Baltimorean @freedlander drops a major truth bomb re: O'Malley’s record in Baltimore [View all]

Last edited Wed May 6, 2015, 03:07 PM - Edit history (1)

Lis Smith ‏@Lis_Smith (longtime, unofficial O'Malley press responder)

Baltimorean @freedlander drops a major truth bomb re: @GovernorOMalley’s record as Mayor in Baltimore http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/06/you-have-martin-o-malley-all-wrong.html …

Lis Smith @Lis_Smith · 6m 6 minutes ago
GovernorOMalley did something a lot of these mayors don’t do: He walked w/ the small people…He walked the streets”

From 2000-2010, the incidents of crime in Baltimore dropped 43 percent, outpacing by a stretch the 11 percent drop that the nation saw during that period. The crime rate dropped by 40 percent. Graduation rates rose. Median home prices doubled. A new biotech park was built on the city’s east side. A new performing arts center was built on the west side. O’Malley was obsessed with numbers and metrics, and set up a 311 call center to track citizen complaints. A program called Project 5000 enlisted volunteer attorneys to help deal with the city’s massive vacant home problem as titles to those homes was eventually transferred to individuals and non-profits for redevelopment. The school system was pulled back from the fiscal brink. CitiStat, designed to track crime, helped bring the crime rate down and created a budget surplus of $54 million that was then reinvested in schools and programs for children. At last, the population stabilized. It was no longer necessary to flee, if you could. The number of college educated 25-to-34-year-olds living within three miles of downtown Baltimore increased 92 percent in the ten years after O’Malley became mayor, fourth among the nation’s 51st largest metro areas.

Time Magazine named O’Malley one of the five best big city mayors in America. Esquire named him the best young mayor in America. CitiStat won Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government “Innovations in American Government Award.”

Drawing a bright red line between the Clinton and Bush years, O’Malley said, “We haven’t had an agenda for our cities in thirty years. It is not something you solve with a nifty pilot program. It is not something you solve with philanthropy or with a thousand points of light. When you create an economy where you subsidize corporate profits through a welfare program and food stamps in order to keep wages low in some perverse pursuit of ‘competiveness,’ than you reap the fruits of the anger that you sow. And that is what is happening in our country today.”

Tying O’Malley to Baltimore is an old political saw. When you tried to run for governor of Maryland, Republicans ran ads with flashing police lights, talked about how O’Malley would do for Baltimore what he did for Maryland. O’Malley won statewide twice though, boosted by those same Baltimore neighborhoods that he is now blamed for turning into powder kegs.


read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/06/you-have-martin-o-malley-all-wrong.html …