Five Goals, Four Years. Text of the Mayor's speech

"President Garcetti, members of the City Council, members of the school board, Chief Barry, general managers, distinguished members of the Los Angeles Consular Corps, fellow Angelenos:

Today we welcome the new arrival of two change agents with a fresh mandate from the people.

Please put your hands together for our new citywide leadership team, Wendy Greuel and Carmen Trutanich! Controller Greuel intends to apply her powerful magnifying glass to the cause of common sense accountability in city government and City Attorney Trutanich has vowed to lead an intensified assault on the gang problem, our most critical public safety challenge. Wendy and Carmen, your goals are not only my goals. They are central to everything we are trying to do for the City of Los Angeles.

I want you to know, you have the full support and the full partnership of the mayor's office! and to our new - and not-so-new -- City Council members I say, under the able leadership of President Garcetti, your institution has stood above all else as a peerless and tireless voice for livability in our neighborhoods.

Together, in the next four years, let's do something truly big and put L.A. on a permanent track to a sustainable future! Angelenos, with this oath, we commit ourselves to more than just a new term. We pledge a new beginning.

I stand here humbled by the opportunity, grateful for your trust and mindful of the responsibility that lies ahead. I stand, hopefully a little bit wiser as well, chastened and enlightened both by our successes and failures over the last four years. I stand renewed and reinvigorated, re-committed to the task before us. Above all, I stand determined to finish what we started, determined to find a second wind in our second term.

I intend to lead with everything I have! There is a special clarity you can only experience on a bright summer day in Los Angeles. It's true the light can be harsh and unforgiving. You have to almost squint your eyes and narrow your focus on the object at hand.

I don't know about you. I find I see better that way. From the canyons, to the basin, I see people struggling in this recession, unemployment the worst in three decades. Thousands of hardworking people with their savings eroded and their equity wiped clean. I see a mounting wave of home foreclosures threatening to engulf entire city neighborhoods. I see the devastating impact on our own budget. And still, I see something bigger.

Mayor Bradley said it best, "In a great city, City Hall must be a beacon to the people's aspirations."

I say if the times are tough, so too must be our resolve. Together we must see that our future as a great global city depends on our willingness to run hard at L.A.'s biggest problems.

In our first four years, I'm proud to have laid a foundation on jobs, schools, housing, public safety, traffic, and the environment. But I will be the first to admit, it's awful hard to see a foundation when it feels like you're standing on shaky ground.

Angelenos, I offer this oath today. In the next four years, we are going to judge ourselves plain and simple -- based on what we build. We intend to write our record in concrete rather than poetry, focused on deadlines over headlines. And you have this in writing, we are going to track our promises and put the results online. And we are going to build our efforts around five clear goals for the next four years.

Our first goal is job creation. As your mayor, I am going to make it my number one priority to be L.A.'s number one salesman. I'm going to have a toothbrush in my briefcase and a speech in hand! Bring your jobs to L.A.! We are open for business! We are going to aggressively target emerging sectors for growth. We are going to sit down face-to-face with our friends in the business community whenever and wherever we see the opportunity to help hire local workers and create local jobs. We know we can no longer sit back and rely on the sunshine to sell L.A.

In my second term, we are going to practice -- and refine -- a lost art in the City of Los Angeles: economic development. Beginning immediately, I am refocusing my business team, which did an outstanding job facilitating the historic construction boom over the last 4 years.

But with 12% unemployment, what we need now is a "jobs team" dedicated 24-7 to nuts-and-bolts business attraction and retention. We are going to bring in some new people from outside City Hall, business ambassadors to better connect our public servants to the private sector and entrepreneurs with fresh perspectives from the practical world of applied job creation.

In our jobs team, we're going to create a business concierge service where entrepreneurs can get help solving their problems, opening their doors and creating jobs for Angelenos. The City is blessed with powerful economic engines in our utility, our port, and our airport. It is time to use our city agencies to invest strategically in economic growth.

At our port, the San Pedro Technology Center will serve as a crossroads for goods movement and an incubator for green companies and good jobs.

At our airport we will open a renovated, LEED-certified, state-of-the-art Bradley terminal to welcome the world to Los Angeles by the end of my term.

And beginning immediately, I will work with the Department of Water and Power to offer a package of rate incentives to new businesses, giving new firms a reason to locate and stay in Los Angeles.

At the center of our economic strategy is our green agenda. Angelenos, there are two shades of green, and they go together beautifully in L.A.!

We know that in the decade to come entire industries will come into being answering the riddle of how America can more sustainably meet its energy needs.

We know our very future depends on advances in conservation, solar, wind, and geothermal energy. We know economic growth and environmental innovation must be seen as fingers on the same hand.

Within walking distance from here, our clean-tech corridor will put L.A. on the international map as a center of green jobs and innovation as home to our best minds, a partnership between world-class universities and emerging industries and a leading incubator for President Obama's economic vision of green jobs at good pay.

And we know never to lose sight of our successful effort to put L.A. at the forefront in the fight against climate change. In the last four years, we quadrupled our renewable energy portfolio. We've removed 2,000 dirty diesel trucks from the port and sent them to the junkyard. And we've left much of the world in the dust by beating the Kyoto targets four years ahead of schedule.

It's now time to meet the carbon challenge. Our second goal for the next four years is to put L.A. on a path to permanently break our addiction to coal. Coal currently accounts for roughly 40% of the DWP's power portfolio. Breaking the coal habit is a long term proposition demanding a long-term commitment. It's going to require investment from ratepayers. Our future depends on pricing power in relation to the environmental cost.

During my first term, we set high standards for green development and we've taken action to meet them. Los Angeles will get 20% of its energy from renewable sources by next year. We rolled out the most far reaching green building standards of any big city in America.

And this month, the largest city-owned wind farm will start delivering clean power to L.A.'s families. Moving forward we're aiming to get 40% of our power from renewable sources by 2020 and go 60% carbon-free by the end of the next decade.

Today, I am directing the CEO of the Department of Water and Power to take every action necessary to reach these goals and eliminate the use of coal by 2020. Meanwhile, we're going to move beyond the clean air action plan - the most aggressive effort to cut emissions at any port worldwide. We are going to electrify goods movement at our harbor.

We're going to make L.A. plug-in ready, aimed at making our city a national hub of the electric vehicle market.

And we're going to say to every household and every family. This is the time to power our future with conservation and alternative energy.

This is the time to stand at the forefront of the green revolution. This is the time to build a future founded on innovation and defined by our commitment to building a more sustainable and livable Los Angeles.

Building a sustainable future rests at the core of our third goal. With Measure R, in the next four years we are going to lead the largest mass transit construction program anywhere in the United States of America.

Last November, Angelenos voted their hopes for a real, viable, 21st century public transportation system.

The people did their part, now it's time to do ours; to get that investment off the drawing board and into the ground; to connect the eastside to the airport, and Downtown to West L.A; to build housing for our workers along transit lines and near job centers; to take action to build all 12 Measure R rail projects on time or ahead of schedule.

Just a few days ago, our accelerated push for public transit allowed us to break ground on an extension of the Orange Line in the Valley sooner than expected. And in the weeks and months ahead, we are going to see if there isn't a way to accelerate all transit spending.

Just think, speeding up this process would mean an immediate jolt of economic stimulus, with over 210,000 good-paying jobs. It means transit improvements could be a reality this decade - not just in the lives of our grandchildren.

Our fourth goal for the next four years is to keep L.A. on track as one of the safest big cities in America. As I've said many times before, public safety is the first obligation of government.

It's the foundation for everything we are trying to build, the context for economic growth, the setting for good jobs and a brighter future, the building blocks of a strong, thriving community.

Today, crime is own across the board in virtually every neighborhood.

It's important to remember that our security begins with our men and women in uniform. They confront danger every day so that we don't have to. They stand today on every corner in every community in our city in historic numbers approaching 10,000 strong. Their sacrifice is the bedrock of our safety. Their service is the cornerstone of our security.

Their commitment and courage are the foundation for our prosperity .And in the next four years, I will fight day and night to keep all 10,000 officers on the job. Keep our police force at its highest level in history!

Today, we are blessed to have some of the bravest Angelenos with us.

They're ordinary men and women committed to an extraordinary task. As officers and firefighters, they live at the front lines of tragedy. They face danger daily with equal measures of courage and humility. They are the LAPD Medal of Valor winners and the firefighters who took charge in the Metrolink disaster and in the fires of last autumn. I couldn't be prouder to recognize these outstanding public servants!

Our commitment to these heroes will remain steady and unwavering. But in the long term, we know that law enforcement alone can't get the job done. We know investment in policing must be matched by our investment in the next generation. And in the next four years, we are going to get even tougher on the root causes of crime.

Our strategy begins with an expanded emphasis on gang prevention and intervention. We're expanding the successful Summer Night Lights program from 16 sites to 50 over the next four years, reclaiming dozens more parks and giving thousands of young people a refuge from violence in the summertime when the days are longest and the nights the hottest.

We are developing a system to target gang prevention services at the kids most at risk. We're holding ourselves accountable, setting benchmarks for progress, tracking our results and measuring our success not by some abstract statistic, but by the number of young people we serve.

And we are tackling this challenge where our ultimate success has always started: in our schools. Our Partnership has already changed the way we do business in 10 of our lowest-performing schools. Students are getting more attention. Parents are getting more involved. And teachers are getting more training and support.

In one short year, 30% more Partnership students passed the High School Exit Exam. Seven of 10 campuses increased the number of kids passing the English Language Learners Test. And this year, more students were identified as "gifted" and "talented" at Partnership schools than ever before, proving that any child from any neighborhood can succeed if given the chance.

Across our city, charter schools are changing the face of public education. Groups like Green Dot, KIPP, and the Alliance are taking over faltering campuses and transforming them into centers of innovation run on a common sense philosophy, less bureaucracy means more money for the classroom. Higher pay and more training mean more effective teachers.

Raising graduation rates is not simply an option, it is an absolute necessity. It's long past time that we welcome all reformers as partners, not competitors. It's time we give all school operators the chance to compete to run new schools set to open their doors in the next four years.

And it's time we embrace ideas that work in the 21st century. So, our fifth and final goal for the next four years is perhaps our most important.

We cannot accept the pace of progress in our schools. In the next four years, I will lead an effort to shut down failing schools and reconstitute these schools as charters, as partnership campuses or as district schools committed to metrics-driven, measurable progress. We can no longer afford to accept the same old tired excuses for failure.

And to our teachers, let me say this, I know how hard you work. I know the sacrifices you've all made for our students. I recognize that change won't come easy and that new ideas come with a heavy dose of uncertainty. But rest assured, reforming our schools begins and ends with you, with placing your voices at the center of the debate, with raising respect and reward for the teaching profession.

Yet with that respect comes even greater responsibility, a common commitment from each and every one of us to hold ourselves accountable.

I know this is an ambitious agenda. I know what the doubters will say.

They will say what they always say. They can even call me a "dreamer." But you know, "I'm not the only one."

As a son of Los Angeles, I know, the L.A. story has always been written in the creative arc connecting focused dreams and relentless hard work.

In my own family, it began with my grandfather. He came to America in 1903, a young man from Léon, a small town in Mexico, with little money and even less English, but a twinkle in his eye.

According to the story, my grandfather arrived first in the state of Texas, but when they wouldn't serve him in a restaurant, he knew it was time to head west to Los Angeles. And like countless others before and since, my grandfather found a permanent and welcoming home.

Like his neighbors in Boyle Heights, immigrants from Poland and Russia, who shared that magical world just east of the Los Angeles River. Like the families over on Sugar Hill in West Adams, who escaped sharecropper poverty for a middle class life, like families everywhere.

They came from the tenements and the cotton fields. They're Armenians fleeing persecution in the Soviet Union; Persians escaping repression in Tehran; Koreans, Chinese, Filipinos, and Japanese seeking out brighter horizons. Refugees from Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, came from every continent and every culture: rich and poor, gay and straight, young and old. Like the thousands who will arrive this very year, bus drivers and busboys, home care and hotel workers, each bound by an intricate history of work and struggle, each with a unique story to tell, each one affirming the dream is real.

Angelenos, it is only fitting that I close today by recognizing eight "True Angels" of our city. They are parents and police officers, docents and teachers. They work to feed the hungry and keep kids out of gangs. They give a precious part of themselves, applying their imaginations and their muscles each and every day. I am proud to lead a city that bears their footprint. "True Angels," please stand and be recognized.

If we need any proof that the dream is real, that the spirit of community is alive and well in our time, let their example be our inspiration and our reminder, because Angelenos, we're going to need some more volunteers!

This is bigger than any one person. The future of Los Angeles is up to each and every one of us. Together, we can build the economy of the future. We can cut out our carbon footprint. We can build a mass transit system of a world class city. We can be safer and stronger than ever. We can bring fundamental change to our schools. We can make L.A. a more livable city. We can do it if we do what Angelenos have always done, reach for the stars and work like hell! We've laid a foundation, now it's time to raise the frame.

Roll up your sleeves with me, Los Angeles!

Get out there!

Let's show what we can do when we do it together as one city.

God bless you all. "