Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

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Archives for February 2011

The Mayor as Manager

February 23, 2011 By Otis White

Mayors have three jobs, but most enjoy only one or two of them. The ones they like are creating public policy or building political support for those policies. Almost universally, the one they don’t is managing the city government.

This should come as no surprise. Most people who run for elected office are drawn to public policy (How do we reduce homelessness? How do we keep our young people? How do we connect land use and transportation?) or politics (How do we create a coalition of interests? How do we persuade the city council? How do we get our friends elected?). They don’t run because they want to manage employees. If they wanted to do that, they’d probably be a city manager.

And yet, local governments are complex and challenging organizations and, as we were reminded in the 2008-09 recession, sometimes poorly managed ones. And despite how a mayor feels about the grind of organizational management, it’s a job that cannot be ignored. To do so is to risk every smart policy initiative a good mayor can create and every shrewd political move she can make.

So what does a mayor—or, for that matter, any civic leader—need to know about managing a local government? Here are four of the basics:

During good times, prepare for the worst. The problem with a good economy is that it creates a false sense of security. If a city depends on development-related fees (such as impact fees) or sales taxes (which tend to spike in good times), beware: They can make leaders complacent. The best things to do with boom-time revenues are pay down debt and make capital investments. The worst things to do are hire more employees and hand out generous pay raises and pension increases.

When you make capital investments, ask how they’ll increase productivity. Productivity, of course, is doing more work with the same or fewer people, and corporations have made great gains in productivity in recent decades. Governments? Not so much. This has to change, and the place to do that is with capital investments.

Think back to the Econ 101 class you took in college. Remember the three “factors of production,” the resources that create goods and services? As Adam Smith explained two centuries ago, the factors are land, labor and equipment (which Smith called “capital”). Labor and equipment have a special relationship in that you can substitute one for the other; that is, you can buy labor-saving equipment to . . . well, save labor. And that’s exactly what governments should do. Every time a local government wants to build a building, buy a new computer system or purchase a sanitation truck, elected officials should ask how many hours of labor it will save. If the answer is zero, don’t buy it. If the answer is that it’ll require more employees, run away as fast as possible.

Don’t just ask about productivity—measure it, set goals for it and hold managers responsible for achieving the goals. Let’s not beat around the bush here: The objective is to reduce the city’s workforce while delivering better services to the citizens. It’s simple math really: 70 to 90 percent of local governments’ operating budgets are salaries and benefits. If you can improve the productivity of workers through labor-saving equipment, good training, better work flow and smarter management, you can reduce your headcount, please the citizens, pay higher salaries and hold taxes in check. It is, as economists like to say, “the only free lunch in town.” It’s also the surest route to re-election.

But change never comes easily even when it promises great benefits. Employees don’t like being told to work differently—say, moving from paper forms to electronic—and neither do their managers. So offering better ways of doing things is just the start; you have to ensure the better ways are implemented. And here is where it is critical to have reliable measurements of productivity (number of potholes filled per worker, number of business licenses processed per hour, etc.). It’s the only way to be sure you’re actually doing more work with fewer people.

The good news is that there has been a revolution in measuring productivity in city governments in the last 15 years. For a glimpse of what’s possible, visit New York’s elaborate NYCStat performance-reporting system. You’ll be amazed at the detail with which New York’s services are tracked. They should be tracked just as diligently in your city too.

Stop feeding long-term liabilities. You know what I’m talking about here: pensions and other benefits. We didn’t create our country’s $1 trillion public pension problems overnight. Oakland, California’s city government hasn’t made a full payment on its pension obligations in a decade and a half, which explains why Oakland owes more in unfunded pension liabilities than its entire $400 million annual city budget.

Neither Oakland nor any other local government is going to solve its pension problems overnight, but we can make a start. This means, at a minimum, moving new public employees to defined-contribution retirement plans (like the 401(k) accounts private workers have), ending health insurance benefits for employees retiring early—and never, ever adding to these crippling liabilities again.

You’ve probably figured out by now that these are related. Productivity gains will help governments dig out of their financial holes. Budget discipline, particularly in good times, will keep us from digging future holes. Capital investments are a key strategy for boosting productivity—especially when married to measurements, goals and accountability. And all of it depends on mayors facing up to their least-favorite job: managing the city government as if it were a serious organization. Which, come to think of it, it is.

Photo by Indiana Public Media licensed under Creative Commons.

The Five Elements of Successful Visioning

February 1, 2011 By Otis White

Visioning

I have been involved in large-scale community visioning projects for years and worked on them in all sorts of places, from metro areas to individual cities. I recommend visioning as a way of pointing communities forward. I’ve seen how it can engage citizens, give heart to political, business and civic leaders, and help set bold new directions for communities. But . . .

There are limits to what visioning can do by itself, and it can be done poorly, which is worse than not doing it at all. So, over the years, I’ve created a list of the five elements of successful visioning. Here it is.

Make it as representative as possible. The hardest part of visioning isn’t the meetings or analyzing what the citizens say. The hardest part is getting a cross-section of the community to the meetings. Believe it or not, there are people who think there are better things to do with their evenings than spend them in a public meeting.

But it’s worth the effort to be sure all parts of the community are heard. First, visioning’s power comes from its legitimacy; these are, after all, large-scale efforts to listen to and report accurately what the citizens want. If parts of the community aren’t heard, visioning loses its legitimacy. Second, it improves the visioning process to hear from a wide variety of citizens. That’s because people who are different sometimes think differently about community issues, and you need that diversity of thought, both in the meetings and in the final report. I’ve seen people change their minds during visioning meetings because another point of view caused them to think more deeply about an issue. We don’t have nearly enough opportunities for people with different ideas to talk with one another in communities; we should make sure it happens in visioning projects.

Ask appropriate questions. Once you have a cross-section of citizens in the room, make sure you involve them the right way. The best way is to ask them to talk about things that they—and only they—are experts in. My favorite is to ask participants to imagine that, in 20 years’ time, the community has become the place they want it to be. What does the community look like and work like? What is the same as today and what is different? What obstacles did the citizens and their government overcome to make it happen?

This asks citizens to define broadly what they want their community to be. You don’t spend a lot of time asking them how to make it happen—these are questions best asked of technical experts. The citizens are experts in what, the way they want things to turn out.

Listen to the citizens first. Many times, visioning is combined with a planning project, such as developing a comprehensive plan. There’s nothing wrong with this as long as two conditions are met:

  • It needs to be an authentic form of visioning with a sustained outreach effort to get a cross-section of people involved, hundreds of citizen participants, appropriate questions asked, and an honest report summarizing what they said and containing every single idea that was offered. To repeat: Bad visioning is worse than no visioning at all, so don’t cut corners.
  • It needs to end before the planners begin their work. I regularly get phone calls from planning firms that are looking for someone to help with “citizen outreach” or “citizen engagement” at a mid-point in their work. My answer is always no. If the citizens are worth hearing from, then hear from them first. Reaching out to the citizens after plans have been drafted isn’t visioning; it’s salesmanship.

Create accountability. Nothing breeds cynicism like being asked to speak your mind, being thanked for doing so—and then being forgotten. If you ask citizens to share their dreams with you, you should report back to them on what’s happening with their dreams. They don’t expect immediate success in all areas, but they want to know if there’s any success—or even backsliding.

If the visioning precedes planning, there are immediate opportunities for accountability. You could ask some of the citizens to serve on a steering committee to make sure the plans are true to the citizens’ desires. You could have a large community meeting and invite all who participated in visioning see the plans and comment on them. Better yet, you could do both.

However you do it, make sure that once citizens are “in the loop” of community progress, they stay in the loop.

Understand visioning’s limitations. Visioning is probably the best way ever devised of listening in an organized way to what citizens want. It helps build a sense of ownership and citizenship in communities. It can be an important way of moving a community forward. But it’s not sufficient by itself to create progress.

As I’ll write about in the future, breakthrough ideas for communities come from places where three judgments overlap: What the citizens want, what is politically possible, and what is best for the community at this point. Visioning can deliver the first judgment, and political leaders the second. The third can come from individual leaders and blue-ribbon committees or it can bubble up from the bureaucracy or from community groups like a chamber of commerce or civic league.

But even then, an idea is only an idea. What turns an idea into reality is someone committed to building support and removing obstacles. And we have a term for such people: We call them “leaders.”

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About Otis White

Otis White is president of Civic Strategies, Inc., a collaborative and strategic planning firm for local governments and civic organizations. He has written about cities and their leaders for more than 30 years. For more information about Otis and his work, please visit www.civic-strategies.com.

The Great Project

Otis White's multimedia book, "The Great Project," is available on Apple iTunes for reading on an iPad. The book is about how a single civic project changed a city and offers important lessons for civic leaders considering their own "great projects" . . . and for students in college planning and political science programs.

For more information about the book, please visit the iTunes Great Project page.

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