Mayor for a New America (38 page)

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* From my interview with Katie Couric on the
Today
show, May 17, 1994:
KATIE COURIC
: You know, you're a lone voice in another area, welfare reform. That's a big cause right now across the country and in . . . Massachusetts. Governor Weld has cut the number of people on the rolls dramatically. He wants to cut an additional seventy thousand families. And you're a public official who is saying, “Whoa! Wait a minute . . .”
MAYOR MENINO
: It's another one of those things [like crime]. While there are welfare cheats—do all those young women and men want to be on welfare? Probably not. . . . If we cut welfare, where do they go? They go to the streets, and they go into the shelters. . . . Let's have a comprehensive plan . . . to get people off welfare and [into] jobs—job training programs, attracting new industries to this state and this country. . . . We can't just say we're going to cut welfare for the sake of headlines. Let's get real about it. The problem is that we—we tend, as elected officials, to worry more about headlines than really doing something for people.

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* In June 2002 Trina Persad was playing in Jermaine Goffigan Park when a stray bullet hit her. “We as a government can put program after program in place,” I told the press. “But there has to be some sense of caring and a focus from parents on their children.” I visited Trina at the Boston Medical Center. She hung on for two days. She was ten years old.

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* I was a pro-union mayor. For example, I took the side of SEIU janitors in their struggle for higher wages and better health care, helping settle a 2002 strike on terms favorable to the janitors.

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* Foreclosure Intervention Teams case-managed every notice of foreclosure that appeared in city or neighborhood papers. At Northeastern University's Reggie Lewis Center, we brought together people in danger of losing their homes with representatives of the banks that held their mortgages. In “work-out” sessions, deals were struck between home owners and lenders. Not all homes were saved. But many were. And our activist approach was adopted by other cities. With Washington blocking a national solution to the wave of foreclosures, we could not sit back and do nothing while good people were thrown out on the street because of the financial crisis.

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* “If there were a trophy for excellence in financial management, Menino would have won it. . . . His administration has been notably cautious in managing taxpayers' money. Rating agencies examine management practices, debt burden, reserves, and liquidity before determining a city's creditworthiness. . . . Boston is on target to fully fund its $2.1 billion pension liability by 2023, seven years ahead of statutory requirement.” From a
Boston Globe
editorial, October 26, 2009.

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* Two individuals I depended on to advise me on the merger were Dick Nesson of Partners HealthCare and Dean John McCarthy of the Harvard Business School. They were the ones I called on continually whenever we reached an impasse.

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* “Seemingly overnight Boston has become the new startup capital of the state's tech economy. . . . Last year, in fact, Boston accomplished a previously unheard of feat by having more venture capital deals than Cambridge—for years the center of gravity of the startup scene in Massachusetts.” Kyle Alspach, “Boston Suddenly Finds Itself the State's Tech Startup Capital,”
Boston Globe
, April 6, 2014.

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* “We've been able to do something that none of these other cities can do, and that is attract a lot of the very wealthy from around the country and the world. . . . And they're the ones that pay a lot of the taxes. . . . And we take tax revenue from those people to help people throughout the entire rest of the spectrum. And you know, it gives you this income-inequality meas­ure.” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg on his weekly radio show, September 20, 2013.

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* It was true. I didn't want citizens calling City Hall to talk to a machine. I'm told voice mail is considered a “blocking technology” anyway. In my last term, spurred by my tech-savvy chief of staff, Mitch Weiss, the city adopted “engagement technology” like Citizen Connect, a mobile app allowing people to send in photographs of potholes, graffiti, and broken streetlights and track the response to their complaints.

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