Transcript: Mayor Harper Highlights Accomplishments During Council Meeting

During Tuesday nights Antioch City Council meeting, Mayor Wade Harper used his Mayors Comments to share with the public what he thought was “good leadership” and highlighted examples of the City Council moving the city forward.

The comments came shortly after Antioch resident Rich Buongiorno told the mayor he was being recalled and presented him with paperwork. After Buongiorno several people spoke in support of the mayor.

Here are Mayor Harpers Comments which ran just over 11-minutes.

I teach law enforcement leadership and my students they can’t believe the mayor is there teaching them in the classroom and they ask me why you are here? I ask them why are you here? They said to learn. I said to teach so it’s a good combination. But I have met some really solid students that have gone through a lot. Sob stories and I’ve had to explain to them what goes on in our council meetings and every one of them has a right to their opinion and even have a right to recall if they wish and talking about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

I’ve had pastors call me and apologizing and friends and families apologizing for some of the comments that was made, but everyone has their opinion and so do I. This council was able to get a sales tax measure pass to fund public safety—my family personally worked on that whether we were at 1:00 in the morning putting up signs, writing post cards, we did everything we could from phone banks. My wife works at Dallas Ranch Middle School and my son attends Deer Valley High School.

We worked hard and this tax measure passed with the approval of nearly 70%. I don’t know that that’s happened in the City of Antioch where we pass a tax to hire additional police. To me, that is leadership—taking the lead to get that done. Currently we are looking to pass Measure O. We are getting push back from the opposition who has a lot of money to defeat the issue. There are threats of lawsuits from attorneys but we are still moving forward because it’s the right thing to do and I think that’s leadership.

This council extended 3% at 50 hiring retirement benefit to hire experienced lateral officers to our city despite public criticism to deter us from doing so. As a result, we have hired several experience lateral police officers so we can reduce crime in our community. That was an unpopular decision with the critics at the time, but it has proven to be the right decision that we made as a collectively as a city council and our neighboring cities in the county have commented that they should have been proactive and did exactly what we did because they are now having problems hiring lateral police officers and to me that is leadership.

This council passed a budget to stop deficit spending of our General Fund and live within our means. To me, that is leadership. Had the previous council done this are budget deficit would not have been impacted so that we would to have to reduce our police force.

In short, we are recovering from past decisions that were made.

This council has attended countless public meetings to address public concerns. We have several community cafes; probably had 10-15 community cafes and I have attended everyone and met a lot of community members. We listened and looked for solutions to make things better. And we developed our city strategic plan to move this city forward. To me, that is leadership.

This Council was elected by the community, I ran on a platform of zero tolerance to crime. I have no tolerance for crime and I never will. That was my platform but everyone in that platform but everyone in this community has to adopt this mindset if we are to be successful and I think several people have which is why we have more neighborhood watch programs than we have ever had in this city—you can see Bill Cook for the numbers. It’s anywhere from 500-600. So I have no tolerance for crime, but I do have a lot of tolerance for young people that is why I am in the schools working with them. That is why I signed up to be a mentor . That is why I am at Deer Valley Plaza pitching my tent and bringing chips and soda and interacting with them. Students who are artist, students who are basketball players, young ladies taking detour from long-distance running to talk to us.

I didn’t run on the platform that I was going to be the public information officer for the city. We have a city manager that we hired to do that and he is the most transparent city manager that we have ever had. If you look at his weekly and monthly reports.

There are many times that myself and fellow councilmembers have been approached by the media, for newspaper statements and on-camera interviews. I don’t like to read a lot of the blogs because a lot of them are very hurtful and you have to have very thick skin. A lot of them are slanderous. A lot of racial comments on the blogs. So I choose to stay away from the blogs but if a member or citizen wanted to speak with me or meet with me and talk about some solutions, even those that have held up the recall papers, I am willing to listen to those people also if they have solutions.

Even with the issues at Deer Valley Plaza, including Probation, District Attorney’s Office, School Board, Police Chief, and we talked about issues at Deer Valley Plaza and putting One Group At a Time or the Williams Group back into the Schools. Met with the landlords at Deer Valley Plaza talking about increasing the the cameras and letting them know we no longer (I never wanted) the smoke shop at that location and lets have it removed and work on removing the smoke shop.

Talking to Probation and the District Attorney’s Office, talking about parents who have actually brought their students to that plaza to fight and to be charging or presenting that case to the gang unit to address parents who bring their student to school or the plaza to fight. It will not be accepted and we will not tolerate it. At the same time, we love our youth and as I met with a 100 young people at Deer Valley Plaza we know you are great students and we met a lot of great students there and it’s a small few kids who want to cause problems.

Another thing they told us was they wanted to keep the momentum going because the media covered it and they want to keep it going. We want to have fair reporting by the media. Don’t just report all of the bad thing. Don’t just report or follow the police scanners around town. There is a lot of good things going on around town of Antioch. Those are my comments and I am here to serve. Let’s get to work making this city better. This is a great city and I love representing the people of this city. A lot of the kids know me because I am in their schools. I have come to visit them, I have substituted in their classrooms. The parents don’t know me but the kids know me. They stop me at the movie theaters they take pictures with me and they call me to all their events and functions.

I am not a person who is consistently who is pushing myself forward or tooting my own horn. That is not me, I am a modest person but I see that I have to start a campaign to pretty much let people know these are some of the things I am doing but I am consistently pushing our council forward, pushing our city staff forwards and applauding their efforts. That is the type of person I have always been.

Even as a musician that played for the church choir, I did not play any solos, I played in the background so those are my comments. Hopefully you can hear my heart that I am here to serve and I think that we have had a lot of successes.

We didn’t mention the $463,000 grant for the downtown area. We didn’t mention the third grant we received to hire more police officers. The city council agreeing to spend all of the Measure C funds on police and code enforcement so there has been plenty of successes here under this city council’s leadership.

Not just as me, but as Monica Wilson, it is Tony Tiscareno, it is Mary Rocha, and Gary Agopian who left a legacy too. It’s all of us working together and I’ll say this and I’ll move on, this is the longest Mayors Comments ever, but as soon as we were elected and we decided to do strategic planning and had a team building workshop and we learned to bond as a council and we learned we can get more things done if it didn’t matter who got the credit. When we figured that out and we learned that and began to really love one another as a council and not hold anything against one another as a city council we really learned to work together and it was destiny because we all had to work through Councilman Agopian’s illness and walk through that and deal with that together as a council and support him and Robin and carry the load. We did the right thing and this was the right council for the right time.

Let’s move on.