Lightfoot and Durkan: Governing in time of crisis

0:00:01.2 Celeste Watkins Hayes: All right, good afternoon and welcome to the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. And welcome to the many people watching the livestream of this event. Welcome. While it is frigid outside here in Michigan, as I was walking in, my ankles were cold. It was so freezing. We have a warm and lively discussion planned for today. I am Celeste Watkins Hayes, the Joan and Sanford Weill Dean of the Ford School, and we are so happy to to welcome back last semester's Towsley policymaker in residence, former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who was in office in Chicago from 2019 to 2023. She is joined by former Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, who led that city from 2017 to 2021. Welcome both of you to the Ford School. So these two accomplished urban leaders dealt with multiple crises during their tenures, including the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown and the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, on top of the responsibilities of managing large, complex cities. We look forward to hearing about their challenges and the lessons we can draw on from how they approached those difficult times and the lessons for today. They are joined in conversation by law school professor and former US attorney, the incomparable Barbara McQuade.

0:01:31.1 CH: Welcome Barbara. When Lori Lightfoot became the 56th mayor of Chicago, she had been deeply engaged as a manager, as an advocate and a reform expert. She chaired the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force and served as the President of the Chicago Police Board. Previously, she was the Assistant United States Attorney in the Northern District of Illinois's Criminal Division. Importantly, perhaps most importantly, with that illustrious biography, she received her BA, Bachelors of Arts from the University of Michigan in 1984. Go blue. So when Jenny Durkan was serving as mayor of Seattle, it became one of the first areas in the United States to experience diagnosed cases and death from Covid-19. Her work during the pandemic earned her recognition from Fortune magazine, naming her one of the world's 25 greatest leaders, heroes of the pandemic in 2020. And previously she was US attorney for the Western District of Washington from 2009 to 2014. Barbara McQuade, now a professor from practice at the Michigan Law school, served from 2010 to 2017 as the US attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. Appointed by President Barack Obama, she was the first woman to serve in her position.

0:03:02.3 CH: And before becoming US attorney, McQuade was an Assistant US attorney in Detroit for 12 years. She has her BA and her JD from the University of Michigan. So Lori, Jenny and Barbara, thank you all for being here today. And the flow of this event is that Barbara will lead our discussion and then we'll open it up to audience Q&A. So we're going to have a great conversation. For questions in the room, we're going to pass around a microphone. If you're watching online, the question link can be accessed on the event page or in the event description on YouTube, LinkedIn or Facebook. And with that, let's give a warm Ford School welcome to this excellent panel of leaders.

0:03:47.6 Barbara McQuade: Well, thank you very much, Dean Watkins Hayes, and I'm delighted to be here with two friends and all of you. And thanks to all of you who came out on a very, very cold day in Ann Arbor. We're delighted that you're here in person, and we're also delighted that I know many others who were not able to make it through the cold are joining us on the streaming video. So thanks for being here as well. I am really happy to be with both of these leaders because both our friends. Not only did Mayor Lightfoot attend the University of Michigan in the 1980s, she also served as the RA in my dorm. I've got stories, but even then, Mayor Lightfoot was somebody that I admired, that I respected and that I was a little bit afraid of. And that's still true. If you were the casting director for Lori Lightfoot the movie, you would choose the same actress to play both young Lori and current day Lori. And you would just put a little bit of frosting in her hair because otherwise she is identical to how she looked back in Bursley hall in the mid-1980s.

0:05:04.2 BM: And Jenny Durkan, mayor of Seattle, we also served together as US attorneys during the Obama administration. And so I've come to think of Jenny as a friend as well as a colleague and someone who I deeply, deeply respect. She was not fortunate enough to attend the University of Michigan. She was on a hardship program at the University of Notre Dame. And is it too soon to say that only one of our panelists can say that she graduated from a school that has won a national championship in football in the past 13 months.

0:05:35.0 Jenny Durkan: I told Barb I'll go to Ann Arbor when hell freezes over. Well, here we are.

0:05:45.1 BM: Very good. Well, let's dig into it. I do wanna discuss all of those things that the dean mentioned about the COVID pandemic and the George Floyd protests and the threats and harassment that you each received. But before we do that, I wanna ask you about what made each of you decide to run for mayor in the first place. You had to know it was a Big job. We'll start Mayor Lightfoot and then Mayor Durkan.

0:06:06.4 Lori Lightfoot: Well, the short version is, if you had asked me, what, six, seven years ago, will you run for mayor? I would have said, you're crazy. And in fact, that's what my wife said to me over and over again when I first approached her about the idea. But what I saw through some public service that I was involved in, particularly around police reform and accountability, is looking at some of the root causes for violence, intergenerational poverty, lack of investment in black and brown neighborhoods in our city. It became clear to me that the incumbent mayor didn't have a plan to address any of those things. He saw the city as much smaller than what it was. And those of you, Chicago, I would always say during a campaign, hey, we got to look at neighborhoods south of Roosevelt Road and west of Ashland, meaning the south side to the west side, that were just literally being starved for resources. So after talking to other people about trying to get him to formulate a plan to address these needs, falling flat on that, looking at other people who are jockeying to run against him, he would have been running for a third term.

0:07:20.3 LL: I just didn't see anybody who was articulating a set of values that to me, were going to be bringing everybody to the table, recognizing that regardless of zip code, people had things of value to contribute. So after about a two-year process, I started to think, well, what about me? Look, I was very clear eyed about running against Rahm Emanuel, who was going to raise more money than God and who had a reputation for being a fierce fighter despite my reputation. I knew it was going to be an uphill climb, but I just felt like I regret it for the rest of my life if I didn't get out there, put myself to be the woman in the arena, to paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt's famous quote, and raise a set of issues and a narrative that needed to be part of the public conversation for that campaign. So I did it. Jumped into the deep end of the pool and lo and behold, was successful.

0:08:24.0 BM: All right. Very good. And Mayor Durkan, how about you? What caused you to decide to run?

0:08:27.6 JD: I think it's... I love being here at the Gerald Ford center because I was just an avid and passionate follower of politics my whole life. I watched every day of the Watergate hearings that I could as a young kid. And my father was in elected office. I really came to believe that institutions are the way you can accomplish the greatest change in society and that you can have the best nonprofit or the individual. But if you can affect people's lives broad scale. And so I'd always looked for opportunities, but it never seemed either the right timing or the right office. One job I swore I never would do would be mayor. But it came... We ended up with a vacancy in Seattle because of the previous mayor had to resign suddenly because of a scandal. And we were at a really pivotal time in the city. And for me it was a better time. My kids were mostly grown, not totally grown, and I talked to a bunch of different people and I love the city. I was born and raised in Seattle. I lived different places, including Indiana. And I still believe that our institutions in government affect everybody's lives in one way or another. And if you wanna do broad scale change and really broad scale justice, to be able to do that, have your hands on the lever, is really important. And there's nowhere you feel it more than in a city.

0:09:56.0 BM: Yeah. So interesting. What you didn't hear is because I wanted to be mayor or I wanted to have the fancy office or the fancy car. I think so often in these conversations, people who seek these positions of power do it out of ideas of self grandeur. And what we've heard both of these leaders say is they had ideas about what they wanted to do with that job and realized, I can do this, I can make a difference. I think that's very laudable. In our conversations before today, we talked a little bit about some of the cornerstones of leadership that you brought to your offices before you encountered these crises. And one of the things you flagged was the importance of communication. What lessons do did you learn about communication and the importance of communication that you tried to establish in your office? Maybe we'll start this time with Mayor Durkan. Tell me about communication.

0:10:45.1 JD: I think you can never communicate enough, and you always think you're communicating all the time. And it's surprising how little of it penetrates. And in today's world, there is such a tsunami wave of information coming at people from so many panels, from their phone, from the TV, from their friends, and to be able to pierce through that. So you communicate for a lot of reasons. If you're a leader, number one, your job is to be an elected representative of them. You govern at their will. And so if they don't understand what their government is doing, I think you're denying one of the principles of democracy. Second, it's how you get legitimacy. If they don't know what you're doing in this day and age, they will suspect the worst. And there's so much negative information that goes into the communications channels. So I just think you can't communicate enough. You have to be clear, we're going to talk about it later, but during the crises, we found it was very important for the governor, the county executive, the public health officials, myself. We'd go in rooms and we would fight things out because we had different viewpoints.

0:11:49.7 JD: But when we talked to the public, we tried to talk with one message over and over again through every channel we could. Whether it was community groups, TV, radio. We couldn't do in person because it was shut down. So it put even a premium on communicating through those other channels.

0:12:06.8 BM: How about you, Mayor Lightfoot?

0:12:08.4 LL: Well, I think one of the biggest challenges is, as Jenny said, people don't get their news in the same way anymore. So whenever we were conceiving of a policy rollout, we'd meet with the relevant stakeholders, we'd do a press conference, we'd put information out on our websites, but we just weren't reaching people. And so one of the things that we certainly learned and Covid exacerbated is you got to be the producer of your own content. You've got to establish a brand, you've got to understand what particular sides of the audience you wanna reach and how they're consuming their news, which is very different than historically. I won't say that we were always successful, but there's got to be much more intentionality about an overused phrase. But meeting people where they are through the mediums that they are using. And so we became, I had a bunch of 20-somethings who were much more conversant in social media than I would ever be. So I found myself on TikTok and we did some things that had these viral moments. But being able to consistently reach people through media, it's hard. And particularly we all know this.

0:13:26.3 LL: The media market is still in a state of incredible flux. The traditional media companies are trying to figure out how they can balance their books but also be reporting. And nowadays anybody with a keyboard thinks they're a journalist. And the journalistic standards, such as they are, are very different. I'm a firm believer in the strength and importance of the fourth estate. Even though I had my issues with the local media, I put Chicago political reporting up against anybody as how tough they are. But we've got to figure out a way to get people to the truth and not rumor and innuendo, not relying upon their friend Joe. Who knows where Joe's getting the information. But as an elected official, you've got to understand how to harness those various sources of communicating to get your message out.

0:14:20.1 BM: One of the other cornerstones of leadership that you each mentioned when we talked before today was the importance of building community partnerships. Can you talk a little bit about your views on community partnerships? Maybe starting with you this time?

0:14:32.6 LL: They're invaluable. And I'll go to our experience during COVID It was like the wild, wild west early on in Covid because we didn't know a lot. The CDC wasn't providing much guidance. And truthfully, I don't think anybody really knew what is this virus, aside from it's deadly and it spreads like wildfire. So we needed to be able to reach the people who were most impacted. In Chicago, we were seeing death rates among black Chicagoans at seven times the rate of any other demographic. We were seeing case spread in traditionally Latinx communities that was just off the charts that we were having a hard time wrestling with. So there were places that we as the government couldn't get into because of a lack of trust, because of a lack of understanding. So those community partnerships were absolutely essential to us to really save people's lives. It really was life and death. So my mantra through Covid and really the rest of my tenure was no temporary scaffolding, which to me meant we wanna build authentic relationships, we wanna build infrastructure that we can multi purpose not just for this immediate crisis. And those community partners were absolutely invaluable.

0:15:54.5 LL: And one of the things that I've heard frankly from them still is people lived in their own little orbit. They didn't know people that were doing the same work many times in the same neighborhood. So we were able to set a table with community partners that they were then able to leverage for other purposes beyond what our immediate need was. And the breaking down those geographic silos was invaluable to them because they've been able to now build relationships across the city that otherwise didn't exist.

0:16:28.5 BM: How about you, Mayor Durkan, Community partners?

0:16:31.3 JD: I was just listening, Lori. And I think one of the things that I never appreciated being mayor, even though I had worked in and around civic ventures, literally my whole professional life, working on nonprofits, community groups, civic affairs, is I think you always underestimate how much people really would like to make their lives better and take control of their own situations and make their community better. And if you harness that energy, that is like an X factor for what you can do if you just dictate. And So I think it's not just. It's invaluable. It's. You can't get where you wanna get if you don't like those kind of fires. And the reverse is true. Exponentially, you can accomplish so much more if you are able. And the first step of doing that is listening. Don't be a stranger to communities. Don't think you know what the issues are or how they feel about them. You got to get in there and you've got to listen. And then you got to go back and listen again and listen again. I think one of the things that was hardest about the pandemic is it was so displacing, but also because it cut us off from those connections.

0:17:45.9 JD: I did community listening groups and walking tours four or five times a week. I was hundreds before the pandemic because I was just trying to get to hear those parts of the city that I was less familiar. Thank God I did, because then I understood the people in those communities better than I had before and knew who the leaders were and had done things to build the scaffolding like Lori's talking about, that we could then come during the pandemic and use some of that to to better our efforts. So I think that if you... It's got to be of and by the community first, top down doesn't work.

0:18:25.0 BM: All right, well, here's another sort of secret I've always wanted to know about being mayor or governor or president or whatever it is that is, to me, a cornerstone of leadership. And that is, how do you make decisions that are really important when you don't have all of the expertise? You're both very accomplished, very smart, very capable people, but obviously you can't know everything about everything. How do you make decisions about areas beyond your own expertise?

0:18:57.1 LL: Well, I'll borrow the famous phrase from Bo Schembechler, the team, the team, the team. Right. You've got to create a team of people. And I'll point out two of my folks that are in the back of the room. You've got to build a team of the people who you rely upon, who you trust, and who have the expertise beyond who you are. And even if that expertise doesn't exist in your immediate team, that they know where to get it, they know where within city government or they know where in a community, in the business community, in academia, to get the expertise that you need to bring to bear on a particular project. But the truth is, and again, I'll go back to Covid, we didn't know. We were making a lot of projections, a lot of educated guesses, but they were still guesses. And it goes back to the point we were just talking about. You gather the best information, the smartest minds, and then at the end of the day, you wear the jacket. You got to have confidence in yourself to be able to make decisions. And then in a crisis in particular, you've got to be able to articulate to people why. Why are you doing this versus that, how are you doing it? And be incredibly transparent about what you know, but about what you don't know.

0:20:17.2 LL: Because I think about the many times that we were in front of the public. For us, it was end of February through really June, July, when after the murder of George Floyd and all those crises, but particularly during COVID people were hanging on to every word. And I know that because they tell me still, like, you got us through this and recognizing the power of the information that we were sharing in those daily press conferences, the information that we were putting out on those various dashboards. You've got to be transparent and confident in your decision making. But that comes from having a great team. It comes from getting the best data and information you possibly can, talking to as many people, particularly the folks whose lives you were disrupting. I think about the small businesses, I think about the hotels, our tourism industry. Everything in our economy was turned upside down during that time period. We would have had zero credibility to do any of that. And frankly, I wouldn't have had confidence to make the decisions that we had to make if we weren't engaged in listening and building strong relationships with the people who are affected. But again, to summarize, it really starts with making sure you've got a great top flight experts around the table that you're relying upon.

0:21:43.2 BM: How about you, Mayor Durkan? How did you supplement your own expertise?

0:21:45.9 JD: I found, I think probably like both of you is, the best leaders are not the ones that think they're the smartest and best person in the room. They're the ones that get the best and smartest people in the room to help them. And I'll give you two examples. We had the first diagnosed cases of COVID and the first deaths in the Seattle area, and we had to go from zero to 60. There was a television show many years ago where it was like you could phone a friend. So I phoned a friend, a person who worked in President Obama's administration, was national Security Advisor in the National Security Council, and said, who's the best public Health person and will you connect me? And I was able to get to this woman, Dr. Beth Cameron, who is just fabulous. And she put together a group for me that had epidemiologists, public health people. We added a modeler later that I found, and people who had expertise in pandemics. And I met with them on a regular basis, almost every day for a while, then like two, three times a week, and then weekly.

0:22:50.0 JD: And they were great because, as Lori said, nobody knew what was happening or where this was going. We knew that it was spreading quickly, particularly in certain demographics. We knew we had no vaccine and no tests. And so I needed not just to know that was happening. I needed to look around corners. What should I prepare for as a leader? What can our city do? And I'll give you one very specific example, while having that kind of advice made a big difference is I sat down with the public health people very early on when we had our first deaths, and they said, look, we have, I think at the time was 18 deaths. We think that there could be this much more. But we don't think there's broad community spread. We think we have contained it in these other areas. And so right now we've got to assume that we have somewhere between 20 and 50 cases. And in the meantime, there was this group led by a doctor at the University of Washington and some people at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer who had done a flu study. And they just swabbed all the patients coming in the ER testing for the flu and kind of doing their epidemiological work.

0:23:54.1 JD: And then they went back, somewhat controversially, tested the swabs for Covid to see if there had been community spread. And so I heard about this. I followed this guy online. So I set up a meeting. I said, okay, public health is telling me this. Where do you think we are? And I will tell you, this is one of the most profound meetings I ever had because we're sitting there, I think I have one set of problems which was big enough. And he said, based on the science and the modeling right now, the best estimation have around 1,100 cases. It doubles every three to five days. And it will do that until you reach the peak. And I'm a little bit dysgraphic, so I had to write the numbers down. I'm thinking 1100 2200, 44... And I realized in a number of weeks I was going to have 70,000 cases and thousands of deaths. That requires a totally different response than a few dozen cases. And so having that expertise. And they were right. They were right in terms of how it had spread, what the severity could be. But it was a wake up call.

0:25:02.3 JD: But if I had just relied on the people who came to me rather than thinking, okay, who's got more information? We would never have been in the position to have the information to act like we did. We were fortunate. I mean, it was terribly tragic. But Seattle, we ended up, New York Times did a study, and we had the lowest incidence of disease, hospitalization and death by the end of the pandemic as anywhere. But I credit that to the great work and collaborations between the state, the county, public health officials, and having these outside experts who were willing to take their time to help us.

0:25:36.2 BM: Interesting. Well, let's talk a little more about the Covid-19 pandemic and Mayor Durkan. I remember learning the term social distancing from you watching an interview that you were doing on television. Like social, what is that? You were so much ahead of everybody else around the country because you really were ground zero when it came to that. I'm curious about other lessons you may have learned during the pandemic about how do you get the resources you needed. You heard President Trump making it clear that states and municipalities were kind of going to be on their own, and you had to get what you needed that way, working with other governmental entities. You said you had some cooperation, but sometimes different leaders have their own agendas and you're trying to solve a problem. What other lessons did you learn during that Covid-19 pandemic about those issues?

0:26:28.0 JD: Yeah it was really interesting. Barbie was. Because at the beginning stages, it was like the Hunger Games and you would have mayors talking to each other, but really everyone was thinking about, how do I get ventilators, for me, how do I get a new. I was able to get an army in Seattle by just constantly talking to Vice President Pence. But you have to be creative. But then the lesson I learned was I can remember one of the biggest problems and one of the reasons the pandemic went like it did is there was no testing. And so we couldn't really tell who had it. And so we had to almost assume everybody could. And so you had to break people apart, which ended up having such devastating social consequences that I think we're still feeling as a country. And I couldn't get them from the state, I couldn't get them from public health. But I knew... My experts told me this is the key. If you don't know how big the problem really is and where it's happening, you can't address it. So I was also on an international mayors group called the C40 Mayors, which is a climate crisis group organization.

0:27:36.5 JD: And I was one of the North American representatives. And we set up a Covid recovery subgroup that would meet regularly. And it was a smaller group of us from each of the continents at all different times of the night. And the mayor of Seoul, South Korea, was on the call. And at that time, Korea had the gold standard for both contact tracing and testing. And I thought to myself, okay. So I said, mayor, would you mind staying on? I have something to ask you. And he's like... So he stayed on the line. And I said, you've got this great program for contact tracing and testing. Can I buy some tests from you? And so we'd had a great relationship with the Korean government in Seattle. They had opened up a consulate there. And we got our first over 100,000 test kits from South Korea. Not from the United States, but from South Korea. But then I had nowhere to run them through a lab because the state said, no, we're too busy, because they were overburdened. Everybody was overburdened. So the University of Washington stepped up their lab, was able to run it. We then had another hurdle, which was, no, only certain people can do this swabbing.

0:28:44.0 JD: So we got all of our city paramedics and the fire department certified. So we opened up our test. Free testing by each of those stages. You had to be creative. But at the end, what we learned, and I think Lori would say, this is Hunger Games wouldn't work. We did the best when we collaborated. And a few months in Los Angeles and I, for example, city of Los Angeles, we did a buying consortium so that we could use our joint powers to bring down the cost of math, to bring down the cost of the other PPE and trying to find ways to solve each other's problems worked a lot better than when we were working in competition.

0:29:23.3 BM: Yeah, that's great example. And Mayor Lightfoot, let me ask you, too, about how you resolved some of these issues. Chicago, I seem to recall, was one of the very few cities to which all flights from China were diverted. So you found a situation where all of these people had to quarantine in your city. What were some of the challenges you faced there, and how did you work through them?

0:29:46.8 LL: Well, I think that's the first time that I really got to know Jenny Durkan was on that. And let me kind of take you back. It was late in the day on a Friday at the end of January of 2020. And an e·dict came out of the White House. Now note the White House, not the CDC, not HHS, but the White House, telling us that planes from China, and particularly Wuhan Province were all going to be diverted initially to seven airports, which included O'Hare and I think included Sea Tac, eventually got expanded to 11, and that passengers coming off of those planes all were ordered to quarantine for 14 days. So maybe straightforward, but when we started digging into questions and asking DHS, asking the folks in the White House, well, wait a second, what if somebody is asymptomatic coming off a plane? What do we do then? No answer. Where are we quarantining these people for 14 days? That's a long period of time. No answer. Under what authority can we say to folks, hey, you're not free to go about your business. You've got to go here, here and here. Even if we solve those first two, who's paying for that? No answer.

0:31:12.6 LL: So as we started to kind of unravel the basic logistics of putting together an order like this, how we were going to execute it, and under whose authority, it became very clear that the federal administration at the time literally had not thought this through, had no answers for us. And I remember saying to my team, folks, we are on our own. We're going to have to figure this out ourselves. And that's what we did. And in some ways it was a good lesson for us that we had to be self reliant, independent. And luckily we were, we were actually very fortunate to be super prepared. Despite the fact that the budget for our public health department had historically been underfunded, the one thing that they really focused on was preparation. And so we were better prepared than our state, and I dare say we were better prepared than the federal government and we've definitely better prepared than a lot of cities across the country. We didn't have the Hunger Games. We watched as people were scrambling and carrying these suitcases of money and flying to this place or that place to buy swabs, to get ventilators and all the other things that we knew that we needed, in those early days.

0:32:29.4 LL: We were really able to focus on other crucial issues like making sure that our healthcare system didn't collapse. Making sure that our vulnerable residents, our seniors, our homeless and others had the care that they needed. Making sure that our healthcare workers and our self first responders who are out there on the frontlines every single day were protected and had what they needed. But it was a real lesson on how do we create something out of whole cloth when historically we have all relied upon the federal government to do the work?

0:33:07.4 BM: Yeah good lesson that the cavalry's not coming.

0:33:09.8 LL: The calvary was not coming.

0:33:11.6 BM: It's up to us to solve this problem. One thing, Mayor Lightfoot, I wanna follow up on, because you mentioned earlier, the importance of communication and meeting people where they are and getting on social media. There were these viral memes during COVID of you looking very sternly on people who were out in gatherings. And it became kind of a funny thing. You know, it'd be these famous Chicago landmarks of Mayor Lightfoot standing there looking rather stern, and then get to, like, by the Michael Jordan statue and famous Chicago landmarks, that diner in the Nighthawks painting in the Chicago Institute of Arts. Was your team behind those or were they truly viral?

0:33:50.4 LL: So they really kind of rose up organically, but we loved it and really leaned into it. We made this whole series of stay home, save lives videos that really kind of arose from the creativity of Chicago artists, graphic artists. And then we, of course, created a few of our own. But the vast majority were people in our city who needed, frankly, some relief. Being super creative and using, as you said, a lot of Chicago iconography to communicate the message that. And frankly, I viewed it as a tribute to the work that we were doing, that they felt like I, as the leader of the city, could keep them safe.

0:34:35.3 BM: Yeah, it was a really effective message, I thought, because they were kind of funny, they were kind of light hearted. But it was about a very serious topic and it sent an important message. So I thought they really worked in a way.

0:34:47.1 CH: I thought they were great.

0:34:48.3 BM: I would chuckle every time I saw one. But rather than a a stern warning, they brought, I don't know, a little happiness.

0:34:55.7 LL: Well, they really started... And I'll peel back the curtain a little bit when we figured out that we really needed to separate. And that was not true early on. If you look at the early parts of the pandemic, we were all standing together. We weren't wearing masks. Nobody was talking about social distancing, except apparently Jenny Durkan. But the vast majority of us are like, okay, this is serious. But we were continuing on with our lives when we realized, oh, no, if you're in large groups, particularly indoors, unmasked you, it's going to be a massive problem. So we have our beautiful lakefront. And I remember in my office I had cameras that I could look at different parts of the city. And the lakefront I had just gone out and said, folks, I know you love the lakefront, but you got to stay home. You got to stay off the lakefront. We're very concerned, blah, blah, blah. And I said what I said. I went back into my office, and I looked at the cameras that were focused on the lakefront. And it happened to be an unusually warm day, probably in March. And it was... People were out there.

0:36:03.6 LL: They were rollerblading. They were walking their dogs. They were sunning themselves. And I hit the roof. And so I gathered the lakefront aldermen, the city council people together, and I said, we've got to shut this down. And I know this is going to be a hardship, but from north to south, we close off the lakefront. And so the first meme that came out was me standing with my little folder of my notes at a press conference, but in front of a police barrier that says close or something to that effect. And that's then when it really kind of took off.

0:36:38.0 JD: Yeah.

0:36:38.2 BM: Well, those are funny if you haven't seen them just Google Mayor Lightfoot memes Covid shut down Chicago, and you'll find some really funny ones. All right, so you've got the Covid-19 pandemic raging, and then suddenly we get the murder of George Floyd, and that leads to yet another crisis, because people, understandably, were very angry, and it resulted in protests across the country and even civil unrest in some cities, including yours. And so what was that experience like? And in particular, we heard that you both have backgrounds in law enforcement as federal prosecutors. How did that background in law enforcement inform your decisions that you were making during the violence that ensued following the death of George Floyd? We'll start with Mayor Lightfoot this time.

0:37:30.0 LL: It was an incredibly, incredibly difficult time. We were just starting to feel some breathing room from the height of the pandemic. And in fact, on June 3rd of 2020, we were planning to really reopen the city, to really get rid of some of the social distancing bans, open up our bars and restaurants. And then this horrible murder happens in Minneapolis that truly ignited a fire all across the world. We were following it, of course, and each night in Minneapolis was worse than the next. And then we started seeing this outcry and protest popping up in other places across the country. And then eventually it spread to a number of places across the world. We had not experienced anything like this in Chicago in anybody's memory. Following the assassination of Martin Luther King, the west side of Chicago, there were riots, there were arsons, but this was something that was all over the city all at once every day for weeks. I have such graphic memories of being in our command center at our 911 center and seeing the video monitors from across our city of people not just peaceful protesting. We could have handled that, but it was like a three legged stool.

0:39:05.9 LL: The peaceful protests would get hijacked by people who clearly came to confront and fight with the police. I've been in protest march in my 62 plus years, but I never brought a bat, a tire iron, a frozen water bottle full of urine. I never brought other instruments to provoke violence and danger. And we were seeing that every day in different areas of our city. That was a very different set of circumstances. And of course, because we've got the infamous Trump Hotel, it became a focal point of the protest. People wanted to get to that hotel, they wanted to be inside of it and make a statement. And so ironically, shielding and protecting that property and not devolving into chaos because frankly, I was fearful if we let that hotel go up for grabs, what was Trump going to do to our city? What was he going to do in terms of sending in the military? And he had already started threatening that that's what his plan was. So that also became really ground zero for protests. But I will say I think we saw not just the garden variety anarchists, not just people who were upset with the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer.

0:40:33.7 LL: We had coordinated efforts by people that I think are outside of our city because they were monitoring our police communications in ways that the garden variety anarchists isn't doing that. They were prepositioning weapons to use in the protests. They were using very sophisticated hand signals. That was something different. And the interesting thing is, and I don't know if Jenny experienced this in Seattle, it was happening in the same way in cities across the country, in DC in Atlanta, in Denver, in New Orleans, in LA. That wasn't... You have to have some real sophistication to be able to unleash that. And that happened all across the summer. Of course we were talking to the FBI and the DHS and you know, they gave us no answers. They still have never given us any answers. I'm not a big conspiracy theorist, but I do believe that that was foreign actors in our city intending to create chaos and disruption. Not a surprise it was happening during a summer leading into a national election, but trying to manage that at the local level. I said to you in our pre-call, I ended up doing things that I felt were absolutely essential for public safety. That never would have occurred to me. The necessity of doing.

0:42:03.2 LL: Imposing a curfew. I would never have thought of that. Calling in the National Guard. I'm a kid that grew up down the block, down the street from Kent State. I had a very clear vision of the National Guard, and it wasn't positive, but we were getting overrun by the constant citywide experience. A protest getting hijacked in a way that I said. And the third leg of the stool was organized robbery crews that were coming in, hitting our various commercial strips, not just the high end strips down Michigan Avenue, but in our neighborhoods. The looting that happened during that time, on top of the protests, on top of the violence, was just something, frankly, that I hope we never experience experience again as a country.

0:43:00.7 BM: How about you, Mayor Durkan? You've got law enforcement background, dealing with another example in Seattle, a great deal of violence and civil unrest. How did you handle that?

0:43:11.5 JD: So I would agree with everything that Lori said is. And I don't think we can disconnect the pandemic from what we saw after George Floyd. I think that the murder was awful, but the rage that was released was also manifestation of people being locked in, afraid and desperate for two, three months. And they suddenly had a legitimate reason why they could go outside and be with the people that they had kindred spirits with. And in the history of our city, we'd never seen this many spontaneous protests at one time, and many of them peaceful. We had one silent march across Seattle that over 65,000 people turned out. And so I think that looking at this retrospectively, what we have to figure out is how do we as a society in the moment, I'm not sure anyone had the tools to stop this tsunami because it had all the factors that Lori just said. But we will see more isolated cases of that as we have different crisis in our country. And learning the lessons to say, okay, how do we make sure that we can both protect legitimate protest, let people be out of their houses in ways that are appropriate, but at the same time, we were still in full lockdown.

0:44:31.4 JD: And so it was hard for us to say, oh you have a right to protest, the First Amendment right. But at the same time, we're very concerned that suddenly you have 65,000 people who are marching together. And we started seeing outbreaks and isolated. So I think the contours of all this, you just have to communicate as much as you can. We did some things right, we did some things wrong. And we're also facing different from any other time in our country, all of this was happening at a time when the way people communicate and how they digest information has changed so much. And people, during the pandemic, that's where we first learned about Netflix in many ways. And things like, people were binge watching shows, they were glued to social media. They were liking things. They were getting outraged with all their friends about what they saw. Perfect example, we had one event in Seattle during the protest that there was about 14,000 complaints made against the city of Seattle police officers for their actions during the protest. Most of them related to one incident.

0:45:38.9 JD: And the incident did not happen, as social media said. In fact, the officer who was first identified by thousands of complaints was not the person who had done the thing, but it just... It fed in a way that no one did. And so I think you just have to learn those lessons. I'll tell one more part about it that I think is really important is we ended up having a protest, nightly protest that was violent with protesters and police. The ACLU went to court, got a court order on what the police could do in terms of clearing protesters out, the tools they could use, the methods they can use. We get that court order, and the next day we decided to take the barriers down, let people march, and then we got our occupation zone, and we had an active federal court order on what the police could and could not do, which in many ways meant we had to let them stay. And so we see on Fox News that suddenly Fox News is running fabricated photos of what's happening. They took pictures of Minneapolis fires. They superimposed people and said it was Seattle. Shocking.

0:46:50.0 JD: But it led to a real acceleration of what was that going to look like and how do you respond as a city? Our president at the time responded by saying, I'm going to send the military in if you don't fix it. And we'll talk about that a little bit later.

0:47:05.3 LL: And also said, if there's looting, there's shooting. He encouraged law enforcement to shoot people who were looting.

0:47:13.8 BM: Well, why don't we turn to that? Because We've got about 10 minutes of our time. And so we're going to open it up to questions. And I wanna ask you about how you both dealt with that. You both found yourselves targeted by President Trump. He's back in power. Sanctuary cities issues, violent crime, lockdown orders, all of these kinds of things led to direct targeting from President Trump, which in turn, I believe, led to other threats and harassment you receive from members of the Public responding to those kinds of things. We'll start with Mayor Durkan. What was that like? And how do you do your job when you are the target of constant threats and harassment?

0:47:56.7 JD: It was not on my bingo card when I ran for mayor that there would be this pandemic protests and riots and then your own president singling you out as a leader in a city for taking actions. And I, like Lori, hope we never have that perfect storm again. Because for example, when the president had tweeted that he was going to send in the military, I reached out to city attorney, the governor, the attorney general. We had been meeting regularly on different stuff to say, okay, what's our plan here? And everyone was pretty much convinced that it was just rhetoric. My view is if we had military showing up on the streets of Seattle, it really would have accelerated division. People would come to be at the fight. We saw that every time there was some announcement or pronouncement, people would come to join the fight and became this us versus them thing. Well...

0:48:51.4 LL: Look at Portland.

0:48:52.0 JD: Look at Portland. Every night I went and bought Secretary of Defense Esper's book just to see if he said anything about Seattle. Well, not very well reported the night that the president said, clean it up or I'm sending the troops, the next morning, I'm sure after watching the Fox News fake photos, he called the Pentagon and ordered them to send troops into Seattle hard and fast. It led to an Oval Office meeting with Secretary Esper, General Milley and Attorney General Barr where they came up, they talked him out of it and they gave him a compromise.

0:49:30.7 JD: That compromise was basically a two legged stool, not very stable. One of it was, we will just get federal law enforcement to go in instead. And that happened in Portland where suddenly Department of Homeland Security officers were going in in fake camo, unmarked cars and just pulling people off the streets, which led to greater riots. And we'll declare Seattle and some other cities anarchist jurisdictions and take away all their federal funding, which was unlawful. But it shows you that unprecedented, you have to take these threats seriously. But I think if I were to do things over again, I think there was too much personal animosity and not talking high enough in principles. And I'm hoping that in this next administration it doesn't become everything just pitted against the president, but you can actually appeal to the people of your city and the country in ways that makes it much more about values and principles.

0:50:34.3 BM: How about you Mayor Lightfoot, you were same, targeted by President Trump. Threats and harassment from members of the Public as a result. What was that like for you? And any insights gained?

0:50:45.6 LL: No. I mean, it was a pretty awful time. Regardless of what you think about the individual holding the office, the President of the United States has the largest megaphone in the world. There's a reason why, when we talk about it as being the most powerful person in the world and blowing that dog whistle of hate and using me by name, using my city by name, the level of death threats that I got during that time period went up exponentially. And when you give space for that kind of hate by the actions that you take, the words that you use, people will take that seriously. I had people come to my house with guns. I had people calling and threatening to come and kill me and my family and my staff at City Hall. I still have police protection, particularly when I'm in the city of Chicago for a reason. And that's because of that time during the summer of 2020, and particularly because it was clear it was a campaign strategy. I mean, targeting Jenny, targeting me. Muriel Bowser of DC, Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta. There was a common thread amongst us, but not caring about what the consequences of that were was really, really difficult for us to manage.

0:52:14.1 LL: But I will also say it was a very schizophrenic relationship with President Trump. I didn't communicate with him directly that often, but when I did, it was like the guy who was using all manner of verbiage to call me incompetent and stupid and everything else on the phone he was like, oh, Lori, good to talk to you. You're doing a great job in Chicago, blah, blah. I'm like, who is this person? Because it was literally like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But the thing that I worry about now is not really caring or comprehending the consequences of what the word of the President of the United States means. Any impact on individual people. And I think we're already seeing that play out in the context of the threats of mass deportation. I worry a lot about the children of parents who maybe are subject to those deportations, and their fear about coming home from school, coming home from work or events to an empty house because their parents have been taken away. And what you see is just no care or concern for what that means to individual people's lives. We had to deal with that a lot in 2019, when we were going through a very similar experience to what we're experiencing now in 2025.

0:53:46.1 LL: But I wasn't so much worried for me personally, but I was worried, of course, for my family, I was worried about my staff who was with me. And there's no way in the world that I'm not riding around in an armored vehicle. I didn't have 30 people of police around me. When I would travel and go out in community, I still had to do my job. But you never knew the person who hand you shook is that the person who's coming for me? I can't say that that thought wasn't permanently planted in my mind, because it was.

0:54:21.8 JD: Yeah, I had a similar experience with, the level of... When the president would tweet, the level of death threats and harassment would go up. We also had, because of the very active left, I became a symbol because I was not for defunding the police and had constant vandalism of my home, threats. And it became, at times I had to wear ballistic vests under my suits because that would be an event. They would be worried that there might be an attempt. There was actual death threats against family members. We had round the clock police protection. And my son was home from school. He had been a freshman in college, came home for spring break and suddenly he's stuck in his childhood bedroom. And then all this stuff starts. So you're like, Lori, you think about it, and the bigger picture is we have to bring that level of rhetoric down. We've seen and very cognizant of what happened on January 6th. But I think we also have to make sure that that level of threat isn't on any part of the spectrum because we are discouraging people from running for office and holding those positions.

0:55:28.8 JD: And a lot of people, they'll take it for themselves. Hardly anyone will do it if they think their family is going to be put in that position. And so I think it's going to be a really important thing for us to call it out on both sides and to join, to say certain things, just cross the line.

0:55:46.7 LL: If I can just add during this time period, we were unified across the country as mayors. We were talking to each other to figure out what someone was doing that worked. We were talking to each other to provide support. And I will say that was a really scary time for me and my family. But as scary as it was for me, Jenny had it so much worse. So much worse. People were awful to her in Seattle. And it's just not right for the reasons that Jenny says, but just human being to human being, right? You sign up for criticism. That goes with the territory. You Sign up for the fact that... Just by virtue of the fact that you're now the person in the position of power, there's a dedicated group of folks on the right and the left that are not going to like you because they're wired to hate all authority. But what you don't sign up for is someone literally doing what they could to try to put you in a situation where your life could be at risk, where your kids are afraid to be in their home. Nobody signs up for that and it's just not right.

0:57:02.2 JD: Tell you, move to a little bit lighter topic 'cause I agree with all that. So recently one of the former mayors of Seattle who had been three term mayor passed away. And he was the mayor for a lot of my childhood. And we had a memorial service. Great guy. One of the people he was mayors with came and he was mayor during when we opened up with China. And so the State Department got this group of mayors together and they were going to send them to China and then bring China mayors to the US. So they have to go to the State Department first, learn all the protocol, never talk about personal lives, don't ask personal questions, don't talk about politics, whatever. Well, our mayor, he's a great guy, was not a rule follower. So he's at this one dinner with someone and he's the mayor of the city and he's talking to him and he says, so what'd you do before you were mayor? Well, unbeknownst to him, this particular mayor had been imprisoned as part of the Cultural Revolution and was in and out. He goes, well, I was in prison and he was my friend. This mayor says, oh, that's funny. Usually in the United States you're a mayor, then you go to prison. And the mayor from China said, if I'd known what it was like to be mayor, I would have stayed in prison.

0:58:20.0 BM: Well, in all seriousness, let me ask you one final question before we open it up to questions from the room. I'm sure there are things that you both did that you're proud of in your work as mayor. But we've also heard about the burdens of leading, especially in times of crises, and all the things that you had to deal with. And so I think it would be important for these students to hear. In your view, is public service worth it?

0:58:44.3 JD: I think public service is absolutely worth it. But you got to go in eyes wide open and judge for yourself and for your families what type of public service is the right thing for the right time. And I think we all of us, everyone in this room, everyone watching it. I think we owe it to our communities, our cities, and our country to really be advocates for you can disagree without demonizing. Just because you disagree with someone, they don't become an enemy. And we've got to get back to a place where we can have actual discourse and not just demonize and make people the enemy. Because people will choose not to serve and then it becomes self selective on who will serve. And it may not be the best people we want serving us.

0:59:31.0 LL: Yeah, I would say 100%. It's worth it. You ask us at the outset what our journey was and why we chose to go. And fundamentally, for me, it was about trying to really make a difference in the quality of people's lives, particularly folks who look like me were growing up in circumstances that I grew up in as a mayor. And again, I'm obviously 1000% biased, but no place else can you have such immediate impact on someone's life. You can conceive an idea, you can write the policy, you can then see it executed. And you know right away, is it working? Is it not working because you're that close to the people who you're trying to serve? It's a very unique but very amazing opportunity to serve. And as we've all said, there's lots of different ways in which you can serve. You don't have to be the elected official and go through the campaign and raise the money and be the focal point of mostly criticism, not a lot of praise. So I would encourage anyone who has that penchant for service to really think about how you can contribute to the greater good.

1:00:47.4 LL: But you got to know your why. And particularly if you're thinking about, oh, I wanna run for elected office, really understand why. It's not worth it if your goal is just to have the title or power, because it is a grind. It takes a toll. But for me, even with the four years of real, real challenging times that we went through as a city, that I went through as a mayor, I wouldn't have traded that experience for anything in the world. It was the best.

1:01:20.2 JD: And mayors are the best. Just one last analogy. One of the mayors, I won't say who it is, but he said elected politics, the US Senate, it's the country club, the US House, it's the high school gym. And what mayors do, that's Fight Club, baby.

1:01:41.0 BM: All right, well, very good. Well, why don't we turn to our student questions now?

1:01:47.7 Daniel: We have a microphone available.

1:01:51.5 LL: We have a gentleman down here in the front.

1:01:58.0 BM: We'll probably need it, but it's on its way.

1:02:04.1 Speaker 6: Well, first off, let me start by saying thank you very much for being here and thank you for your service in your respective cities. My question is about how to find latitude for movement, trying to accomplish policy goals in situations where your actions are constrained either by systems or by crises. Do either of you have any insights into what strategies worked for you, what you might do differently, and how you might apply that in the future?

1:02:32.7 LL: Yeah, I mean, I came into office as, again, to quote "Chicago polls", as somebody that nobody sent, meaning I didn't come up through the party system. I was in some ways a very unlikely candidate. But I came to disrupt the status quo. And so you realize pretty quickly as a leader, you can have all the grand visions in the world, but where the rubber meets the road is how it gets implemented at the grassroots level. And in Chicago, we had a long history of machine politics. People getting hired because they were able to walk a precinct, sell fundraising tickets, and not necessarily because of their expertise and commitment to public service. And even though the machine of the Richard Daley era had long been dismantled, that muscle memory within city government was still very much present. So what I would say is you've got to get buy in, not just at the commissioner level, but a couple layers down where the people are actually doing the work and you've got to hold them accountable. You've got to make sure they understand what the mission is and then ask questions because we had 30,000 employees.

1:03:58.9 LL: It's real easy to get lost in a department when you got that many people. Other cities like Los Angeles and New York, multiples of that. But I wanted to make sure that I was present in those departments in those areas of the city that made a difference. For example, in infrastructure. One of the things that I knew from my own tours across the city as infrastructure dollars were not meted out evenly. Again, in black and brown neighborhoods. The quality of the roads, the quality of the sidewalks, the alleys, basic things that really are the manifestations of government for people, those resources were not evenly distributed in those neighborhoods. I wanted that to change. In fact, started kind of barking out orders, if you will, during the transition because I'm driving around parts of the city that look like the third world in terms of the amount of investment that has been made. You can't be a world class city and have neighborhoods that are literally where the infrastructure is crumbling. So that's just one example but you've got to make sure you've got the right people in the top position in city departments. But you've also got to make sure that those people who are the executors down from the commissioner level, know that you really mean business about the things that you wanna change and the investments that you wanna make, the priorities that you have.

1:05:24.4 LL: And there's nothing... I'd show up in city departments and word would get out pretty quickly. But I did that for a reason, to let them know that I was a mayor who cared, who wanted to set the employees up for success. But you can't just demand. You've also got to give. So we did a lot of things that weren't sexy, that were never going to make the national news. But to improve the quality of life of the people who were employees in the city. For example, we implemented paid medical leave for anybody who came, who had a baby, whether it was a live birth, whether it was adoption, whether it was foster care for men and for women. 12 weeks, no questions asked. That was historic for the city of Chicago. Other places in the country that probably had been in place for a number of years. We had a bunch of issues regarding salary compression, meaning unionized workers were making more than the people who were supervising them. So we were losing really talented people because they couldn't make enough money. We started instituting some changes in that. Again, that's not going to win you a lot of praise in the media.

1:06:38.8 LL: But for the operation of city government to keep and retain and attract great talent, you had to make sure that you were doing those things that made a difference in their lives as well. If people are unhappy, it shows up in the way that they give service to residents.

1:06:56.0 JD: It's a great question. And I think I learned when I was US attorney a lesson that I hadn't... Even though I'd been around government forever, I was doing my first meetings with everyone, and there was an assistant US attorney who'd been in a position of power for a very long time that I tried to meet with everyone that clearly was entrenched in old thinking. So I wanted to talk to him about opportunities and whether he could do something different. And I'll never forget, he just folded his arms and looked at me and said, US attorneys. I've seen them come, I've seen them go. You're not going to be here that long. It struck me, and I thought, when I was mayor, there is a huge impetus to solve the problem that's on the front page today that drives so much energy in city government. And you have to be super disciplined to think, okay, yeah, you do have to solve a lot of those problems because that's where you're going to get your credibility and legitimacy. But if you're not thinking long term and durable programs, they will fade as soon as you're gone.

1:08:00.7 LL: That's right.

1:08:00.8 JD: And so I really focus coming in. What were those things for me that were really important that I thought could provide durable change? And I think one of the ones I'm most proud of, besides how we handled the pandemic, is I came in and instituted a program to give two years free college to every Seattle public school graduate and then backed it up with money for transportation, books, fees, and then got in the public schools are a separate governmental entity, but got their buy in by us providing the money for them to also have counselors in those schools to get the kids ready and with the community colleges, counselors, when they landed, to keep them there. And it was remarkably successful. And to this day, that program is the most successful in our region for having kids stay in and complete the time. So I think thinking about durable change and how you get it enough embedded and enough support from other entities that it will last.

1:09:00.0 LL: And Jenny will tell you offline where the headstone is of the joker who folded his arms and said, I'll not last.

1:09:08.4 JD: Seen them come, seen them go.

1:09:10.1 BM: Good. Other questions?

1:09:14.7 Daniel: Okay, there's one that's come in from the Internet, which is how can local governments overcome the fact that during a crisis, those most affected are often the least able to ask for or leverage assistance?

1:09:28.5 LL: Great question.

1:09:33.0 JD: It's 100% accurate. And I think one of the things about being a mayor is you are so proximate. People see you at the grocery store and they tell you what they're thinking. They see you wherever you are. And so if you're doing your job right, you're out in those communities that are the least able to do it and you're thinking across the board on how do you serve them as government. So when the crisis hits, hopefully you've built up those relationships and those muscle memories and you make it a priority because you understand that that's where services need to be delivered. I'll give two quick examples and I'll give it to Lori is one of the most successful programs that the city of Seattle's had over decades is its program for senior citizens. And we serve a number of senior citizens, but we delivered that services almost solely through these senior service centers that we created across town, people could go and they'd get classes, exercise classes, but they'd also get a hot meal every day. So when Covid came and we decided we had to shut things down and we had to shut down order, we had to close all our senior centers, we suddenly realized we have thousands of seniors who will be shut in, who will have no society and who will miss a hot meal.

1:10:52.0 JD: And so we were able, through other relationships we had in the city to get this program that had been a culinary program for people experiencing homelessness to train them. But they had to close their restaurant, they prepared hot meals. We got the Seattle Seahawks to give us their big kitchen so we could socially distance to do it. And we got Uber and Lyft to deliver the meals. And so you just have to think who is going to lose out the most in these situations and how do we get services to them that they need?

1:11:23.7 LL: No. I think Jenny is 100% right. True. The only other thing I would add, well, a couple things is it's really important that you are actively seeking feedback from community to build that infrastructure, whether it's through advisory committees. But the other thing I would caution is there are a lot of people who are out there who self appoint themselves as speaking for the community. You've got to be able to separate the people that are real from the people that are not so real. And making sure that you're actually getting more of a 360 view of what's happening on the ground in particular communities. And I don't know any other way to do that than to be there yourself to make sure that the people on your staff are out there in communities as well, so that you're hearing real time what people's pain points are. But if you don't do that, you could miss the boat. Because the person who's a self appointed person may be saying, oh yeah, we need this, this and this. When in fact that's not where the community's head and heart is at all. And you get burned by that once or twice, you figure out how to get a lot smarter. Other questions or comments? Yes.

1:13:00.6 Speaker 7: So old alumni asking a question. Yeah, I'm kind of curious what your thoughts are and what you would say to your respective community leaders in light of climate and environmental sustainability and climate actions. Covid, obviously a crisis. I think the experts, including those here at University of Michigan now say it's. Not a matter of if it's a matter of when. And it will continue to get worse. And they are catastrophic at times. What would you say to the current leaders, what they need to do to be "ready"?

1:13:32.0 JD: That is such a great question. And I think it gets eclipsed by so much of the other issues that are so forceful. But it's real, it's happening. It's coming to you. And I'll give you an example. In Seattle we had, when I was mayor, among the other things we had to deal with was there was huge fire seasons now in Washington state where just tracts, acres and acres and acres of forest would burn. And in Canada, and depending on where the winds, we would have weeks where the smoke was so bad in Seattle from these fires that our air quality was worse than Beijing and people couldn't be indoors and so we had to set up fresh air centers. And so you think about these crises at cities, you see what's happened in Los Angeles, and people can argue about what's the response, the right response, but those fires coming now because of the winds and how climate has changed, it will come either by way of fires or by droughts or by rains and floods. And so I think be ready. It's real.

1:14:51.1 LL: Yeah, I would say it's not if or not when. It's now. We're seeing manifestations of it literally nonstop, whether it's the incredible force of hurricanes in the hurricane season being extended, obviously the wildfires, which we're all watching with horror in Chicago, we don't have earthquakes, we don't have wildfires, but we're very concerned about what's going on with our lake in extreme weather. Lack of rain, lack of this or that. So it is very real. I think a couple of things. One is, I'm a big believer, and you've got to lead by example. You can't wag your finger at private industry or the community, if you're not willing to step up and lead yourself. So we did a number of things. One of the things around sustainability that I'm most proud of is by 2030, all of Chicago city electricity needs are going to be met by solar. 70% is coming from a solar farm that was built in the southern part of the state, and the other 30% we'll buy on the market. But you got to lead by example. We continue to do things to retrofit city buildings to make sure that they are as green as possible.

1:16:19.0 LL: That then gives you, frankly, I think the moral conviction to then go to the private sector and say, you got to be a partner with us in this. But it is really real. And there's a lot of innovation at the local level that's happening nationally as a result of organizations like what Jenny talked about before. So there's a tremendous amount and body of best practices that can help a variety of different mayors. Meaning if you're a big city, small city, urban, rural, there's a lot that can be done, but we've got to be prepared. And I believe that there's things that can happen at the local level through innovation and partnerships that isn't going to be dependent upon the waterfall of dollars coming from the federal government. Don't get me wrong, that helps a lot, but it's not the only way that you can create sustainable, meaningful change to be a participant in solving the climate crisis that we are in right now.

1:17:25.3 BM: In light of the current administration, some of the new executive orders that are doing things like rolling back support for wind farms and other kinds of things, is it cities, maybe, that we need to look for too, for help? You mentioned, Mayor Durkan, that you were part, part of a group, a committee of cities that are working on climate change. Can you tell us a little bit about that work?

1:17:44.9 JD: Yeah, and I think it's great. I mean, all that's old is new again. So C40 mayors, it grew up largely because of the insights of mayors globally, but also, I will say, of the different leaders I've met over my lifetime, and I've been really fortunate to meet presidents, heads of state, this Mike Bloomberg is one of the most brilliant leaders and committed people I've met. And so he funded the C40 mayors, which rose because the US withdrew from the Paris climate accords and thought that by the synergistic actions of cities across the globe, you could get almost or more of the same response. And I think that you will see that resurgence again. Whereas the Biden administration have been very active in that space. But I think having those ties and just connected to each other for me to hear what works in Seattle is very different than what has to work in Indonesia or in Africa or in Europe. And solving those problems is so important. But we also remember that that the Southern hemisphere is disadvantaged by economically and by climate, and if we don't solve for that, we'll have so many other issues, whether it's climate refugees or the like. So I think that it's something we have to solve for. And if we're not going to get the leadership from the federal government. We're going to have to do it. And I think it's going to be the coalition of cities again.

1:19:14.8 LL: Yeah. Going local is going to be where it's at. And I think certainly part of it is we're in response to what we're all anticipating over the next four years. But I don't think it has to be a bad thing. I really think cities, which are the incubators for great ideas, are going to be where we see a tremendous amount of innovation, growth, creativity. Going local is going to be where it's at.

1:19:43.9 BM: Well, we probably have time for one last question. Anyone in the room or Daniel online? Why don't we take one in the room? Yeah, sure.

1:19:55.9 Speaker 8: Right. Well, thank you both for coming in today. And you both briefly touched on the wildfires going on in Los Angeles. I'll leave this pretty broad. I was wondering if there was any advice you would give to both Karen Bass as a mayor going through this crisis right now, and then also Gavin Newsom and how best he can coordinate with Karen Bass and helping the people of LA?

1:20:16.6 JD: That's a great question. Look, I don't envy them where they were. And every mayor has been caught at some point out of town when a crisis happens and that becomes the issue. But I will say that it's really important not to point fingers at each other and to have common solutions and to communicate as much as you can, including what you don't know or what you can't do. And I think that at the beginning of the wildfires, we saw too much disjointedness on that front, which left an opening for the critics to say, it's your fault, Newsom, or it's your fault this. And so then people were talking about how to assign fault rather than talking about how do we solve it. And I compare that in the pandemic, I mean, we did daily, sometimes three times a day, press conferences with public health me leaders to deliver.

1:21:13.5 JD: During the pandemic, I met with every broadcast TV station on a weekly basis, every print journalist. I was on the PBS radio in Seattle every week just... And phone in to communicate, communicate, communicate. Because if you don't, you're going to leave an opening. Now you're going to get the contrary messages anyways. So if I were to say one thing, it would be don't have the big press conference where you have 50 different people who are all coming to the microphone. At least at some point you have to be standing shoulder to shoulder with the governor, the mayor, the fire People, and most of it should be the fire people, because that's what people wanna know about. Is the fire ever going to get out? How's my house? When do I get back in? And knowing who needs to talk is part of that, too.

1:22:05.6 LL: Yeah, I'm always hesitant to give advice to sitting elected officials. And Karen Bass is a personal friend. But I would guess, I would say this. She and the governor have to be on the same page, period, full stop. I'm sure, as Jenny alluded to, and I certainly know in my case, during the pandemic and other crises where it was critical that state and local government were coordinating, the governor and I didn't always agree. In fact, many times we disagreed. We're very different people, we have very different approaches. But I just felt, frankly, looking across the country at other examples, that our residents deserved us to be adults. And that meant coordinated communications and letting people know that we were competently working diligently night and day on their behalf. So there can't be any space. That's issue one. That also applies to city department heads. I will tell you, I was astonished that the fire chief in LA, I will say a little bit got led into, but walked right through the door of, yeah, we don't have enough resources, yeah, our budget was cut, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

1:23:31.6 LL: Who does that help in that moment when fires are raging to create a political firestorm, no pun intended, by saying, I got screwed and this is about me. That person made this moment about thousands of people whose lives are completely upended about her and her competence. So if I were to give any advice, I'd say I hope she pulled that person aside and had a very stern conversation about communication, about mission, and that it's not about her. And we'll be interested to see what her tenure is after the dust clears. But you've got to get people on the same page and communicate. You've got to demonstrate competence and leadership. And now what you've also got to be planning behind the scenes is what's the recovery? So, for example, in Chicago, when we were at the height of the pandemic, by April, I was thinking about recovery and we started standing up working groups to look, to talk about, well, what does that look like? Who's most impacted, not just from a dollars and cents perspective, but social emotional as well. So we launched the first recovery plan of any city in the country, because we started thinking about it even while we were still in the height of the pandemic.

1:25:05.4 LL: So I would hope that what's happening already in LA, because this is a catastrophe of such catastrophic proportions, it's going to take a long time to get people situated. How do you streamline getting people information about insurance help, about FEMA help? What do you do? My aunt and uncle live in Altadena. Their house was burned to the ground. There's nothing left, as was their neighbors and everybody around them. Three quarters of that city is gone. And how do you start to think about the monies that are going to be needed to do the rebuilding? Particularly if you're probably not getting a lot of help from the federal government. How do you rally the business community? How do you rally construction companies? Make sure that you solve for supply chain issues. There needs to be a team that is thinking about that right now as they still manage the fires that are still raging. So being able to operate at multiple levels, having your team divided up in a way that they're communicating with each other, but that they have different things that they're worrying about on a daily basis, that's going to be critically important.

1:26:23.0 LL: But it's heartbreaking to see the level of devastation that has happened to not just the wealthy in Pacific Palisades, but the working class in places like Altadena, which I know well. I've been going there for 50 plus years, since I was a little girl. The losses there are just staggering.

1:26:49.7 JD: And I wanna add one thing to that is I would like us to get to a point where instead of during every crisis we focus on whose fault it is, we focus on the solution. And I'll use another example, New Orleans and the terrorist attack that happened there on New Year's Day. The whole bollards discussion was bollocks. I mean it was... I have tons of family who live there. My partners are living there most of the time taking care of someone. And anyone who has been to the French Quarter, you can't... And it's not like you can build a wall around it. It's a neighborhood where people live, there's bars, there's things people drive through there all the time. It's not like there's just one street. And those bollards, if you've ever been there, they are not as effective as the patrol car that was sitting there. You had a determined person who was going to ask. But that became the narrative for weeks on the news. Whose fault was the bollards weren't there? Why weren't there Ballards? We should have had bollards let's take care of people first. Fault is different than accountability. You need accountability in government, but what leaders need to do first is solve the problem and get through the problem.

1:28:02.8 LL: And let me just pick up on that because it, I think it adds a nuance to a conversation we had earlier about how do you communicate. One of my big takeaways is whenever there's a crisis, you've got to reach out to the media and not just the line reporters, the editors, the station or presidents, if you're talking about TV, to help educate them about what's happening. I think we did that very effectively through Covid, not as effectively in other crises. But thinking about this notion and reflex of whose fault is it? The whole if it bleeds, it leads. We're worried about clicks on a website. I think if you are constantly having a relationship with the hierarchy in media organizations and educating them about whatever the issue du jour is, you're going to get a fairer, I like to think you're going to get a fairer kind of reporting because they're going to be smarter, they're going to have access to information, and maybe you mitigate against the, well, somebody's got to be at fault here. That's got to be the storyline. No, it doesn't have to be. But if you... It's easy as an elected official in the middle of a crisis to get back in a defensive crouch, that's unavoidable.

1:29:34.9 LL: But again, just like we talked about, you got to build those relationships with the community when you're an elected official. The media is your community. And again, I think we had some successes with it. We had some failures with it. But reaching that middle ground, I think is critical, important.

1:29:51.7 BM: Well, thank you for that very good question. Thank you all for your great questions and thank you both for sharing your insights with us about leading during times of crisis. Please join me in thanking Mayor Durkan and Mayor Lightfoot.

1:30:10.6 JD: And also thanking Barb McQuade for being a great narrator and for the Ford School for having us here. Thank you.

1:30:16.9 CH: Thank you very much.