Thanks to all of you who are reading my blog. I wanted to take some time to answer some of the questions that people have posted. Sorry if I missed anyone in this round.

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To Jarret, who asked about mentoring.

Jarret,

I am all about mentoring and have been mentoring since I was a teenager. I believe it is one of the greatest ways you can make an impact in the lives of others and in a community. Plus, it doesn’t take that much time — even if you just have four hours a month (one hour per week!) to give, you can be a mentor. And now, with such a wide variety of programs you can invest your time in a host of different ways. There are even online mentoring relationships now.

In Newark, I helped start the Newark Mentoring Coalition which is a collaborative effort to bring together all the organizations that provide mentoring and coordinate those efforts. We have a mentoring hot line for people who are interested in being a mentor or finding a mentor and we have done a lot of community outreach including PSAs.

Still we do not have enough mentors. . . . there are hundreds of Newark young people who are unmatched with a caring adult mentor. This is very unfortunate and I am hopeful that we can continue to expand the number of mentors in Newark. If we could get just a few hundred more mentors it could have rapid transformative effect on our community. We all have had a mentor or mentors in our lives — we should all give back in a similar fashion.

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To Neil, who had a lot of ideas in a short note.

Neil,

Your short paragraph of questions was chock full of issues. I’ll do my best to address what I can.

First, what am I going to do about “skyrocketing” unemployment in Newark.
Unemployment is unacceptably high in our City – but the level of unemployment is not skyrocketing. We have numerous strategies to lower unemployment and have been seeing solid success in finding, creating and expanding job opportunities for our residents. A few examples:

A. We started a program to work with local companies to look to Newark for more of their employment base. Through this program, companies have hired thousands of more Newarkers in the last two years. For example, Continental Airlines went from hiring only 7 to 8% of their employees from Newark to now hiring more than 25% of their employees from our City — this added hundreds of jobs.

B. We started a program through which we tailored our job training dollars directly to the needs of our employers to great success. For example, our Newark Works teams started a call center training program. Those graduates have been having great success with compainies ranging from CableVision to local banks. With so many call centers located in Newark, this has been very valuable. We must use our job training dollars to train workers for those jobs that actually exist . . . . NewarkWorks (our job training/job placement center at 990 Broad Street) is doing a great job here.

C. We have put strong “first source” requirements on companies and developers who seek and obtain City incentives (city land, tax abatements, etc).

D. We are drawing numerous new employers to the City of Newark. For example: AMB warehouse came to Newark bringing hundreds of jobs with Mimeo (a printing firm taking up space in the new warehouse we built). There is so much energy and investment pouring into our City from a new hotel coming to our downtown (and creating hundreds of jobs) to tech companies like Audible.com and All Hip Hop.com who have taken up residence in Newark – this generates jobs and further economic dynamism.

E. We just launched a Port One Stop job center to open up hundreds of jobs for people at Newark’s Port,

F. We have a host of programs for ex-offenders – one great example (that you hit on) is a program that hires people coming home from prison directly in our parks and grounds department to clean and green lots around the City. This is considered a transitional job program and we work with these folks to develop their job skills for better job opportunities while they get on their feet.

G. We have a host of job development opportunities for young people. The best one I believe is the Youth Education Employment Success Center or the YEES Center. This works with disaffected or at risk youth to find employment, careers (with unions and others) and helps to empower them for life success.

H. One final example is the new businesses we are launching through our minority/small business/female headed business loan fund. Small businesses are the true engine of job creation in America and we have a strong strategy in that sector as well.

2. You asked about trolley or light rail on Bloomfield Ave. I think improving mass transit is key to Newark’s success. There are no plans for this type of expansion right now and my explorations to this end have been limited by tightening budgets. Additionally, we just recently had light rail expansion that is still building out its ridership in our downtown but we are working with NJ Transit on creating rapid bus lanes that would significantly speed bus traffic along key routes in Newark.

Please keep the ideas coming Neil Lori. . . I do think that they are helpful and constructive.

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To Marilyn and her special needs son.

Marilyn,

On Thursday evening during my radio show on WBGO, I had a direct conversation with Dr. Janey, the new NPS Superintendent, about special needs children in our school system. I was so pleased to hear that, even though he was only in his first month on the job, this seemed to be one of his highest priorities for making needed changes. During the radio show he discussed this with the public and offered up his office number for calls regarding issues with special needs children. I strongly suggest you reach out to his office with any concerns you have. Also, my team in City Hall will continue to work with him as he focuses on the challenges our special needs program faces and on ensuring that the resources are there and used properly.

Finally, you can reach out to me any time on any issue. As a resident, you should feel free to call my office and speak with my Constituent Services staff or come to my open office hours to discuss this issue further or anything else you like with me directly. My next open office hours are this Tuesday, September 23 at 4:00 p.m. at Arts High School on Martin Luther King Blvd. The Mayor’s Office’s general number is 973.733.6400 — feel free to call if you have other questions.

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For Kay, who had some thoughts on our non-emergency call line.

Kay,

I am so happy you used the service and that you found our operators caring and helpful — particularly back during the pilot phase when we were still working the kinks out of the service. I hope you will call back and I believe you will find the service even better.

We sent teams to check out other city’s call centers. Every city, including New York City, took some time to ramp their programs up and build up their efficiency. These lines grow organically, the longer we have them the better the knowledge base on the lines and the more the services grow.

Further, the lines are a powerful management tool for my team. We know that right now it may take a short while (longer than I’d like) to address some conditions — this line now gives us another good objective tool to measure the productivity of departments and hold them accountable for the speed with which they address the concerns of our residents. With this tool, I can make sure that we improve –- that each month departments get smarter, swifter and more successful.

Finally, the hours are indeed curtailed (Monday through Friday, 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.). I visited the call center on Friday after 5:00 p.m. and there was very little call volume. Right now, the volume of calls we get after business hours is small and, at this time, I do not believe weekend service is a good investment. However, I hope that, as more residents discover the service and begin to rely on it, we can expand the hours of service as is appropriate.

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To Fawn, a dedicated Newarker.

Fawn,

Thank you, thank you for such a candid note (and for your support). Fawn, please come to my office hours this Tuesday. I have been known (much to my staff’s frustration) to spend much more than 5 minutes with people. Lets start the conversation on Tuesday and, if we don’t have enough time to cover what you want and it seems to both of us that more time is warranted, I will definitely schedule some time with you as I often do with many other residents.

Truth be told we get dozens (maybe even hundreds) of requests for meetings every week – as you said, people just want to have direct contact with their Mayor. If we scheduled every request from one week’s worth of request, it would take more than one month to do the meetings. I have a phenomenal team in City Hall and usually most of the meetings are taken by the appropriate person on our team (from a Newark Police Department captain to the head of Economic Development). I would so like to meet with every person in the City directly but it would be incredibly challenging. . . . with 280,000 residents in Newark, if 1 in 10 wanted to meet directly with me for 10 minutes, it would take me 194 days (working 24 hour days with no breaks) to meet with all of them all. Even when I have campaigned in the past and knocked on doors in Newark for months, I still am only able to meet a fraction of the total registered voters in our great City — and, in 2006. I took off from work and put my efforts into campaigning full-time.

But I don’t think Newarkers want me, as their Mayor, operating in this way. Folks want me to be fighting for Newark, managing City departments, pushing our proactive goals, raising money for parks, re-entry programs and other important projects, lobbying Trenton and Washington D.C. for our issues, dealing with crises as they arise, etc.

I do agree with you — on top of this, I believe it is critical for me to be in my community. So I pull very long days. I have tried in this blog to give people a feeling of what my typical days are like. They often start early in the morning and go until late at night. And I am all over our City – from birthday parties of friends and constituents, too many funerals and wakes, hanging out in restaurants and barbershops, going to churches, block parties, tenant meetings, having meetings with community leaders . . . . well you get the point and hopefully you have been seeing this in my blogs.

This job is the greatest privilege I have ever had.

Some members of my family and friends complain to me that I am not living a balanced life (and my mother is starting to talk a lot more these days about me getting married and having kids) –- but truth is, I just love what I do and I just don’t want to let up on the pace I’m keeping. There are too many urgencies in our City right now.

What I love most about this wonderful job is our community – Newark residents are my lifeline and I particularly love being in the neighborhoods and talking to folks who love Newark and want to see their community get better. Some of my best ideas for my job come from residents who take their time to reach out to me or my City Hall team and give us their thoughts — just yesterday we broke ground on a park that was redesigned after we received input from residents after our plans were unveiled during a community meeting.

Fawn, I will do my best to continue to meet with residents and to improve in my serving them.

I believe I am one of the few mayors in our tri-state area that has open office hours – this is one of my chances in a long 4 to 6 hour period to meet directly with residents. I hope you will use this time and this blog to communicate with me. And, again Fawn, I make this offer to you — if we feel we don’t have enough time on Tuesday then lets schedule some more time to meet – maybe at Kings on Clinton Avenue – they make great black eyed peas. I will buy.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 21st, 2008 at 8:03 pm and is filed under Environment, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.