California’s Gavin Newsom: Battling Unemployment (VIDEO)

[ 0 ] July 8, 2011 | Gavin Newsom

Watch Gavin Newsom at the 2011 Aspen Ideas Festival spend “2.5 Minutes With genConnect.” We connected with the State of California’s 49th Lieutenant Governor.

Click the play button below to watch genConnect Creative Director Kelly Hayes interview Gavin Newsom on the unemployment challenges facing California and how he plans to overcome them:

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GAVIN NEWSOM: I appreciate that. 12 days old. Hunter. KELLY HAYES: Absolutely fantastic, and go get them. GAVIN NEWSOM: It’s the best. I don’t want to sound like a real cliche, but it’s the best. KELLY HAYES: That’s terrific. So you’re bringing into the world a new son at a time in which there are tremendous economic challenges, globally, particularly for the eighth largest economy in the world, the state of California. What are you doing? Give me two or three things that you can– [INTERPOSING] GAVIN NEWSOM: Let’s put it in perspective. California’s economy is still suffering from this recession. We’re now the second highest unemployment rate in the United States, we’re around 12%. You’ve got 26 counties with unemployment north of 15%. You’ve got seven counties with unemployment north of 20%. Those numbers change on a monthly basis, but seasonally adjusted, it’s about as bad as it was in The Great Depression in some of these counties in our state. The first thing we need to do is put a plan together. It’s a remarkable thing. I’m not exaggerating. California has not had a jobs plan, an economic development plan, in over a decade and a half. We shut down our trade offices in 2003. We got out of the business of intentionality around manufacturing. We didn’t focus on cluster strategies. And we have no workforce alignment, because we have no plan to align the workforce strategies to. So number one, we put together a team. Brookings and [? McKinsey ?] are doing a national search of best practices. We’ll be out with a plan in July. The first plan, again, in a decade and a half. Second, we have 36 agencies responsible for job creation and retention in the state, which means no one’s accountable. So we’re actually going to create a new aggregated economic development and workforce agency in the state. And then we’re going to get back in the business of intentionally, building the metro and a regional cluster strategy. A framework to take advantage of our geographic presence, particularly as a gateway to Asia and the rest of the world, and really focus on being more competitive from a tax incentive perspective, and a productivity perspective. KELLY HAYES: What’s so interesting to me is, I hear you talk about this. You make it sound like you’re going to run California like a business. And it hasn’t been run that way in the past. GAVIN NEWSOM: No, I come from the private sector. I’ve got about 1,000 employees in the businesses I created it. When I became mayor of San Francisco, we were suffering from similar fates. We were particularly– from the private sector, looked upon as a business-unfriendly city. We reconstituted our mayor’s office of Economic Workforce Development. We put together teams in biotech, life science, nano-tech, green tech, digital media, digital arts. And we put together incentive packages, public, private, transaction teams focused on doing programmatic EIRs. I won’t bore folks by saying– expanding on all that, except to say, we got back in the business. And we saw success. We got the Stem Cell Institute to locate in San Francisco. We’re now 73 bio-tech companies. We started with one. We’ve been very successful in green tech. We’re the most sustainable, greenest city, not only in the United States, but even if you look into Canada, the most green city. And we grew the economy. And so that’s the approach we need to take in California. Because that’s the approach they’re taking in Texas. That’s the approach they’re taking in Mississippi. That’s the approach they’re taking in Louisiana. Not just Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Maryland. And even now, your governor here, Hickenlooper– John’s a good friend– a real focus on regional strength. A focus on, again, intentionality, getting in the game of not only recruiting new companies, but supporting existing companies and creating conditions for the real job growth, which is new start-ups. KELLY HAYES: Gavin, you’re here with a couple of other mayors to talk about the state of the union of US cities in the 21st century. Can you tell me a little bit about that conversation? GAVIN NEWSOM: It was great. You’re talking about two of my friends outside of politics, Cory Booker and Antonio Villaraigosa. And it was, I thought, a very spirited discussion. Because we were focusing, as Bill Clinton would say, on the how business. We weren’t just focusing on an ideological debate about, here’s what we should do, or this new way of thinking. Sometimes, with all due respect, that frustrates the heck out of me. Because we can hold hands, and have a candlelight vigil, and pray that the world changes, but it doesn’t necessarily make it so. And so mayors are on the leading edge. Because we have to be hard-headed. We have to be pragmatic. No one cares about your ideology. They care about your ability to get something done. And we understand cause and effect. Good decisions and bads. We understand inputs and outputs in real time, and we have a constituency, 24/7, that will let us know how we’re doing. We don’t have to wait for the pundits and the polls. We get a sense of that. And so that’s the spirit of governance that we need to bring at the state, and, with all due respect, the federal level. And I’ll tell you, coming from being a mayor, where ideology was secondary to productivity, and resolve, and results– I come up to Sacramento, in California, and it’s all ideology. It’s a microcosm of what’s happening in this country. Democrats, Republicans. Sort of a tribal framework. If you break with precedent, the special interests crush you. And this is, fundamentally, the greatest challenge we have to our democracy. Because the reality is, we’re not producing and performing, particularly with income and equality, the loss of the middle class, our inability to compete by creating new economies, by having a workforce that’s competitive because the educational system’s suffering. Our higher educational system’s beginning to show weakness compared to our international indexes. And so we’ve got to get back in that game. KELLY HAYES: Gavin Newsom, lieutenant governor of the state of California, in the how business, as it were. GAVIN NEWSOM: I like that. KELLY HAYES: You can see more from Gavin at genConnect.com, and also at AIFestilval.org. Gavin, thank you very much. GAVIN NEWSOM: Thanks for having me out here.

Gavin Newsom is a man of action. Currently the Lt. Governor of California, the 49th in the state’s history, he is focused on the economy, education, environment and job creation within California. Newsom has previously served as Mayor of the City and County of San Francisco as well as a County Supervisor. Newsom attended Santa Clara University and in 1991 founded PlumpJack, a wine shop that turned into a 15-business empire.

Click here to watch Part 2 of our interview with Gavin Newsom on how the whole state of California is reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

genConnect is credentialed press at the 2011 Aspen Ideas Festival in Aspen, Colo., where we are interviewing the premier speakers and attendees at the conference. For more of our video interviews and articles from the Ideas Festival, click here.

Sign up for genConnect.com and automatically be entered to win a trip to Aspen! Follow us on Facebook and Twitter (@genConnected) for additional Ideas Festival coverage (#AspenIdeas).

Tags: 49th lieutenant governor, antonio villaraigosa, Aspen Ideas Festival 2011, California, Cory Booker, democrat, economic development, economy, featured, Gavin Newsom, genConnect, governor, ideas festival, ideology, job creation, Kelly Hayes, largest economy, Mayor, recession, republican, state of California, Unemployment, video

Category: Film, Music and Entertainment, Lifestyle, Videos, Views on the News

About Gavin Newsom: Gavin Newsom, 43, was elected as the 49th Lieutenant Governor of the State of California on November 2, 2010. His top priorities are economic development and job creation, improving access to higher education, and maintaining [...]
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California’s Gavin Newsom: Battling Unemployment (VIDEO)

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