children the critical factor that drives the job decision? Believe me, this confusion in philosophy is destroying a lot of systems and a lot of schools. And the debate's eventually going to get resolved. The faster we resolve it in favor of the children, the sooner and the faster reform is going to take place - not just in New York. Reform that really reaches everybody. Reform that is enormously useful in making the system more accountable. The Chancellor is more than willing to give principals who are doing a good job more money, raises, but he needs the flexibility to remove the principals who are not doing a good job. Commissioner Safir, Commissioner Von Essen, any of the other commissioners in New York City… Commissioner Turner, who is doing lots of things at HRA that are really revolutionizing it… you couldn't do it if you can't change people.

I couldn't do it if I couldn't have brought in new commissioners and occasionally moved a few out. Remember? I could not have done it. You can't manage an operation and bring about significant, revolutionary change if you can't remove the people who are working for you and put other people there who can do a better job. Principal tenure is critical in getting that accomplished in our school system. And changing the symbolism of this from a job system, where job protection has become the compulsive thought of what's going on, to: "Look, I can only have my job if I'm doing a better job of educating children." And ultimately I shouldn't even want the job if I can't do a better job of educating children. I should go find something else to do with my life that can be very productive and not educate children. Not everybody is a principal, not everybody is a teacher. And if we really care about our kids, not everybody should be kept there who isn't doing a good job.

But I have to tell you that the excitement that I have about the changes that have been brought about gives me great confidence that we can make every single one of these changes and probably a group of others that will emerge as we move along throughout the year.

That brings me to one other subject about education, which is CUNY. The performance at CUNY has really not materially improved. We're still looking at a graduation rate after two years of 1.3 percent in the community colleges, an on-time graduation rate of less than 8 percent in the four-year colleges. I mean this is really sad. And the defensive, bureaucratic protections of it are even sadder. The excitement for me of being Mayor of New York City is seeing the improvements that we make. The frustration is seeing the defense of failure and the rationalizations and some of the silliest things I've ever heard said to protect a system in which we have an 8 percent graduation rate. That's a system, literally, if we were rational people who really cared about kids being educated and people being educated - that's a system we'd blow up. Right? With that kind of graduation rate - if we had the guts to do it and we weren't scared politically. And I find a tremendous amount of frustration in making that happen.

So here's what we're going to try to do. First, I congratulate the Board on making changes. They did change remediation for the four-year colleges. They have now reiterated an attendance policy. And they're working hard on doing a new writing test so that we have basic levels of writing that the kids who are being educated there can meet. But here are the additional things that we should do.

We should definitely have a voucher program for remediation. A person who wants remediation and needs it should be able to choose any school they want so that we start to break out of the CUNY monopoly on remediation. They shouldn't be the only place that's doing remediation for lots of people. We should start to challenge them with private schools, other schools, that can maybe do a much better job than they can do. And then maybe they'll turn around and they'll start to do a good job. That can be done by giving vouchers to people who want remediation - so we start to have a full system here and not an enforced system. Let me give you one other thought. You know when you really save a school system? This applies to public, grammar school, high school, college. You save a school system when people go to that school not because they're forced to go there but because they want to go there. That's the way you save a school system - when people want to go to a school, when they say, "That's the school I want to go to." That school starts to get overcrowded, everyone wants to go there. And you know when you destroy a school system? When you force people to go to a school that they otherwise would not go to. You've got to let the standards rise to the level of what parents, children, and students want - and you've got to have the courage to do that. Or what are you serving? What are you serving? Politics, special interest - who knows what? -- and that's what CUNY's got to try to do. Have the courage to give out vouchers. Let them go select NYU or St. John's or some vocational school that's put together. If they want that more than they want CUNY they're telling you something. Just like in Milwaukee, if they want the private school or the parochial school more than the public school, they're telling you something and then you make that public school better than the private school or the parochial school. And then you make CUNY better than St. John's or NYU or Fordham. Boy, wouldn't that be exciting if we could do it, and wouldn't we feel good about ourselves if we could do that instead of constantly serving all this failure and letting it play itself out year after year. So we're going to push very hard for a voucher program at CUNY.

We're going to ask them to establish flagship schools in which a school bids, raises its attendance standards, raises its admissions standards, raises its performance standards, if it meets those it gets more resources, so that schools start to be held accountable. We're going to start looking at colleges where the graduation rate is slipping below 1 percent… we have a few. Maybe we should close them. Maybe if you can't graduate more than 1 percent of the kids in two years, maybe you should close and we should try something different. We've got to do things like that and a lot more.

We need minimum SAT scores. And I congratulate Queens College and President Sessoms at Queens College for announcing that there will be median scores of 1100 for admission to Queens College. All of the colleges should do that. We just have to press the agenda for reform as aggressively this year as we did last year. So we won't stop and I hope you understand why we are doing it. I also feel that what we are doing is completely misrepresented and misconstrued as wanting to destroy remedial education. It's really just the opposite. We want to make it work. It wasn't working and nobody said anything about it for 20 years. If you have a better idea that's very different from what we're doing now to make it work, rather than just reflexively defending the system. Well, fine you recommend that idea but not the idea of CUNY having a monopoly on remedial education, because it hasn't worked in 20 years. So let's see if we can get together and really do something effective with this system.

Now, I guess the core of the changes that have taken place in New York City, the reason why jobs are being created in record numbers and business are back and we are acquiring businesses, rather than attaining them, is the reduction in crime and the improvement in public safety. And you can never do enough. You should never reach a point where you feel you have done enough. Again, like the school system, the changes there have been very, very strategic. We haven't just said, "Here's a lot more money, here's a lot more cops, and a lot more cops will reduce crime." More cops do not necessarily reduce crime. In fact, you can have a lot more cops and have a lot more crime. It's what you do with the cops that reduces crime. It's the strategy that you utilize. It's the Broken Windows theory, which has assisted greatly in making New York City the safest large City in the country. It's the CompStat program that won an award from the Kennedy School of Government. It's strategies like the gun strategy that we put in effect five years ago. We have a whole program and strategy to taking guns out of the City of New York. We do it relentlessly. We use every excuse that we can to take guns out of the City. Let me give you a statistic. Statistics are boring, but enormously important to restoring accountability.

In 1992, there were 1500 murders with guns in New York City. Last year, there were 271. But that's a bad thing to clap for… It is… 271 murders by guns, 629 altogether last year, the lowest number anyone can remember in a very long time… That's tremendous. So now we have to reduce it even more. And we should reduce it even more. We should be able to produce even more safety, because it is the most basic civil right that people have. We have to produce more safety for the people of the City. So we're going to build and expand many of the things that have been working. One of the things that we've done to reduce crime to record levels, that probably doesn't get the attention it deserves, is that we've put relentless pressure on the drug trade. This is something I know about from when I was a young assistant U.S. Attorney and prosecuting drug dealers and how important it is to reducing overall crime in the City.

Last year, we arrested more drug dealers than we ever did before in the history of the City to 132,000. That's one of the reasons that crime is down to such a low number. We're going to expand our drug initiative this year. We'll have four more of them. We'll arrest even more drug dealers. We'll do everything we can to disrupt heroin, cocaine, marijuana - that is at the core of our crime reduction. It costs a lot of money, it takes a lot of effort. You lose lives - the lives of police officers, very brave police officers, including three this year. We should always honor and remember their sacrifice because that is the reason why our City is safe. And we'll expand it and continue it.

We'll work with the Governor to do away with parole for people who are convicted of crimes in New York, expanding Jenna's Law beyond violent crime, because right now drug dealers are excluded from having no parole. They are allowed out on parole. We have to expand DNA testing. This is a sensible thing to do, it is a good thing to do. Of course, we should have very strict privacy protections. But when somebody gets arrested for a crime, we should test their DNA in the same way we take their fingerprints. It's a method of identifying them. The innocent have nothing to fear from this. In fact, it is a very effective method of clearing people who are falsely accused of a crime or falsely accused of paternity, which can also happen. And it will help us convict people who are guilty of violent crimes and help us establish paternity more often. That is very important, and I'll talk more about that later. This is something that we would very much like to see happen and we'll work with Governor Pataki to see if we can bring that about.

I think it's also very important to see that, as much as we can, we understand something that I don't think is described often enough. A couple of months ago, I was in Iowa. Now you ask, why was I in Iowa? Well I'm not going to answer. I got up on a Sunday morning, because I was going to do this talk show, and I saw headlines in The Washington Post about the problems of the Washington Police Department. The article contained a statement that I'd love to see in headlines in New York City. The statement said, Do you know the police department that is the most restrained of major police departments in the United States? Do you know the police department in which police officers shoot less often per capita than any major police department in the United States? Do you know the police department in which the fewest number of fatal shootings per capita have occurred this year, last year, the year before and the year before that? If you read some of the political vitriol about the police department, you get the impression that the 50 percent reduction in crime and the 70 percent reduction in homicide occurred because they shoot more often and they kill people more often, and they're out of control. Do you know during that period of time, shootings by police officers have gone down by almost 70 percent? That the New York City police department uses its guns 8 times less often than the police department in Washington, D. C. This is the most restrained police department in the country. It can do a better job, it can have better relationships with all the communities in New York City, it can do a better job of reducing brutality, it can do a better job of reducing disrespect, but we've got to start with the proposition that they are doing a better job than anyone who does this work in the country. So let's start with respect for them. Let's not allow the people who want to cause problems to create a totally unfair impression by not giving credit in the areas in which credit is not only due, but very, very deserving. Then, let's begin our analysis about how to make improvements from reality, rather than from prejudice. So that's the reason why I mentioned that. And Police Commissioner Safer is committed to improving the department in every single one of those areas. And we promise you that we will do that.

Now, I'd like to talk for a moment about children, and about protecting children. It's probably the most important and the most sensitive thing we can do in the City, particularly for children who have the most need. A few years ago, I put together a new agency called the Administration of Children's Services. The purpose of that agency was to focus complete attention on how to protect the children who were at most risk. That agency, under the direction of Commissioner Scoppetta, has really done remarkable things. They've changed a culture of unaccountability to a culture of performance. They started to impose much higher standards on the people that are selected, much stricter tests. They now have a merit pay system - again this is very controversial, but it is the exact direction we should be moving in. They have instant response teams so they measure the time they get to the scene of possible child abuse or child neglect. And they work with the District Attorney's Offices in order to accomplish that, and the Police Department.

Commissioner Scoppetta and Chancellor Crew have done a memorandum of understanding on how the two systems can work together. Because in systems this large, even with the best of intentions, tragically children are going to fall through the cracks. Most of the kids that are risk are in the school system. Most of the kids at risk, not all, come to the attention of ACS. If they can work together and share information, and be responsive to the children, maybe we can save more lives. We're never going to save all of them, even like we're never going to remove all crime or remove all problems, but you have to keep trying to save all of them.

I believe that ACS has become a model for the way to do this all over the country. The neighborhood-based care that Commissioner Scoppetta is putting in place in the Bronx, and will be put in place throughout the City, will start to engage people in the neighborhood in a way that has never been done before. And, I believe the emphasis on adoption, and the success that they've had was exactly the way to go. The most important thing that we can do so that we can be sure that a child is protected, is to have that child raised in a loving home. And all of those reforms are continuing, and we'll do everything that we can to have ACS protect the children of this City better.

But this is something that I will have to honestly tell you that government does not have the answer. And if you look to government to answer this, it will just get worse, and we'll just be fooling you. And I don't like to fool people. Let me read you a statistic. I'm going to read it to make sure that I get it right, it's about the most important thing you can do to save children at-risk. When compared to children of married parents children born out of wedlock are twice as likely to drop out of school, from 20-33 times more likely to suffer child abuse, and this is 33 times more likely when a woman is living with a boyfriend, and 3 times more likely to commit suicide. Let me read this one more time. When compared to children of married parents children born out of wedlock are twice as likely to drop out of school, from 20-33 times more likely to suffer child abuse, and this is 33 times more likely when a woman is living with a boyfriend, and 3 times more likely to commit suicide.

These are painful things, these are sensitive things, but you can't hide your head in the sand and not listen to these things, because they're saying something to us. I'm not sure I know the answers to what they're saying to us, but I know they're saying something to us about how something is going really wrong in society that is beyond government. We have limited government in America, we're not supposed to intrude into people's family lives and personal lives, and it's worked really well and we shouldn't change it. But something here has broken down really, really bad. 70 percent of long-term prisoners and 75 percent of adolescents charged with murder grew up without a father. So, I guess if you wanted a social program that would really save these kids, a lot better than the City of New York, the United States Congress, the Social Welfare Agency and Administration for Children Services, I guess the social program would be called fatherhood.

We'll try to use government to push that idea forward by doing what Commissioner Scoppetta does and Commissioner Turner does, in which we try and get fathers to support their kids. I think this year we are going to collect more than $450 million dollars from them. We are trying to establish a basic legal principle, that if you father a child, you are responsible for that child. But we need have that taught better, maybe it's not even my place to say this, but those things have to be taught in churches better. They have to be taught in community groups, they have to be taught in all of the different sub groupings that we have in society. The idea of stigma works. In olden times, they stigmatized people who did things that were outrageous to the rest of society. They were stigmatized. You used to be stigmatized if you were a man and you brought a child into this world and you didn't support them. You weren't thought of as a man and you weren't accepted. We must reinforce the notion that you're not a man if you bring a child into this world and you don't take responsibility for that child.

If I think about the children of this City, and I think about the thing I could give them, to protect and save them in addition to what we are talking about fatherhood and family, I would find a way to give them a pill that gave them the work ethic. They used to call it the Protestant Work Ethic. I'm a Catholic but somehow I got the Protestant Work Ethic. Don't tell Cardinal O'Connor that I got the Protestant Work Ethic. But if you could do that to children at an early age, you know they are going to be successful, you know that they are going to get through life. If they understand that they can't go out to play right now, they've got to study. If they understand they've got to work in order to earn a living, that self-respect depends on whether you are able to support yourself rather than have somebody else support you, if you can support yourself then you can do a better job of taking care of your family. Because when you stop being able to support yourself you lose a lot of the resources, including both internal and emotional, that allow you to take care of other people. This is part of what has gone wrong in certain cities and in urban America. So that's what we are trying to do when people talk about workfare, and people talk about tying welfare to work, what we are trying to do is to help people more. For years, what we saw was massive failure and no answers to it.

When I was running for Mayor of New York City in 1992, thinking about the things that I would do, I remember seeing a report that New York City had 1 million or 1.1 million people on welfare and there was a projection that the number was going to go to 1.5 million people. And here was the answer of the City of New York, there wasn't a single suggestion about what to do about it except one thing, go to the federal government and get more money for it. In other words, let's accept that there will be 1.5 million people on welfare. Let's not consider the damage done to them. Let's not consider the damage done to our society. But let's go get the money and subsidize it and support it. We felt that we had to do something about it, that we had to do something to address the problem and to say, maybe we're doing it because we're so guilty we don't know how to deal compassionately and lovingly as mature adults with a social problem because we need a group of people dependent on us. I really don't know, but there is something perverse about this.

We've got to re-establish over and over again, the social contract, for every benefit an obligation, that for everything you get there is something you have to give back. We have got to be willing to treat social problems as if everyone is your child, everyone is your relative. You wouldn't just want them to be dependent the rest of their lives. You would want to get them back to work. And I'm really excited that we are accomplishing that, and I don't even think it gets noticed as much as it should. But I promised last year that we would take all the welfare offices and change them into job centers. We've done that now, and Jason [Turner], are we at ten? Thirteen, that's great. And we're going to do it with all of them this year. The welfare office now is not like what you used to think a welfare office was like. The welfare office is an employment office, it is the place you go to find a job because that's going to help you more. That's because we care about you more. That's because we understand you better. That's because we can deal with our own guilt more effectively and more maturely than the City was able to do it five years or ten years ago. HRA is going to turn into a big employment agency. That doesn't mean that people aren't going to get welfare when they need it, that doesn't mean people aren't going to get help when they need it. But it means that the maximum number of people will be kept in the workforce. It means that our people working for HRA will be fighters to keep you in the workforce. And I ask you to go and visit one of these job centers, the competition that's going on there now is tremendous, the sense of morale in the workers of New York is tremendous.

Rather than constantly watching and subsidizing failure, we're starting to see success. We're finding jobs for people, we're allowing people to keep their sense of themselves and their ability to take care of themselves. We will expand that this year and move HRA, hopefully by the end of the year, so that when we think of HRA we will be thinking primarily of a place that finds jobs for people. We'll take the JTPA program that is now in the Department of Employment and we're going to use this to tie training specifically to jobs so that people go right into a job. We'll take the daycare vouchers that we now have and we will devote a large percentage of them to daycare for people so they can work. So that if you have a child and you can't work, we'll take care of that by making sure you have daycare. And we'll make sure that HRA has a sufficient number of "in time" daycare vouchers so that they can do that. We'll give a preference to working families in New York Housing Authority buildings so we put the preference very much on work, and move the City toward work as quickly as possible. What I want the City to do is to re-establish the work ethic, because if we do, I think we can accomplish a great deal.

Then I have to ask Commissioner Scoppetta to look at something else. Right now, 30 percent of our children in foster care are with families, mothers, who are on welfare. Now, mothers who are on welfare can do a tremendous job of taking care of children, they can do a tremendous job of giving love and compassion and support. Some of them can re-establish the work ethic despite some of the difficulties in their own lives. But frankly, I prefer to see the preference go to working families. Think about where you get the work ethic. Most of you learn it by example. You get it by seeing what your parents are doing by working. And I want to see if we can make sure that more and more children see that by example at an early age. Please understand why I'm asking for this change. I know the way stereotypes are done, and I know the kind of cheap shooting that we do at any new idea or new thought, but I think if you step beyond this you'd see that if we could increase the percentage of children in foster care in families where they see the model of working from the earliest age, we could give these children a better chance of success. This is not meant to demean anyone. This is not meant to cast aspersions on anyone, it's meant to help children more. So I'm going to ask Commissioner Scoppetta if he can increase that percentage.

That leads me to the area of dependency, and if we could remove this, we would have an absolutely incredible future and we would fulfill the promise to reach everybody in New York City. And that's the problem of drug addiction. We've got to do more to reduce drug addiction in the City of New York. And the police are doing everything that they can, we are going to do everything we can through HRA to this year put more emphasis on people who are addicted to drugs. They have to be in rehabilitation programs. They have got to work. And if they are not in rehabilitation programs and are not working and we're giving them money, what we're going to do now is not give them money but give their money to a third party trustee so that they can't use their money to buy drugs. It makes no sense for your money and mine to be used to subsidize somebody's drug habit. It makes sense for them to be straightening themselves out, but it doesn't make sense for us to be subsidizing illegal drugs. So if they have other needs, those needs should be taken care of by a trustee, not by giving money directly to them.

Let's talk about methadone for a minute. Because when I suggested doing away with methadone I was almost impeached by the politically correct. Let me tell you what I would like to achieve with methadone. What I would like to achieve is a city of drug freedom, I would like our city to be drug-free. Now, let me explain how I think and my philosophy. It comes from being a big student of philosophy. I think of Platonic ideals. When I think of our city, I want our city to be murder-free. I want our city to be crime-free. I want our city to have every single person working. I want our city to be clean everywhere and growing everywhere. I know we're not going to reach that ideal, I know that we're never going to have no crime. I know that we're never going to have no murder. I know that we're never going to have jobs for everybody. Maybe we can do that. But when I say that we want people off methadone toward drug freedom, I realize that there are going to be a certain percentage where that can't be done. But we've got to reverse the horrible situation we are in right now. A vast majority of our positions in drug treatment go toward maintaining people on methadone. They go to keeping people chemically dependent. Well over half of those people take other drugs, somewhere around 70-80 percent don't work. A number of them, a very high percentage, commit crime. So what are we doing? We are subsidizing sociopathic behavior instead of subsidizing the maximum number of people moving toward drug freedom.

So how about we make a deal? Instead of doing away with methadone completely, maybe we can calm everybody down, suppose we reverse the percentages. Suppose that instead of 63 percent of the slots used for keeping people chemically dependent, 63 percent of the slots will be used toward moving people to drug-freedom. And we'll reserve 10, 15, 20 percent - whatever we have to - for methadone for those people who need to have a transition and for those people where drug-free treatment programs just can't work. So I hope that we can work with the State and Federal government. I'd like to see the City controlling and monitoring the drug and rehabilitation programs in the City so that we can have central intake, so that we can have success-oriented criteria for them. But I hope that this will move it forward.

Business. New York City has changed from an anti-business to a pro-business city. Now, we've done that in a number of ways. We've done that by removing regulations on businesses. We've done it by trying to remove as many burdens as possible. We've done it in a very specific way with a strong support and partnership with the Speaker by reducing taxes. We've reduced taxes by 2.4 billion. And if you want to know the biggest changes we can make, the biggest changes we can make is in thinking, ideas and philosophy. This city is now an aggressive tax reduction city in which we fight over what taxes to reduce, not what taxes to raise. That's great… And I think we've made mostly very good choices. I don't think we would have had a growth of over 300,000 private sector jobs in three to four years if we hadn't made some very good choices. I don't think you'd see the kind of growth we've seen in the hotel industry, the restaurant industry, etc. if we hadn't made some very good choices. But I think we've got to keep this agenda in place, and it seems to me it is worthwhile to put together a task force on tax reform and reorganization. So that we can figure out if we can reduce the number of taxes so that we burden businesses less. Let's do a comparison of New York City and New York State to other places of the tax burden we create and where we are making ourselves anti-competitive. We need taxes. We're going to have to have taxes. We can have taxes and they can be at high levels. But the question is when do they get to high so that they make us anti-competitive like they were doing with the hotel occupancy tax, like I believe we're doing with the sales tax. The data on that, how we compare with other places, would be enormously valuable and create an agenda for a discussion about where we can reduce taxes even more at the city and state level.

I also think it would be enormously valuable to take a look at how we can finally accomplish the complete elimination of the sales tax. We've accomplished a lot in eliminating the sales tax on purchases of clothing or shoes of $110 or less, which will go into effect December 1st of this year. I'm very appreciative of that. I know that it will be very helpful. But for another loss of revenue of about $50 million dollars, and I think we'll eventually gain revenue, we can do away with the tax completely. So that in New York City nobody pays sales tax on buying clothes. Last year, I said that we would have to put shoes back in. Remember? We did, shoes are now included. New Jersey and Connecticut do not have sales tax on clothes and shoes. There's no reason why New York City needs one. Whatever loss in revenue, which would be about $50 million more, would more than make up because this would be the very best job program we could ever create. So we will work very, very hard to go that extra step to see if we can eliminate the tax on clothes completely.

We have to do a lot of things to privatize in the City, but not for the sole purpose of privatizing. Sometimes we should and sometimes we shouldn't privatize things. We've got to keep considering our options and keeping that agenda open. We've got to look at a couple more hospitals and see if we can't get some help by having the private sector come in and run those hospitals. The public hospital system used to exist for the purpose of caring for people that couldn't pay for hospitalization. Most people have health insurance now, and the New York City hospital system is suffering because people who have health insurance, including Medicaid, select private hospitals. They don't select public hospitals. And they have improved dramatically. Before we even get to the debate over additional privatization of hospitals, which has to happen and will happen, we're going to try to increase health insurance in the city. I have a card here, see this GHI/HHC card, small business health insurance. This is a program in which employers of 50 people or less for $100 an employee can buy health insurance for their employees. A lot of people who work in businesses of 50 people or less do not have health insurance. The City of New York, HHC and GHI together are creating a health program that will begin with 26,000 businesses and hopefully this can be done all throughout the city. We will also establish a purchasing alliance, which will involve pooling small businesses. If you're a business of 10 or 15 or 20 and you can't afford health insurance, many of the people who aren't covered work for businesses like that. We're going to pool them together so that when we're buying insurance we're buying it for a thousand or two thousand, three thousand, ten thousand people, and therefore we can keep the rates low and hopefully reduce the number of people who aren't insured because then we could have a much more competitive hospital system. If everybody is insured, then people will select the hospital they want to go to and that will tell us something about which is a good hospital and which is a hospital that needs help.

There's also another area that we could privatize that would help a lot. Sixteen different agencies in New York City send you thirty-three different recurring bills as a citizen of New York City, much like this tax thing where there are all kinds of taxes and nobody even knows them all. We would like to privatize that and create something called the Citizen's Account Statement. You would get this each month, you get it from the City of New York. You get one bill, not a possible ten, fifteen bills sporadically and then we would cut it. Pay it by phone, pay it by the Internet, come down and pay it if you want to. We're going to put this out for bid so that a private company actually runs this. We're going to see if we can privatize a lot more of the billing of New York. So these are very exciting ideas, ideas that I hope help make the city much more service oriented and friendly than it has been in the past.

I'm going to conclude with talking about something I described last year as monuments, things that you can put there that remain behind and indicate our contribution to the city and the wonderful times that we are going through. We are enjoying very good times. Some of it by design and some of it by good luck and God's will. One of the things we can do is to reform the City Charter to take advantage of some of the changes that we've made. I'm going to put together a Charter Revision Commission, the Speaker and I are going to work together on this, and I hope that what they'd look at would be things like this. In addition, to reforms to procedure that would make our city more efficient, I'd like to see if we can put in the City Charter some of the changes that we've made with the budget that made the City much more stable.

I'd like to see if they can put in the City Charter, and get the approval of the State to do this, so that we could permanently have a rainy day fund, a savings account, we don't have one right now. Literally, for reasons that I won't bore you with, we have to spend all our money but $100 million every year. That sounds strange and weird, but we have to spend all our money, except for $100 million reserve. We have increased the reserve to $200 million. We've created this rainy day fund of about $400 million to $500 million, which hopefully will be even higher by the time we do our financial plan. So we have a cushion of about $700 million to $800 million that we never had before - the most we ever had before was $100 million or $200 million - but we do it by paying debt next year and the year after. It would be much easier if we could actually just have an account and save it the way Connecticut does, the way about six or seven other states and municipalities do now. So that would be a very good thing that we could do.

And also the Charter Revision Commission could look at ways of putting limits on the amount of spending that could be increased every year as some states and cities have done. We could consider doing what Governor Pataki is considering doing for the state, which is to put restrictions and limits on the ability to raise taxes, when you need a two-thirds vote or something like that. So I think there are very useful things that can be done that could take the more prudent budgeting policies that we've had in the budgets that we've done with the City Council and at least make some of that permanent so that the City never slips back to where it used to be before. That's one big change in terms of reforming thinking that we can bring about this year.

The physical changes in this City are absolutely tremendous. There's one physical change that indicates a change in thinking, though. When I came into office, we were worried about keeping the Mercantile Exchange in the City. And there was a very good chance - not just a negotiating chance, but almost a reality - that the Mercantile Exchange was going to go to New Jersey. The deal was done, the site was selected, and the Board was favorable to it. We had to work really hard to keep them here. And I had a feeling then that that was really critical to keeping the financial core in downtown Manhattan. It was the same time that we were fighting to put together the downtown plan to save downtown Manhattan. We kept the Mercantile Exchange. They've built their new building. They're doing great. They're going to expand.

This year, we probably did the business retention deal that's the most important one we'll ever do, which is to keep the New York Stock Exchange in the City of New York. That says to our children and their children that New York City is going to be the financial capital of the world in 2010, 2020, then it's really up to them how well they utilize that. But it accomplishes something really great.

But here's the big change. We were worried about business retention a few years ago, and we did a lot to retain businesses. Now we're doing business acquisition. We've got about 8 or 10 major businesses of major proportions that have come to New York in the last year, and instead of just keeping the Stock Exchange, now we have NASDAQ moving from Washington to New York City, and we will have another stock exchange in the City of New York when we didn't have it just a short while ago. That's the way we should be thinking.

I do not want to make any recommendations to Coach Parcells. However, always be on offense. Then you never have to worry about being on defense. So acquiring businesses is a very good idea. And there are a number of other things we could talk about - we don't have the time. We could talk about Times Square, we could talk about Renaissance Plaza in Brooklyn. We could talk about the wonderful projects that are going on in each one of the boroughs - the new hospitals in Queens. We could talk about the tremendous work being done in housing in the Bronx. There are any number of things that we could talk about.

But I would like to spend a few minutes straightening out the whole discussion of stadiums, because that consumed way too much discussion time last year. I can assure you that the retention of the stock exchange is more important than anything else we can do. But this is also important, and there's a real opportunity here if we all work together. There's a real opportunity to do what we did with the Stock Exchange: not just keep our great Stock Exchange, which is the most famous and the best in the world - that's giving us some of the flexibility to do some of the things in our budget that we're doing - but there's a chance here to keep what we have and to grow. And here's how I think we can do it.

New York City is committed - and you only accomplish this through negotiation - to keeping the Yankees and building a new stadium for them… and to keeping the Mets and building a new stadium for them. The Mets stadium will be built in Flushing Meadow. They have a grand design. We have to negotiate it. Here's a point that should be made very, very clear. It's clear to both teams, there's nothing new. Both teams are going to contribute to the new stadium that we're building, meaning they're going to put money into it. The City is going to put money into it. We're going to try to maximize the amount of additional private money that we get, meaning from people who want to help sponsor those stadiums in a lot of different ways - naming rights and signage rights, and other things like that that go along with modern stadiums. We're going to seek as much help as we can get from the state - Brad [Race] - any contribution is very much appreciated. And we'll try to negotiate, and we will negotiate, as we did with the Stock Exchange and everyone else, the best possible deal, with the City making a significant but not the only contribution. And you can't put too many restrictions on that because the only way to negotiate is if you don't have too many restrictions. Otherwise you don't have much room to negotiate. So we will work very hard to come up with a good deal for our great baseball teams, the Mets and the Yankees. It is my preference - it always has been, and I hope it works out that way - that the Yankees remain in the Bronx. And we're going to assume that it works out that way. Except we're also going to say, because I don't want to be irresponsible about this, that my overall objective is to keep them in New York City. So we will do everything we can to convince them to stay in the Bronx. We'll negotiate with them to build a new stadium there. And if they do, I would be very, very happy, and so would you. If we have to negotiate with someplace else in the City, and we don't want them to leave, then we would also do that.

Now, I'm going to assume they're going to remain in the Bronx, because I have another idea. I've spent a lot of time thinking about the West Side of Manhattan in the last year-and-a-half - debating, discussing the possibility of a baseball stadium there. But there's another possibility for the West Side of Manhattan. Because not only should we keep the Yankees and the Mets, who are going to play in the World Series next year, which will be great. Not next year, this year. 1999 they'll be in the World Series. What we're going to do is consider using that West Side to acquire a football team. Let me show you how that would work. And you know what football team I'm thinking about, right? The Superbowl champs. That's why I don't want to give Coach Parcells any plays. Here's what we could do very realistically. Just look at this. The site that is being talked about for a new Yankee Stadium… Because I really want to show this to you, because this is very, very exciting.

This site right here [points to poster (available in PDF format)], which is the site that was discussed for a baseball stadium, could be used - a little bit more land, but could fit in a football stadium, a domed football stadium, which is really important to why this would work so well. This area down here, which is almost exclusively warehouses, some of the property owned by the City, some privately, but we're talking about warehouse area here, could be used for parking. Madison Square Garden is here. Madison Square Garden could, if it wanted to, move here and build a new Madison Square Garden. They're not my business, but I have a suggestion.

If you put a domed stadium here, it would allow for the expansion of the Javits Convention Center - you could virtually connect it. Now, New York City doesn't have a domed stadium. We get hurt by that really badly. If you want to put 25,000, 30,000, 35,000, 40,000, 50,000, 60,000, or 70,000 people in an enclosed facility you cannot do it in New York City. You can do it in New Orleans, you can do it in Pontiac, Michigan. You can do it in a lot of places. And we have political conventions, ABA conventions, AMA conventions - probably literally 200 different conventions that would like to have a facility like that and we're virtually cut out from that. We're cut out from the NCAA Final Four, because now I think they require a facility of 35,000 or more. Madison Square Garden is 20,000. So it would help us a lot. If you had a domed stadium where you could play football in New York City, you could have a Superbowl in New York City. And you could have concerts there. So this would bring tremendous value.

The reason for my interest in this project, which is often attributed to my being a Yankee fan, is not about baseball. I love baseball. I can separate that from being Mayor of New York City. It's about something that would be enormously valuable for an area of Manhattan that right now is underdeveloped and underproducing. This is not producing the tax revenues… this is not producing the opportunities for jobs… this is not producing the opportunities for future development that it should be producing. A domed stadium right there that allows for the Javits Convention Center to expand and to acquire conventions that are now cut out from the City of New York is going to mean more jobs for the people of the City. It's going to mean more opportunities. It's going to mean more great events. If we could build a football stadium for a football team, our chances of acquiring a football team go up dramatically - as you know from what you read all around the country. And there's room to build it right there.

Madison Square Garden, which is over here, could sell its property or develop its property. The proceeds from that, where they are right now - big office tower, let's say, big hotel, office tower, whatever would bring the biggest revenues - would create lots of revenues to build a new Madison Square Garden with more luxury boxes, more seats, state-of-the-art, whatever, in the property right across the street from the football stadium. Now you have a full sports complex here. Now the reason why I urge Madison Square Garden to do that is if they put up that big tower like that, then we get somewhere between $30 million and $50 million more in real estate tax every year. You could take that and you could dedicate that to offsetting some of the cost for building the new football stadium. And when you add that to the Commercial Rent Tax and some of the other sources that we have, that would help to fund this project.

Now you'd also have to do a few other things in order to maximize the expansion of the Javits Convention Center. There's a subway line, right now the 7 line - which happens to be the subway line that goes to Shea Stadium. The subway line ends right under the Port Authority bus terminal just about a third of the way down the block on 41st Street between 8th and 9th. You would have to extend subway tracks for about two-and-a-half more blocks. And then you could connect it to a group of tracks that's already there. And that would give you a new subway station, a new 7 line station, right here in between the Javits Convention Center and the football stadium. So you could just virtually walk out. One direction you go to Javits, one direction you go to the football stadium, and you'll walk right down here to Madison Square Garden.

In addition to the new 7 line, which in and of itself would be probably the best thing we could do for economic development in this area, if we brought a subway line over here, because the Javits Convention Center is hurt by not having it, we would allow for this to become a real convention and sports corridor for the City. And believe me, what you would see in development in this whole area would pay for this many, many times over. This is a worthwhile thing to do and to consider.

Finally, if I can't convince you of any other way to do this, just think of all the tremendous opportunities the City will have for world class treatment and world class events. This would become the most famous sports facility in the world - nothing even close. The new Madison Square Garden, the new football stadium, whatever else you add to it. New York City should always be number one.

That's why we should get out of the Port Authority. You were wondering when I was going to get to that. The Yankees and the Mets are the most famous and the best teams in baseball. This year they're going to prove that. Kennedy Airport is number 35th of 36 in a ranking of airports. In other words, it's one of the worst in the country. LaGuardia is number 31st of 36. That's unacceptable to New York. That would be unacceptable to Los Angeles, it would be unacceptable to Boston, it would be unacceptable to any great City. Our transportation is the core of our ability to really survive and grow. We have got to get out of the Port Authority. This makes no sense to be partners with our friends in New Jersey because they extract more out of it than we do. I think that's been proven over and over again. So what we're going to do this year is we're going to announce that we're not going to renew the lease when it comes up in 2015, and we're going to immediately put out Requests for Expressions of Interest by private companies - we know of two that are very interested - in taking over the two airports, and to begin now to make concrete plans for how they would change those airports. Start it now. That may be a little bit soon - but actually, given the way things work, it isn't so soon. And hopefully by doing that, we will increase the pressure on them maybe to move aside. Because they're not going to be continued. We're not going to continue to allow them to lease that space from the City of New York any longer. They have proven that they can't do a good job of running the airports in the interests of the City of New York. It isn't personal. It's purely business.

I respect Governor Whitman. I respect the people in New Jersey. I think they're doing a terrific job. In fact, in a certain grudging way I respect the way they've used the Port Authority for their benefit and not ours. Like okay, guys, it's time now that we cut it out and we take our two airports and we use them for our benefit. And if that doesn't work we'll try other legal remedies to try to get ourselves out of it. But it's really important that we do that.

The final thing that I want to do is to say that today we completed a promise that we made last year. And I take all of these promises seriously. I can't complete all of them in one year. Some of them, like school security, take three or four years. Some of them take longer. Some are still ongoing, we're still doing them. But last year I promised that we would do something that I'm looking forward to when I retire: minor league baseball in New York City. My idea of retiring is to go to minor league baseball games in the morning and then to go see the Yankees and the Mets at night. So here's something that many, many times this year - and for 20 years nobody ever thought was possible. Here are three agreements. I want to show you these three agreements. One agreement is an agreement with the Mets to use the site in Coney Island where we'll build a baseball field to put a minor league team. Another agreement is with the Yankees. This agreement is to put a minor league team in Staten Island. And that team will begin in May. They'll be playing at the College of Staten Island first for about two or three years while we build a field for them at the Ferry Terminal while we build a tremendous development there. There's going to be a new terminal, there will be a museum, and there will be a baseball field where these young ballplayers will be trying to hit home runs in between the World Trade Center towers because the outfield faces the World Trade Center. And just think of the amount of business that this is going to bring from Wall Street. You can go by boat to the Yankee facility, to the Mets facility. Those teams hopefully could play each other. It would be great for Coney Island. It would be great for Staten Island. And it would be great for Major League Baseball because a lot of people can do what I want to do which is go in the daytime to see the minor league teams and in the night time go see the major league teams. And here is the agreement between the Yankees and the Mets that promises me that they're going to be in the World Series this year. Both of them waive so that the other can bring a team into New York.

I really want to thank them for that. This is a difficult thing to do. It really is. It's a risky thing to do. I don't know many major league teams if any that would bring a minor league team right into their home city. I don't know any major league teams that would allow another major league team to do it even if they were doing it. I think it shows that both of these organizations - the New York Mets and the New York Yankees - put the best interests of the City first. And this is the way to do economic development. I love Coney Island. I used to go to Coney Island when I was a little boy with my grandmother. That was really my summer vacation. My grandmother would take all of her grandchildren to Coney Island every summer. And I have dreams of what it used to be like and how wonderful it was. I know that if we could put this baseball field there, that's the way a Sportsplex will really happen - not the make-believe way in which they've been talking about it for 15 to 20 years. And I'm very bad on make-believe stuff. I'm really good on real stuff, which is why the City has turned around. And we can really, really turn around Coney Island if we put a baseball field there and 3,00 or 4,00 or 5,000 people per night come there and then everything else starts to get built around it. That was the trick to finally doing 42nd Street when they couldn't get it done for 15 years. That could be the trick to turning around Coney Island.

One last thing. New York City has lots of heroes and lots of legends. Our most important heroes are our police officers and our firefighters. We lost a lot of firefighters this year and too many police officers. Our firefighters have brought us the safest year for fire fatalities in 50 years. And they did it by the loss of life, by a tremendous number of injuries, by a lot of bravery and sacrifice. And we owe it to them - and I really want to thank the Speaker and the City Council for working with us on the fire reforms that we're going to be doing, the sprinklers, and really we should dedicate that to them. Because they brought about the kind of thinking on this that hopefully is going to have us have a City in which we take the record low in fire fatalities and we bring it down even lower.

I'd like to end by dedicating something to a hero of mine. He's probably a hero for all of you too. Phil Rizzuto once described to me that when he played with Joe DiMaggio and the Yankees were losing 8-0 in the eighth inning, he would run out to shortstop, he would look out in center field, he would see Joe DiMaggio standing there, and he would say, "We're going to win." Because Joe DiMaggio was a winner, and he gave New York a tremendous number of championships. He means something really special to the people of this City. Very often we do these things when it's too late. We did it - and I'm very proud that the Mets and New York City and the State did this - renamed the Interborough Parkway for Jackie Robinson - but we did it after Jackie Robinson died. Mrs. Robinson knows about it. We should rename the West Side Highway for Joe DiMaggio. And we should do it now. This would be the time to do it. And maybe it would really mean something.

I can't thank you enough for what you've done for the City. You know, the Mayor gets lots of the credit for the things that go right, and I'm sure not shy about taking it. But I know that that isn't correct. It's all of these people you see here who are the commissioners, the administrators, the deputy mayors - really exceptional people. They are much better and much more effective than anybody has any real understanding of. And all you have to do is see it in the results. This City honestly hasn't done better in a long, long time. I didn't do it. I did it by the times when I was fortunate enough to select the right people.

And it happened because of all the people you see here - the elected officials that we have. We debate, we discuss, we have disagreements, but ultimately we share in common a tremendous love for the City and I think a tremendous pride in what we've accomplished. We know - all of us know - that this City is now the envy of the world. Let's keep it that way.

Thank you very much.