On March 12th Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka gave his fifth State of the City Address at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. The following are excerpts of his address with our headings of the key sections relating to the city’s business ecosystem:
Opening Quote of Martin Luther King, Jr. Given by the Mayor:
Time itself is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will…Human progress never rolls in on inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.
Mayor Baraka’s Mindsight about Transforming Newark:
“Power is the ability to exert force on an object or mass, either animate or inanimate- and make it move. It’s the ability to activate your ideas then put them in motion…I was an activist when I organized rallies with the Newark Anti-Violence Coalition to speak out against the epidemic of homicide in our community. I was an activist when I traveled to LA at the request of then Mayor SJ and came back and began to organize peace with street gangs. The difference is now I am the Mayor of one of the oldest and most important cities in this country, the economic life-line of this state, one of the most important transportation and tech hubs in this region. An educational powerhouse. A cultural hotbed, with a deep history of people from many parts of this world that settled here. I am the Mayor of this city, the city of my birth by the grace of God and over 70 percent of the people that voted. As the Mayor, I cannot just be an activist, I have to have the mind to build, and do all that I can to get others to agree to do the same. So tonight we want to show you what in fact we have been building and tell you why we are building it.”
His Perspective on the Amazon Bid:
“No one imagined we would make it to the last 20, then the last 10 then, the final cities that Amazon considered. When they came here with their team, they witnessed something most of us miss everyday: Extraordinary collaboration, a clear vision, instruments in place for change and growth, an incredible arts scene, a growing college community, transportation infrastructure, diversity as strength, and beautiful people with a will to win. When they left here, we knew we had already won! The minute they showed up here, we won. The minute every paper began to print why Newark wasn’t ready, we had already won. And so when they ask me how I felt when they chose New York or Virginia, I said, and still say, we made it to the game, and we still playing. And to those that see a small window of an opportunity for us to revisit these talks, who are trolling me on social media, I don’t have the privilege you have. I actually have to build! We are courting the world through the vehicle of Amazon.
We were courting investment in employee owned businesses, in infrastructure and direct services to our community, from homelessness to scholarships for our children…This is not the Newark it was when I went to college in 1986. Things are moving and moving fast”.
His Emphasis on Economic Development that will Support the Long Term City Residents:
“For the past 4 years or more, we have been working to change the old narratives of Newark, attract more people, create an economic ecosystem that attracts investments, stabilize our housing market, leverage and seed our arts community, support small business growth, encourage buying local, and prepare our residents for what we knew would come if we had the mind to work.
So yes, we have an inclusionary zoning ordinance. We create an equitable growth commission and an office to manage affordability, and make sure local brown and black residents are included in the economic growth, to address the wealth gap that stains this state.
The Initiative Surrounding Employee Ownership:
And we don’t want to just focus on big companies to attract jobs and growth. We are encouraging employee ownership, and residential and worker owned cooperatives. As a beginning, the Council just passed an ordinance that’s the first of its kind. It encourages employee ownership for Newark based businesses. Company owners that are looking to sell or retire from their businesses will have an option of applying to the city for a loan or loan guarantee when transferring ownership to employees. We have begun to engage businesses about this idea, where workers can collectively buy the business with no personal investment but receive ownership as a part of their employee benefit package. Businesses of this kind around the country currently employ 13 million workers.
The Contractor Development Initiative:
And you saw through our Contractor Development Initiative how we are servicing and preparing an army of folks ready to take on the challenges of developing and building in the city where they live, ready to tackle the countless abandoned and vacant properties in our city and not be defined by what’s going to happen in our city, but creating those definitions themselves. They will be armed to predict the future of our city by creating it.
Universal Basic Income:
Lastly, the city is currently exploring a pilot for Universal Basic Income. We have already received national recognition and technical assistance from the Economic Security Project and the Jain institute to launch an exploratory taskforce to assess the feasibility of a program in Newark. We believe in Universal Basic Income, especially in a time where studies have shown that families that have a crisis of just 400 dollars in a month may experience a setback that may be difficult even impossible to recover from. Where 1/3 of our city still lives in poverty.”
Jobs as the Foundation of the Newark Community:
“We know that one of the immediate ways to address poverty, our economy, to stabilize families and even reduce crime is to make sure people have access to good paying jobs. We have been fighting steady and intractable unemployment for years. We are excited to watch the numbers decline as new businesses and development come to our city, as our One Stop places 650 Newark residents in fulltime jobs! And 262 of those are reentry. When I first became mayor, the unemployment rate was 11.2%. Now, we have the lowest unemployment in 50 years.”
The Important Role of Large Corporations and Anchor Institutions to Support the Community
“The engagement of our Corporate and Anchor institutions in employing Newark residents is at an all- time high. We have gotten Newark 2020 on its way, and have created an atmosphere where our anchor institutions want to eradicate the notion that Newark residents are not ready to work in their firms.
Are we perfect? No- but we have been building. Prudential, Rutgers, Audible, NJIT, and NJPAC have invested millions on a live local incentive to encourage their workers to choose to live in Newark. As we want them to not just share in Newark’s prosperity, but also help us address its challenges. Our local procurement is up as well. That is, we are encouraging our anchors to increase their spending with local businesses. On average the spend was at a dismal 3%. We have gotten that number to 9%, and are still pushing for at least 20 % by 2020. Which means we have much work to do. Rutgers has increased their spending to 26 %. PSEG last year alone spent 253 million on local businesses, an increase of 25 million dollars. Audible has subsidized over 10,000 employee visits to neighborhood restaurants in the past two years alone that directly impacted the local economy and hired over 100 high school students last year in paid internships. We need other corporations to do the same now…
But we are not just depending on the right actions of our anchors. We are convening a financial empowerment summit for our youth and developing youth entrepreneurship programs, Mini MBA programs for small businesses seeking to grow their capacity and expand, collaborating with Per Scholas, Newark 2020 and the Newark Alliance, to prepare our residents for the tech economy, and collaborating with the New Jersey Department of Labor to prepare, train, and hold positive recruitments for our residents, for growing industries like health care, manufacturing and transportation.”
