By Schenectady (NY) Mayor Brian U. Stratton
January 31, 2011

While President Obama addressed America's mayors in the East Room of the White House on the morning of January 21 as part of the 79th Winter Meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, I had the high honor and privilege of a personal discussion with the President that day as we traveled together from Washington to Schenectady.

Flying aboard Marine One and Air Force One for the President's scheduled tour of GE's Renewable Energy Headquarters and Large Steam Power Turbine and Generator manufacturing operations in Schenectady, he and I had a personal and intimate discussion about the challenges America's mayors are facing in today's extraordinary federal and state fiscal environments.

The President and I walked together across the South Lawn from the Oval Office to the Marine One helicopter, while my fellow mayors watched and cheered our departure from the White House balcony. Once onboard, the President immediately summoned me to the executive seat across from his and asked me: "What is your greatest challenge as Mayor?"

I told him my challenges in Schenectady were not unlike those faced by nearly every other mayor across the country; the single largest being the job of maintaining essential services without either decimating our public work force or raising property taxes through the roof. In Schenectady's budget this year, I told him, we were forced to leave 12 vacant but desperately needed police officer positions unfilled, and that eight of our remaining 154 sworn police officers were only there because of funding Schenectady has received under the COPS grant program and the President's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

As we lifted off from the White House lawn and turned south toward the Washington Monument and Andrews Air Force Base, I thanked President Obama for his leadership in making the stimulus program possible. He listened intently as I told him how cities can and must reduce costs through local government consolidation, especially important in New York State where there are more than 10,500 government taxing entities. In our own Schenectady County, New York's second smallest county, there are seven individual police departments and more than 130 individual local taxing entities.

I told the President that Governor Andrew Cuomo has rightfully made consolidation a major part of his economic recovery platform, and that Schenectady has completed a police consolidation study by Columbia University and funded by New York's Department of State to identify which services our local police agencies can share to reduce costs for taxpayers.

On Air Force One, the President joined New York's Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand and our Congressmen Paul Tonko, Chris Gibson and Richard Hanna already on board for the flight to Schehectady.

Seated with our bipartisan Congressional delegation for takeoff, the President continued our discussion of ways to help New York State, the nation and America's cities become more competitive through renewable energy, green jobs, and export manufacturing. Those issues were the purpose of the President's well publicized trip to Schenectady and GE that day, and they laid the very foundation for his State of the Union address to the nation the following week.