 Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome. It's really a delight to see everybody here with us today. I'm Susan Collins, the Joan and Sanford Wildean here at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. And again, a pleasure to welcome you to today's special event. It's co-sponsored by one of the Ford School's research centers, the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy Close-Up. And so on behalf of both Close-Up and the Ford School, we are just delighted to have this panel here today. I'd like, as well, to acknowledge that we're joined by the University of Michigan Vice President for Government Relations Cynthia Wilbanks. We're delighted to have her joining us, too. Well, today's panel really represents a very distinguished group of public servants. We have Carrie Duggan from the office of Vice President Joe Biden, Arthur Jemison from Detroit, Colonel Kevin C. Riley, and Abigail Beniston from Youngstown, Ohio. And joining us, her plane is a little bit delayed, but joining us soon will be Karen Freeman-Welson of Gary, Indiana. They'll be introduced more formally in a moment, and their bios are in your program as well. And so I'd just like to say that it's really an honor for us to have our panel here. So welcome to the Ford School. Well, it's also a very special honor and a true pleasure to welcome home today's moderator, Cecilia Munoz. And we're delighted to have you here. Cecilia is a special advisor to President Obama and director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. She's one of the nation's top policy leaders, and she's also a native Detroiter and an alum of the University of Michigan. In fact, she reminded me a third generation alum. So Go Blue, we're delighted on that. And some members of her family, her father and sister are here with us, too. And we're delighted. Great to have you. While much of Cecilia's career was spent working at the National Council of La Raza, as DPC director, she has led the Obama administration's efforts to fix our country's broken immigration policies, increase the minimum wage, forge federal partnerships with local governments, which is one of the key topics for today, and so much more. Her commitments to improve the lives of others has earned her many honors, including the very prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2000. I met Cecilia during my first year as dean. She had served as a Towsley policymaker of residence here in 2007, and our students lobbied really hard to bring her back as commencement speaker in 2008, which was my first year here. And she just did a wonderful job with that commencement address. And so it really is a pleasure to have you back again at the Ford School. And I just wanted to thank you explicitly for being so generous with your time, spending time with both our students and our faculty, as well as the more general community. So Cecilia will moderate our distinguished panel. After the initial conversation, she'll take questions from the audience. And you should all have received cards as you came in. They will be collected starting at around 12.30. We'll have staff who will be circulating. Ford School Professor Megan Tompkins-Stang, together with two of our Ford School students, Gabrielle Horton and Josh Rivera, will facilitate the question and answer session. For those who are watching online, please tweet your questions to us using the hashtag policy talks. And we'll be delighted to include your questions in the queue as well. And so now, please join me in getting a very special welcome to our guests who will do our panel today. So thank you very much for that very warm introduction. And good, I guess, afternoon, everybody. Thank you for being here. I'm just going to give a little brief introduction to the session. And then we will get rolling. The president that I work for started his career as a community organizer. And really in that spirit, he not only attracted fellow community organizers into his administration, but he really challenged us to think about how making life better for Americans works at the local level. And he challenged us, as a federal government, to be thoughtful about what it's like to be a mayor, what it's like to be a community leader, what it's like to work in a neighborhood association, and really challenged us to think about how we intersect with those people as a federal government to see if we could be the kind of innovators that the country deserves. And most importantly, work in a way that puts federal government leadership in the service of local leadership. And that's really what we've come to talk about today. We developed a whole host of what we call place-based policymaking. And I should point out that my former deputy, James Quall, is a current Towsley policymaker in residence at the Ford School. And he's sitting right there. And he was involved in these policymaking decisions. And the Ford School is lucky to have him. It's smart to have him here. We devised a policymaking approach that was focused on local communities and that has four sort of central characteristics. And first is that the local community sets the vision for what's the tipping point? What's the goal? What is it that you're trying to achieve? Not the federal government, but local leadership. And then the second thing is that these are to be long-term plans. That this is not about going from crisis to crisis. This is about looking over a longer time horizon, figuring out what's needed and how to get there. The third is that we rely and ask local leaders to rely very heavily on data and metrics in order to demonstrate, did we make the right choices? Are we reaching our goals? How do we need to readjust in order to get there? And then fourth is that the federal government tries to coordinate across our bureaucracy rather than expect local leaders to navigate the very complex bureaucracies that we currently ask them to navigate. So the idea is that we try to operate as if there were one door to the federal government and we try to coordinate ourselves rather than expecting local leaders to have to figure us out because we can be big and complex and maybe more than a little frustrating. So during just the eight years that I've been involved in this administration, we started with five federal agencies working in a coordinated way in a small number of communities. And today we have 15 federal agencies coordinating across about 1800 communities. This is a big, big initiative on the part of the Obama administration. And we are eight years in and it turns out that if you're trying to make long-term goals, eight years is a pretty small time horizon. So we are still determining whether our theory of the case is correct, that if the federal government were to work in the service of local leadership that that would actually catalyze change. And the jury, frankly, is still out and the most important jury at some level are the local partners that we work with. So what we've assembled here today is a panel of folks who are true experts because this is the work that they do day in and day out. So we have folks from the federal family who are involved with local communities. And we have local leaders as well who are doing this work, in particular in Youngstown and in Detroit and when the mayor gets here in Gary, Indiana. So let me ask them quickly to introduce themselves to just tell us quickly who you are and what you do and what you're focused on and then we will dive right into the conversation starting with Carrie. Thank you, Cecilia. And thanks University of Michigan as an alum of the School of Natural Resources from a decade ago. It's good to be home. Real quick, my name is Carrie Dugan. I'm Dugan, he's Dugan in Detroit. We're not related, getting that out of the way. Currently I am in the vice president's office as his energy and environment and climate advisor. But for the past five years I've been part of the president's efforts in Detroit originally through the Strong City Strong Communities executive order and team there. And prior to moving to the vice president's office I was fully embedded in City Hall in Detroit which we'll definitely be talking about here today. So it's great to be here. I was at the Department of Energy for about five years before I started doing this work. And so that's the sort of toolkit I brought with me to work on Detroit. Thanks, Carrie. Arthur. Hi, good afternoon. My name's Arthur Jemison. I'm the housing director for the City of Detroit, Michigan. I'm the, we're principally, I'm the community development banker for the city. We receive all the city's CDBG home, ESG and other federal funds for community development. I'm also the day-to-day leader of the mayor's housing agenda in the city. Before I came to Detroit I'd spent about 20 years working in the public and private sectors in Boston, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. And I'm pleased to be here today. Good afternoon. My name is Kevin Riley. I'm the director of STUFF, the 910th Airlift Wing at Youngstown Air Reserve Station in Youngstown, Ohio. Previously I was the mission support group commander and what that is is easily put is there's the operations group, they're the flyers, there's the maintenance group, they're the maintainers, there's the medical, they take care of the obvious stuff and then there's everything else and that was my job was everything else. If you think about a city manager that's pretty much what my job was and Duel had it as the mission support group commander as the city manager, if you will, for the base. I had some 1500 reservists to get ready to go downrange and my job then there with that hat is to provide a training venue to get them ready to go downrange to do their duty downrange and our responsibility was to make them as good if not better than the guys who were doing it full time. So one week in the month, two weeks a year I have to find all kinds of opportunities for training for them to get them ready to go downrange. So it's a pleasure to be here. I am a Southern Cal graduate so we'll be back. We won't hold that against you, Abby. Good afternoon and thank you for having me. I'm Abby Beniston from the city of Youngstown. I'm the code enforcement and blight remediation superintendent so very long title for pretty much everything housing related in the city of Youngstown. I've been working in city hall for the past nine years and the past five years in housing related appointments. The city of Youngstown is one that the peak of their population was at 170,000 people and has dwindled to about 65,000 in 2015. So we're dealing with a large blight and vacancy problem and so building the relationships and coming up with the strategies to defeat that problem is what I do from day to day. So Abby can we start the conversation with you and Colonel Riley because I can see people wondering. What you just described currently has to do, Abby, with what you do. Correct. So the partnership between the city of Youngstown and the Youngstown Air Reserve base is one that came about through a federal program called the Community Partnership Program in the Department of Defense. And what that is is a program that looked for ways to team up local Department of Defense installations with partners in their communities to better invest the bases and spiderweb them throughout the community. We do have a large vacancy and blight problem in the city of Youngstown. We are a municipality that has three demolition units held in our city street department. We own all of that equipment ourselves and we tackle close to 500 demolitions every year. With that, we can always use help with that problem. So we teamed up with the local air base and asked that the airmen and women come into the city of Youngstown and receive their training on our equipment while tearing down homes. So the Colonel could probably speak a little bit more about what else goes on with that. Can I have this slide if it's possible? The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 codified the Community Partnership Practice and that allowed the installations and authority to negotiate with and to partner with, team with the communities, something they've been doing for as many years as there have been bases in communities. But this allowed us to come up with different ways, creative ways to partner to save money. As you know, the budgets are tight and getting tighter. We're dealing with sequestration at the time. So coming up with ways to get our training done, get coming up with ways to find ways that we could save money. Whether it's plowing, having the city plow our, or the county plow our streets or working with the Port Authority who owns the runway, having them come over and plow with us or we plow for them. Right now we provide all of the emergency services to the airport across the way. So we've been partnering with the community for quite some time. But with the partnership program, we reached into that and asked the secretary of the Air Force to send a team out to work with us as an installation to invite all the communities in to set up different work groups. One of them was the Blight Remediation Program out of Youngstown. And Abby was I think a charter member of that group. And that one is probably our most successful group. We've had a number of other ones that have done great things. We built some stairs in Newton Falls, South Carolina, not South Carolina. Newton Falls, Ohio. And this program took off when we were able to work through all the hurdles using one of the programs. And there are two programs that the Department of Defense has. One is called the Innovative Readiness Training Program. And that one's been ongoing for many years now. And that one is a large scale, takes about two years to set it up and to get it going. But once you do, you can do it on a very large scale for hundreds of thousands of houses. The illustration, the picture there is our guys working on houses on the Navajo Reservation in Gallup, New Mexico, building houses. And they're inside a very large building, assembling these houses and they move them out and plant them on foundations. The 910th is also the Department of Defense's air spray mission, the only aerial spray within the federal government as a matter of fact. And we do large scale spraying for mosquitoes, for oil spills, for other things. We use the IRT process for that as well. But for the city of Youngstown, for our current needs, we used what's called the Realistic Military Training Program. And that is codified, it's a Department of Defense Regulation Instruction, if you will. And that allows installations to team up and identify something like the blight remediation where I have civil engineers who need training on heavy machinery. They have a need where they have excess houses that need to come down. So we were able to work through all of the legal issues to get that partnership and a memorandum of understanding put together and signed. It required the city to go through quite a few legal hoops to get there, including passing some ordinances to allow us to work on their equipment. They would provide all of the supervision, they would provide the equipment, I would provide the labor. My guys get valuable stick time. They may not necessarily be driving track hose or excavators like here. And that is an awful lot of fun, by the way. I was able to do one. Yeah, if you ever want to get some really good, that's it. But our guys got good stick time. So when they go down range, they may not be driving one of these machines, but they'll be driving something like a bulldozer or driving something else, heavy duty machinery, where they're not learning it for the first time. They're actually going in there with great confidence because this is very complicated in a closed, confined environment, taking down a house and those complicated moves, they translate very easily to a bulldozer where we're just going straight. So can I ask, Abby, can you describe a little bit how this intersects from a community perspective? And these are not homes in some isolated place. We're talking about doing demolition in neighborhoods. Correct, so all of these demolitions took place right in the middle of neighborhoods. We have plenty, we have close to 3,500 vacant lighted homes in densely populated neighborhoods that are posing a risk to the house next door, whether it's danger of collapse or arson for them to be set on fire, but the neighbors are very upset with the conditions they're living by. So the airmen and women are coming into neighborhoods where there are plenty of homes that still are occupied and not only are they getting training, but they're doing a service to the residents where they're very pleased that the blight is gone. So with each house that we took down the first six months, we were able to complete about 85 demolitions with the air base and the neighborhoods, the neighborhood groups, the residents, they all came out and embraced this process. They were very excited that the blight was being gone but it was also something new to them that they had people from the Air Force in their community helping to spruce up the neighborhood and they were very excited about it. So let's go one more thing, Karen. We were able to expand that demolition to other services within the community. For example, there were a number of signs, street signs that were missing. They're not just the ones on the poles, they're the ones hanging from above so they have to get in the bucket and that's good training for them as well. And we were able to replace about 800 signs as well. So thank you. So let's bring Detroit into this conversation. Arthur, starting with you. Now you deal with blight and demolition as well but I'd love just your sense also of how in the challenges that you're dealing with in Detroit, how has the local, federal relationship worked? Well, I would describe the relationship as working very well. I mean, I think the things that we've been able to achieve in Detroit over the last three or four years are testament to a great degree to the participation of the federal government very directly in some of the policy thinking and most importantly through cash resources invested in the city's work. You may have heard that the city has some 40,000 houses that are in need of demolition and you may also have heard that we recently passed a milestone of demolishing our 10,000th blighted abandoned vacant house. Something that took a lot of time and frankly took a huge amount of money in coordination with the Obama administration as well as the Treasury Department and all the people in between. So that's one major milestone. You may not know about some other smaller things that have I think a huge opportunity to impact day-to-day life in the city that the federal partnerships allowed us to do. Besides the demolition, the city has a housing commission. The housing commission's been under the receivership of HUD for 10 years and about two years ago we were able to appoint a local board and get that board to lead the housing commission. Now housing commissions, maybe you don't know about housing commissions, but public housing is really the anchor of the affordable housing system in any city and having that under the jurisdiction of HUD makes it hard to do things. Things like mobilizing the rental assistance that many Detroiters urgently need. Things like reusing development sites that are in the portfolio of the housing commission, targeting important communities for attraction to the city. There's a number of different things that a housing commission can do that when it's not under the control of the local authorities, you don't have access to those resources. Another example is in our efforts to change the city for the better. And we also work closely with HUD on things like a recent allocation of $9 million to the city for the purpose of creating place-making landscapes that'll go in next to the areas of strength in the neighborhoods of strength in our community that's going directly into the planning that's gonna create those great concept plans and it's gonna go into the implementation of those parks and open spaces. I could go on about other federal resources like the city recently made a proposal to develop a thousand mixed income housing units on the former Brewster-Wheeler public housing site. That was an opportunity that was highlighted to us through our federal partnership. You know, I could go on for a long time talking about matters of obscure and matters that are well known but none of those things would have happened without a federal partner. Now, to some degree, the stronger that the city gets in its implementation management of its resources, it can take better advantage of the federal partnership and make more pointed and specific requests that it's been my experience that the federal government's gone to great lengths to satisfy and partner with the city on. But without strength in the city department, you can't, it's hard to articulate those needs. So I think as we've gotten stronger, we've been able to make a higher quality of request and a higher quality and be a better partner to the federal government. So I guess again, I can't name an area where I've had success that doesn't have the direct involvement of a federal partnership. So I think that's pretty much the whole message. Thank you. So, Carrie, when I visited Detroit in January, one of the things, stories that I think you told, which has really stuck with me was that when we started this partnership and sending folks to work on the mayor's team, what the mayor thought he wanted was just resources. Just like, you know, it's very nice that you're sending a person, but what I really need to do is write a check. And one of the things the mayor said to me when I was there in January was actually that turned out to be, that writing the checks is great, but that the most valuable thing has turned out to be technical expertise and technical assistance. And you have some stories to tell about that. Sure, I'll try to be quick and talk into the mic. It is funny, I think the recipe that I've learned, and I'll go back and give you some specific examples, but what seems to have been proven out, and I've been doing this for five years, is that its capacity first, it's what Arthur just said, is the city gains more robust capacity at the high levels. Yes, you can and you have asked us for more stuff, which is great, but it was capacity and then the technical support and then the resources, the money. I think that's sort of the recipe that at least from my perspective has really worked. In Detroit, I can give you two examples and then one that's hopefully gonna produce some fruit that Arthur and I have partnered on. When I started working on Detroit, it was during the previous mayoral administration when half of the streetlights were out, so those of you who know Detroit do remember those days. It's funny that two years ago that was the case still. And so it took a long time and a lot of private public partnership to get to a place where there were enough resources at play to reinstall the streetlights. And that's when I realized that they were gonna reinstall technology that I'm being funny here, but that Thomas Edison himself would recognize. And having spent a number of years in a very technical office in the Department of Energy, I was familiar with the advanced lighting that the administration has gone hard on R&D to bring down the cost and improve the efficiency. So I suggested to the public lighting authority in Detroit, maybe you ought to consider advanced lighting. And it took some time and some convincing, but I brought in some of the partners from the DOE universe, which is the National Laboratory System, in this case of the Pacific Northwest National Lab, brought them to the table. They in turn brought some other partners to the table. And we had a closed door, big conversation about infrastructure problems and what was going on in Detroit. And now you have, let's fast forward here, now you have 63,000 LED streetlights lit in Detroit's neighborhoods. The downtown is the last piece that they're finishing and the plan is to finish before the end of this year. Two years ago they were in bankruptcy. Now they have one of the most advanced lighting systems in the nation, it's fabulous. If you haven't been down to Detroit, you should go there. So that's one example. My other example is actually very recent, Secretary Moniz, my former boss was in town just two weeks ago, cutting the ribbon at a new solar farm on the west side of Detroit at the O'Shea Park. Now what's neat about this is the mayor had approached Secretary Moniz in 2014 saying I'm really interested in how we reuse land in Detroit. Detroit is a very big city with a lot of vacancy as was mentioned. So in addition to the 10,000 demolitions of the residential, you've got an equal number of commercial sites that need demolition and you've got a ton of abandoned school sites. So we looked at the problem, we partnered with utility and it dawned on me that the utility and the city had, well the city had an appetite for doing solar deployment. But the utility was more interested in probably where it was easy and economically feasible to do something in a cornfield, right? So I said, well can we just have a conversation about urban solar? And so Secretary Moniz two weeks ago cut the ribbon on one of the nation's largest urban solar farms and not only that, half of the site is actually gonna be repurposed for recreation. So they're revitalizing a whole neighborhood and then he brought in a community partner to do a free energy audits for the neighbors so they're actually getting a direct benefit and it's been very exciting and that partnership happened, I brought in the technical resources of the National Renewable Energy Lab out in Colorado. So it's kind of been an all-hands-on-deck approach to finding the resources, the technical resources to support. And I think this all goes back to my eighth grade history teacher who had on his podium a sign that said, assume nothing. He was a terrifying professor. My sister's here, am I right? Yeah, so that is my attitude. I don't assume, I think these people in Detroit, Arthur isn't one of them. The folks I work with in City Hall are some of the brightest, most creative. You have one of the hardest jobs in America, sir, but I don't assume that they definitely know where all the resources are and that's been the joy of this work that Cecilia and the president have enabled is allowing me to spend the time to understand the problems and then go find the resources to bring to bear. So Arthur, I know that Kerry's sitting right next to you so, you know. She felt compelled to say things like that. Well, no, you should also feel compelled and I'm a federal official as well. So, and you got one on the other side of you and he's in the military, so no pressure. But seriously, part of what we need is feedback about whether or not our theory of the case is really true. Whether or not, in your experience, as a city official who's trying to do this work in NAPI, I want to bring you into this conversation too. Our theory of the case is that by having Kerry or somebody like her on the mayor's team, they're on the ground as opposed to in an office in Washington. That she, that it'll add value to your work but that we can do it in such a way where it's still clear it's your work. It's the people of the Youngstown, the people of Detroit advancing the ball here and we are working in the service of that. So that's the theory of the case and it's really easy for me to say that I sit in an office in Washington but in your experience, and Abby and yours, is this adding value, are there ways that we can do it better? Does that make sense? Yes. Do you want to go back and join me? You can go ahead first. I guess I would say that it is working. I would like to try to give some examples of cases. I'd like to give some examples of cases where it's working and maybe that'll tell us where it didn't work. So my experience of working at the city was, you know, it's my first time being on a cab and I'd been in a governor's, sort of, I don't know, second JV cabinet. Governor Patrick, it was my former employer in Massachusetts. So I had, it was a new experience for me to learn that in my cabinet meeting where we get grilled every week by the mayor about our status, where we are on various metrics, I was surprised to learn after the meeting that one of the people in the meeting was a federal official who'd been assigned to the city to work on our issues. And he said, and as a person who is one of the primary voices to the federal government and a representative, to some degree, of the money that the city's investing in, that the federal government's investing in the city, it's, you know, I have a lot of interaction with the federal government. So realizing there was an official one in the room was kind of a revelation in a lot of ways. I was able to ask him, look, I've got this question, I've got this issue, who do I really talk to about this? I'm getting a lot of, you know, federal talk, I need an actual person who knows about the business of being a grantee to talk to me. And I got that person on the phone and we had a materially better conversation than I'd had before. And then talking about grant opportunities. When I'm in cabinet talking about the grant opportunity, someone in cabinet can say, that's gonna work, that's not gonna work, this is where we're going, this is not where we're going. But I think I'd like to talk a little bit about kind of there's a sense of collaboration that existed, you know, when the HUD announced something called the National Disaster Recover Resiliency Competition, we urgently wanted to be a proposer because we believe that we have a resiliency case in our city that's unique. And we were ineligible for a couple of reasons a disaster happened in a year that was outside the window. So long story short, because someone was in my cabinet, heard me talking about this, we got into a dialogue that resulted in the end and a significant federal investment is gonna result in significant, I think, investments in open space in our community. That wouldn't happen without the official in the room. And again, I guess, I don't know if it's been the expectation of other recovering cities that they'd have a federal presence in the room. So that's, I think, a victory and a success. In terms of feedback that was negative, I guess it'd be hard to name something that didn't, I mean, maybe it makes you feel like you're two, I will tell you, say two things that have happened and then I'll let Abby get in here. I can remember federal officials who had dealt with the Detroit, the people who were assigned to Detroit saying, please don't tell the federal official to sign to Detroit about this because if you do, it's like they're gonna land a cruise missile in my office. Yeah, we don't actually do that. I don't want you to, I don't, it's hard for me to, I can't do other stuff because they're all over me about your question. And the only other thing I'd say, and so that, and then there's that sort of Geoffrey Canada experience, I'm a big fan of his book, Fistic Knife Gun, and one of the stories is about how when you have a gun, you know, it makes you feel a little bit safer when you go deal with people who are tough for you to deal with. And so maybe there's a degree to which knowing that you have the federal official makes you feel bolder and bolder into you. That's not always a good thing. It's always a good thing for me, right? But it's not always a good thing to feel emboldened because sometimes you don't have, it's hard to get as good a sense of the strength of your case. So I think that would be, those would be the downsides since you asked for candid advice. Those would be the downsides that I'd offer. Thank you. Abby. Thank you. I would say that our partnership with the federal government and having the technical assistance on the ground, the city of Youngstown was the recipient of two strong cities, strong communities, fellows, and they were a blessing in disguise. When I took over in 2014, the blight was overwhelming. The history of code enforcement and demolition was demolished, demolished, demolished. It wasn't really about preserving the housing stock that we had left. So it was a daunting, overwhelming task to completely change the thought process of the staff and out in the communities that were not only coming into demolish, but we need to preserve the houses that we have left. The two fellows that were assigned to Youngstown, one specifically worked just with housing, code enforcement and demolition. And she was wonderful with being able to point out the different opportunities that were available because not only do you have these daunting tasks as city officials, you still have day to day operations that need to take place. So the amount of time that you're able to dedicate to looking for these resources is minimal. And having somebody from the federal government that is able to connect the dots was a super huge help. That was one instance just in code enforcement. One of the other initiatives from our current Mayor, Mayor John McNally, that was big when he came into office, was community policing. We also had some representatives from the Department of Justice that came in, helped us with this model of community policing. We now have a community policing unit of seven officers that are out in all of the different neighborhoods. We have seven wards in Youngstown, so an officer in each ward. And the Department of Justice has been involved since that was launched to help connect the pieces on not only how that should work, but the different avenues and programs that it can help to enhance. So it's just, I would say that it's been wonderful to have experts involved, invested in Youngstown, to help connect the dots on the federal level. And Colonel, can I ask you to just, to talk a little bit about, so you, I'm still quite fascinated with this example of the demolition work that you're doing. Do you think it's possible for something like that to go to scale? I mean, you mentioned things that you were doing in Gallup, New Mexico, and other places, but do you think there's more service to local communities that can be mined here? Absolutely. The program's called the Innovative Readiness Training Program, and I do have some information on that. The city or the community does propose through Department of Defense, through their website, and it gets the process going. Abby's pretty familiar with that as you've submitted a couple of them. And it's a tedious process, but once you get past all the hurdles, it is scalable to a very large scale. We talked about the airport in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the houses down in Gallup, New Mexico, tearing down several thousand houses at a time. Ah, here we go. Tearing down several thousand houses would require more than just our little base. It would require a number of different units to come in, and that can be managed through that program, the IRT program, and it is very possible. It is very scalable. So I'll defer the rest of my time to my esteemed colleague to the left. Mayor Freeman Wilson, welcome. Sorry about the flight problems. Well, thank you, and I'm sorry about the flight problems, too, that's one of the things that I don't control in this place. Well, we're very glad that you're here. We've been having a conversation. I'm Cecilia, by the way. Yes, of course. Nice to meet you. We've been having a conversation about the federal local partnership in dealing with, in dealing particularly with tearing down blighted properties, in dealing with issues like innovative ways to bring energy policy into a local community. Kerry was just talking about a solar project in the middle of Detroit, for example. And Abby, who's sitting next to you, just brought in some work that the Justice Department has been doing with the city of Youngstown in expanding community policing and supporting their local police in both preventing violent crime, but expanding community policing. So those are kind of the topics that are on the table. One of the things that we're exploring is the local federal relationship, the extent to which federal partners may have helped you, may have not helped you. I'm trying to keep the door open to constructive feedback on whether or not our theory of the case, which is that if we were to work in the service of your community and your leadership and your goals, that we'd be able to maybe help you go a little further than we had been previously. So I'd love, in particular, I know you've been doing, well, obviously you're the mayor, you work in all of these areas, but in particular work with respect to public safety, but your intersection with federal partners in particular. Well, first, let me just take a couple of seconds to just thank everyone for the opportunity and say that it's a great honor to be on the panel with these esteemed guests, and especially you, Ms. Munoz. We have been extremely helped, or we have been helped a lot, I would say, by our partnership with the federal government. Shortly after taking office in January of 2012, I got a visit from our regional HUD secretary, Antonio Riley, or a HUD administrator, and he said that I'm from the federal government and I'm here to help. And of course, you know, I'm like, I swear it's right there. Yeah, exactly, and I'm like, okay. And I think, I'm thinking, okay, I'll entertain him for maybe 30 or 60 days and send him on his way. But I am just pleased and humbled to say that it really did transform into a wonderful working relationship, not with just HUD, but with the EPA, with the Department of Justice, with the Army Corps of Engineers, with HHS, and all of those federal partners that have offices in Chicago. And the two areas where I would just highlight are the area, are two things that we have had previously found intractable, quite frankly, in the city of Gary, and that was vacant and abandoned properties. And the other was with our criminal justice efforts. Relative to blight, just the whole notion of blight. When we got into office, we were told there are 20,000 vacant and abandoned properties in the city of Gary. And I was like, gee, I don't think there are 20,000 structures. So I didn't know. But I couldn't answer that question because I really didn't know how many there were. But one of the things that we were able to do early on was to adapt, thanks to the students at the University of Chicago. I don't know if I should be saying that here. But they gave us or introduced us to the local data survey that was being used in Detroit. And we were able to quantify the problem, first step. But upon quantification, we were then able to adapt another thing that was going on in Ohio and Michigan and to get the Department of Treasury dollars that were coming through the hardest hit fund to really put a dent and to begin to put a dent. And so we were able to find out that there were actually 6,500 vacant structures. We were able to determine that probably four to 5,000 of them would be eligible for demolition or deconstruction through the hardest hit fund. And because of that partnership that we had developed because as a result of this work with HUD and the EPA and the Department of Transportation early on, we developed a Northside partnership which led to the local data survey which led to the quantification and the creation of this garrimaps.com and we were able to put together the best application in the state of Indiana for this money once they were able to develop their process. And we are so far ahead of the other communities that even when they opened up the second round of dollars they said, oh and for the larger cities or the cities in group A were opening up $5.8 million, you can apply for $4.4 million because we know that you're qualified for that. And I'm like, but what about Indianapolis? I'm thinking, I was like, I'm not really that worried but what about Indianapolis, what are they gonna get? Obviously our problem is bigger but it's because of that collaboration, it's because of that work. The second area is with our work with justice. And again, they hadn't been that involved before but midway through, I believe it was 13, we were having such a hard time with violent crime, particularly murders. And there's a Native American staking ceremony that you have where you just stop and just say, this has got to stop. And I wrote a letter to then Attorney General Holder and I wrote a letter to the governor of our state asking for help. And as a result of the letter to General Holder, we were able to become one of the first cities to be involved with the Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs Diagnostic Center. And I'm telling you, I have never had an experience as a guinea pig be so positive. Because we were able to get training for our police officers, we were able to then be engaged with the John Jay College and the work that they were doing with police community relations and all of the training that they're doing with implicit bias. And that has opened up our opportunity also be involved in some of the other activity that will ultimately and has ultimately allowed us to bring our crime down. Our murder rate is half of what it was this time last year. Now I'm generally afraid to say that publicly because you never know what will happen. But what I can say is that in changing the strategy and having the support and getting the collaboration with the federal government, it has caused not just the local government to come to the table, but the county government, the state government and private foundations. I mean, we have had investments from night and we're a night community that we haven't had in 10 years. So all of that has been a snowball effect. And I'm not saying it's not hard work because it is by far the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. But it is also the most rewarding and it's that way because we have some really good partners at the table. Thank you. So we're gonna go to questions, but before we do, I just wanna say briefly because it's important, we're obviously talking about cities and that's who's represented on the panel. I just wanna say out loud, the federal government's also bringing this approach to rural communities and to tribal communities. We've tried to be deliberate about making sure that we do this around the country and in all kinds of different kinds of communities and there are different lessons to be drawn from what we've learned in cities compared to what we do in partnership with tribes and with rural communities. So maybe that's fodder for future forums here at the Ford School. But I know folks have been submitting, I've been seeing cards flying around. So what have we got? Thank you all so much. My name is Joshua Vara and I'm an MPP student here. And I'll be kind of giving us the audience questions. So our first audience question concerns demolition in Youngston in Detroit. The audience member asked two questions. How are the communities health protected during demolitions? And the second is how are demolitions prioritized? Which areas do you go to first? Take the first part. We want you to do the first part of the EPA. So on health and then we'll just go down the line. Go for it. Thank you for the question, Joshua or whoever asked it. One actual really good story that's coming out of this Detroit work are the demolitions. So the 10,000 demos, that's significant. But what I think is more significant is about a week or two ago, the EPA team out of region five that developed a toolkit for how to do green demolition was just to given a major award by the president. So that was based on their work in Detroit. It's very rare that I would say this kind of tongue and cheek that the EPA says good job on your demolition. You've done it in a green fashion, right? For 10,000 demos, Detroit is actually considered now the model for how to do green demolition. So I keep saying the word green, but what does that mean? It means keeping the dust down, using water, notifying the neighbors that a home is gonna come down and that type of thing. So there's information that we can provide you online about this practice. We're hoping that it does become the model practice. So any other comments on the health piece? I would just say yes, that the health avenue of it does come into play with every demolition that we do asbestos is abated. You have the rules and regulations from the EPA to minimize the dust. So the EPA begins to be your best friend as to making sure that you follow each and every rule, but that always comes into play and is number one before we do begin to demolish. And what about the prioritization question? Sure, so on the prioritization, it's important to talk about, I also don't want people to underestimate the health hazards of having a vacant house next to your house and the actual cash impact of having your house not be insurable because the other person's house is dangerous. So there are health impacts to not getting rid of houses. Now, I say that evangelize about that because I was a non-believer in that for some time and coming from Boston to Detroit. The prioritization is very important. People, I think, perceive the demolition strategy as sort of a thing. It's part of, it's one of four things. So it's prioritized in areas that have the highest amount of occupancy in the city. So the way that that works is if you live in a neighborhood and there's a bad house on your street and the broadcasting power of that house is the 20 people on your street. If you live in an area where there's 10 houses and 10 people, the broadcasting power of those 10 houses is impacting only 10 people. So we have to do the demolitions in places where the demolition's gonna have the maximum broadcasting impact to men, women, and families that are living in the neighborhood who say, okay, that house is gone. I'm gonna redouble my efforts to stay here and be a good neighbor. So they're prioritized around areas with the highest occupancy so that we can get those places stabilized and new things can happen. Madam Mayor. We've also done a similar approach in terms of prioritizing not only areas where the occupancy is high, but also areas where we have targeted redevelopment. But we also have added a layer of data. And so we're using a group called Econometrica, I believe is the name of the group where they look at reports, they look at the permits that have been pulled, they look at sewer bills, they look at other utility bills to determine where it's best for us to spend the dollars on demolition. Great. Do we have another question? Sure do. Good morning, mine or good afternoon. My name is Gabrielle Horton. I'm a first year here at the Ford School of Setting Public Policy. And one of the audience members asked a question about race, which I think we're sort of being confronted with in all sectors of our society, especially some of our Rust Belt cities that are here featured today. So the question is, Rust Belt cities experience extreme racial segregation due in large part to federal policy. What is the federal government doing to address this issue? And I probably would expand that to say, what are some of these collaborations you all are speaking of doing to address these concerns? So I have an approach, but does someone on the panel want to take it before I dive in? Well, I, what I- I wanted to defer to the mayor. Go ahead, I'll defer. I would certainly defer to the mayor. No, no, I'll defer. No, I'll defer, I'll defer. Well, look, this is a very naughty issue and it's hard to talk about in the time permitted. I'm sure that I'd love to actually hear the mayor in particular on this point. You know, my mom and dad are cast technicians. They're from a particular generation and a particular worldview about racial matters. And we're working in cities that really represent black people to the city and to the country. I mean, Detroit, Gary, a few other places there's not too many other places that really represent black people to and how we're doing to the country as much as Detroit, Gary, and a few other places. So obviously there's gonna be an opinion and there's gonna be a racial conversation. I think I always come back to how the cities of Detroit, Gary, and a few others really rep. When you look at the landscape, you think about the wealth gap and you think about the secondary impacts of the wealth gap. I think about things that are happening in Detroit that are really positive. I see a lot more of a mixture of African American and white progress and investment, but it's not where I want it to be. It needs to be greater in particular, African American investment and participation in the growth of the city. I'd like to see that enhanced. It's a matter of both personal and actually, because Detroit is what it is, it's a matter of, it's in our professional interest to cultivate and develop black talent in our city. But the whole idea about the way that federal policy plays a role here. I mean, I think the people would like to talk about the GI Bill and they'd like to talk about FHA mortgages and how those things impacted and created wealth in America and how that wealth wasn't available necessarily in, wasn't available to be created in the same ways in black communities. I think that that's true. It's hard to, I spent a lot of my time trying to think about, okay, what, think about places and it's not always easy to immediately go to what is a manner of creating that African American wealth that is needed to sort of address the longer term issues. I mean, it's a naughty question, I appreciate it. I don't have an answer other than to say that it is front of mind in the work that we're doing. Mayor? You know, when I talked about bringing credibility to our efforts, this is one of those areas where it's important because the approach to Gary prior to our administration was that we'll do whatever we need to do around Gary. We'll develop around Gary. We'll even develop Gary's airport without Gary's input because there was no belief that quite frankly, a city of predominantly African American people could execute and I won't say that that wasn't founded in some degree of reality because in the past there had been diminishing execution but because we sat down with folks from the federal government who said, show us your plan and we were able to do that and the federal government was able to come in and say to our neighbors around Northwest Indiana who had incidentally fed off Gary for a long time but to say to them, this is an administration, this is a group of folk who have credibility, who are looking to get the work done, it has made a tremendous difference. Now that doesn't mean that once that credibility exists you don't have to do it because you do and it also doesn't mean that there aren't some folk who are just living in the past and who will still approach you like you don't know what you're doing but at least because of the policies and because of the federal government's willingness to say we want to work with the city administration, it makes a difference, it made a difference to our local community foundation before they were one of the entities that was developing, investing on the periphery, on the lakefront community and finally I said to them, I said, we don't need any money out there, they have a lot of money and they said, you're right, this is a past practice and we're willing to work with you. I think there's value and this is part of our theory of the case in demonstrating that progress is possible and that we can work in a way which is in service to it and what you just said, Mayor, I hope is a proof point of what it is we were trying to get at in developing this way of working overall and I think it's very important in this moment where people have questions about whether or not government has value in people's lives especially at the federal level. I work for president who has an answer to that question and this is one of the ways in which we're putting it into action based on the assumption that it is local leaders who understand best how to move forward and certainly better than we do and that we can bring our expertise to bear in the service of that in a way that moves things forward but look, it's our job to demonstrate that it actually does move things forward and that there's value to working in this way. I would just say two quick other things is that a lot of the policies that we were putting forward in this administration are aligned around these sets of questions but we came in office at a time of epic economic downturn and put forward a series of policies that were aimed at not just assuming that a rising tide was gonna lift all boats but to both raise the tide and be deliberate about pockets of the country, communities in the country where there were big disparities where you can't just assume that if things get better they get better for everybody, they don't, we know that and it was more than gratifying to see a couple weeks ago a release of census data which showed that yes, we lifted all boats and medium income went up by more than it has in 50 years but it went up more for communities at the bottom and that is another proof point that the theory of the case here that you have to be deliberate in investing in particular communities in particular places where there are disparities paid off. Now God knows there's a lot more to do but we are hopeful that that is evident set not just the work on these kinds of policies but on housing, on education, on putting tax dollars into the pockets of people that all of those things ultimately pay off. Another question please. Our next question comes from the audience in this geared toward artist esteemed mayor on the panel. The audience member states that you spoke about the impact of these federal, local, private partnerships but this audience member had two questions. Can you elaborate a little bit about how these partnerships were developed? And second, how long do these partnerships take and in your mind what are the biggest complications in getting them to go forward? They were developed in two stages and so I talked about Antonio Riley coming to the city from HUD and we started meeting with his team really on a bi-weekly basis and so after that initial meeting it wasn't okay, well let's move on to the next thing. We actually sat down, rode up our sleeves, looked at the areas of the city where we thought we could have the most impact, the quickest and one of the things that we prioritized was a vacant hotel that had stood next to City Hall for about 20 years. I mean you could literally see through it and if you've ever gone down the toll road you saw it and so we said there were a lot of folks who had come to town, Donald Trump was one of them who said we're going to redevelop this hotel and of course it never happened and so I said you know what, I'm not gonna sell anybody a bill of goods about redeveloping a hotel that should not be redeveloped and that was one of the first projects that we worked on with HUD, with the EPA, with our other local partners to say what does it cost to take this down? What do we need to do? We were able to redistribute some of the dollars that we had gotten from HUD through some of the programs that had not been utilized previously, we got permission to do that, we got similar permission from the EPA and we took it down and that went such a long way in just getting people to believe but it also kind of gave the team that hope that okay so now what's our next project and so we identified certain communities and we were able to then target our demolition there and deconstruction there, we were able to target our other planning there and all of this predated the second round or the announcement of the second round of strong cities and strong communities and so when that came out and I got a letter saying you're invited to apply, I called Antonio and I said you know this is from the White House but quite frankly I don't want them to mess this up. I'm like we've got a good plan here so I'd just assume pass on that and let somebody else try their hand but he said no, no we should apply, you guys should apply and so we did and that just strengthened that partnership because what it allowed us to do was to take some of the folks who were just coming every two weeks and they were literally embedded in City Hall and up until the last week was actually last week they worked and came to work every day in City Hall alongside of our team which allowed us, I mean the nature of business in a city is putting out fires most days and so in addition to putting out the fires we also had the luxury of planning because we had an architect from HUD and we had a career professional from the EPA and we had someone from actually two people from the EPA and that made all the difference in the world so that's how it happened for us. And just a quick word on how that happened in the first place, this was really on the first year of the administration where we passed the Recovery Act there were a lot of things that were gonna put resources into communities but in terms of tackling communities that had been hit the very hardest. You know we engaged in a policy making process understanding that aside from the work, the recovery work we were doing there wasn't gonna be new money, we weren't gonna necessarily be able to sell Congress on some big funding initiative to get into places that were struggling more. So we had to figure out what assets we had in the federal government that we could deploy and it turns out that's our people. So that's what the Strong City, Strong Communities program is that it doesn't give you a nickel but it sends people like Harry to work on the mayor's team and that turns out to help a lot. I have to interject with one quote that you reminded me of. During Detroit's bankruptcy I had a technical flying which I mentioned earlier and it was this all day long, really heady, deep dive into the infrastructure issues and lighting and at the end of the day the chief operating officer of the city of Detroit during its bankruptcy said, Kerry your technical assistance is more valuable than your money. I thought that was a quotable quote. That's it. That is absolutely the case and I tell people that all the time so often as city leaders we think about how do you get a grant? How do you get money from the federal government? Now I'm not saying I don't want any money, I do. But what I've come to understand is that the technical assistance, the ability to work across agency lines, the willingness of the federal agencies and those who work in them to collaborate has just been priceless to the city of Gary. Now the complication is the attitude that local residents have because they're still stuck on the old stuff, right? And so when we say that we're part of the strong city, strong communities initiative they're looking for the big check and when I say oh no, no, there's no check then they're looking like someone pulled the wool over my eyes and that I'm not really paying attention but that's a downside but ultimately they come to see as well when things get done. The other really lovely effect it's had is on the federal employees themselves who end up on your teams and end up falling in love with the work and with your cities and that's been a lovely thing to watch as well. This next question is for Carrie and also our panelists from Youngstown, Ohio. How is local feedback incorporated into federal grant making processes and also the competitive grant competition? So can you sort of talk about what that looks like as you sort of get ready for new partnerships or maybe renewing old ones or existing ones? Abby, do you wanna start, Carrie? Sure. I'd say that we have a large population of outspoken residents so they are very abundant with their feedback so I think that that goes especially in what I do in cleaning up and stabilizing and revitalizing the neighborhoods. That goes into our decision making every day not to go too far back but when the question was asked about prioritizing demolition, I mean number one on top of the health is also the safety of our residents. So making sure that we listen to the residents' voices, we listen to what their needs are, also take into account that not every one of their voices is gonna be on the right track but that goes into play as even in our partnership with the air base, it wasn't just demolition, we kept it very broad in our public works department for things like street signs because it may seem minimal but when there's 600 missing street signs, it's very difficult for anyone to invite somebody to their house and expect them to get there if they don't know where they're going. So I think that it is something that comes into our everyday decisions in looking for grant opportunities in prioritizing our different initiatives is listening to the residents. The revitalization of the neighborhoods affects every neighborhood. You may have your high crime areas but there's a vacant blighted house in just about every neighborhood across the U.S. Carrie. Sure, thinking about Detroit, Arthur mentioned that he started finding these federal civil servants in the mayor's cabinet meetings but in addition to the cabinet meetings, we were also invited to attend all the community meetings so the mayor hosts at a regular interval community meetings throughout the city and we were invited to sit with the mayor's cabinet at those meetings so we were hearing exactly the same feedback that not only the mayor but mandatory cabinet members were also sitting there taking everything in so we heard all of that stuff and one way avenue that that has actually played out in a feedback loop back to the federal government, thinking about the street lighting and how that played out, that program became the model for an accelerator used in the federal government so the feedback we got on the ground is actually kind of funny when you think about the LEDs, people would come out and bring the utility workers, coffee and bagels or whatever because they were so happy to see the street lighting but more importantly the technical feedback about how the lights were performing. We were able to take that information back through the labs and ended up being part of a program that is now the model for how to do a conversion. Great. This will be the last question for our panelists and the final question from the audience concerns the future of place making initiatives. The question is given limited federal resources, how can these initiatives be sustained in the next five, maybe 10 years? And looking forward, where does the federal government see the best places to assist in the future in terms of the types of cities that should be struggling? So I'll take a stab at that. So one of the initiatives that we haven't talked about in this instance but which is part of the federal place making program is called the Promise Zones Initiative. They're now 22 Promise Zones which is another brilliant invention that doesn't bring a dime with it. We're getting really good at those. But what it does do is give the places which are designated, they're not necessarily cities, sometimes they're neighborhoods, sometimes they're tribes. Gives them preference points with respect to a bunch of federal grants so it makes them more competitive and so the first round of Promise Zones has gotten now ultimately hundreds of millions of dollars of existing federal resources just because they became more competitive but that's because they had a plan and all of the things that we asked them to do they had a plan, they knew what their metrics were, they knew who their partners were and how they were gonna measure their results and so that is what ultimately has made them competitive for federal grants. So there are now 22 Promise Zones and it's a 10-year designation. So that means the first ones are about five years in but the most recent designated Promise Zones, I think there were seven or eight in the last round who have just been designated Promise Zones are gonna be Promise Zones for the next 10 years. So that's one way that we know this effort continues. A second way is that and my colleague, I'm gonna embarrass my colleague Elizabeth Garlow in the back who's wave Elizabeth, she works both for DPC and OMB and she is part of an initiative that is really making sure that we entrench this way of thinking into the federal bureaucracy. So people like me aren't gonna be, I'm not gonna be sitting in my chair back in the West Wing after January 20th but there are hundreds upon hundreds of folks in the federal family who work at HUD, who work at EPA, who work at the Department of Energy and all the other agencies who if they're the ones who are doing this work they're the folks that we're embedding on mayors teams, they're the ones who are, who we have been asking to work in this way. So we've spent especially the last couple of years identifying folks, making sure that they have trainings, working with an external partnership for public service, an external organization to help train folks. So we now have hundreds of folks who are working this way, who have kind of fallen in love with the notion that this is how the federal government should work. And so that's another way that we're sustaining this because ultimately this isn't so much about the individual programs, it's very much about the spirit in which the federal government approaches its partnerships with local communities, which is I think a good note to close on. It's this notion, Mayor, going back to what you were saying, but what is really visible in what all of you were doing, which is that these kinds of changes are possible. This is not, we are not at a point where these are intractable problems that can't be solved, not anywhere in this country, not in Detroit, not in Youngstown, not in Gary, not in the Pine Ridge Reservation. What we're finding is that we have all kinds of resources that we tend not to think of as resources that we tend not to count. And this is a really, really important moment to be having that conversation. I was saying to a group of students earlier, the thing that the president fears the most is cynicism, this notion that things are just broken and they just can't work and that we can't make these neighborhoods places of opportunity anymore. And he just, he believes that's wrong. And we have evidence that it's wrong. And that there is brilliant local leadership and great innovation that people in this country remain capable of. And that great things are happening every day. And that we can be catalysts and do more of it. And so on that very hopeful note, let's thank our panelists for the work that they're doing for being here today. So I have to say as a policy school, it is really an honor and a pleasure to have hosted what I suspect many of you also found to be a very inspiring conversation and one that really highlights the role that committed talented people can play in making a difference and moving things forward. I wanted to thank our audience for joining us and for some really excellent questions. I know we didn't get to all of them, but perhaps you'll stay outside in our great hall and continue that conversation. Please join me in a final round of thanks to our panel and especially to Cecilia Munoz who was our moderator. Thank you so much.