2009 Public Officials of the Year

Jay Williams

Q&A: Jay Williams

Jay Williams (full profile) is the mayor of Youngstown, Ohio. Along with its neighbors in the industrial Midwest, Youngstown spent decades hoping that declines in both population and employment could be reversed. Finally, under the leadership of Williams, the city is taking a different — and more realistic — approach. The city is planning a future for itself as a smaller yet hopefully more vibrant place. Williams, who was all but assured of reelection on November 3 against two write-in candidates, talked with Governing Staff Writer Alan Greenblatt about Youngstown's "right-sized" future and his own move from banking and planning to elected office. Here is an abridged and edited version of the interview:

You were working for the city putting together the Youngstown 2010 plan, with the vision of the smaller but perhaps more sustainable city, when you ran for mayor in 2005. How would things have played out differently if you hadn't run?

I left the banking industry to come work for the city because I wanted to contribute and see this city turn around. Being involved in that Youngstown 2010 process was both personally and professionally inspiring for me. I started with no aspirations for running for mayor, but after having been involved in that process and seeing how much civic excitement and trust there was about redefining the future of this community, it left me with the idea that this should be the platform and the centerpiece for anyone who was running for mayor.

We talked to some of the candidates that were emerging, and while there was general interest, I wasn't convinced that the individuals who were running at that time were going to be completely immersed in this or use this as the agenda for their administration. There was a great deal of concern, with all the time and trust that had been invested, that if this wasn't the focal point for the campaign, I don't know that we would have achieved enough momentum.

You've gotten a lot of attention from other communities around the country facing similar challenges. What is the reaction on the ground in Youngstown? Do you still hear grumbling that shrinking is not the way to prosperity?

I don't think there's that kind of grumbling. When we laid this out, it was always going to be a journey and not a destination. We weren't going to have arrived in 2010 and see this transformational change occur over five to ten years. Generally, it's been accepted that changing this community is going to be a process, and it's going to be a difficult one that doesn't always have easy answers.

But as people see the changes that are happening on the ground, there is more and more buy-in. There's more of an understanding of the necessity and importance of this. And there's also an understanding of the benefits. There has been a lot of positive attention and there are additional resources, both public and private, to leverage as a result of having this plan.

While people are well aware there are no quick and easy answers, the transformation of this community into being a smaller community doesn't mean that we're going to be an inferior community. In fact, we see ourselves being more diverse and better off in the long run than we would have been otherwise.

I read that you were five years old on Black Monday [the day in 1977 when a large steel company shut down most of its Youngstown operations] and perhaps not quite as beholden to the past. It seems that your message has been that this is reality, we just have too much city for the population we're going to have. But it is hard for cities not to say that there's going to be a factory in our future that will save us.

The fact is, while we are right-sizing, there are still some significant economic-development investments going on. Being a city of 75,000 or 85,000, the benefits are going to be that much more valuable to us. We are negotiating right now a billion-dollar investment from one of the larger employers here in the city of Youngstown. That's just one of four or five major deals we're working on. When we say we are right-sizing or trying to make the city fit the population we have, by no means are we giving up on economic development or investment. We're just trying to do it in a more intelligent way.

How is the economic downturn affecting you? You've got chronic problems, but I take it that the job losses of the last year have still been a blow.

It has unquestionably slowed and been a blow. But we've been doing this for 25 years. Crisis management is not necessarily something we'd like to be adroit at, but we've learned how to manage in very difficult economic environments. So while it has been a blow, it hasn't been devastating as it's been in some communities that aren't accustomed to dealing with severe and prolonged economic downturns.

Every department head is used to operating under very difficult economic environments. In fact, we believe some of the things we're doing now, in terms of how the city is governed, will benefit us significantly over the next several years but specifically over the next year or two. We are outsourcing certain functions. Our police department, which is our single most expensive department, obviously it's critically important, but we're going through a restructuring that is going to see fewer management officers and more patrol officers.

We're taking steps assuming that the downturn is going to be long enough and deep enough to make these fundamental changes. The environment being what it is has helped us to make the case that we need to make these changes. We believe by doing this now, we'll be much better positioned to take advantage of the uptick when it does occur.

What looks different in Youngstown? What are the tangible benefits of the rightsizing?

We have been very aggressive in terms of our demolition program. We have tripled or probably quadrupled the rate of housing and structure demolition over the last three years. The neighborhood landscape looks dramatically different, but it's helped us work with some other groups in helping transfer these vacant lots into productive use. Along our major corridors, we've used this as an opportunity to really clean up some of the blight that had been there for decades.

You'd also see our business parks, which were formerly brownfields, polluted areas that were of no real value. My predecessors deserve credit on this. We've continued to invest so that now our business parks are teeming with a diversity of industries that are engaged in distribution and advanced manufacturing. It's really allowed us to change the visual landscape of this city.

But there are still areas of significant disinvestment that are going to need a lot of work. We are not sweeping over the fact that there are neighborhoods and commercial areas that are still struggling that must be addressed.

We are not forcibly moving people out of certain neighborhoods or certain tracts of the city. We are structuring our programs to offer incentives to relocate. But again, for those that choose to remain, we still have an obligation to provide them the highest quality service we can absolutely do. We will continue to maintain that.

Ten years ago, we would offer incentives that would allow people to rehabilitate their homes where they were, notwithstanding the condition of that neighborhood or the future of that neighborhood, and it was just an inefficient use of resources. Obviously, relocating is a very emotional and personal decision for people to make, and we don't want to use an inappropriately heavy hand.

The process was called Youngstown 2010 and we're almost at 2010. What's your prediction for how things will look at the end of your next term, presuming you win reelection?

As we move toward the year 2010, we want people to see that it is a process. This is literally part of the city charter. It requires officials of Youngstown to update this long-range plan every 10 years. We'll be able to document where we've come from, the things that have been accomplished as a direct result of the plan.

We spent 25 or 30 years looking at the rearview mirror at the Youngstown of Black Monday. We somehow have fallen into the trap of thinking that the history of the city is only from 1977 when we struggled economically, socially and otherwise. The true history of this city is one of innovation, manufacturing and a social structure that made everyone here in this valley proud. What we are accomplishing is getting people to stop focusing on Black Monday and being defined by that relatively short 30 years, compared to the rest of the history of this city.

Now we are thinking in 10-year increments moving forward. When we talk about a technology economy, which would have been laughable five or 10 years ago, having a tech core downtown that attracts some of the best and brightest college students, that pays them $50,000 and $60,000 a year right out of college, while they're able to live in an upscale apartment complex that just opened — these are all things we're going to be talking about for Youngstown in 2010, 2015 and 2020. Downtown Youngstown is once again becoming a destination point for people in the region, whether it's arts or entertainment or culture or business.

You talked earlier about how it's necessary for the mayor, the top political leader, to tout something like this, and I know you would like to credit your staff and other people who have worked on these issues. But how do you communicate with the general public, to get that kind of support?

You know, the Facebook and Twitter generation, we've started to integrate some of those things into what we do as city government. Right now, if there's a group of people who need to express themselves, we do everything we can to remove the barriers for them to communicate and convey their ideas. Where once they might have been seen as the threatening mob marching on City Hall, we've completely turned that around. We are interested in those ideas, because you have as much responsibility as citizens as we do as city officials.

They understand that their voices can be heard, but it also allows them to understand that there are some bureaucracies or some inherent difficulties in moving government around. Establishing those relationships and letting them get an inside view has really helped.

What's been the hardest decision you've had to make as a leader in government?

We did recently have to do some layoffs. This is in a city government where virtually all the departments are understaffed. It's excruciatingly difficult to have to try to figure out what individuals were going to be laid off, while continuing to provide continuity of excellent service.

It's a very common struggle right now, trying to balance layoffs versus cutting hours in general.

We did have proposals to have most if not all the individuals remain working, with some modified hours but maintaining full benefits. That's where some work remains to be done with getting some of our labor groups to recognize that layoffs are never the best solution. Proposals that would allow people to keep working and keep providing services are much more palatable approaches to what will be a temporary economic downturn.

Making those decisions is tough, particularly in public safety, which is the last place any public official wants to cut. But with the economy that we have, where the people who pay our salaries are happy to have any kind of employment, public employees, including elected officials, who are unwilling to make modest sacrifices — public opinion is significantly different than it would have been just three years ago. It's unquestionably a PR problem that works to the benefit of the public officials who have to make the tough decisions.

Again, we're not making those decisions out of spite, we're not making them to be punitive, we're making those decisions because they have to be made. Those who hold onto the notion of, well, we've got ours, this is the way it's always been, you guys figure it out — again, that's not a position that's going to be tenable to the general public. That's a message that internally we're trying to get across.

That's just a fascinating phenomenon, how this has transformed in just a very few short years. And we have some labor groups in the city who get it, they absolutely get it. They have come along and done the things necessary to make those changes and modifications. And then we have other labor groups that have yet to understand that this is an inevitable course that we're all going to have to deal with.