“Let there be no doubt: the state of our city is now better, safer and stronger.”

So said Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake yesterday in her State of the City address, an annual knockoff of the State of the Union speech that aims for presidential heft (a quote from Abraham Lincoln) and a lofty vision (“We will never stop dreaming big dreams”), all the while discoursing on the bottle tax, MadVac street sweepers and other nuts-and-bolts of local government.

The State-of speech was an invention of Martin O’Malley when he was Baltimore’s mayor. Today he’s Maryland’s governor and his younger brother, Peter O’Malley, is Rawlings-Blake’s chief of staff.

Because there is no rebuttal by an opposition party (there being nothing but Democratic Party officeholders in Baltimore), the speech is really a look at what’s on the minds of the mayor and her staff, a list of the initiatives they want to publicly embrace and, by omission, the issues they’re steering clear of.

Thus, the mayor cited the “forward momentum” of a decreasing crime rate and “new partnerships” forged between citizens and government, while proposing several modest actions, including expanding the free Charm City Circulator Bus, cleaning up retail districts with a small fleet of new MadVacs and instituting a two-cent-a-year (0.08%) reduction in Baltimore’s double-than-the-counties’ property tax rate.

As typical for such exercises, a lot of stardust was sprinkled and very few dollar signs attached to the proposals.

Growing the City

The mayor came across as commanding, calm and professional – and showed a spark of passion when discussing the dilapidated state of Baltimore schools.

She told her audience of City Council members, department heads and about 30 citizens on the upper balcony of the ornate Council chambers that she was totally focused on attracting 10,000 families to the city over the next 10 years. (Baltimore has lost a third of its population since 1960.)

To this end, she introduced to the audience Jessica Martin and Arthur Grace, who moved from Cecil County, and Vernon Brown, who came from Baltimore County, to buy homes in the city.

“Members of the Council, let’s welcome homeowners Vernon, Arthur and Jessica to Baltimore!” she declared.

In addition to attracting new residents, Rawlings-Blake said the city must “reduce the number of working families moving out, show them the hope that staying in Baltimore is worth it, and that it is in the best interest of their family.

“I believe that, because of the progress made, we can make that argument, and we can win it,” she concluded to more applause.

Enlarging on this theme, she ended the address, in a section titled “Just Getting Started,” by citing the aforementioned Martin O’Malley and his campaign to plaster black-and-white “Believe” signs everywhere in the city.

“Probably not since the Believe campaign have we seen this level of enthusiasm,” she declared of her Grow Baltimore initiative. “During every meeting I’ve had with business leaders, churches, community organizations, state officials and even the press, someone has a great suggestion.”

Avoiding the “Hot” Issues

Not mentioned in her address were issues messier to administer than encomiums to homeownership and safer communities.

This would include her administration’s reliance on PILOT and TIF tax breaks for developers, support of a new $100 million juvenile detention center, pursuit of a new promoter for the Grand Prix auto race, lack of structural reform of the city’s development arm, the Baltimore Development Corp., and her plan to close or privatize some of youth recreation centers,

Was she alluding to her fight over closing the rec centers (with City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young, among others) when she noted the importance of “saying no to other things that may make us feel good but are not as important to the cause [of growth]?” If so, the dig was subtle enough to be deniable.

Fixing the Schools

The big takeaway from the speech was her acknowledgment that the physical condition of city schools was as bad as critics – armed with school-children’s photos of their own beat-up classrooms, hallways and lavatories – have asserted.

“I’m truly embarrassed by the physical condition of some of our schools,” she said. “Too many without air conditioning to keep kids in the classroom on hot spring days, too few computer labs, too many with water fountains that you can’t drink from.

“Our kids deserve better. As a mother and as the mayor of this city, I’m not going to stand by and do nothing about it.”

But as in the case of property tax cuts – where the mayor’s plan is vastly more incremental than proposals by her recent mayoral opponents – her plan to fix the schools has been criticized as too meek.

Next week she said she will introduce a bill in the City Council to increase the city bottle tax from two cents to five cents. That would generate about $10 million a year in new revenues.

Dissing the Alonso Plan

Combined with a share of the city’s profits from a yet-unbuilt slots casino and savings from the school systems pension fund, a total of $23 million in new annual revenues will allow the schools to secure about $300 million in bonds for new construction and renovation.

The bottling industry opposes any tax increase. While the industry got the City Council (in a rare moment of mayoral defiance) to vote down a 4-cent tax two years ago, veteran City Councilman Robert Curran predicted yesterday that Rawlings-Blake had the votes to win passage of the 5-cent tax.

Her plan, however, doesn’t go enough for Andres Alonso, CEO of the city schools. He is pressing for combined city and state funds to leverage $1.2 billion in bonds – four times more than what the mayor wants.

While praising Alonso profusely during her address, the mayor cut down his plan, saying “it’s false to say we can borrow a billion dollars.” Twisting in the knife, she added: “If we’ve learned anything from the global crisis. . ., it’s that over-leveraging has serious risks.”

Alonso, who sat in the VIP section, gamely told reporters afterwards that Rawlings-Blake was making a “huge commitment” to school repairs and construction.

He also indicated that he would pursue his financing plan with the state regardless of her support.

Another person who has feuded with the mayor over school financing is Dr. Bishop Douglas I. Miles, co-chair of the interfaith group Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD). The group has called for $2.8 billion in school building financing.

In the small world of Baltimore, it was Rev. Miles who happened to give the invocation before her address.

Schools, of course, were never mentioned as he read from the scriptures and called for wisdom and compassion from the city’s leaders. He then sat behind the mayor and quietly took notes while she talked.

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FULL TEXT OF MAYOR’S ADDRESS.