By Jim Welfley
July 26, 2004

The new round of Meet the Mayors video clips taped in Boston at the 72nd Annual Conference of Mayors have been posted to the Conference web site: usmayors.org. J. Joseph Burgess, Senior Vice President and Chief Operations Officer of Veolia Water North America, announced the new round of Meet the Mayors video clips during the meeting.

"It's a presidential election year," said Burgess. "With that the economy is front and center and will be increasingly so." As such, the question asked of mayors in Boston was: "How has the global marketplace impacted your local economy? And what do you envision as the source of future job creation for your community?"

Mayors from around the country gave their own unique responses to the question. Conference President Akron Mayor Donald L. Plusquellic responded that while competing with locations overseas was difficult due to the low wages that can be paid, "we are still recruiting companies regularly throughout the world to come to Akron to take advantage of our opportunities and knowledge base." Augusta Mayor Bob Young said that while many textile jobs have moved off shore, overseas consumers are taking advantage of products manufactured in Augusta. "We have to develop new strategies to better market the exports that we have available in our community so consumers overseas can take advantage of those and keep people in our community working," he said.

Veolia, formerly USFilter, has sponsored the Meet the Mayors program since 2001. The Meet the Mayors section of usmayors.org is the most popular section of the web site. If you are a mayor and were unable to tape a video clip in Boston, you can still tape your own response to the question above and submit it to the Conference for posting on usmayors.org. Please contact Jim Welfley at jwelfley@usmayors.org for more information.