2006 State of the City Speech

Looking back, 2005 certainly will be a year to remember in the history of Houston, Texas. The number of new jobs in our region increased by over 40,000, more than half the entire population 100 years ago; housing starts continued to set records; by year-end our region was home to over 150,000 new residents, evacuees from the September hurricanes; and we recruited a major league soccer team and hosted our first World Series.

Houston's reputation improved around the nation and the world, as our community was an island of competence in a sea of chaos during the September hurricane disasters. And I suspect our confidence as a community improved, as we realized how much we could achieve if we broke down barriers with local government and business and non-profit organizations to get things done. Yes, we have learned some lessons on emergency preparedness. But, Judge Eckels, the most exciting lesson is that Houstonians can accomplish anything we set our minds to.

In 2006, let's use this sense of public commitment to fight crime, reduce traffic congestion, attract new jobs, cut our drop-out rates, and make Houston a national leader in efficient energy use.

Let's start with public safety, as I did when I announced my candidacy for Mayor a few blocks from here three years ago. I said then that public safety would be the highest priority in my administration. It has been. The crime rate per thousand of population dropped in my first term from prior levels. We took bold actions on police and fire pay, equipment, training and leadership to make our Police and Fire Departments the best in the nation. We've undertaken efforts to restore confidence in the police force with crime lab improvements and tasers.

But we have criminal hot spots in a handful of our 24 police districts where crime trends are unacceptable. We are cracking down on crime by putting the equivalent of over 160 officers in these areas with the aggressive use of overtime. And this year we will have a record number of new police academy classes to expand our police force to deal with a larger population.

And, with the leadership of Chief Hurtt and Public Safety Committee Chair Garcia, we will give our officers laws they need to do police work more effectively. We'll crack down on apartment owners who do not take common sense measures to ensure the safety of residents and neighbors. And we'll tighten the curfew laws on school nights. And we must change either procedures or laws which hurt public safety by directing vast amounts of police time responding to false alarms from automated systems.

In my first term, we fought traffic congestion by clearing incidents and assisting motorists on freeways, retiming traffic lights, and completing some street projects on accelerated schedule. This year, with your help, Houston-area employers should chart a course for our community to become the national leader in more flexible working hours.

By implementing programs to use best practices to encourage more flexible working hours, Houston's businesses will increase employee productivity and retention. These programs are in the public interest because they improve the quality of life and economic prospects of our region by reducing traffic congestion. For some workers, punching a time clock at traditional hours may be mission critical, but for most it is not. The two principal causes of traffic congestion are too many people trying to get to the same place at the same time, and obstruction of the flow of traffic because of some accident or stalled vehicle. We are addressing the second cause with Safe Clear and now must get to the first root of traffic congestion by doing a better job of encouraging more flexible working hours.

Twice I have convened meetings of CEOs of the largest employers in two of our largest commuting corridors. By removing the commute of just 300 vehicles during a peak 15 minute time period in the mornings and evenings, flexible working hours could speed the flow of traffic along our freeways such as IH 59 and IH 45 by 5 percent. Removing 600 vehicles for every 15 minutes at peak is equivalent of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on building a new lane on a freeway.

Major employers must take leadership and cooperate with each other to maximize the use of these programs, because the cumulative impact benefits every individual company and every employee who uses our congested highways and thoroughfares. We need more companies with programs like J. P. Morgan Chase, which supports flexible work programs for over a third of their employees. Chase's program has improved productivity, cut fixed overhead, and allowed Chase to remain open while other businesses were closed because of their telecommuting capacity during times of hurricanes and other interruptions.

S&B Infrastructure, a large employer on the IH 59 corridor, recently implemented a flexible work program in which over 98 percent of employees participate in a variety of compressed work-weeks that match the needs of the client. The firm initiated the program to attract and retain key employees in a competitive market, but all commuters in the IH 59 corridor benefit because they have shifted so much of the commuting schedule off the peak hours.

BMC Software has found that a more flexible work environment has increased employee retention and productivity. BMC provides managers with guidebooks so they can tailor work schedules to the needs of each job.

The leaders of this effort must be major employers. We appreciate the leadership provided by Mike Ballases with J. P. Morgan Chase in the central business district, Chris Lloyd Jones with ABB Lummus in the Westchase area; and Christopher Parker with Worley Parsons at Greenway Plaza.

Currently we have signed up 20 employers with over 400 employees that will undertake new flexible workplace options during the first three months of 2006. I want to invite every employer here to a summit I will be hosting on February 21 at the Wortham Theater for one hour between noon and one o'clock to review specific best practices and implementation plans for specific employers, so that other firms can commit to replicate these efforts.

Houston cannot grow if we are in a traffic jam and we will destroy neighborhoods and tax our citizens exorbitantly if we rely principally on expansion of freeway capacity to reduce congestion. We must make real and measurable progress on more flexible working hours in 2006.

The long run economic health of our community depends on the education of young people. In 2001, there were 70,000 ninth graders in the 24 school districts in and around the City of Houston. Four years later, however, only 44,000 graduated. This graduation rate of 62 percent is simply unacceptable. In an international economy, Americans can only preserve our standard of living and way of life if we are selling brains rather than brawn. So we must invest in the brains of those young people.

Join me in seeing how we can measurably cut this drop-out rate beginning with the freshman class of this school year. Already I have gotten almost five thousand students to sign a commitment card to stay in school. I and hundreds of citizen volunteers walked the neighborhoods at the beginning of the school year, bringing drop-outs back into school. We need businesses to adopt schools, and provide mentors to those young people who are brought back to school or are at the highest risk of dropping out. Please see me about committing to help with this project, which we call Expectation Graduation.

In 2006 we will break ground on over 200 new homes within the city limits in our most neglected neighborhoods, all built on lots that were weeded and abandoned. We call this and related neighborhood improvements, Project Houston Hope. To revive our most neglected neighborhoods, we are rehabilitating the water and sewer systems, installing necessary drainage and working with the local public schools and our community college system to enhance education opportunities in these neighborhoods.

We continue to foreclose on thousands of long-term abandoned, blighted properties where taxes haven't been paid in over a decade, so we create a cycle of redevelopment for affordable housing, reversing decades of a cycle of decline and despair.

As families move in, the vast majority of them being homeowners for the first time, neighborhoods will become safer. We reduce traffic congestion as we provide more housing for the work force closer to major employment centers. We reduce the upward- pressure on property taxes as new housing construction is put on the tax rolls.

Too long this effort was delayed by squabbling among the different local government entities concerning how to handle accrued tax delinquencies. Meanwhile properties sat idle while neighborhoods declined. I want to thank Harris County and our school districts and community college system for moving quickly so we can expand this program.

Finally, in 2006 we want to take some bold steps that will set Houston on the course to being the national leader in the efficiency of energy use, just as we are now the recognized leader in energy supply.

Rising electrical power costs force citizens who are struggling to get by to choose between basic necessities, and raise the cost structure and reduce the competitiveness of our region's businesses. We have both worked with and fought utility providers to limit the increase in regulated rates, and achieved some notable successes in lowering their rate requests. But power providers and consumers cannot simply ignore rising fuel costs associated with increasingly scarce natural gas. The most effective long-run strategy for reducing energy bills is to invest wisely in more efficient energy use. This year we will prove what can be done by weatherizing the house of anyone who wants to in the distinctive residential community of Pleasantville in Southeast Houston. Our goal is to reduce power consumption, during the summer, of those houses by at least 10 percent. If this succeeds, we will work with CenterPoint and the Public Utility Commission to roll out such a program to all neighborhoods that so desire it, in Houston, Texas. We want our electrical transmission and distribution utility to have the same economic incentive to invest in energy saved as in energy sold.

During the first part of this year, we also will work with commercial building owners on a long-run strategy for the best practices for the design and rehabilitation of commercial buildings to reduce energy consumption.

Finally, within 60 days we will announce a program designed to educate Houston consumers on what they can do to buy power at the cheapest reliable price. We will also tell them how they can buy power from sources with little or no pollution of the air. Most consumers have not yet realized the benefits of the competitive marketplace, which were advertised as part of deregulation. We must.

In my last two State of the City Addresses, we announced some annual goals and met them. We broke new ground on efforts to enforce pollution laws, reform public pensions, and a variety of other ambitious undertakings first announced at the last two State of the City Addresses.

In my first State of the City Address I challenged businesses to help cultivate a diverse and competitive group of entrepreneurial businesses in our community. I explained that this took work, because people do business with people they know and it is hard to get to know new people in a community that is working so hard and expanding so fast. I am proud of the initiative by our business community to increase the commitment to the business done by small and minority professional firms. The City of Houston is setting records in the participation of minority and women-owned businesses providing professional services and construction, our two largest types of procurement.

This commitment represents the deepest values of Houston, America's City of Opportunities. We saw how this community came together to welcome God's children from all backgrounds during the hurricane crisis. In other cities, including some in the devastated areas, some civic leadership viewed some evacuees simply as members of some ethnic group. In Houston we treat them simply as Americans.

But I am concerned that we not get complacent in our progress or forget how far we need to go in order to live in a country in which you could walk into a leadership meeting like this and the folks seated at the tables share more of the heritage and background of those waiting on the tables.

Many of our fastest growing and dynamic businesses are owned and managed by people from non-traditional backgrounds, and their leadership has not been adequately integrated into some institutions of our traditional business leadership, such as the GHP. The first generation of entrepreneurs from Mexico, the Camara de Empresarios Latinos, has witnessed explosive growth over the last five years, as small retailers have seen their business blossom and have sought to develop a new business network. Over 1,000 Pakistani Americans who own and manage convenience stores work together to purchase goods on large volumes comparable to the largest regional retailers. The 20 to 30 percent of local hotel and motel rooms owned by minority business people were the most generous and responsive in responding to a call for free hotel rooms in the early days of the Katrina evacuation, before any FEMA reimbursement was available. We are proud of firms like that of Nathelyne Kennedy, a premier civil engineering firm owned by a hard-working African-American female, who graduated from the City's affirmative action program and, has become a prime contractor for major public projects based simply on its excellent performance. For those who believe as I do in the free enterprise system and the critical role of business managers in civic leadership, I believe strongly in an umbrella business organization such as the Greater Houston Partnership. But we must all remember that the very relevance of the GHP in the coming decades will depend on its success in engaging the active interest of a new generation of entrepreneurs and managers.

I fear in giving a speech like this that my co-workers at the City will feel neglected if I do not mention the important service of each of their departments. Whether it be libraries, public health, solid waste collection, or parks and recreation, I could not improve the quality of our neighborhoods without the hard work of these thousands of employees. And remember, you rely on my co-workers in city government to pick up the trash in front of your house, keep the nation's largest public water and sewer system working, and operate one of the world's fastest growing airports. We would not be able to attract many workers who could live anywhere without excellence provided by public support of organizations provided by the transit authority or the excellence in trauma care provided by the Harris County Hospital District. I apologize for neglecting other essential public functions just as critical.

Above all, I want to thank the citizens who provide assistance everyday in helping us create a culture of service in the most efficient and responsive big city government in the United States. Thank you especially for the support that you have given to my hard-working city colleagues on the City Council, and the City Controller, who are setting a shining example for all levels of government concerning how people with different views and backgrounds can work together to attain common goals and get things done. Please thank each of these elected city officials for their service and willingness to work as part of a team. Sometimes all elected officials get pressure from the tiny but vocal minority in our community who would prefer a good fight to solid progress. In particular I want to thank and I ask you to thank members of City Council who work hard, and help maintain a unique atmosphere of civility and high ethical standards.

Thank you for letting me work for you, and God Bless Houston and our great State and Country.