Candidate for
Mayor; City of San Bernardino

MAYOR PAT MORRIS' ACTION PLAN TO CONTINUE REDUCING CRIME AND IMPROVING PUBLIC SAFETY

Reducing crime and improving public safety remains San Bernardino's biggest challenge and it remains Mayor Morris' absolute top priority.

In 2006, the voters elected Mayor Morris to crack down on crime and improve our public safety. In the last four years, that is exactly what Mayor Morris has done. Today, major crimes in San Bernardino are at their lowest per capita rate in decades. According to the latest FBI Uniform Crime Statistics, since 2005, murders are down almost 45%, vehicle thefts are down almost 35%, assaults are down 18%, robberies are down 15%, burglaries are down 12%, and thefts are down 8%.

San Bernardino's success in driving down crime has been so significant over the past four years, that Mayor Morris recently received recognition from the White House. He was asked to fly to Washington DC and meet with the Vice President, U.S. Attorney General, and other top White House staff to discuss our city's success and how San Bernardino could be a model for other cities across the nation.

While the City should take pride in receiving national recognition for our tremendous progress, Mayor Morris is not satisfied.

Mayor Morris believes we must do more.

The following are Mayor Morris' priorities for continuing to aggressively fight and further drive down crime in San Bernardino:

1. Hire more police to patrol our streets.
2. Tough oversight and strict accountability for parolees.
3. Eliminate graffiti and hold taggers accountable.
4. Eliminate crime-infested housing.

For detailed information on each of Mayor Morris' priorities for aggressively driving down crime in San Bernardino, please visit his Crime and Public Safety webpage.

MAYOR PAT MORRIS' 10-POINT PLAN TO PROMOTE INVESTMENT AND CREATE JOBS IN SAN BERNARDINO

Our economic development strategy must be focused on putting people back to work, on creating jobs. Every investment we make as a city should be measured by its "job multiplier effect" - how many jobs it creates in our city. To deploy this strategy, Mayor Morris has been implementing his 10-point jobs and economy plan over the past several years. We must continue to follow this strategy to successfully rebuild our local economy, and to make it robust and sustainable for decades to come. Here are the 10-points in Mayor Morris' plan:

1. Safe, clean & business friendly city.
2. Build infrastructure.
3. Leverage our locational and transportation advantages.
4. Focus on airport and logistics areas.
5. Downtown revitalization.
6. Work with San Manuel Tribe on investment opportunities in San Bernardino.
7. Support expansion of hospitality industry.
8. Revitalize historic commercial areas to support small business.
9. Resort development at Arrowhead Springs.
10. Keep state politicians from stealing our money.

To read details on each of the 10 points in Mayor Morris' jobs and economy plan, please visit his Jobs and Economy webpage.

MAYOR PAT MORRIS' ACTION PLAN TO ELIMINATE GRAFFITI, BLIGHT, AND CRIME-INFESTED HOUSING

After Mayor Morris' election in 2006, there was an initial intense focus on reversing the rapidly escalating violent crime in San Bernardino. With some good success on violent crime under his belt, he turned his attention to addressing quality-of-life crimes that also holds back our progress in improving our public safety and economy in San Bernardino.

Mayor Morris' holistic "broken windows" approach to combating crime and increasing public safety has been a hallmark of his administration beginning with the 18-point Operation Phoenix plan he published in 2005 and promised the voters to implement.

Based on my forty years of crime-fighting as a district attorney and judge, when Morris developed the Operation Phoenix plan he knew that driving down the number of serious and violent crimes in San Bernardino would be critical, but it would not be enough to accomplish the mission.

Successfully transforming San Bernardino into a safe and business-friendly city requires a more comprehensive approach to public safety that combats graffiti, blight, and crime-infested housing. That is why Mayor Morris' Operation Phoenix plan calls for aggressive use of code enforcement to clean-up blighted buildings and neighborhoods, the use of affordable housing funds to eliminate crime-infested housing and increase home ownership, and the creation of civic beautification programs to combat graffiti and blight on our streets.

Following is a summary of Mayor Morris' implementation of these critical quality-of-life components of Operation Phoenix in order to transform San Bernardino's image and reputation into a safe and clean city.

1. Eliminate Graffiti. Elimination of graffiti must be one of our highest priorities, and in order to "win the war" on graffiti, we must continue to professionalize our graffiti removal services. We have begun to do this over the last nine months, and while we have a long way to go, the results of our progress are beginning to show. Winning the war on graffiti requires a sustainable, consistent, accountable and professional battle plan. This strategy has been successfully deployed in neighboring cities. We need the same plan and results in San Bernardino.

2. Eliminate Crime-Infested Housing. Elimination of crime-infested housing must also be one of our highest priorities. There is a significant amount of dilapidated and poorly managed housing in San Bernardino that has been accruing for decades. Absentee and irresponsible property owners keep purchasing these cheap rental properties and "milking" the property by renting at low rates and making only the minimal repairs to avoid being shut-down by Code Enforcement. When the property becomes so rundown, these landlords simply walk away, the property goes back to the bank, and it is once again sold-off at cheap prices to the next bad landlord. It is a vicious cycle.

More concerning are the public safety implications associated with this housing cycle. Because there is typically no on-site management and no desire of landlords to invest, these rundown and mismanaged housing units can quickly be taken over by criminal elements, creating a hot-bed of criminal activity, destroying the surrounding neighborhood and threatening our public safety. Every law enforcement official will tell you that problematic housing is one of the significant issues contributing to crime in San Bernardino.

To read the details of Mayor Morris' strategies for aggressively eliminating graffiti and crime-infested housing in San Bernardino, please visit his Graffiti and Crime-Infested Housing webpage.