A Fireside Chat with Stephen K. Benjamin, Assistant to the U.S. President

Transcription:

Sam P. Johnson (00:08):

Good Afternoon, you hot. Come on y'all. We can do better than that. Good afternoon. So this is interesting in that I've got a panel here, a fireside chat with Mayor Steve Benjamin, who in full disclosure was my former boss before he fired me. Then after he wrapped up his tenure as mayor of Columbia, started an amazing firm that I had the chance to take over as he started his public service

Stephen K. Benjamin (00:49):

Again, again,

Sam P. Johnson (00:52):

His bride chagrin, serving as a Senior Advisor to the President and running the Office of Public Engagement. As was said, Mayor Benjamin served as President of US Conference of Mayors as well as the African American Mayors Association. Some call him by another title, the Mayor of Mayors. And so several of my questions will relate to his tenure in both the White House as well as his tenure as mayor. And give us a little bit of a backdrop on what it's like having some of these conversations with a mayor, right? Some of you who are having some of these conversations and you're sitting down regarding a project, and I was talking to a few of you earlier today and you were sharing, Hey, I've had this conversation in the past around these bridges or around some of these different infrastructure issues and this panel is meant to give you a little bit of a backdrop.

(01:55):

I want to set the ground rules real quick before I share any more about Mayor Benjamin. The ground rules are is that this is a conversation, this is a back and forth, so if you have questions, there'll be an opportunity for questions and answers and that sort of thing. Mayor Benjamin, if you don't mind, I'm going to get straight to it. I feel like we've shared quite a bit about your background, mayor with the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, how do you feel they've transformed the municipal landscape, particularly in terms of infrastructure development, economic growth, and sustainability?

Stephen K. Benjamin (02:33):

Alright, yo, this is pretty odd. Okay. I've known Sam his entire adult life. He hired him as he's coming out of school. I wish I'd say I hired him. He hired himself after our third meeting on my campaign for mayor. He just decided he was going to start coming to work. He started working unpaid on the campaign and then started working for me as mayor for almost six months. I think also volunteering until we actually found a job for him. So I tease him incessantly, so actually being subject to his mercy right now is not something I'm comfortable with, so let's see how this goes. Okay, let's see how it goes. Hopefully he behaves himself. As Sam mentioned, I served as mayor, both the US Comp mayors and the African American Mayor's Association worked with several in this room when I chaired the Municipal Bonds for America Coalition, actively working to preserve the tax exemption when cities, quite frankly, for many years, cities and local governments, other political subdivisions were on our own.

(03:39):

There was no significant investment in infrastructure from the federal government consistently. There were some really good ideas that came and went. Some that went away with the tax cut and Jobs Act with 2017, but just fighting every single day under both Republican and Democratic presidents to make sure we preserve the tax exemption was something that was sacrosanct to my work just as a mayor, but as former co bond council for the City of Columbia before I was mayor, I'll tell you that the period in which we're living in right now really presents some amazing opportunities. I mean, we would go to Washington, many of you probably also in tow for an infrastructure week every other week in the past, and now we have a bipartisan infrastructure and it's important to say our president led the charge where it was a bipartisan action that is injecting well over a trillion dollars into infrastructure projects of all kinds, all across the country.

(04:39):

If you think about where we were coming out of the greatest pandemic since 1918, probably the greatest economic disruption, some of us thought maybe since 1929, even the great social invest we saw since 1968 all wrapped up into one the incredible amounts of capital, both in the American Rescue plan, the infrastructure law, the chips and science bill as well, and certainly under the Inflation Reduction Act, just giving more tools in partnership with local government. That's probably not just the resources, but more importantly the latitude and the flexibility that has been awarded to cities and mayors and county executives and other political subdivisions to really try and make strategic investments that address those historic needs in their own respective cities. Recognizing that every city's not built the same. There are still some cities, as many of you know in the country that still have wooden pipes, a dated infrastructure.

(05:43):

We're taking every lead pipe by the ground between now and 2030 across the country. Older cities and younger cities have different needs, so being able to address these in a place way, working with hopefully thoughtful local leaders, leveraging what can be some pretty interesting and creative capital stacks is something that these laws give my former colleagues and it, it's been great working on the inside. My job now at the White House in the Office of Public Engagement is I don't work directly now with mayors. I speak to literally, I wish I was exaggerating that half dozen or more mayors every single week. And I don't do governors or other tribal leaders of sovereign nations. I work mostly with the private sector. I work with private sector, I work with labor. I work with all of our civil society groups, helping them forge partnerships, not just with the White House, but across the administration and across their communities to help solve problems in a thoughtful way.

(06:51):

Approaching things from the perspective of my grandmother who would say that God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason. You're supposed to listen twice as much as you talk. And it's amazing if you bring some wonderful policy experts from the federal government to the table and you actually send them in a room with subject matter experts, people who actually have to solve problems every single day, then you're able to be much more thoughtful in how you get those things done in a very thoughtful and pragmatic way. I think these tools finally having these tools at our disposal has been according to the mayors I speak to and I speak to, as I said, a lot of them on a regular basis on both sides of the, and those who are independent, they're excited to have resources that have helped their economies rebound significantly over the last few years.

Sam P. Johnson (07:38):

So having those resources, and as you mentioned, no city is equal, right? Every city is different. Every city has its own challenges, but some of the folks who were on the stage right before us, I heard the word housing, workforce housing mentioned several times this year for the US Conference Mayors Mayor Ginther from Columbus, Ohio is the current president of US conference mayors. He has said that this year housing will be the number one issue that US Conference mayors focuses on task force chaired by LA's Mayor Bass, having those resources, mayor outside of housing, what would you say are the major policy holes that we need to be focused on and trying to tackle?

Stephen K. Benjamin (08:29):

Sure. Well, at first I'd double click on housing.

(08:33):

Certainly maybe the greatest challenge as you speak to families all across the country, and we have some great mayors, Andy Ginther, he mentioned from Columbus, and I'm sure you'll hear the very same from Mayor Parker, thinking of ways in which we might be able to not just meet affordable housing needs. I mean, if you have done 9% deals and 4% deals and the like, but I think finding some more thoughtful and creative ways to try and meet the great housing need that extends well beyond those who are 80% a MI below, but certainly those who in workforce housing, 120, 150%.

(09:11):

It's a major challenge literally in every single state across the country. And those who are willing to work closely with local leaders to help solve their specific problems, I think will benefit from it significantly just under the bipartisan infrastructure. I think we've seen about 550 billion go into infrastructure, and I use that loosely including into this space. But I think in addition to housing the real challenges just around creative approaches to maybe income inequality, we talked about some of the softer issues that we're talking about. We're still watching some really some real challenges between those of us in this room who do well and who will usually do well under any economic situations. And trying to help people make that very difficult leap from the bottom quintile of American economic society into the middle class and trying to make sure we're doing everything we possibly can to help facilitate that through some type of creative investments and who gets the opportunity to help build infrastructure.

(10:18):

It's a wonderful way into a middle class life. There's another conference actually going on inside the hotel right now, an historically black colleges or universities. So 101 of them, all their presidents gathered I guess across the breezeway over there and really getting some pretty awesome data that shows how even some strategic partnerships with them around housing, around meeting their long-term infrastructure needs. It's proven to be maybe the greatest accelerator of moving particularly African American students from those who are first generation low wealth kids into the middle class with modest investments. But I think long-term, we're going to have to be thinking much more strategically about how we align these once in a generation investments in ways that actually move people forward. I love to talk about as if it's humanized infrastructure, and when you really as a mayor, you're kind of forced to because of your proximate to people's hopes and dreams and the sufferings, you have to sometimes think about ways you can be very creative in making sure that every dollar that you spend, every dollar, every cent that you issue, how do you make sure you're benefiting the whole of people's lives?

(11:39):

And I was sitting here as we were preparing, I was making some notes and went back to the fall of 2015. It's easy to remember. It was October 4th, 2015 because I was supposed to be taking my wife out to California. She wanted to go to wine country. And a few days, a few weeks before that, it wouldn't stop raining in the Carolinas tropical storm. Joaquin born down on the Carolinas and it's kept raining and raining and wring into the ground was fully saturated. And then we got hit with the big ones over the Carolinas. We were hit with 11 trillion gallons of water gas. You think about that and when you remember it well as well, fundamentally changed the way that we approached infrastructure. We'd been very engaged as a city. It was coine council for the city before I became a mayor. We understood that we were going to have to make some significant strategic investments, our water and our wastewater system.

(12:39):

We had never really thought about the lack of stormwater infrastructure and investing resilience and how important that would be to the city as we move forward, 11 trillion gallons of water and overnight we had 45 dams, failed, failed. We heard citizens and residents tell us about how they heard the sound of pop pop pop, 541 roads damaged and closed in one day, 6,000 four hundred and fifteen nine one one calls 2,697 agency dispatches and across our state, $12 billion worth of damage and probably the most challenging number 19, precious lives lost because of a century of not making thoughtful strategic investments in climate infrastructure and then realizing that if we're going to do this, we're going to have to do it right. And we then aggressively worked across Prairie Lines, a unanimous vote to issue our first $100 million of stormwater infrastructure, including our first issuance was I think the first standalone stormwater bond, certified green by the climate bond initiative in the country.

(13:55):

We wanted to get out there and show that yes, even in the deep south, we could do something that was pragmatic and progressive and investing in our infrastructure hopefully for time and memorial. But the issues that keep me up at night are economic insecurity, climate resilience, and just making sure that we are making sure we continue to talk to each other. And that would probably be, I'm not sure if you're going to have that question or not, but some unsolicited counsel and advice that the cities and counties and other political subdivision, state governments that you work with, I hope and pray that in addition to being masters of your craft, that you spend a decent amount of time really listening to the folks that you work with, listening closely to what they believe their needs are, and then find a way. When I was mayor Sam was my chief of staff. We'd often have some really solid meetings with folks who would come in and tell me exactly what they sold, but never told me, never bothered to ask me what I actually needed. And I think being able to listen closely to people understand you share the same priorities, you share the same values, we're going to creatively figure out how to solve this problem together is a wonderful way to lean into building solid relationships with people that you might prospectively do business with.

Sam P. Johnson (15:24):

I want to take it back real quick. In that conversation, you mentioned the years of inaction, the years of not investing in infrastructure and of course this major climate event that took place. How as we engage in that conversation, as we build those relationships prior to ever doing any type of deal or what have you, how do we have a type of conversation so that we understand the penalties of inaction, of not investing in infrastructure, making sure that there's a fine line between selling and having a conversation around how do we make sure that our communities have what they need?

Stephen K. Benjamin (16:08):

Sure. Well, I think first of all, these types of partnerships, I think it's wonderful that the bond buyer has been doing this series and infrastructure the last few years and working closely with a I ai. I think really just constantly ideating over creative solutions that pencil out and finding something that works. And if it's great, you can replicate it and scale it up or down to a city or communities respective, but I think you have to also, I think, lean in with the women and men who serve as leaders in your community. If you don't know your own mayor, that's a great place to start. And if you think your mayor has some incredible strengths and then also some easily identifiable deficiencies, that's also a great place to start. Hey, Madam Mayor. Hey Mr. Mayor. Let's sit down and have a discussion around public finance.

(17:09):

If the FA is not doing it in some places, you have some superb fas. We had a great one in the city of Columbia and some places not so much, but an opportunity to actually sit down and make sure that mayors understand the power of the pen, the creative and thoughtful use of the public purse, and helping meet long-term needs, not just short-term needs. I would serve every two years. The US Comp of Mayors hosts, new mayors at Harvard, the New Mayors Institute. Now that's kind of been taken over in partnership, the Bloomberg Center there, but it's a wonderful place in which you're able to get the measure of a mayor. And my job every two years was to come in and bring in a hard copy of our caffer and to scare the crap out of them to start on the table and say, if you hadn't picked up your CER and understand exactly how your city is financed, then there's no way in the world you'll be ever able to meet your goals.

(18:14):

Everything you want to do costs money, and it is an issue of priorities. It's you have to get an idea of who your top 10 taxpayers, top 20 taxpayers are in your city. You have to understand your millage and your tax rates. And if you're going to take from here, something has to go over here and helping them understand that very early on, again, from people who do this every single day, it's so important. I walked into office with that strength. I did not have any experience whatsoever in public health. So when it came time to the pandemic, I was on a real short track to becoming an expert. And after I left office three weeks later, I was at the Chan School of Public Health at Harvard. I was teaching, I was really learning because I realized that's something I needed to bone up on as a leader, as a public sector leader in learning. So I think automatically assuming that your civic leaders are not experts unless they come out of the field and leaning in to make sure that they understand exactly, you have to get done. We had a major challenge when I became mayor of the city. Good people, genuinely good people who ran the city for years before that. But we couldn't close our books for two years.

(19:37):

Our pension liabilities, our eps were just out of control. Our medical costs, we had not budgeted appropriately for them. And it put us in a real serious situation, our water infrastructure and wastewater infrastructure, just a reticence to raise rates without understanding that if you didn't fix a $50 problem, it was going to become a $50,000 problem. And we had a record amount of sanitary storm overflows in our river, the three rivers that feed our city, and we had to fix that. And that's actually when it first stimulated my interest in thoughtful p threes, realizing that the economic fragility of the people that I was serving, that we could not have five years of success of 25% rate increases, which is probably what we needed, but that we're going to have to be thoughtful. And it stirred a stirred up a discussion that allows me to at least go down the path of doing the RFI and getting ideas from the private sector as to how we might solve our challenges.

(20:46):

I not gotten to the point where I'd facilitated enough public discussion with my constituents, and at one point you would think one city council meeting, it was like mad Maxon thunderdome that was trying to sell the water system or something like that to the private sector. And it turned into a real time. But stimulated the conversation that got me to the point that we were able to issue probably about three quarters of a billion dollars worth of debt to fix our city's infrastructure, dramatically decreased by 97% sanitary overflows and start treating our city and our constituents the way that they should have been treated. We did that while also not raising taxes for 12 years in a row. It's seven years worth of surpluses budget surpluses. We rebuilt our reserves. We actually invested, increased our police department budget by 90% over that period of time while investing in smart 21st century policing.

(21:54):

And we also sent our kids to summer camp for free in the city in ways that made sense, again, by making smart investments and working to grow the pie and showing people whether they were the suits downtown. I used to be chair of the Chamber of Commerce too, or if they were just that single mom working hard to pay her bills, she needed to know that you were being a good steward of her resources. We got five or six upgrades from standard boards and Moody's and Fitch as well over that time as well. But back to the beginning of the question, not assuming, first of all, knowing who your civic leaders are, not assuming that they know the answers to some of the tough questions that you deal with every single day, and then taking the time to maybe help get them up to speed, it will help make better decisions. We have Sam mentioned Andrew Ginther, who's the mayor of Columbus. I'm not sure if you from Columbus is in here, but we have some really talented public sector leaders in this country who get the job done, who listen very closely, who are innovative, who are thinking about ways in which they can build up not just the physical infrastructure, but also the spirit of this city. And Mayor Genta is one of them and representative of all the people he serves as president of the conference,

Sam P. Johnson (23:18):

Mayor you just talked about, and you gave me a little bit bit of PTSD, some of those public sessions that we had, but you laid out the vision that you had for fiscal stewardship and for dealing with some of the challenges and making sure that we were on a track to be able to do and have the fiscal bon AFI days when you go to the public to be able to say, this is my vision for the room here. As we engage as there are many times, and oftentimes a project is going to sink or swim based on a mayor's ability to sell the vision. How as someone who has gone to the community, gone to the public and said, Hey, this is my vision. This is what I'm trying to accomplish, what are some nuggets that you would give to this room that will help them help that mayor, that community?

Stephen K. Benjamin (24:18):

Okay, first of all, will any of you ever consider running for public office? Raise your hand. That's what I expected to see. I got one over here. That's more than I expected, 100% more than I expected. So first of all, I have a little bit of sympathy for those who do serve. It's never easy. I mean, obviously particularly public life right now. So as much as you can do to try and bring people together around a common cause means you have to cast a very broad vision. You have to show people that two people equally yoked can see the same thing very differently. So you have to really work to pass around a legal pad and ask people whether the 10 most important things to you, your family, and you'd be amazed if you can circle five or six of those. And they're the same things.

(25:14):

And those are the things that you focus on. You work the bill consensus around them, and thank God we live in the greatest democracy the world's ever created. Those other four, you duke, those out majority wins and you protect the rights of the minority as you work to get those done. But you focus on really thoughtful, pragmatic solutions around solving those six things that you agree on things. The real issues are in the margins. It's never fun. And even sometimes after you've made your very best case, people will still not be there where you are. But as you all know, in this room, time is money. So there are opportunities you have to make deals done. And our city, every city is different. There's some cities that have these amazingly large, unwieldy city councils, 30, 40 people. I would never run for office in those cities.

(26:03):

We had seven, and I had one of those seven votes. And I remember when I first ran for mayor, I told our editorial board at the time, and they didn't believe me, that the most important votes that we're going to take as a council would probably be four, three votes and maybe five, two votes that you're never going to find unanimity, but you want at least make sure there's enough time for real thoughtful consensus building. And then when the time comes, you just got to make a move. So we would spend time aggressively more and more public hearings that went well into the night. One I remember, went to 2:00 AM 2:00 AM my wife had tried to get me to quit counsel, quit office not long after that night. But you spend the time giving people the respect of listening to their thoughts and opinions, their hopes, their fears and the like.

(26:56):

And then sometimes you actually have to do something simple like put 'em on a bus, put 'em on a bus. Most of the things that we're doing occasionally, we were kind of out there on some ideas, but most of the things that we'd been doing, we were doing, were done successfully somewhere else, maybe within a three or four mile ride. You got to put people on the bus. And if you want to build a baseball stadium, you put 'em on the bus and take 'em at the Durham and see what the bulls have done and how this strategic investment we were pitching a public private partnership, a new multip venue of baseball stadium around minor league baseball, which serve as a catalyst for what is now almost a billion dollars worth of private sector development around it all on the tax roll, a city like mine, the DNA, we had 67% of our real estate, not on the tax roll.

(27:45):

You think about the University of South Carolina, Fort Jackson state government, local government hospitals, and thank God a church, synagogue, mosque on every corner in the south, which meant that a disproportionate share of the tax burden was being born by small businesses in the private sector. So we had to commit ourselves to an idea that we had to grow the pie. We had to use these other wonderful economic engines, the Ford and the University in particular as tools to grow around this particular stage. And then once you got 'em on the bus and showed them what could be, things got a lot easier respecting again, that dialogue, including when people don't agree with you. And now some of you, if you ever get bored, look up Bull Street, Columbia, South Carolina. It is adaptive reuse of the old historic asylum. It was our mental health campus, literally as a crow flies in three, four blocks from City Hall that now has turned into an amazing live work play district that's helping drive the future of our city and will I think serve as the long-term anchor that gets the city on full financial footing and perpetuity.

Sam P. Johnson (29:09):

Well, mayor, you mentioned earlier how much you teased me,

Stephen K. Benjamin (29:12):

And those are both four, three votes, both the stadium and actually a development agreement with the private sector to build out the infrastructure turned into a gig community, both four, three votes that went well into the night.

Sam P. Johnson (29:26):

Oh, 3:33 AM by the way, one, two,

Stephen K. Benjamin (29:29):

Is that what Oh, I remember three 30. Okay. I stopped counting

Sam P. Johnson (29:34):

As much as you tease me, and of course I return fire. You have a, for you, someone who is serving in the White House and of the most senior roles in the White House, someone who has served as mayor for three terms, president of US conference, mayor, somebody who's served as bond council, as he mentioned. So municipal bond attorney who has those scars to show it. We've got a little bit of time left, and if Lynn and Lisa wouldn't mind, I'd love to open up the floor. Any questions that we may have from the crowd.

Stephen K. Benjamin (30:22):

I take that as a sign. We answered every question. Oh, we bo you the death one or the other.

Sam P. Johnson (30:30):

I got

Stephen K. Benjamin (30:32):

You behaved. I'm proud of you.

Sam P. Johnson (30:34):

I

Stephen K. Benjamin (30:34):

Take the high road. I won't have to rat you out to your wife. No, very proud of Sam and what he's been doing in life. You all, I'll maybe leave with this. Continue to serve at the pleasure of President Biden and we'll be doing that for the next several months. If there are any thoughts or ideas that you might want to share with us, the Office of Public Engagement really serves as the front door of the White House. I really believe that our job of being the listening ears serves as a representative of the sacred trust that the president and vice president have with the men and women that they serve. So we love input, we love constructive input, and particularly if you're seeing something that works really well, trying to find ways to facilitate its replication and scale, and even more importantly, we've been able to do some really cool stuff when something's not working well, when some policy idea that someone hatched one of our policy councils somewhere in the federal government and it's not landing the way that we expect it to, we're able to take that constructive criticism.

(31:49):

I remember meeting with a bunch of bank CEOs back earlier this year, and I teased them up until 'em. I walked in with a old school Yellow pages stuck in the back of my pants. I knew I was going to get my butt whipped and came out with some thoughtful, constructive criticism. Took it back to the National Economic Council, facilitated one-on-one calls with each of the CEOs so they could share their frank input with no-brainer, the President's National Economic Advisor. And I'm convinced it's led to some really thoughtful policymaking from the Fed on particularly capital reserve requirements and the like. So it matters when you lean in. So I'd encourage you to do so. You deserve a government that works for you and works arm in arm with you. And when we disagree, we'll at least have the understanding that we listen to each other at those times. So there for a few more months. So y'all lean in and put us to work. Alright, thank you. God bless y'all.

Sam P. Johnson (32:48):

Thank y'all.