From Blimps to Budgets: What Akron's Mayor Has in Store

Mayor Malik
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Hey, it was a fun day in Akron if you didn't see them.

We had three blimps flying around downtown celebrating the 100 years of the blimp, basically, and the mayor did the state of the city, so that's what you're going to hear. Here is his presentation from Lock 3 Downtown.

Announcer
00:00:22.080 - 00:01:22.580
Mayor Shammas Malik was sworn in as Akron's 63rd mayor on January 1, 2024.

He was born and raised in northwest Akron, graduated from Firestone High School, and went on to attend the Ohio State University and Harvard Law School.

He then began a career in public service, first serving as an Assistant Director of Law for the city, then winning a seat on Akron City Council as mayor. He is focused on building a safer, stronger, more equitable Akron for all of our residents.

He is the youngest mayor and the first mayor of color, and he has a bold vision for Akron's future. Mayor Malik has a deep appreciation for the city of Akron and its residents and believe the best is yet to come.

Please join me in welcoming tonight's speaker, Akron Mayor Shammath Malik.

Mayor Malik
00:01:34.100 - 00:56:40.680
Good evening. Thank you for being here with us this evening. June 3rd is a special day.

100 years ago today, the first Goodyear blimp was launched right here in Akron, Ohio. And you know what they say, what's better than one blimp? 3. It's truly an honor to have these three blimps here with us tonight flying over our city.

It's an iconic Akron site that we get to share together thanks to the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. And CEO Mark Stewart. I want to thank the Akron Roundtable for helping us host this event for eight straight years now.

I also want to thank IdeaStream, Public Media, PBS, Western Reserve and the University of Akron for helping us with the live stream and the broadcast. I also want to thank our ASL interpreters and our interpreters who are translating this speech live into Nepali and Spanish.

Providing these kinds of accessibility options is just one way we are honoring the value of inclusion. Thank you to our amazing team here at Lock 3, led by Chris Griffith. We are so glad to be here in this beautiful, completely renovated park.

This space began as a pop up park back in 2003 and it has grown into a beloved community gathering space. This new renovated space is a real representation of what can happen when folks come together for a common purpose.

Thank you to everyone who has made this project possible. I want to thank former Mayor Dan Horrigan whose administration started this project.

Dan Rice with the Ohio and Erie Canalway Coalition, Kyle Kutachieff and the Knight foundation and all of our residents and stakeholders with the Akron Civic Commons work. I also want to thank the funders and sponsors who helped raise $10 million, led by Becky and Bill Kotzenai. We've got an exciting variety of concerts.

You can clap. It's not just speeches.

We've got an exciting variety of concerts and festivals planned for this summer thanks to Howard Parr and the team here at the Civic. We've also got free public wi fi. If, like me, you need a quiet place to check, email and do some work. Look at that.

I don't know how I'm going to get through this. This is too exciting. So our administration leads a broader city government, and we will always seek to work collaboratively with our other branches.

If you are a member of Akron City Council or the Akron Municipal Court, can you please stand or wave a hand to be recognized? Thank you for the work that you do each day for our residents.

I want to also acknowledge our county executive, Eileen Shapiro, for being here tonight. We're blessed in Summit county to have your talent and your leadership, and I deeply value our partnership.

And we have a number of other elected officials here with us tonight. Could you also please stand or wave a hand to be recognized?

The work that each of you do day in and day out for our communities is so important, and we appreciate your service. We have roughly 2,000 folks who work for the City of Akron, and this team is the engine of our city government.

If you're a City of Akron employee, could you please stand for a round of applause?

I'd also like to give a special shout out and thanks to our dedicated cabinet and mayor staff, not only for welcoming folks here tonight, but for the hard work that they put in each and every single day. Thank you. And finally, I can't begin this speech without taking a moment to thank and acknowledge my wife. Alice.

The love of my life was cheering me on every day. Most of you know that Alice is pregnant with our first child and we can't wait to be parents.

We've got the name picked out and everything, but we're going to wait on sharing that. But Alice has been such an inspiration through her pregnancy, always supporting me while also doing the incredibly difficult work of growing a life.

Each day, I'm in awe of your strength, your kindness, your beauty, your compassion. Each of those things inspire me to be a better husband, a better father, and the best person I can be. Thank you.

Throughout 2025, we've been celebrating Akron's bicentennial with the help of Mark Greer and the Bicentennial Commission. If you haven't yet, please check out the Akron History center next to the Civic on Main Street.

Dave Lieberth, the Summit County Historical Society and the Akron Summit County Public Library have done a truly amazing job spotlighting our rich history.

And later this month a delegation of representatives will travel to Denver to compete in the All America City Award, where the City of Akron is a finalist and that would be our fourth time winning this award.

Competing with other cities will really showcase all that Akron has to offer, so we look forward to cheering on that effort throughout this Bicentennial year. I've often said that looking back on our history gives us an opportunity to learn lessons and chart a course for the future.

As we think about what we want Akron's future to look like.

I know that it starts by focusing on all of us together, the folks here in this park tonight, and each one of the 187,000 people who call this city home.

In 2023, when I was first running for mayor, I first shared my Together for Akron plan, a bold vision of priorities and initiatives to tackle the most important issues.

Safer Together focused on our top priority, Learning Together focused on education, working Together focused on economic development and living Together focused on health, housing and the environment.

And last year, I gave my first State of the City speech on our 100th day in office and shared some of the progress we had made so far, which we also shared online with our 100 day tracker page. Tonight I want to share an update on the work our administration is undertaking every day to move Akron forward.

I want to talk about the successes and the challenges and what we see as the work ahead. I want to share our updated Together for Akron plan and our new tracker, which lists key initiatives that we're working on.

This tracker is available right now on our website@akronohio.gov togetherfor akron and also through the QR code on the front of your program.

And as part of our continued commitment to building a more transparent city government, we'll be updating this tracker quarterly so you can see our progress across all of those priorities. Let's start with our first priority, Safer Together. A safe Akron must be the foundation on everything else we want to build.

Our approach to public safety starts with our safety forces in police and fire who respond daily to difficult, often dangerous situations and help people who are victims of crimes, dealing with medical emergencies and more. They're assisted by an amazing group of people at our Safety Communications Dispatch Center.

Our first approach under the Safer Together Plan is focused on gun violence prevention and intervention.

With our APD Anti Violence Bureau and our state and federal partners, we are focused on holding individuals accountable who are perpetrating gun violence, both fatal and non fatal shootings alike. We're working to improve our testing around shell casings to solve crime and make arrests.

And actually APD made an arrest today, announced an arrest today in a shooting that recently happened. We are thankful that overall shootings and homicides have been trending downwards, but we are going to stay focused on this.

You're not going to be hearing me declare success and moving on to something else. Anyone perpetrating violence in the City of Akron must be held accountable.

We also want to do whatever we can to prevent our young people from going down a path to where they might one day fire a weapon at another person. This work is not just about saving lives today, it's about saving lives for years to come.

In 2024, we launched our Street Team Pilot program with Minority Behavioral Health Group working with credible messengers who have been involved in the criminal justice system and made a change and who can speak to our young people authentically about making positive, empowering choices.

This fall we intend to launch a new hospital linked violence intervention program designed to meet victims of gun violence at their hospital bedside to disrupt cycles of violence, prevent retaliation and address trauma.

Tonight we are very proud to announce that we've received commitments from Summa Health and Cleveland Clinic Akron General to work with us in this effort. Dr. Deveney and Dr. Lashridder, thank you so much for your support in this work.

A year ago on June 2, we experienced a mass shooting in our community which took the life of one individual and injured 28 more lives. I will always remember the aftermath of that.

The next morning, walking through the yard, imagining the chaos of the night before that event put the heroism of our Akron police officers and our Akron firefighter medics on full display as they ran into chaos and confusion to treat the wounded and make sense of a tragedy that they were witnessing.

In the midst of this tragedy, we worked with the Akron Community Foundation, Victim Assistance Program and other partners to create the Gun Violence Response Fund to help the victims of that shooting and other shootings as well. To date, that fund has gone on to raise almost $315,000 to help support victims of violence.

Our approach to gun violence reflects the comprehensive approach we're taking to public safety and across all issues, the comprehensive approach led by our police department's efforts, adding in our community based street team, our hospital partners and support for victims is our way of tackling the underlying root causes of issues and seeking to reduce gun violence deaths again, not just in the short term, but for years to come. It's a recognition that every one of us can have a role in creating a safe community.

Another key piece of our Safer Together plan is building engagement, trust and accountability so that everyone in our community feels that our police department, our fire department, and indeed our entire city government is focused on keeping them safe. Over this past year, Police Chief Brian Harding has worked hard to bring new energy to community policing.

In February of this year, we announced the creation of a fourth subdivision in our Akron Police Department focused on community engagement and crime prevention.

Today I'm excited to share that APD has developed a comprehensive plan around community engagement designed to foster more positive relationships with residents.

This plan includes more foot and bike patrols and interacting more with our youth in order to build positive relationships with the communities we all serve as a city.

We also want to do a better job sharing the good work our officers do and giving them more time to do the proactive work that we need them to do that diffuses neighborhood issues before they bubble over. Akron Fire is also undertaking a lot of community engagement and awareness activities.

Our Fire and Community services team is interacting with residents all the time to reduce the risk of falls, prevent fires and resolve other health issues.

Just last week they were out with our mascot Safety Pup at Orchard Park School in Kenmore, letting students see the inside of a fire truck, passing out smoke alarms and sharing information with families.

When it comes to trust and accountability, over the past year we have amended our vehicle chase policy, reviewed our public order policy around crowd management and protests, and worked to develop a positive, constructive relationship with our new Police Auditor's Office and Citizens Police Oversight Board.

One of the key issues before us is around use of force in the wake of officer involved shootings that resulted in the deaths of Michael Jones and Jasmir Tucker. In recent months we have also seen incidents in which officers have been fired upon.

These are unacceptable acts that can never be justified or condoned and I feel strongly that in this charged environment we need to confront this issue head on with a comprehensive review of our use of force policies and practices, something we have never done as a community. This will ensure that we have the best possible approach to life and death split second situations.

We need to have public discussions about how and why some of these encounters result in use of force and we need to develop shared community expectations around these situations.

We owe it to our officers to equip them, equip them with the best training and policies available, and we owe it to our entire city to work towards the best outcomes possible.

We're going to keep working with city council to get their approval so that we can turn to identifying a consulting firm, beginning the work, and making sure that everyone has a voice in this important issue. The third objective of our Safer together pillar is supporting our safety forces. From police and fire to dispatch.

We have hundreds of people who are doing incredible work day in and day out.

Our job as a city is to make sure that from recruitment to retention training, to leadership development equipment to staffing, that our safety forces are able to do the important work we've asked of them. Let's start with the top line staffing.

In the last two years of city budgets, we've worked hard to keep budgeted public safety staffing numbers at their Highest levels in decades. 488 for police and 402 for fire.

We've also hired two exceptional leaders, police Chief Brian Harding and Fire Chief Leon Henderson, who have both hit the ground running when it comes to making advancements and also when it comes to building out their own leadership teams. Last August, I swore in 44 new police recruits, and in March, I swore in 28 new members of the Akron Fire Department.

Now, just getting to the total budgeted staffing number itself is a huge challenge.

This year, for the first time ever, we made lateral hires in police from other departments, and we're working to grow that program in the years ahead. We also know that retention is a major issue, and so we're hiring a recruitment and retention specialist specific to safety forces.

We need to put more focus on this work, including revitalizing our relationship with our Akron Public schools, college and career academies, and truly building a pipeline from our high schools to our safety forces. We recently opened the new Fire Station 12 on South Hawkins. It's a much needed replacement to the old one.

As I was running for mayor, I talked a lot about finding a permanent solution for the future of the police station. We've narrowed down the options to three possibilities.

The vacant 88 West Bowery building behind me, a new building on Ford street up at the University of Akron, or a renovation of the current building behind us. In a perfect world, I would want us to start construction tomorrow.

As I'll address later in this speech, any of these three choices will require us as a community to confront big questions about our city budget.

Finally, I want to acknowledge that we are in the middle of the contract process with both our fire and police unions and a big piece of This a big piece of valuing our safety forces is is compensation, wages and benefits.

As I'll also address in a moment, this demands us as a city to find the right balance between staffing and service levels, wage increases, and maintaining our city reserves and basic fiscal responsibility.

Our fourth and final objective when it comes to safety is a focus on implementing innovative collaborative safety programs that take a new approach to recurring situations.

Last year we launched the Scout Team, a partnership where an Akron police officer, a fire medic and a mental health worker from Portage Path Behavioral Health respond to some 911 and non emergency calls where it's safe to do so. With the help of the ADM Board, this program has flourished over the last year and it's now a permanent expanding program for our community.

Another area where we're doing more collaborative work is in emergency management.

With Joe Nacco's leadership, we're working on launching a new mass notification system called Code Red for situations like evacuations, water boil alert, flooding and more. Everyone in our city deserves to feel safe and to be safe.

We're going to continue our approach to public safety, working across departments, finding best practices, recognizing that everyone has a role to play and that our other strategies around education or housing or economic development can work in tandem with our plans around safety as well. The second area I want to focus on is economic development, our priorities that we call working Together.

This is a plan for strengthening downtown and our neighborhood business districts as well as supporting economic opportunities and utilizing our strengths to drive future growth. We are here tonight in beautiful Downtown Akron in a vibrant, thriving downtown is essential to drive Akron's economy forward.

The Downtown Akron Vision and Redevelopment Plan championed by Downtown Akron Partnership has several core priorities. First, adding 1200 new residential units by 2030, primarily through the adaptive reuse of historic structures that surround us.

The second is developing a convention center adjacent hotel building on our unique assets to grow tourism. And the third is encouraging density in the heart of downtown.

With more retail here along Main street and more office and commercial users now in the past year we've seen real momentum towards those goals. Within weeks, the city intends to finalize the sale of the City center building next to City Hall.

That, combined with the Philadelphia Rubber Works project on the south end of downtown near Barges will create more than 200 units towards our 1,200 unit goal. The PNC building right here has been purchased by NAI Pleasant Valley and the new owner has plans to reinvest, retain and attract commercial tenants.

We're especially grateful to Executive Shapiro, the Summit County Land bank and the Development Finance Authority who stepped in to help maintain that building over the last several years. Quaker Square.

I think the only historic building we can't see from where we're sitting is in the process of being acquired by the University of Akron. And private developers are working to create a vibrant mix of residential, retail and hotel uses for that space.

Together, these projects represent more than 1.1 million square feet of downtown space being repositioned to benefit our community. That means new jobs, increased tax revenue, greater tourism, and higher population in the center of our city.

It also means a renewed sense of pride and energy, all while preserving our historic character. But too often, these projects take too long. They require folks across our community to shepherd them along on a daily basis.

For years, our community has talked about creating a downtown development corporation that can spearhead downtown projects. And tonight we are taking a major step towards that goal.

Our team has worked with stakeholders across downtown to start a new downtown CDC and government, corporate and nonprofit partners alike have chipped in, reflecting the fact that we all have a stake in what happens to the future of downtown.

Additionally, the Knight foundation has announced a donation of $1.5 million to support this downtown CDC in creating active storefronts and new development projects.

And tonight I'm excited to announce on behalf of the CDC board that the first Executive Director of the CDC will be Christopher Hardesty, who most recently served as Director of Economic Development in the city of can you.

Now, Christopher is on a trip and could not be here with us tonight, but I want to ask the members of the downtown CDC board, including its chair Ron Peyto from Huntington, to stand and be recognized for the work you are doing to move our city forward. Now, a thriving city requires both a strong downtown and supporting economic opportunity in our neighborhoods.

These are places where small businesses take root, where entrepreneurs thrive, and where families gather. Our second objective in working together is focused on these neighborhoods in Akron.

We call these the great Streets, which not only reflects their current status, but also their potential. Now, we're a city of neighborhoods, and many of our neighborhoods already have strong CDCs in them.

Better Kenmore the well CDC in Middlebury, West Hill Progressive alliance in West Akron, East Akron Neighborhood Development Corporation, and North Hill North Akron Development Corporation. Now, in partnership with these organizations, we engage with more than 250 businesses across our 13 Great Streets districts.

This summer, we're going to be building on that work with by launching both a Great Street Facade Improvement Grant program and a Small Business Success Grant program. And there's also Flies by the Canal but we're not going to talk about that.

These two programs, both the Facade Grant Program and the Small Business Improvement Program, will help improve the physical character of our space and also help us provide targeted support to businesses that really need it. And now, thanks to state funding, we are also fighting blight in our neighborhoods.

This year, we have been able to demolish 88 vacant residential structures.

This makes a huge difference on streets where a vacant house has been sitting for years, long past the point of being able to be saved, creating safety hazards. Last year, we demolished the Word church structure in 2024.

And this year we've taken down the former Rankin elementary, which has been a nuisance in that neighborhood for years. Now there's more to come, including the 1200 Firestone building just down the street on South Main, where our police frequently respond to.

Now, I want to be clear. Wherever possible, we want to preserve our history.

But when a building cannot reasonably be saved and where it's actively undermining a neighborhood's progress, we have to act to put that land back to safe, productive use. So much of our economic development work in the city relies on partnerships. Many of our partners are here today.

The third goal under Working Together is boosting entrepreneurship and supporting businesses of every size.

Last year, our Elevate Greater Akron team, in partnership with the Chamber and the county and others, conducted over 200 site visits here in Akron to retain businesses and to help them grow.

The city is also proud to support entrepreneurs by investing in a network of organizations who uplift business owners, including the Chamber, the Akron Urban League, the Summit Medina Business alliance, the Black Chamber of Commerce of Summit county, and Bounce Innovation Hub. I want to give a special shout out to the Bounce team because most of this speech was written there over the last few weeks.

The last pillar under Working Together is leveraging our assets and our legacy to create the economy of the future. 100 years ago, to be in the rubber industry, you had to be here in Akron, Ohio. I think we've witnessed that several times this evening.

And that industry created jobs not just for factory workers, but for everyone. Every community needs to have a backbone economy.

And our best chance here in Akron, Ohio, is our sustainable polymers and advanced materials industry.

With the leadership of Steve Millard and the Greater Akron Chamber, our community has collectively advocated and successfully advocated to attract almost $100 million of support for this industry.

And we are helping support that along with the county through a local match City Council and our county council and our leadership teams have worked on. And what does $100 million investment mean? It means research, innovation, jobs and future development.

With a regional concentration of more than 500 polymer manufacturing companies and with the amazing research up at the University of Akron, we are on the right path. We're aligned and we are working together. It's an incredibly exciting time to build the future of our city.

The third part of Together for Akron is Living Together. Our work around housing and how we support thriving, equitable and sustainable neighborhoods throughout our city.

Now, our first objective under Living Together is to stabilize access to safe, affordable homes and address housing challenges. That is a bold and broad goal that focuses on our most vulnerable residents.

Three years ago in 2022, hundreds of local tenants, landlords, community organizers and elected officials gathered for the Eviction Prevention Summit at the John S. Knight Center. We reflected on our high eviction rate and we talked about potential solutions.

As a City Council person at the time, I had been working on a Right to Counsel program modeled off of programs in Cleveland and elsewhere to provide legal representation to folks facing eviction.

Now, using state ARPA funds earmarked for housing initiatives, we have worked with the past administration and with City Council in partnership with Community Legal Aid Services and United Way Summit Medina. Later this month, we are bringing legislation to City Council to launch a three year Right to Council program right here in Akron, Ohio.

In our city, we need to do more to help support those living day to day out on the streets or in our shelters. Our unhoused residents deserve to be treated with dignity and respect just like every resident of our city.

We're working with the Local Continuum of Care, a coalition of organizations who provide support and resources to our unhoused population around their upcoming strategic plan to find new ways to approach how we deal with homelessness. We know that we need more options. We know that we need more overnight beds when the weather gets cold.

And we need a better process to get folks into long term housing. And we've seen creative approaches work in other cities like Houston and closer to home in Cleveland.

And if our neighbors can develop a plan that works for their circumstances, I'm confident that we can do that here in Akron too. Another way we can tackle housing challenges is by sitting focusing on our city's housing supply.

We're working hard to continue the Akron Home Repair Program funded through arpa Help helping people stay in their homes with partnership with Summit County, Habitat for Humanity and Nazareth Housing.

We also need to make it easier to build infill housing on vacant land, simplifying the plan review process, clarifying our housing standards so that new homes look and feel like Akron.

We'll be making additional land available for infill housing in strategic areas where the city already owns numerous lots, including Summit Lake and Cherubandi Hill. We're also working to bring infill housing to East Akron and Goodyear Heights and Ellet 2.

Too often it's a lot easier to add a subdivision on open land out on the edge of town. Rather than building a house where there used to be one. We need to turn that around. Our amazing neighborhoods need more neighbors in them.

We're also making our housing safer by removing active lead water lines.

By the end of this year, thanks to ARPA, our city will have removed the remaining 586 lead lines, making us the only city of our age and size to be completely lead pipe free. We are continuing to work on the decommissioned Akron Interbelt, which isn't too far from where we are tonight.

We've been working closely with the planning team at Sasaki to hold community town halls and get direct feedback from folks who have been most impacted by this long standing racial inequity. By this fall, we'll have a master plan in our hands to deliver actionable recommendations for the future development of the Interbelt site.

Now we continue to advocate each and every single day to keep the $10 million that we were awarded last December. But whichever way that goes, we have to have the plan for what the development looks like for that $10 million and far beyond it.

Next Thursday, right here in Lock 3, we'll have the next open house for the project at 5pm I hope you can join us. Living together is also about valuing our environment. From the air we breathe to the land and resources we use.

Through our Office of Sustainability and Resiliency, we're working hard to bring new programs and initiatives and also expand on the work we're already doing, like expanding our glass recycling program. We've also secured a $175,000 grant through the U.S.

conference of Mayors for a nonprofit in Akron, the Summit Fresh Mobile Market, which is expanding access to groceries and food deserts in our city. And tonight, and tonight here at this event, we're offering Composting through Rubber City Reuse as our partner.

Now last year at the State of the City, I told you we had signed up with Power A Clean Future Ohio, a state coalition to help us build a more sustainable future.

Over the last year, they've been hard at work with us developing a greenhouse gas inventory that will develop a baseline for our greenhouse gas emissions for the city. This will help inform our planning efforts. It'll enable us to track and enable us to assess our progress moving forward.

Some of you might remember the Greenprint project back in 2009, which was the first iteration of this work. We need to go back and refresh those numbers and take stock of the actions we've been able to do in the interim.

Later this summer, we'll be sharing that inventory with you tonight.

I'm also proud to announce that in partnership with Bloomberg American Sustainable Cities, we're undertaking a climate action planning process, the first time Akron has ever done this. This process will take 12 to 15 months and it would typically cost around $200,000. And thanks to Bloomberg Philanthropies, it will cost us nothing.

When we talk about climate change, we're not talking about some abstract, global, far off challenge. We're talking about how the weather can change from 40 to 80 in a couple days.

We're talking about addressing families who are facing higher energy bills. We're talking about investing in our housing stock. We're talking about providing solutions to seniors who are struggling with heat.

We're talking about providing good green jobs for our residents. So we've covered Safer Together, Working Together, Living Together under the original Together for Akron plan.

Our last pillar was Learning Together, focused on education. Now, there's a lot of great work to talk about here, but we're reframing it a little bit.

Our city's primary role when it comes to education is to help support our youth, whether that's in extracurriculars, our community learning centers, our parks, our pools, our community centers and other public spaces. We are also creating opportunity for Akronites of all ages, including our aging population.

So going forward, we're going to call this Growing Together. This starts with strengthening our community's early childhood systems.

This has long been a priority in our community because we know that the earlier our youth start learning, the better off they are. Childcare isn't just about education. It's also a workforce and economic development issue.

When families have access to affordable, high quality childcare, parents have one less obstacle to work. Children thrive and our communities are much stronger.

Earlier this year we announced childcare Mini grants to help 15 small business owners with training, equipment and more.

This fall, we are so glad to announce today we are launching Phase one of a pilot program in collaboration with the Early Childhood Resource center and a group of local providers.

Together we will test strategies to improve quality of child care, expand access to child care, and support the professionals who make early learning possible.

We're going to work with providers to align services to go beyond the minimum state standards to include wraparound supports for families to create sustainability for small businesses and stability for a workforce that is too often undervalued.

We're building a system that meets families where they're at with home based providers, centers, Head Start and school based Pre K all working together because every child deserves a strong start and every parent deserves the opportunity to pursue the future they envision. Now, when it comes to early childhood, we're also working to continue the work the city has done with Full Term First Birthday.

Our initiative to address infant mortality data tells us that while infant mortality rates for both black and white babies have declined in Ohio, the disparity between the two has actually increased.

In partnership with Summit County Public Health and United Way of Summit Medina, we've launched an Infant Health Fund to provide small grants to a handful of community based organizations. We hope to make a difference in the data and help all of our infants reach milestones like their first birthday.

Another critical piece of our Growing Together plan is supporting student success and youth opportunity, making sure our amazing, talented youth have the opportunity to live out their dreams.

During last year's State of the City, we announced our plan to launch Youth Success Summit, the backbone organization to support all the different youth serving nonprofits in our community. And that's exactly what we've done.

The YSS team led by Rachel Teka is working to improve students out of school time opportunities, provide resources and support to keep them on the right track.

We're also building a focus thanks to the work of Daniko Buckley Knight on our team around sports and wellness, carving out small grants that will be awarded later this summer to nonprofits to help pay for training, equipment and more. Now our partnership with Akron Public Schools is absolutely critical.

We're excited to partner with Superintendent Mary Ottley and members of our school board. We're thankful for the Superintendent's leadership and the city will always strive to be good partners with Akron Public Schools.

Since taking office, our administration has been hard at work working to improve CLC access. We've aligned rental guidelines between the schools and the city. We've implemented a new reservation portal to help improve that process.

These are common sense things to do. The next hurdle, the one everyone has talked about for a long time, is insurance.

Working together with Akron Public Schools, I'm confident we can tackle that problem as well.

And as we support infants, as we support our youth, it's also important that we place emphasis on the other end of the spectrum and provide additional supports for our aging population. We recently shared an article in Travel and Leisure that ranked Akron as the number one city in the US to retire.

This wasn't just based on our cost of living. It was based on a variety of factors.

The number of coffee shops and restaurants, access to parks and retail, easy commutes, and the percentage of our community that's able to age in place.

We're proud of the work that Akron has undertaken over the last few years in partnership with Summit county and our Commission on Aging, cultivating partnerships across all sectors. We'll continue to focus on making sure that Akronites in our community can age in place.

So I've covered some of the key initiatives in our Together for Akron vision, things that I believe are initiatives that can be transformational in tackling the critical issues facing our city.

There's even more to see on our Together for Akron tracker online, if you can imagine there's actually more than what I just shared, but you can get to it using the QR code on your program and you can also access our community board and share your feedback and share your own ideas.

Now, much of what our Citi team does day in and day out is delivering core city services, responding to 911 calls, filling potholes, plowing our streets, picking up trash and recycling, ensuring we have safe drinking water and a functioning sewer system.

As we continue to update this online tracker, we're going to be adding dashboards to better tell this story, to better illustrate and quantify this work, to help show you the amazing service that our team at City hall delivers every single day. Now I also want to take a moment to talk about the city's financial picture.

In 2024 and 2025, we've worked to limit debt spending while also maintaining appropriate staffing levels, especially in police and fire. At the same time, we face headwinds.

This year, expiring federal safety grants mean that There are now 75 rolls that are now on our general fund with local tax dollars a cost of $7.5 million over last year, and federal funds account for 10% of our total budget. So any additional significant cuts at the federal level could have a significant impact.

We're in the process of negotiating a police union contract in which I mentioned a major issue is the size of wage increases and how to manage benefit cost increases.

We want our police officers to be paid well, we want our firefighters to be paid well, we want all of our city employees to be paid well, and we have to find a balance between compensation and staffing levels. We also are paying very close attention to our financial reserves. For many years, the city operated on a very thin, too thin of a financial margin.

Under Mayor Horgan, the administration was able to get that number of financial reserves up to $30 million. 48 days, cash on hand, it's still lower than it should be.

And honestly, in this environment, it's going to be a challenge even holding steady at that number. So what happens with our country's economy could have a big impact.

The picture looks very different if our economic growth continues or if a recession happens.

And there's more that I could say, and there's more that I will say, but bottom line is that in the months and years ahead, our entire community, we'll be faced with difficult decisions about what we can afford and what we can prioritize. We may have to make significant cuts. We may have to consider new ways to find revenue.

These are not things I will decide by myself, but in partnership with our whole community, I will seek to work with all of you to find the right balance, providing Akron residents with the highest possible service levels while also being fiscally responsible. Now, over the last year and a half, every single day, all 519 of them, I counted today, it's been an honor and a privilege to serve as your mayor.

Many of you have heard me talk about my mom, her work up at the University of Akron, and how to her life was about finding something she loved and using it to give back to others. I ran for mayor talking about improving not just what we do, but but how we do it.

Building a city government that is more open, more responsive and more collaborative. But what does that mean? What does that mean in practice? Each and every single day.

To answer that, I want to go back, if you can imagine it, to a cold, Snowy Day in January 2015. I was in law school and classes were canceled, and I spent the day reading a book by Akron's own David Giffles, the Hard Way and Purpose.

In it, he reflects on his own experiences growing up in our community, and he found a beautiful way of encapsulating our city's heart. He said, here, uniquely, we do things the hard way, on purpose. We recognize a virtue and a necessary creativity in choosing to do things that way.

That passage really spoke to me.

I didn't know him, but I sent him an email, I thanked him, and I wrote that one of the reasons I love Akron is because the people of this city work so hard in the face of continuing adversity. Last week, as I was looking back on those words, I recalled that it sounds a lot like the last year and a half, every day.

I am so proud of this community because of the team of 2,000 people who work so hard for this city government. Every day I get up and I'm so proud of the people of this city with their tenacity and their grit and their heart.

Despite our uncertainties, despite our challenges, the state of our city is strong because of the people who call Akron home. Now, for my whole life, Akron's future has seemed like it could go either way.

Our best days could be behind us in our rubber past, or they could be in front of us in our sustainable polymers and more things we can't even imagine today.

And the beautiful thing is that in the people of this community and all of us here in this park and the people who live here in this city, we have everything we need to succeed as a community. We just have to believe it, and we just have to put in the work to make it happen. And there are some things, sure, that are outside of our control.

The global economy, decisions made in Washington or Columbus. But the hard way, on purpose means not getting discouraged. It's the serenity prayer.

Lord, grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

And as we're navigating the changing dynamics in the new administration in Washington, my advice inside and outside of City hall has been that we're going to take this one day at a time. Our values are not changing. We're going to get through this together.

The hard way, on purpose also means looking for the right answer, not just the easy answer. Take our Safer Together plan. When it comes to safety, there are very few easy answers.

Good, honorable people have been doing a lot of work for a long time in the face of systems that push problems downstream.

Our Safer Together plan recognizes this, recognizes the complexity of these problems, seeks to build on the amazing foundation we have, bring folks together to new approaches, approaches that might initially seem uncomfortable, but can lead to better results in the long run.

The hard way, on purpose also means that we try to build common ground and common understanding and that we do things in an open and transparent way, not just for its own sake, but because this will build trust over the long run. I work for 187,000 people. I think they want a leader who listens and communicates.

They want to understand why we're doing what we're doing, and they want their voice to be heard. These are polarizing times. People have fiercely different opinions about many things, but common ground.

Doing things together for Akron may sometimes seem idealistic, but this idea of common ground is very personal to me. My whole life, I've been part of different worlds.

A Muslim American with Pakistani and Irish heritage, with a big family full of people with Korean heritage and Jewish heritage and more. That's what a lot of families of ours look like in America today.

When I was applying to law school, I wrote about the importance of finding common ground that unites us all. And I shared that essay with my mom, who was very sick at the time.

And that next spring, after my mom had passed away, I was graduating from college and my aunt shared with me a gift that my mom had made, a necklace with a little pendant and on the back of said the common ground that unites us all. I've always appreciated that my mom picked out that phrase. I've always cherished that gift, and Alice wears it most days.

For a lot of these issues with the use of force review, or frankly, a lot of other issues, there's not a lot of common ground, especially at first glance, especially on the surface. I'm not here to wave a magic wand and pretend there's unity where there isn't.

My job, our job, is to do the hard work of creating common ground inch by inch, stitch by stitch, working with every member in our community, from our elected city council members to our employees, to every single person who calls Akron home, to find real, effective, meaningful problems to our toughest challenges. Meaningful solutions to our toughest challenges. That is the hard way and purpose.

Now, I have incredible optimism in this moment because over the last 18 months, I've witnessed that over and over again. I've witnessed a community full of people who know how to step up and lean in.

I've witnessed extraordinary acts of courage and extraordinary acts of service. That's the Akron way. That's how we take care of one another. Our city government, our community as a whole. We can be the shelter from the storm.

We can do anything together. Now, on the back of your program, there's six things we listed.

Six things you can do to get involved and yet another QR code that takes you with a page for more information. Now, there are so many ways we can use your help. From coming back here to another event at Lock 3 and bringing a friend to spread the word.

Perhaps even an even more fun event. Imagine that. To signing up online to serve on a city board and commission, to becoming a youth mentor through Youth Success Summit.

Now, I know this is a very giving community. I'm looking at a whole bunch of faces of folks who already do a lot in service of our community.

I'm not asking everyone here to do everything or to be a superhero, but I'm asking each of you to choose one thing or a couple things that you can do to lean in a little bit more. Together, we can move Akron forward. Now, in just a moment, we will welcome the Buchtal CLC Drumline to the stage to conclude our evening together.

I'm so proud to have this group of students join us tonight and hope you can stick around to help us welcome them and celebrate them.

And as we look to the future of our city, I hope that you can take this energy, this energy behind us, this energy in front of us, the spirit in this park and across our city, this momentum, the heart of our people, the work ethic of our people to move forward in the face of uncertainty, in the face of adversity. We know how to do things together. We know how to do things the hard way on purpose. And with those things, there's nothing we can't do.

Thank you so much.