News Service of Florida has: Five Questions for Andrew Gillum

By DARA KAM
THE NEWS SERVICE OF FLORIDA

THE CAPITAL, TALLAHASSEE, September 21, 2016 .......... Hurricane Hermine thrust Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum into the statewide spotlight this month after the Category 1 storm --- the first hurricane to hit Florida in more than a decade --- walloped the capital city.

But the 37-year-old Democrat is no stranger to the limelight.

One of his party's rising stars, Gillum earned a speaking spot at the Democratic National Convention this summer and is working the Florida college circuit as a surrogate for presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in the lead-up to the November election.

Gillum was elected to the Tallahassee City Commission in 2003, where, at the age of 23, he became the youngest person to serve in the post. After serving on the commission for 11 years, Gillum was elected mayor in 2014. Gillum is a graduate of Florida A&M University, where he was president of the student government association, and also served on the school's board of trustees.

Gillum has long ties with People for the American Way Foundation, where he serves as director of youth leadership programs.

The News Service of Florida has five questions for Andrew Gillum:

Q: The city's response to Hurricane Hermine, which resulted in power outages to a large percentage of Tallahassee utility customers, has put you in the spotlight. What would you have done differently, if anything?

GILLUM: I think it's first important to know that our community had not been hit by a hurricane, or a storm of this nature --- actually, Kate was not a hurricane when it impacted Tallahassee. This was a Category 1 hurricane. We hadn't seen one like this in 30 years, and over 80 percent of our electric utility system was impacted by the storm. Looking back on what we would have done differently, I think that we probably would have communicated more consistently and more clearly to our customers, to the citizens here, about what was the staging of the repair process. When you've got over 80 percent of your system impacted, what do you repair first? What should the customers and citizens expect to see happening, because, as I've indicated in other places, the first level of repair work had to be done to the transmission lines, which are not usually in plain sight of folks. So if you came out that next day, and you didn't see power trucks littering the city, it's largely because they were working on the most important piece of the system necessary in order to get power back to people. Also recognize that we are the first hurricane, and the first storm, in this state in 11 years, since the advent of social media --- Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, you name it. So we're a little bit of a test case in what it means to manage a disaster where you don't have one voice of authority or the government speaking and communicating out. You've got 300,000 voices that are communicating across lines to each other. This is the impacted area, citizens telling their own story and whatever my experience is, in my home, without my A/C, gets projected to my 800 or 1,000 or 5,000 friends. And it looks a lot more ubiquitous of a problem than what it might be. It actually might be more contained than what is being pushed out. In retrospect, we have seen that our response actually outpaced the response, restoration process, after Sandy. That, of the last three major storms Category 1 to Category 3 in the state and the U.S., that Tallahassee leads in its power-restoration process. That's something we can be proud of. But I think that gets lost in the chatter, because the truth is, whether we're able to get 90 percent of our system restored in three days makes no difference if you were part of the 10 percent of the people who were still waiting for your power. It's discomforting. It's inconveniencing. And in a time and age where everything, we expect it to happen quickly, I understand what frustrations might exist there. But I will tell you, I'm just so thankful, by and large, by the efforts that I saw of members of this community, of folks coming together, folks helping neighbors out. I got to meet people on my street that I hadn't met before. And I hear that story repeated time and time again from people all across our community. Folks who bought meals and thank-you cards, and notes to our linemen and our first responders. In a community where we had over 1,000 trees come down, trees that could have gone like this into somebody's bedroom went like this into a living room or another part of their property. We had no loss of life. So I understand that there are lessons to be learned, and obviously we want to learn them and share our experience with the rest of the state and nation. I also want to pause and say how grateful I am for the way in which our community responded, in hindsight, pretty rapidly, to get us back up and going.

Q: You had a testy exchange with Gov. Rick Scott, and you said his offers of assistance would have been "more authentic" if they hadn't been accompanied by a barrage of press releases that seemed to be shaming the city for the response. Do you think he undermined the public's confidence in their local government's ability to handle a crisis?

GILLUM: As I communicated to the governor, it doesn't do the state government and it certainly doesn't do the local government any good when a bifurcated message is communicated to the public, one that says we're on different pages. Because I think we both had the same intention, which is getting power restored to people as quickly as possible, but also tending to all of the other needs that make a city run and operate. We had 120 sewer pumps fail. We had nearly every traffic light in our community that was out. We are a Tree City USA. We had trees and debris and limbs spread across every major thoroughfare in this city. By the end of the day on the first day of the storm, all of the debris on all our major thoroughfares were cleared. We had over 200 generators deployed so that our stoplights could be functioning again. Despite the fact that we had sewer pumps that were out, we didn't have backflow going into anyone's homes or into anyone's businesses because our workers got out there and manually dealt with that. So there are manifold challenges that our community had to respond to. Not just the power, which is the most obvious one, but other systems that have to work in order to make the city work. And, with respect to him, this is his first storm as governor. He's in his second term. This is his first hurricane. Dealing with that, he follows a very important legacy, that of Jeb Bush who was pretty well known for getting in the middle of these things, working closely, even with people of different parties, to make sure we responded well. I remember observing that in Gov. Bush, who I have major political and philosophical differences with. But I absolutely tip my hat to him and the way that his leadership as governor came in in a supportive way of the local governments that were dealing on the front lines with these issues. I expected the same to happen in this case. I didn't expect press releases to fly that had false information in them. On the day that the governor and I had the exchange that we had, there was one that said that the city had rejected help that we in fact did not reject. In fact, the state workers at FDOT (the Florida Department of Transportation) and our workers were working side-by-side with each other as the statements were being made. So the governor's office had to end up issuing a statement saying, oh it was a miscommunication. Well, we owe each other better than that, and better than we owing each other better than that, we owe the citizens better than that. We owe them the full weight of the state and the local governments coming together to address and solve this problem. That didn't help us, me having to respond to messages coming from the governor's office that were inaccurate. It didn't help any of us in getting people's power restored and getting back to 100.

(Do you think he would have handled it differently if you were a Republican?)
I don't know. This is the only example we have of his leadership in a time of natural disaster is what we've been seeing with regard to Zika, with regard to the algae bloom and now with the hurricane. And, unfortunately, what I've been seeing is the consistent pattern of sort of blaming everybody else. On the algae bloom, it was President Obama's fault. And the Zika crisis, he and the mayor of Miami Beach also had to deal with this whole governance by press release. And in the situation with Zika, instead of doing what Sen. (Marco) Rubio did, by lifting up the example of bipartisan partnership between Sen. (Bill) Nelson, Sen. Rubio, the entire bipartisan delegation of Florida, our governor went to D.C. and blamed Sen. Nelson, instead of saying, send us a clean bill that funds Zika, a vaccine, and Zika research. So I now know that, instead of just us in Tallahassee, there seems to be a pattern of behavior that, instead of going to resolution and solution in these matters, there seems to be a kind of unhealthy blame game, which again at the end of the day does not help a single citizen. We owe them better than that, and we ought to be better than that.

Q: Aside from the personalities and the politics, is there a lesson here about the roles of state and local governments in responding to crises like Hermine?

GILLUM: One example someone gave was, what if President Obama were to come in here after a hurricane and sort of sideline and quarterback Florida's response over and aside from the way in which the governor chose to respond? I would liken that relationship between the local and state government as well. What we all ought to be doing is figuring out what are the best ways in which, given the resources of the state, given the resources of locals and obviously the federal, what are the best ways we can coordinate with one another to be on the same page, deliver the help that's needed in the time that it's needed and really sideline any other agendas. We have really good examples of that happening in our state, if we just turn back to the page of Jeb Bush when he was governor and natural disasters attacked this state. Largely, South Florida, if you look at it in partisan terms, is largely a Democratic stronghold for state and federal elections. That didn't get in the way of the governor getting in there and saying, how do we figure this out. Because you're not the governor of any one party, you're the governor of the entire state of Florida. So it's helpful for folks to get into the same room. It's helpful for us to use our joint and mutual-aid agreements between cities. We were fortunate. We had nine different public and private utilities come to our aid. We also borrowed resources from other communities across our state. I would encourage people to have those updated agreements in place so that, when you need the help, help is there to come in to back you up when necessary. The other example I would give is we are now operating in a different age of communication. I cannot understate the impact that social media has in either telling the story, getting out information, accurate and timely information, and making sure that we're aware that there can be counter narratives that are going that can undermine the message that's coming from the government. I think there have been a number of stories that have tried to highlight some of that in the aftermath of this storm, that there may have been other agendas at work that really undermined the message that we were trying to get out from the government. So, for folks to be aware that they're not the only message going out there. Government isn't the only message with information being communicated to the citizens. There are other messages and other agendas that are at work.

Q: The GOP presidential nominee, Donald Trump, appears to have closed the gap with Hillary Clinton, who has enjoyed tremendous popularity in Florida historically. How do you explain the toss-up?

GILLUM: The truth is, I agree with you, the Clintons have long enjoyed a lot of support in this state. I still think they enjoy a great deal of support in this state. But the truth is, Florida has always been this 1 percent kind of state. We're 1 percent when it comes to governor. We're 1 percent up until the last minute, and then it breaks one way or another for a candidate. I'm guessing this is really following the historic voting past, the historic polling past, in the state of Florida. I've got every confidence that we're going to deliver the state of Florida for Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine. We're a state that voted twice for Bill Clinton, arguably a state that went for Al Gore, and this is a state that voted twice for Barack Obama, including when Obama had a historic low in white voter support in his re-election in 2012. So, we're going to work hard. I've been moving all across this state on behalf of the campaign. I had the pleasure of stumping with both Hillary Clinton as well as President Clinton. I'm hoping to bring them back to our area in the near future. We've had major surrogates for the campaign in and out of our community, and they'll continue to be in and out of this state. President Clinton was very kind to call during the hurricane and offer his support and well-wishes for our community. They care a lot about Florida. He's of an old-school politics. His approach is very granular. He likes to talk at the precinct and county level, and I think it's going to be that style that we're going to see show up in these closing weeks, that style of politics at the most nuanced and granular level that is going to make the difference between our ability to deliver this state for Hillary Clinton by one point or four points. Again, we just have to keep working at doing this. One thing for sure, these latest polls have shown that none of us can rest on our laurels. I have told young people all across this state that a vote for anyone other than Hillary Clinton, as a protest vote for either her or Donald Trump, is a vote for Donald Trump. There's just no two ways about it. With all due respect to (Libertarian Gary) Johnson and (Green Party candidate Jill) Stein, there isn't a path forward for them. … This is a hugely important election, and elections are choices. Sometimes you get to check every one of the 10 boxes, and sometimes you get to check eight out of the 10. But I'll take my chances, and I think young people should take their chances, any day with Hillary Clinton over the disaster of a candidate that Donald Trump is.

(As a surrogate on college campuses, how are you selling Hillary Clinton to young people?)
I'm using her record to demonstrate that she cares about a lot of the issues that we care about. I remind people that there's been 40 years of concentrated effort on attacking her character. I try to communicate to young voters the fact that I've been around these folks and I've watched their public policy closely, and that I trust them to do right by us. And then I ask them that, if they can't put their full trust in them, that they put their trust with me. We'll try to advocate, as is the process, regardless of who gets elected to the House, to the Senate. Democracy is a ship that turns slowly in some ways. And change happens in some ways also at a snail-like pace. But intention matters. People's public-policy goals matter. The heart that they bring to this work matters. And if you compare the great passion and love that Hillary Clinton has for this country, the way in which she from a very, very early point with the Children's Defense Fund and Marion Wright Edelman went out and accepted a job paying a heck of a lot less than she could have being a corporate attorney somewhere to advocate on behalf of poor black and brown children and children in Appalachia and those who weren't given the same opportunities that she was given to have a good start at life, to going on and advocating for SCHIP (the State Children's Health Insurance Program) and children's health care on behalf of mainly children who were up for adoption and then expanding that program to include all children across this country. Her record is one that I think comports well with the issues that matter to me, raising young children. Her record and advocacy for young people in this country is one that we can believe in. And again, I hate to refrain back to this, but when you compare that to what we're hearing from Donald Trump --- a record of division, of selfish promotion, of tearing our country apart based off the way people look, based off their race, based off their religion, a Muslim test to enter this country. I mean it's almost laughable if it wasn't so embarrassing, quite frankly. And those ideas don't comport well with the values of young people. We've got to remember that in November. The message of hate, of separation, of division and derision being driven by Donald Trump, a message of fear speaking to the worst part of humanity and not the best part of humanity is inconsistent with our values as millennials. And that's what we ought to be voting for in Hillary Clinton.

Q: If you could invite three people, living or dead, to go on a fishing trip with you, who would they be?

GILLUM: Wow. That's incredible. So, living, I probably would ask Oprah. There've been some moments I could use some talking through how I'm feeling, and she's got a good listening ear. You know what? In this current condition, I think Muhammad Ali would be an interesting person to talk to. We see what the debate is like around athletes taking a social-justice stand. I was thinking back to his funeral where you had people on the left and the right and everything in between extolling the merits and the courage of Muhammad Ali, whereas in the moment when he was standing firm most courageously, he was talked about in the worst kinds of ways, made the enemy of everyone. So it speaks to something about the long view. I'd be curious to know from him what gave him the courage in that moment and whether he thought, in that moment, as history would play out, whether the long view would end up on his side. So, what do you have to say to yourself to get through that kind of experience. And I also think Abraham Lincoln. I know it's probably a cliche, maybe everybody would choose that. But for the kind of division that he experienced, the literal division of a nation. To be the head of a country that found itself at such a great precipice, where we could go one way or another. We could literally have been a different type of America, a South America --- not in the traditional way that we see South America today --- and a North America, based off of the slave divide. To move our country past that moment and to also garner such generosity in the reconciliation effort. … Getting the 13th and 14th Amendments … I mean, what was that like to have to deal with such a divided nation and to have to reckon with bringing that back together to make us the United States of America. It must have been a tremendous and an awesome time, but as the man who carried and shouldered that burden, it would be interesting to know also what he was telling himself.