Closing Keynote with Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker

Transcription:

Presenter (00:08):

Well, we are certainly privileged to have the Mayor of Philadelphia here, Mayor Cherelle Parker, who also happens to be the first female mayor in the 100 year history of Philadelphia, so that deserves a round of applause. As I was reading through Mayor Parker's resume and reading of all of her major accomplishments, it just struck me that she is a consummate public servant. Having served as not only a teacher in the house of Representatives on the council, and now as the mayor of the city of Philadelphia, it's truly amazing that she has dedicated her life to her neighbors, and it's something that we can all learn from and strive to do. I think some of what we feel as being part of the public finance communities, we're building infrastructure to help our communities and what a great way to end our first day, but to have this wonderful public servant here to give us her remarks, I am just going to touch on a few highlights from her career.



(01:28):

She is a Philadelphian native. She is also a graduate of a historically black college and university. I know they're having their conference here as well, and we've had a chance to mingle a little bit, but she was inspired to public service by a councilwoman who she worked for, Marian Tako. And I think another thing that we just heard from this last panel of Hall of Famers in our business is these are all people who have inspired us in our careers, and I know you knew one of our recipients as she was coming down off the DAAs.



(02:08):

So the future mayor was elected to the house serving 10 years representing Northwest Philadelphia. She made history as the youngest African American woman elected to the state legislature, continuing in her quest to break every ceiling that she came up upon. She also served and represented the Ninth Council District in the Philadelphia City Council, and she was elected in 2019 to serve as city Council majority leader. And in 2023, she was, as we all know, elected to serve as mayor of this great city of Philadelphia. She is also a mom, a teacher, and a strong experience leader, but also somebody who I know that not only hard infrastructure but soft infrastructure. We've been talking today, mayor, about soft infrastructure and the human aspects of infrastructure, human infrastructure that we are as part of this public finance world, that we are trying to figure out better ways to finance affordable housing, migrant housing, all of the things that are part of the infrastructure world. And I know that you were a recipient of some funding in the bipartisan infrastructure law, and we're really interested to hear some of your great thoughts around how you are going to make the lives of Philadelphians better. So with that, please help me welcome Madam Mayor.



Cherelle L Parker (03:56):

Let me just start by saying good afternoon to each of you. It is an honor and a privilege to be here on today to Beth Coolidge, head of public finance at Oppenheimer. And Devin Brennan, a partner in Orrick, Harrington and Sutcliffe. Devin, are you here? Are you here around wherever he is? Give the two of them a round of applause. This is work and thank you for that warm introduction. I also need to thank Aris, the parent company of the Bond Buyer. Thank you so very much for your work. Lynn Funk, who is somewhere around here, but you know the people who do the connecting matter to me, Lynn, so thank you so very much for your patience. And then Mike Ballinger, the publisher of the Bond Buyer. Where are you? Wherever you, Hey Mike, this is full disclosure. Now I've got through all of my formal hellos.



(04:54):

I want you to know my grandparents who raised me have both passed away. So I have a strong village of extended family members, and I called my aunt this morning who wants to know what's on the mayor's schedule? And there are a lot of things happening in our city on the day the vice president was here on today. So we've been moving about with that. Some people are waiting some forthcoming announcements and we've been talking a bit about that. But she said, well, what are you doing? I said, well, I want you to know that on today, I know that I have really arrived. And she says, what do you mean that you've arrived? You're the mayor, you've already gotten here. I said, no, no, no, no. I fell in love with the substance and the power of retirement security during my tenure as a member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.



(05:54):

And that is when I became a Bond Buyer reader. And she says, well, who's going to be at this conference where you're going to talk to the bond buyers? I said, all of the public finance experts and our nation are going to be there. And the people who like me are weird enough to think that retirement security is the sexiest issue in the world that you could be advocating for. And so I really do want you to know that it is an honor to be here. I am going to get an opportunity to talk about her I think tomorrow. But I do have to say before I get started, I've been paying attention to what has been happening across the nation, particularly as it relates to some of our large cities. And I am so very fortunate that it was years ago, years and years, decades now when Philadelphia was on the brink, quite frankly, of receivership and bankruptcy.



(07:04):

And we had some of the best experts and legal minds and public finance to come together to figure out how we could establish a process, a system, and a protocol that would assure ensure that Philadelphia would never again be in a position where our budget was not balanced or we couldn't pay our bills the next year and or we were not making the essential payments necessary to ensure that the defined benefit pensions that are available for municipal workers, that we were not making our contribution. And we created something called pika. And don't tell 'em this. Their heads are going to expand if they're here. I said this, but I've got to say it out loud. I thank God for PIKA and one of the mothers of PIKA is here. Joan Stern. Give Joan Stern a round of applause, Joan. We were at the US Conference of Mayors and we were at a gathering in Chicago, Beth, where I met your counterpart there.



(08:15):

And we were just having a conversation about some challenges that some other cities were facing. And I was saying, Philadelphia, we have to have a five year plan. Our budget has to be balanced, and PICA has to give us approval, and we have to make our MMOA minimum municipal obligation payment to Harrisburg to ensure that our municipal pension and finance system is stable. But none of that would've been possible without Joan Stern, Joe McLaughlin. And there's another young lady whose Marilyn, had it not been for them, Philadelphia would not be now, and it is because we studied it at Fells and Penn. We are a textbook case study on how you stabilize municipal finance in cities across the United States and quite frankly, the world. And for that, I'm super proud. Please give them a round of applause.



(09:21):

Once again, let me say this to you. It is great to be here at the 2024 Bond Buyer Infrastructure Conference with so many public finance professionals as we look at the future of our country's infrastructure. I'm proud to say for the record that the city of Philadelphia has its highest combination of credit ratings in more than 40 years, and this room knows better than most how exciting that is for me as the mayor, we've worked hard to improve our fiscal health while making critical investments across Philadelphia. And this, I hope you'll be as excited about it as I am. I was a member of council. When we establish this, we have set aside funds for a future rainy day in our budget stabilization reserve, and we continue to plan for deposits in years ahead. We have more funds now in our rainy day fund than ever before in the city of Philadelphia's history. Philadelphia's prepping. Can you give that a round of applause please? We're prepping, okay for black swan effects if they come, we've allocated supplemental operating funds as pay as you Go dollars to support our capital investments. And you've heard me mention this, but we are continuing the excellent trajectory of our city's pension fund, which just reached a 62% funding level, the highest funding level in decades. And even better, we are scheduled to hit 80% by FY 29 and a hundred percent by FY 33. I'll wait.



(11:19):

What's more exciting? This summer, I got the opportunity to sign my first budget as mayor as the 100th mayor, first woman in 341 years in the sixth largest city in the nation birthplace of democracy. And we coined my first budget, the 6.3 billion budget as the one Philly budget when we signed it into law. What does it represent? It represents our transformational one Philly vision that lays out our commitment to making Philadelphia the safest, cleanest, greenest big city in the nation with access to economic opportunity for all. Now, what we've learned is that fulfilling this vision will take consistent and substantial investments in our infrastructure, which we are clearly committed to doing, but this is what we understand. We the city of Philadelphia proper, we can't do it alone. We are grateful to our state and our federal partners as well as the bond market. Now, you mentioned Beth, the Bipartisan Infrastructure and Jobs Act.



(12:34):

It is the largest long-term infrastructure investment in our nation's history. The Inflation Reduction Act. It also provides significant incentives, grants and loans to support infrastructure investments in clean energy, transportation and the environment. Now together, these two powerful tools for government have helped the City of Philadelphia position itself to tackle major problems that we would never alone be able to address. And with that being said, I want to give a special thanks to the Biden Harris administration for ensuring that Philadelphia not listen. Full disclosure, I just arrived on January the second or the third, so I've only been here for a few months, but since I've been here, and I want you to know this, this is my standard operating procedure. Beth, I think I'm jaded because I've been in politics too long. I never take a picture with the big check until the little check is in the bank.



(13:40):

And with that being said, I want you to know that since I have been Mayor Philadelphia has received more than 650 million in grants alone this year as it relates to those two policy measures. These in my opinion, are once in a generation opportunities to invest in our communities, and we want to ensure that the funding Philadelphia secures is not just a way to fund our deferred capital needs, but that we are thinking bigger and we want to make transformational investments in our neighborhoods. Now, what did you do? I just want to walk through a few of them with you. If I may. First, at our airport, we had a $42.6 million award in federal infrastructure funding to upgrade the terminal facilities, make energy efficient improvements, and to make what we refer to as runway enhancements At our water department, we have a $340 million multi-year agreement with the EPAs Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act program, and it is helping to lower costs while allowing us to upgrade our water system.



(15:07):

We're the birthplace of democracy, so like many others, we of course have an aging infrastructure at the transportation, the Office of Transportation and Infrastructure. The city has received $14.2 million to repair and upgrade to bridges over the Wissahickon Creek, the Bells Mills Road. For those of you who may know, Philadelphia is one of the most renowned in our city, and then the Green Valley Road bridges both of them. We are proud to see that the city and its infrastructure solutions team IST here who are extremely important to us because these are the folks that we have put into place to ensure that they help us make sure that we are spending these dollars as efficiently as we possibly can, and we want to make sure that they get recognized as a shining example of how intergovernmental collaboration can ensure a cleaner, greener, and safer future for all Philadelphians.



(16:15):

I have to say to you all that when I talked about this thing called intergovernmental cooperation and planning, when I was on the campaign trail for about two years, telling people that if I were to get elected as the mayor of this city that intergovernmental cooperation and planning, it would be a hallmark of this administration because Philadelphia has limited revenue generating capacity, and we need to work with our federal and state partners along with the private sector and the philanthropic community to ensure that we could meet the moment to address issues. I remember being in a debate, and I remember one of the opponents laughing at me and when they got a chance to speak and said, well, running a city is about more than intergovernmental collaboration and cooperation. If you ever see a mayor who says something like that, you say, how else in the hell are you going to address the issues in your city?



(17:08):

If you think that your city alone has the ability to fix the massive problems that you are facing, why is that important for me to share with you? Because the bond market plays a critical role in helping us invest in our infrastructure. The city, the water department, and the airport. They have significant capital plans. We have a large water and airport bond transactions. They are coming up this fall and the spring. We just priced a transaction to invest more than $350 million in our local gas utility infrastructure at Pgw, and we are redesigning and making critical upgrades to our parks, playgrounds, and libraries through our rebuild program, and that is the legacy of my predecessor, our former mayor, Jim Kenny. Give him a round of applause. When the work is good, it shouldn't matter who helped to get it done.



(18:11):

Our city is also making significant investments in affordable housing through a variety of programs, including our neighborhood preservation initiative, which is the legacy of our former council President Darryl Clark, council president, the current council President Kenyatta Johnson and I, we were members of the City Council of Philadelphia when we got MPI off the ground and we were able to get the bond issued, we will be announcing additional plans to continue supporting that program this fall, and we are grateful to each and every one of you who are here who in your own right, no matter what firm you are with, if you were with someone some years ago, this is what we want you to know. We thank you in the city of Philadelphia for agreeing to work with us as partners. We truly can and we will make our city what Philadelphians can. Now, and this is pretty weird.



(19:17):

Philadelphians can repeat the mayor's vision. If you were to say to someone in Philadelphia, I may not say all, but there's surely quite a few. What is the mayor's goal for your city and what is she trying to do? She's trying to listen despite anyone's race, class, socioeconomic status, zip code, sexual orientation, or identity religion. No matter all, I don't care about any of those things that are sort of qualifying factors sometimes that people use to divide us. The agenda, the issue, if it was a white neighborhood, a black neighborhood, Latino neighborhood, immigrant neighborhood, Haitian, African, it didn't matter. The things that you heard me talk about in that vision, no matter where I went, everyone wanted the same exact thing. That's what we are going to continue focusing on. We're going to need your help in order to do it. We've got one other project that we're working on relative to housing, and it's going to be extremely creative because we've got the best and the brightest minds on board helping us get through it, but we will have very strong intergovernmental collaboration and investment.



(20:40):

We will have the private sector at the table. We will have organized labor at the table and the philanthropic community at the table, and we are going to make a proactive investment in what will be the largest effort to ensure housing in the city of Philadelphia that we have ever seen. My ultimate goal in the number is 30,000. That's what I committed to. 30,000 units here in the city building of new preservation of existing mixed use, single family dwelling, homeowners, renters, you name it. We want it to be something for almost everyone in this proposal. So when you see Philadelphia come knocking on your door asking for help, I want you to say, oh, that's that mayor that actually reads the bond buyer and gets excited when she learns that Philadelphia has made more than it is required in its MMO payments in Harrisburg. Believe me, it buys us some goodwill and credibility when we can do it, but we know that we need you and when we call on you, answer the phone.



(21:58):

Who is she? She's the mayor that's going to make Philadelphia the safest, cleanest, greenest, big city in the nation with economic opportunity for all. She's going to do it by unifying her city so that they can become one Philly, a United City. Everybody put their ones in the air. For me right now, it's a finance people. We don't engage in this only positive economic analysis only. No normative hoopla, one's in the air. This is what we're trying to do, unify our city. You are here and you are a part of our extended family. Let me hear you all say one Philly. One Philly, a United City City. Now I'm Black Baptist, and a teacher. You'll put your ones back up and we'll do that again. Let me hear you all say one Philly. One. Philly. A United City. A United City. Thank you for being here, Bond Buyer. We appreciate you.