Thursday’s State of the City Speech Will Look to Pasadena’s Future Over New Decade

Mayor Terry Tornek is keeping part of his State of the City Speech under wraps – for now.

Tornek will meet his mandate under the city charter to discuss the city’s fiscal condition tonight at John Muir High School.

But Tornek won’t reveal what direction he will go in after that.

“I got to maintain a little bit of mystery,” Tornek said.

“Unfortunately, it sounds like it’s going to be raining, so I’m not optimistic about attendance, but I hope people are willing to weather the storm and come out.”

A preview of the speech was not made available to the media.

Tornek will continue his trend of holding the State of the City speech at a local public school. This year’s speech will be held at John Muir High School.

“I’m anxious to get them to Muir,” Tornek said. “The reason I have held all of my state of the city addresses at PUSD facilities because I want to expose people to them and the Muir auditorium has been renovated and it’s beautiful. I want people to get a look at that and to hear from Principal Gray the great things that are happening at Muir. I like to use the state of the city as a way of attracting people to public schools and have them learn something about what’s happening at PUSD.”

Tornek said this year’s speech will be broader and more positive because of Measure I, the three-quarter cent sales tax results in an additional $21 million annually. Up to $7 million goes to the Pasadena Unified School District.

“That’s 14 million bucks a year. But what I’ve done this year, that’s a little bit different. I’ve always resisted pushing out into the future too far. This year I’m going to push out 10 years into the future because I think it’s appropriate. I mean, the downside is that further out you go, the less accurate it gets. The less confident you can be about projections. But I think it’d be useful to expand our horizons a little bit and push you out into the future and try to do a little bit more crystal ball gazing, and really talk about the policy of how we should be since we have a little bit of additional cash.”

“How we should be allocating it and what our priorities should be, that’s what I plan on introducing and suggesting to the public and to my colleagues and to the staff in terms of how we should be directing our resources as we push out to the future.”

John Muir High School is at 1905 Lincoln Ave., Pasadena. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. Program begins at 7 p.m. On-site parking, including accessible parking in JMHS main parking lot off of Lincoln Ave., adjacent to the auditorium. Carpools encouraged. Childcare will be provided; please reserve childcare by contacting Araceli Mellen at (626) 744-4111 or Rhonda Stone at (626) 744-7147. Spanish translation and closed captioning services will be provided.