Text of Rocky Anderson's State of the City Address

Published: Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2007 12:22 a.m. MST
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Progress through Dialogue and Action, Strength through Diversity

State of the City Address

Ross C. "Rocky" Anderson

Mayor of Salt Lake City

January 16, 2007

Progress through dialogue and action, strength through diversity. That, along with an uncompromising standard of excellence, has been the guiding principle of our administration during the seven years we have had the honor of serving the people of Salt Lake City.

In this, my last State of the City Address, I am pleased to report that our great, richly diverse city is extremely safe, healthy, and strong - a place where the quality of life is unsurpassed. I am pleased to report that, although the road is not always smooth, the progress in Salt Lake City continues.

We tend to expect progress, and some even assume that, somehow, it will necessarily occur. However, progress is not at all assured.

In so many ways, the people of our great nation are in the midst of regress—an appalling retreat, a stupendous movement backwards. Most Americans are worse off than at the beginning of this century, with an enormous, and growing, disparity in wealth. The number of Americans in poverty has increased, as has the number of Americans without health insurance. The income of most families has not kept up with inflation. Adjusting for inflation, the hourly wage of the

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average non-supervisory worker in the US is lower than in 1970. That is egression. As "CEO pay [in the US] has soared – from less than thirty times the average wage to almost 300 times the typical worker’s pay," (Paul Krugman, "The Great Wealth Transfer," Rolling Stone, December 14, 2006) opportunities for upward social mobility are slim. As Paul Krugman recently noted, "It’s easier for a poor child to make it into the upper-middle class in just about every other advanced country . . . than it is in the United States." That is regression. The purchasing power of the national minimum wage - which Salt Lake City has been precluded from increasing locally, thanks to anti-home-rule laws passed by the Utah Legislature – is at the lowest level since the 1950s. That is regression.

Things have been moving backward for most people in our nation. Add to that the unjustified invasion and occupation of Iraq that has had mind-numbing costs in lives, tragedy, and national treasure; the historic deficits and accumulated debt we will be foisting upon our children; the incredible damage being done to our delicate atmosphere, with long term ramifications for the health and safety of our planet; and the wholesale demolition of our nation’s moral standing in the world as our federal administration justifies horrendous human rights abuses, including kidnapping and torture, while our Congress denies access to the courts for those who seek to challenge their imprisonment or the conditions of their confinement, which often are outrageous by any standard of civilization. That is not only regression—it is moving the failure to recognize and honor fundamental individual rights back to before the Magna Carta.

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