Remarks by President Biden at the U.S. Conference of Mayors 90th Annual Winter Meeting
JANUARY 21, 2022
Location: Washington, D.C.

1:54 P.M. EST 

THE PRESIDENT:  Hello, hello, hello.  (Applause.)  It’s good to have you all back in person.  (Applause.)

Mr. Mayor, thank you for your leadership.  I appreciate it.  I know one thing: We both did marry up.  (Laughter.)

Mayor Bowser, thanks for hosting us.  You’re the best.  You really are.  Thank you for everything you do.

I’ve had the honor of addressing this body many, many times.  And I’ve always had enormous respect for the job you do.

Some of you have heard me say it before, but it’s the truth: I ran for the United States Senate in 1972 as a 29-year-old kid because I was a local official and it was too hard.  (Laughter.)  They know where you live.  (Laughter.)

And so — you think I’m kidding.  It’s not a joke.  Mayors carry the quality of the people’s lives on your shoulders.

Everything you do every day affects their lives more than almost anything anybody else does.  And you can make or break a person’s day.  “Will the bus get me home on time?”  It sounds silly but, “Will the garbage get be picked up?”  “Will I be safe walking in the park?”

These are the bigger questions: “Can I afford — can I afford to give my family a good life?”  “Will my kids have a chance to get a good job someday?”  “How will I rebuild from the fire or the storm?”

You know, all of these questions, they’re not partisan, but they’re practical.  People you [they] look to are you.  They’re the people you look — that they look to — are you.  For real.

You know there’s no way to walk into the corner drugstore without being accosted immediately as to what’s going on.  Right?  (Laughter.)

Well, so you know what it means to solve real problems, to
be held accountable for the people you serve.

That’s why, when I put together my Cabinet, I called on former mayors — and I mean this sincerely.  (Applause).  Take a look.  Tom Vilsack was a governor; he was also a mayor.  Marcia Fudge, governor — I mean, excuse me, a mayor.  Marty Walsh a mayor in Boston.  Pete Buttigieg was a mayor.  And I picked Mitch Landrieu to oversee the implementation of the infrastructure law, which is over  a billion 200 million dollars [$1.2 trillion], because he knows how mayors get things done.  (Applause.)  No, I mean it.  Not a joke.  Because mayors know the measure of success isn’t scoring partisan points, it’s did you fix the problem.  Did you fix — seriously, think about it: Did you fix the problem?

The infrastructure law is a perfect example of what we can achieve when we tackle problems the way mayors do.  Everybody in America — everybody in America knows we’ve fallen behind on infrastructure.  So we came together — Democrats and Republicans — and did something about it.

The number of really brave — and I’m not being facetious when I say that brave Republicans stood up and joined us in a bipartisan effort to get it done.

And, by the way, I want to thank you all.  More than 360 of you signed a letter that was sent to me when we were trying to get this legislation passed.  Three hundred and sixty of you.  You lobbied Congress to get it done, and it’s the reason it got done.  Not a joke.  It’s the reason it got done — because of you.  (Applause.)

There were a lot of people who wanted to vote for it, but they had a lot of pressure not to vote for it for political reasons.  But because of you, they voted for it, we got it done.    Because they know — they know how it goes in your cities to determine how their states go.

And now, after years of dead-ends and broken promises, not only has “Infrastructure Week” finally arrived — (applause) — but we can literally, because of you, look forward to an “Infrastructure Decade.”  That’s not hyperbole.

Back in 2009, when President Obama asked me to lead the recovery effort, which was an $800 billion effort — and the first thing I did, I went to the mayors.  Not a joke. 

Now, most of you are too young to have been around in 2008.  (Laughter.)  But — but, look, I spoke to over 200 mayors putting that together.  Because of them, because of you, we came through that moment together.  That’s the same approach that Mitch has taken, having been a former mayor, with all of you.

I know Mitch has spoken to many of you already.  And in just two months, we’ve already seen this law start to make a real difference, creating better jobs, transforming our communities in tangible ways.  

We’ve announced billions of dollars for highways, ports, airports, water and sewage systems, high-speed Internet; funding to clean up the rivers in Ohio, chemical plants and sites in Florida, polluted lakes in Michigan and dozens of other sites; a new program to cap and plug orphaned oil and gas wells spewing methane into the air, cleaning up the communities that, in fact, they’re affecting, while [creating] good-paying jobs.