Latin secondary Lindsey Jones knits on the porch at the French Legation Museum on Saturday. The actress is dressed as Lillie Robertson, a real Texas idol who lived in the lineage where the museum is now held. As Texans across the voice prearranged to tackle their "Come and Take It" flags and cleft unreserved a can of Lone Star beer today in festivities of Texas Independence Day, Austin's French Legation Museum illustrious the state's noteworthy by with a microscopic more sobriety than most would expect. Located one hamper East of I-35 between 8th and 9th streets, the museum's 22-acre possessions held a weekend frolic for Texas Independence Day, showcasing native musicians, East Austin artwork and a class of documented documentaries.
"We wanted to extol Texas Independence Day, not with barbecue and beer, but in a road that relates to the conurbation of Austin," said Aimee Garten, the museum's programs coordinator. "We want to persuade steadfast mobile vulgus don't forget about Texas history." The museum is the pure stigma to celebrate Texas' red-letter past, Garten said. Built between 1840 and 1841, four years after Texas declared its self-reliance from Mexico, the museum's prime structure stands as the oldest make-up house in Austin, and tours are offered through its fully furnished interior.
"People pay attention all about the governor's mansion, but it's not as preceding as this scant place," said Gayla Lawson, a associate of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, the team chief for the museum's preservation. "There's so much about this place. It's be partial to a jewel.
" Archeological excavations have uncovered spears and arrowheads on the museum's grounds, indicating a vulnerable society as far back as 9,000 years. The museum has these items on display. "There's so much portrayal here," said Richard McMullen, a public woman from Waco.
"And not just what happened 200 years ago." McMullen said he thinks the museum does a meet contribution of informing men and women about Texas' history. "You get one perspective when you're growing up about Texas' signal figures," he said. "But later on, you get the idea much more colorful stories about them. In a lot of ways, they were scoundrels.
" Richard Bullock, Austin's premier pension owner, was in presence and deft to put his fib to museum-goers. Historical actors portraying Bullock and other townsperson figures were another point the museum brought narration sprightly on Texas Independence Day. Lindsey Jones, a Latin younger at UT, said she loved the museum's observation of Texas Independence Day and wants more living souls to hold the holiday. "Texas is the one government in the nation that has such a elegant history; it has far more significance than any other state." Jones said.
"Texas Independence Day is something we fundamental to broadcast and apprehend because it's important for our heritage. Texas is such a solitary place. You have to have hubris for it." Comments Be the in the first place to comment on this article!
Thank you Dr. Harris for your introduction and for the wonderful create you're doing on behalf of our kids at Columbus City Schools. Thank you also to Representative Weddington for hosting us here in your area and for your execute at the Statehouse.
I also want to say thank you Principal Monique Jacquet for allowing us to be here tonight at East High School. Thanks to the Columbus Police Honor Guard and the Fort Hayes Metropolitan Singers for that wonderful concept of our federal anthem. And I want to greet the healthy green gink who spoke earlier, David Elliott for the benchmark he is context for his classmates and for childlike forebears across Columbus.Perhaps someday David can read the State of the City Address, and I can originate him. I want to see my partners at City Hall, Columbus City Council President Mike Mentel, President Pro Tem Hearcel Craig, Councilmembers Andy Ginther, Troy Miller, Eileen Paley, Charleta Tavares and Priscilla Tyson, City Auditor Hugh Dorrian and City Attorney Rick Pfeiffer.
I also want to appreciation the members of my chest and staff, especially my Chief of Staff, Mike Reese. Thanks also to Franklin County commissioners Paula Brooks, Marilyn Brown, and John O'Grady, and to all our elected officials here tonight. I also want to give my wife, Columbus' First Lady, Frankie Coleman, for all her worship and support, as well as my wonderful children: Justin, Kimberly and John David. I'm so honourable of all of you. East High School, the digs of the East High Tigers, is consequential in Columbus, an incubator of leaders, provider of talent, and contributor to our great city.
Through these halls walked the great Jack Gibbs, who was more than a principal, a papa to thousands of unfledged people, a taskmaster in this community and a civic chairperson in his own right. Through these halls walked such acclaimed graduates as James Thurber, the famed Columbus writer; Bill Willis, the NFL and College Football Hall of Famer; Phillip Michael Thomas, better known as Rico Tubbs on Miami Vice; basketball legends such as Granville Waiters, Ed Ratliff and Dwight Lamar. This has also been a inception of public leadership, State Treasurer Kevin Boyce, City Councilmembers Hearcel Craig and Troy Miller, State Senator Ray Miller, and of programme the most well-connected graduate, Frankie Coleman, known then as Frankie Young. This shape isn't just a building. It is a cathedral where minds and lives have been shaped since World War I. This $28 million renovation is symbolic of what we are worrying to attain in Columbus, structure for the future.
East High School anchors the east end of Long Street that cuts through the King-Lincoln district. The Lincoln Theater, which will explain this summer, is the west mainstay of the King-Lincoln District. It too isn't just a building.
It is an remunerative setting up of bringing the locality back with jobs and will arouse a neighborhood revitalization. This neighborhood has been through hard-nosed times, but because of these efforts, it is on its headway back. While there is progress, our full diocese is now thriving through the most obstinate spell of our lifetimes.
Every heyday we are faced with more rotten profitable news: pecuniary markets in a tailspin, probity all dried up, following after performers laying off thousands of employees, a flat case peddle as hollow and shunned buildings multiply, bankruptcies soar, aliment pantries are blank because require is so high. The essential capacity of these manly times is their clout on existent people's lives: the bother of a old lady who can't give up to toss a juvenile to college, the helplessness of cladding bailiwick foreclosure, the vain enquiry for a task at a epoch when there are none. We function in a broad crisis, a public crisis, a glory critical time and yes, a catastrophe as the crow flies here in Columbus. This calamity has led to some very nit-picking decisions: layoffs of supreme burgh employees, the closure of distraction centers and swimming pools, significant reductions in yard enfeeble and magnitude ruin collection, earnings cuts, unembellished cuts to many mark programs.
I have short lack of faith that more tough choices prone ahead. But even in these demanding times, the confirm of our municipality is strong. I power this not because I am expected to, but because our asset is reflected in our greatest asset, our people.
We are the fruit of generations of reliable growth, cooperation, novelty and shared sacrifice. We are an wide open community that values multiformity and nurtures innovative ideas. We value magisterial work, soundness of character and perseverance through every challenge, no purport how great.
You see, we will get through this crisis, and we will come out of it a better city. But along the way, much will be required of each of us. We will be called upon to do things differently than we have in the past. We cannot peter out planning for tomorrow just because it is burdensome today. We must keep up a yearn regard toward affluence for our people.
Tough times are a assay of our self-confidence and our ability to survive the long run. I don't want to keep company with any of us hanging our heads, shuffling our feet, and air sorry for ourselves. Because it's not about how intent we depreciation in tough times.
It's about how absurd we stand in the face of adversity. Because a disaster is just a chance to show that our city's resolution is made of steel. We must have the grey resolve to do what is necessary to get through this crisis, while never lowering our sights in the process. That is why I have fought so strenuous for trade pick-up dollars for our city.
I am fighting for every dollar from the White House, from the Statehouse, from Congress. For two months, my rod and I have been working to importance the state, Columbus and our community partners for the acme allowable funds from President Obama's stimulus package. We will situation together with our community partners to fabricate the most of this one-time money, and beginning next week, I will convene a Columbus Economic Recovery Alliance to promote this effort.
These stimulus dollars can labourer us in three judgemental areas: first, our youth; second, those who have down the drain their jobs and requirement retraining; and third, civic safety. Under the aforesaid conduct in Washington, summer jobs for lass were for all practical purposes eliminated. As a result, unemployment in Columbus spiked survive summer. We stepped up with the Franklin County Commissioners to incompletely caulk the pointless and put a thousand teens to line termination summer. We've got to give our sophomoric common man a chance to do something derived during the summer months, rather than standing around on a road corner.
Now under a new president, we have already seen greater investment in our innocent people. Through the Central Ohio Workforce Investment Council, we will endure money-making stimulus the ready in the amount of $6 million. We are great to portend that with these new revenues, we will use half of it to cost approximately 2,500 youth this summer. That means more teenage people will get a job this summer than at any regulate since the 1990s.
At a opportunity when some of our recreation centers will be closed, this will lend a hand give thousands of young people a accidental to grow and learn in a work environment, and put a inadequate money in their pockets. The left $3 million will take into account us to continue to invest in unemployed workers who have astray their jobs, giving them the training they beggary to join today's workforce in unripe jobs, in technology, in health be concerned and in other fields that will be part of a new economy. Thank you to Suzanne Coleman Tolbert, the jobs lady, and and Harry else at COWIC.
Thanks also to our other partners in this effort: the Franklin County Commissioners, United Way, the Chamber of Commerce and Columbus City Schools. I have called for forgoing in these troubled times. This commercial turning-point stilted us to present off hundreds of employees and in the interim direct off 1,300 more. We eliminated raises for all conurbation employees under my control, and we froze hundreds of positions.
In addition, we gave layoff notices to 27 police officers recruits three days before they were to graduate. Under the layoff plan, these recruits would be laid off tomorrow. I had hoped to endure unbidden yielding up from our worker unions so that more layoffs would not be necessary.
I positive there were many employees who wanted to sacrifice. I was very dejected that only one union, the firefighters, agreed to oblige such a sacrifice. Our burg labor leaders, and all of us, want to separate that in times such as these, we must beseech what we can do for others rather than question what's in it for me. Nevertheless, we didn't give up on these recruits.
I went all the motion to the White House to cache this discernment so that these handsome men and women could graduate. President Obama's stimulus bundle is already working front here in Columbus. Because of it, these recruits will be of assistance their city as Columbus watch officers. Thank you, Mr. President.
These stimulus dollars are important, but they will not greet our long-term budget difficulties. To make plain that difficult we must murder a three-part representation that focuses on jobs, reform and revenue. First let me lecture about jobs. Jobs do not appear magically from the sky.
They are the follow-up of public-private partnerships. Last year, we fought through a governmental downturn and entered into 25 advancement deals, representing $309 million in seclusive sector development, retaining 9,500 jobs and creating about 6,500 jobs for the next three years. Net Jets, Children's Hospital, NWD Investments and Tech Center South were the headliners, providing our town $6.5 million in to be to come revenue. And we've made so much upgrade Downtown.
As the budgetary apparatus of our region, we brought 3,000 unripe jobs Downtown. As a regional center of extravaganza and vitality, we are well on our passage with the River South District, the Arena District, the greatest urban and parking-lot in the nation, Scioto Mile, and our rejuvenated baseball stadium, Huntington Park, which will humanitarian this spring. As a neighborhood, we're construction 5,000 untrodden condos and apartments Downtown, not only for ladies and gentlemen who can contribute it and our brood professionals, but also for our most vulnerable. So today I'm grand to publicize that the City of Columbus is a companion in our newest casing bet where we will base 100 quarters units for the no-income and the low-income of our metropolis in the northeast corner of Downtown.
This will be called the Commons at Buckingham. You see, Downtown is everybody's neighborhood, no condition your wealth, no mean something your background. Thanks to the National Church Residences, the Community Shelter Board, Rebuilding Lives and HUD for their partnership. We have also transformed a latent eyesore in the loose Lazarus edifice into a jobs center and the largest inexperienced rehab erection in the nation. With all these affluent efforts, there has been one activity that has held us back from reaching our fullest potential, the big elephant in the room, City Center.
Once a flowering retail center, it sat placid with no prospect of coming crowded again in its in the know form. So we will fly it down and father a strange vision called Columbus Commons. The Columbus Commons will change our Downtown, turning one of the largest unused and debauched buildings in the political entity into a community treasure and creating some 2,000 jobs in the process.
Unlike City Center, Columbus Commons will be publish and interconnected with the abutting area. The Columbus Commons is the centerpiece of the Mile on High, the organize I announced hold out year designed to bring on back retail, section jobs, restaurants and density along the barb of our city, High Street. It will be at the centre of a vibrant Downtown, with bourgeoisie shopping and dining along High Street, living and working in residential and occupation spaces and meeting in an ajar gullible lacuna in the center. I believe that Downtown parks encourage downtown jobs. Another partner, the Columbus and Franklin County Metro Parks System, has also stepped up in a lively route to servant us cultivate the Whittier Peninsula in the Downtown Market.
This is a partnership I value because from this relation grew a better bike tag along pattern and many new sensuous plans we will announce soon. With the inauguration of the first urban countryside center in the heart of a major American city, the Grange Audubon Center will be glaring to all families in just a few months. For the triumph moment kids can come to the center of the see to experience and learn that cast is not just something they see on the Discovery Channel.
Innovation and entrepreneurialism will leapfrog Columbus into greater prosperity. It is no accessary that Forbes Magazine recognized us as the No. 1 up-and-coming tech urban district in all of America. And this is in great part due to our friends at Battelle.
One of our finest assets in Columbus, Battelle is the largest contractor in the boondocks for research, development, energy, health, and sphere with the federal government. Battelle's exert oneself has resulted in dozens of spinoff businesses and hundreds of jobs in Columbus. Just persist month, Battelle announced it will ordain more than $200 million in unfledged Central Ohio facilities, stage set the station for further development. Battelle will join about 200 lab and technology jobs in the jurisdiction over the next three years. Technology continues to make good here.
Another great company, Sterling Commerce, our region's largest software flock and our country's biggest developer of logistics software, entered into an treaty with the urban area to board almost 800 exemplary jobs here in Columbus. With its industry-leading products and worldwide bloke undignified this is the kidney of visitor we want in Columbus. Our handle does not cut there. It is straightforward to expose a green line in the outer edges of our city.
But it is unique to take a brownfield in the medial of our city and convert it into something productive. I often say, evolve carnal with a plan; grow inward with a passion. And that furor is reflected in the definitive phase of the development at Gowdy Field. Because of our work, Gowdy Field, once a landfill and an unusable blight, is the situation of Time Warner Headquarters and some 700 jobs.
Tonight I am glorious to broadcast that the James Cancer Center will frame a renewed medical job building this November, which will be cuttingly to another 130 new, high-paying strength dolour jobs in 2010. Thank you to Dr. Gordon Gee and to Dr. Michael Caligiuri, overseer of OSU Comprehensive Cancer Center, for joining us on this flush effort.
These business announcements show we are touching in the open direction, but we still have a crave way to go. And we cannot get there alone. We dearth our banks and fiscal institutions to step up. Too many of our businesses have been unqualified to access bank loans. Our banks and economic institutions have received $350 billion in bailout legal tender from the federal government.
Still, common people cannot get a allowance to get a house. Banks in Ohio received more than $7.5 billion in bailout money.
And still, selfish vocation owners cannot get a credit to keep their doors open. Our Home Again program is designed to modify uncomprehending and rejected properties into homes again. But it will not be best-selling if, for every c bawdy-house we save, five additional dissolute properties appear on the block, or if for every job we engender or retain, five jobs are strayed because employers cannot get a loan.
So to our banks and monetary institutions: While you may be counting on your bailout money, we are counting on you. The younger tow-path to fiscal recovery is to continue to make direction more efficient. This has been a priority of mine since I took office. Our employees deliver more for their constitution insurance.
Our fleet, facilities, loyal assets and construction divisions are consolidated. We've sold off redundancy vehicles. We've auctioned off superfluous property. We've centralized technology.
We've conserved puissance in our buildings. But we must do more. While we have drawing to the core, we must not let a cracking solvent crisis go to waste. We must use this emergency to achieve greater reforms in government.
With City Council and Auditor Dorrian, I have charged the Economic Advisory Committee to command us how we can adhere to delivering property neighborhood services while making regulation leaner. And I want to gratitude Chairman Bob Howarth and all the members of the board for their onerous exploit over the last year.
