Urban Innovator Award Winner

2002
Mayor Martin O'Malley Receives CCI's Urban Innovator Award

It was CCI's great pleasure to present Martin O'Malley, Mayor of Baltimore and a member of the CCI Board of Advisors, with our highest honor, the Urban Innovator Award. On July 16 th , in a luncheon ceremony at the Admiral Fell Inn, CCI Executive Director Henry Olsen presented Mayor O'Malley with the Award, in recognition of the tireless efforts to revitalize his city that have captured the imagination of the people of Baltimore, and earned plaudits from around the nation by those who care about the future of urban America.

The youngest Mayor in Baltimore's history, Martin O'Malley was elected in 1999 with an overwhelming 91% of the vote, after a campaign that emphasized accountability, change, and reform. From his first days in office, Mayor O'Malley has shown a commitment to innovative approaches to solving his cities problems, and Baltimore has reaped the benefits.

O'Malley's introduction of 'broken windows' policing strategies and a crime fighting program modeled after the New York Police Department's famed CompStat system has resulted in the city, America's most violent big city in 1999, experiencing the nation's largest violent crime reduction, 23% in the first two years of his term. Rather than rest on that laurel, his administration has pressed on, applying the tenets of CompStat to all municipal services through the revolutionary approach to city management known as CitiStat, with similarly impressive results.

During his tenure, Baltimore, which saw nearly 100,000 jobs vanish during the 1990s, created 8,200 more jobs than it lost in 2000. Meanwhile the city's first graders scored above the national average in reading and math for the first time in 30 years. With his term not up until 2004, we look forward to accomplishments in the coming years that mirror the stunning successes of the last few.