Government – Page 5

Why the Goals of Citizen Engagement Are Not What You Think

November 20, 2012 By Otis White

I know local government officials well enough to know some of their secrets. And here’s one: Many don’t really believe in citizen engagement. Or, if they do believe in it, they don’t think it actually works.

I understand why they feel this way. If I had to depend on what passes for citizen engagement in most places—public hearings and public-comment periods at city council meetings—I’d be skeptical, too. These clumsy attempts at citizen engagement are good at producing three things: apathy, antagonism, and cynicism. That is, either no one shows up or every sorehead in town does. And on those occasions when a citizen with a good idea approaches the lectern expecting some sort of reaction from the city council or the staff, what does she get? Stony silence. (This reaction is so common during public-comment periods that a public-radio show in Cleveland devoted an entire broadcast to it, entitled “Is This Microphone Working?”)

But there’s more to the doubts about citizen engagement than bad processes. Some elected officials genuinely don’t think it’s necessary. That’s because they believe they are how citizens engage with their government, through elections. “This is a republic, not a democracy,” I’ve been reminded by local officials over the years. “I didn’t get elected to run back to the voters all the time, asking them what to do.”

So, where to begin? I’d like to make two arguments to my friends in local government. The first is that citizen engagement can work a lot better than it does today, with much better results. The second is that citizen engagement is a critical part of making governments work better. I talked about the first part, the “how” of citizen engagement, in a past posting about visioning. But today I’d like to take on the “why” part—why talking with the citizens is worth the trouble.

To make my case, I need to convince you that the reason you believe the public should be heard from is, if not wrong, then woefully inadequate. You probably think it’s so elected officials can learn what citizens think about a decision they’re about to make. Now, please don’t misinterpret what I’m about to say. There is nothing wrong with hearing from citizens about controversial issues facing a local government. And even if you think it is wrong, you can’t stop them.

But this kind of public engagement has limited value. An opinion is only as good as the information, logic, perspective, and values behind it, and for reasons that are obvious, people who are most affected by a decision aren’t always its best judges. After all, there’s a reason we use impartial juries to decide guilt and don’t leave it to the victims or the accused.

And let me repeat: You can’t—and shouldn’t—stop people from expressing their opinions. They may bring information that others have overlooked or have a perspective that’s worth considering. But opinions shouldn’t be the goal of citizen engagement.

The goal should be something deeper: an understanding of the interests and desires of citizens. And you cannot get that from a public hearing or a public-comment period.

That’s because by the time citizens show up for a public hearing, a proposal is already on the table, and it’s often one they’ve had no voice in until then. At that point, they’re often angry or scared and in no mood to discuss deeper concerns. So pity the poor public officials sitting in the pose I call “duck and cover:” heads down, hands folded in their laps, silent as stones as speaker after speaker assails them.

The better way: Begin talking with citizens before plans are drafted, perhaps even before problems are identified. By doing so, you’ll get a calmer dialogue and a much better sense of interests and desires. And keep citizens involved at every step in the planning stage. Here is the key concept: Citizen engagement is not an event (a town-hall meeting, a public forum, or a “My City 101” class, and certainly not a public hearing or public-comment period); it is a process.

But a process to deliver what? This brings me to the second goal of citizen engagement. If the first goal is understanding, then the second is recruitment. Local governments need citizens, as individuals and in groups, to become partners in solving community problems and seizing opportunities.

That’s because the healthiest communities are those that share responsibility, where everyone does his part and all are held accountable. You see most clearly how shared responsibility works in downtown business improvement districts, where businesses pay for some things (streetscaping, cleanup crews, additional uniformed security) while governments pay for others. The additional resources are important, but so is the diligence. BIDs work so well because everyone is involved and, therefore, paying attention.

And isn’t that the perfect description of an engaged citizen—one who is involved and, therefore, paying attention? Done right, this is what citizen engagement can deliver to your community.

Footnote: When politicians say ours is a “republic and not a democracy,” they should consult a dictionary. A “republic” is any country that does not have a king or some other form of inherited or imposed rule. Therefore, in republics the people govern themselves by some means. (It doesn’t have to be through anything we would recognize as democratic government. After all, when it was under Communist rule, Russia was known as the USSR, which stood for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.) And democracy, it seems, is also in the eye of the beholder. The formal name for Communist East Germany was . . . the German Democratic Republic.

So what are we? America is a federal republic, whose national government, states and localities are governed through representative democracy.

Photo by D. Clow – Maryland licensed under Creative Commons.

The Leader as Strategist and Persuader

August 31, 2012 By Otis White

I’ve met a lot of mayors over the years. Some were smart, a few were philosophical, many were shrewd, but only a handful were strategic. One of the few, Frank Martin, died a few weeks ago.

Martin was the mayor of Columbus, Georgia who, in a single term in office in the early 1990s, changed his city. Yes, you read that right: He served a single four-year term. (It was his decision. He finished his term to acclaim but chose not to run again.) And in that single term he set in motion changes that are still being felt, 20 years later.

I met Mayor Martin when I was researching a book about the remarkable turnaround of Columbus’ downtown, which was a desolate and hopeless place in the 1970s, only to be reborn three decades later as a thriving business, cultural, entertainment, and educational center. I wanted to know how these things happened, and that led me to the political leader who had changed the arc of the city. (If you’re interested in the book, you can find it here.)

We had three long conversations, one by phone, one in his office, and a third for a podcast. Each time we talked I was impressed by how his mind worked. He had the ability to look at something familiar (the city he had lived in his entire life or the government he presided over), see assets and opportunities that others couldn’t, and move decisively toward them. And, in a nutshell, that’s what great strategists do.

And one more thing: He knew how to change people’s minds. That’s important because, in civic work, it’s not enough to see the right thing to do. You have to bring others along with you. Martin knew that words weren’t enough. If you wanted to change people’s minds, you needed actions as well. Bold actions.

When he became mayor in 1991, Columbus was at a very low ebb. For 15 years, a handful of business and civic leaders had been searching for ways to turn around the downtown, without much success. For one thing, there was the sheer size of the problem: Block after block of empty storefronts, sleazy bars and porn shops, and some of the tackiest retail imaginable. The good stores had moved out of downtown in the 1960s, and many of the offices had joined them in the 1970s. (No one lived downtown then.) A few new projects had been built—a convention center, a hotel, a new office building or two—but the tide was still running out for downtown.

And beyond that, there was a huge impediment to change, which was the citizens’ deep-seated cynicism. After seeing decades of decline, they thought the downtown was hopeless and any effort to help it was throwing good money after bad. In fact, they thought the same of the city itself. In the citizens’ minds, Columbus was, if not declining, going nowhere and nothing could change it.

So, where do you begin when you’re trying to save a city that doesn’t believe in itself? Martin’s answer was to start with a bang, with what he called his “man on the moon project,” a project so ambitious and difficult to achieve that, when it does succeed, the civic self-doubt fades away. He found such a project on his first day in office, when he opened a closet in the mayor’s office and discovered a complete set of plans for a civic center. A previous mayor had commissioned the plans and then quietly rolled them up and stowed them away, defeated by the project’s politics and finances.

That, Martin decided, would be his “man on the moon project.” He would build the civic center that a line of mayors had talked about but been unable to deliver. To make a long story short, he did just that, and Columbus has an impressive new civic center today. But Martin didn’t stop there. While he was working on the civic center project, he put together a huge bond referendum that in addition to financing the civic center would make sewer improvements, build sidewalks and parks, and construct a major new softball complex near downtown. He campaigned furiously for the referendum and got it passed.

From the outside, this may not seem like much, but in the sleepwalk that was Columbus in the early 1990s, it was a huge awakening. And Martin was just getting started. The sewer project had an interesting feature, he came to understand. It involved running miles of storm water pipes alongside the Chattahoochee River. And here’s where Martin’s knack for strategic thinking came in: Why not turn this sewer project into a major new public asset by placing a river walk on top of it? (The idea wasn’t his, but he once he heard it, he grasped what it could mean.) He approached the city’s foundations and businesses, and they agreed to put up the additional money. The result is one of the largest and most attractive urban river walks in America today, stretching more than 20 miles.

And the softball complex? It became the way that Columbus got a share of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, when it served as host for the women’s softball competitions. The city that doubted itself was suddenly seeing itself on international broadcasts, with its beautiful new riverfront improvements as a setting.

I could go on and on about Martin’s accomplishments and how they laid the groundwork for the downtown’s revival. (Again, if you’re interested, read the book.) But at the center of things was a civic leader who combined the mind of a strategist with a shrewd understanding of human nature and what it took to move people.

And these are the things the best leaders do: They see unnoticed assets, find ways of making them greater and far more apparent, and bring others along on the journey. Cities need an army of such people, but sometimes it takes only a few. Or, at the right time and in the right place, just one.

Photo of the Columbus Riverwalk from The Great Project, used with permission

The Difference Between Privatization and Magic

June 5, 2012 By Otis White

I’ve spent my entire adult life working in business, as an employee, manager, business partner and owner. I also spent a fair number of years as a business magazine reporter and editor, interviewing executives around the country. I like business so much that I still read the Harvard Business Review, more or less for fun.

So I feel qualified to offer this caution to friends who’ve spent most of their working lives in government: Business isn’t magic. When you outsource a government service to a private company, you don’t always get rid of your problems. In fact, most times the problems just come back to you in new forms.

I offer this caution because outsourcing seems to have gained a new life, thanks in large part to the terrible financial crisis local governments have been in since 2008. Today we find cities and states creating public-private partnerships to manage highways and toll bridges, and take over municipal parking services. States are contracting with private prisons to house inmates, and cities are thinking about privatizing water services and sanitation departments.

And then there are charter schools. If you had told citizens in the 1980s that, in a few decades’ time, we’d be using taxpayer money to pay nonprofits and even for-profit companies to educate public school children, they would have thought you were crazy.

Some of this outsourcing has worked reasonably well, some of it has created only headaches, and some of it is so mixed in its results that it’s hard to make sense of it. (Nearly every comprehensive study of charter schools, for instance, says they perform about as well as regular schools.)

This doesn’t mean cities shouldn’t outsource some of their services, but it does mean they should do so with clear expectations about what will happen. The key thing is this: Businesses have to find a way to pay back their investors and make a profit. And as far as I know, there are only three ways of doing that when you are privatizing an established public service. One way can be relatively painless and may even win the city some credit with voters. The other two are likely to stir up a hornet’s nest.

The painless way is through some kind of innovation, which could include changing the service’s delivery process or use of technology, or by repositioning the service in the public’s mind. How could that happen? Think about the rise of self-service gas stations. Until the mid-1970s, it was unusual for people to pump their own gas. (To this day, it is illegal in New Jersey and Oregon.) Why was it so rare? Because most people thought it was unsafe. And, besides, who wanted to stand around on a cold and rainy day pumping gas?

But with the help of a little technology (swiping credit cards at the pump) and some small incentives (slightly cheaper prices at self-service) gas stations gradually coaxed people out of their cars. It worked so well that today you’d be hard pressed to find a gas station still offering full-service even at a higher price.

Could a private company, taking over a city service, do something like this? Sure, if there were obvious inefficiencies and if citizens could be persuaded to change in small ways how they used the service. Take curbside recycling, which is still so new that customer habits aren’t deeply formed. If a company could think of a highly efficient way of hauling recyclables, helped by a change in customer habits, it could take a money-losing service off a city’s hands, pay back its investors, make a profit . . . and leave the citizens pleased with the city’s decision.

Alas, most city services don’t work that way. Yes, there are always more efficient ways of running water systems, patching streets, or managing landfills. And you can change citizen habits with incentives over time. But for most city services, the improvements and resulting savings will be incremental. They won’t be enough to pay back investors in a reasonable period and turn a profit.

So that brings us to the other two ways that companies succeed with outsourcing: They raise prices, cut costs, or both. Don’t get me wrong: This may be exactly what’s needed in many cases. Every three months, I mail my company’s tax returns to the state revenue department and the IRS. (Remember, I’m a taxpayer.) And as I stand at the post office counter, I always think that the price of certified mail is ridiculously cheap. And as for cutting costs, particularly labor costs, which government in America does a good job of this?

But they could. Governments might never be as good at managing labor costs as Wal-Mart or as aggressive at pricing as Microsoft, but they could be much, much better than they are. (And some are getting better. If there’s a silver lining to our hard times, it may be that governments are finally dealing with their unfunded pension and retiree health-care liabilities . . . and maybe getting serious about worker productivity as well.)

In other words, everything that businesses could do to generate more cash, governments could do as well. There’s no magic here: Innovate, raise prices, cut costs . . . or all three. That’s it.

So why don’t they? Because businesses offer governments what looks like an easy way out. Take the deal former Mayor Richard Daley signed in 2009 privatizing Chicago’s parking meters. The business consortium that won the deal offered the city a cool $1.18 billion to take over the city’s parking meters for the next 75 years. The city was in the midst of one of its perennial budget crises, and the money helped bail it out for a year or two.

That’s not what Daley said at the time, of course. He told reporters the city shouldn’t have been in the parking meter business to begin with. “This is not the core business of the city of Chicago,” he said. Really? Managing city streets isn’t the city’s business? Then what is?

What Daley really meant, in all likelihood, was that doing what came next was too hard for his government. The new owners dramatically raised parking rates. The public reaction was fierce, and it only grew only fiercer when the company was slow to deal with jammed or vandalized meters . . . and cars were ticketed or towed as a result.

Sometime similar happened in Atlanta, where the city privatized parking enforcement and meter maintenance, and citizens and store owners howled about the blizzard of tickets coming from the private company.

In these cases and others, there was no magic. The businesses that took over public services did nothing that the governments themselves couldn’t have done, had they set their minds to doing it. So why didn’t they? Because innovating, cutting costs, and raising rates is hard and sometimes unpopular. Governments turned to businesses because they didn’t want to take the heat.

But, of course, they took the heat anyway, in terms of citizen complaints about the privatized services. Today it’s hard to find a politician in Chicago who will defend the parking meter deal. And Atlanta’s city council is desperately looking for ways of making its parking deal work better.

In the end, then, these cities have the worst of all possible situations. They catch the political heat, lose an opportunity to take on the government’s underlying management and cost issues, and give up control of incredibly valuable public assets . . . in Chicago’s case until 2084.

As I said early on, there are cases where privatization and outsourcing work reasonably well. If it’s a small government, outsourcing of back-office operations may be cheaper because of economies of scale or the cost of expertise. (Why manage your payroll if it’s cheaper to contract it out?) But for large governments, that’s usually not the case. Too often, they privatize for short-term financial reasons or for fear of political backlash.

Then they get the backlash anyway. And the money’s quickly gone.

Photo by compujeramey licensed under Creative Commons.

Smart Citizen Engagement . . . and Dumb, Dumb, Dumb

March 29, 2012 By Otis White

I am a fan of governments reaching out to citizens for ideas and participation for two reasons. It’s good for government officials to work side by side with citizens, and it’s good for citizens to work side by side with governments. But there are smart ways of doing this, and there are dumb, dumb, dumb ways.

I’ll talk about the smart and the dumb in a moment, but first a few words about why citizen involvement is important. Start with the basics: Citizens know some things better than government officials, and government officials know some things better than citizens. Citizens know things that begin with the word “what”—what the problems are (particularly in their own neighborhoods), what they want their city or neighborhood to be, and what they are personally willing to contribute in time and taxes to make these things happen. In other words, citizens are good at vision and judgment. Government officials are good at the “how” parts—how to deliver the things the citizens want, how to pay for them, and how to be sure things work as planned when they’re in place.

When you put these competencies together, with the citizens taking the lead—but not having exclusive say—in the “what” parts, and government officials taking the lead—but not having exclusive say—in the “how” parts, you get a strong partnership . . . with a little creative tension. The tension comes from not totally ceding either part. On the contrary, it helps if the parties look over each other’s shoulder. Citizens sometimes have great ideas about getting things done. And public officials can often suggest things the citizens ought to be thinking about but, for some reason, aren’t. How do you let one side take the lead without ceding control? You act with respect for what the other party does best, the way you would toward any valued colleague or partner.

Here’s another principle of citizen engagement: The goal shouldn’t be a new set of ideas or goals but a long-term sharing of responsibilities. Alas, that’s not the political reflex. The reflex, upon hearing a complaint or an idea, is to take the problem away from the person who’s complaining. I understand why this happens—many elected officials believe the path to re-election is paved with credit for getting things done, and most appointed officials think it’s important to appear in control—but by taking problems away from people you diminish them and limit a government’s effectiveness. The best way to deal with community problems and opportunities is through partnerships, where everyone does his part: government, businesses, nonprofits, and citizens.

By taking the time to plan and act as partners, two wonderful things happen. First, resources multiply—not just financial resources but human labor and creativity. Second, solutions become virtuous cycles, where each partner’s contribution rewards the others’ efforts, increasing the rewards and making the effort easier with each turn of the cycle.

You see this most clearly in business improvement districts, where landowners tax themselves to make commercial areas safer and more attractive. The virtuous cycle for BIDs works in two ways. As they make improvements, property values rise and revenues to the BID increase, enabling it to do more, which makes property values rise even more . . . and on and on. But the real secret to BIDs isn’t the money they raise and spend on their own. It’s the partnerships they forge with governments. Over time, smart and focused BIDs learn how to ask intelligently for things, and governments like working with them. The money they raise, then, becomes not replacements for government services but enhancements, which helps everybody. The commercial district looks good, citizens are happy, businesses prosper, property owners see their investments rise in value, tax revenues grow for government and the BID, and the cycle goes round and round.

This, then, is the power of partnership, and it ought to be the aim of every government—not to coddle citizens or push them out of the way, but to plan and work with them as respected equals.

OK, then what’s a smart way of doing this? You start by asking citizens what they want, plan the “how” parts together—so citizens learn the cost of public goods and can decide if they truly want them—and then you ask those working alongside you to lend a hand in making them happen.

I have two examples of smart citizen engagement, both from older cities dealing with major crime problems. First is from Philadelphia where Mayor Michael Nutter has created a small agency called PhillyRising. It’s a handful of government workers who are good at talking with citizens and enlisting them as partners. Not long ago, a newspaper reporter sat in on a PhillyRising meeting in a Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood plagued by crime. The meeting began with a top city official saying something you don’t hear enough from government leaders. “The city doesn’t have all the answers,” he said. “We know you guys,” referring to neighborhood residents, “know the problems in the community better than anybody else.”

And that was pretty much the end of the speeches. For the rest of the meeting, the PhillyRising staff facilitated the 35 or so who came in talking about the neighborhood’s issues—not just the crime problems, but things like neighborhood schools and adult literacy problems—as others took notes on large flip charts. At the end, staffers invited the residents to come back in two weeks to work on plans for changing the things they had identified—with the city playing a supporting role. As the PhillyRising director told the reporter who was there, “The idea behind it is, instead of doing things for people, we’re trying to do things with them and teach them.” Precisely.

The second example is from Detroit, and it’s not about government doing smart things with citizens but citizens doing smart things with government. (Remember, it’s a partnership.) I don’t have to explain much about Detroit’s problems—they begin with a horrifying homicide rate and go from there. But not every part of Detroit suffers equally. There are a few neighborhoods that have kept crime at bay.

How did they do it? By organizing, watching things carefully, and working seamlessly with the police. These aren’t vigilantes. In one of the neighborhoods, North Rosedale, neighborhood volunteers don’t chase criminals; they photograph things that look suspicious and call the cops. They are so close to the police that, as neighborhood watch volunteers start their evening rounds, they check in with a nearby precinct to find out who’s on duty and what to keep an eye on.

As the Detroit Free Press reported, police and other city officials love these smart, organized, involved volunteers. “The cooperative effort that you have shown with the police department has just been super,” a police commander told one of the neighborhood groups at its regular monthly planning meeting with police and city officials last year. “The arrests that are being made are all with interaction with the community. A lot of other communities don’t offer that. It is a big tribute to you, and it’s very much appreciated.” The appreciation is mutual. One of the volunteers told the newspaper: “We believe it is important to work very closely with the police department.”

Let’s pause for a moment and review what’s right about these efforts. They create partnerships, not dependence. In each case, government knows its limitations. It appreciates what the citizens can do and stands ready to help but not direct. In one case, the government is reaching out to the citizens, in the other the citizens are reaching out to the government. The results of both will be smarter government (specifically, more effective policing) and smarter, more involved citizens.

So if these are examples of smart citizen engagement, what does dumb engagement look like? I have two examples of this, as well. The first involves the Pittsburgh police department, but instead of being partners of the citizens, the police have cast themselves as adversaries. The problem in Pittsburgh is a familiar one for urban police departments. Ethnically the police force doesn’t look much like the city today; it’s overwhelmingly white in a diverse city. The suspicion among African-American leaders is that the hiring process is rigged against black candidates, so they lobbied the mayor to open up the hiring process by allowing some community members to sit in on interviews.

Reluctantly, the police agreed. An organization called the Pittsburgh Interfaith Impact Network offered the names of some volunteer interviewers to the police department, which forwarded them to other city departments for screening and training. In time, the interview panels including civilians were assembled . . . until someone noticed that one woman who was asking questions was wearing an electronic monitoring device on her ankle. Turns out, one of the police interviewers was a convicted felon who had pleaded guilty a year before to felony firearms charges.

The panels were abruptly cancelled. The police chief blamed city bureaucrats for fouling things up by not running background checks. Everyone was embarrassed and angry. But take away the embarrassing revelation—the woman with the ankle monitor—and you see this for what it was: a shallow and ineffective substitute for citizen engagement. It was shallow because it substituted a handful of people on city hall interview panels for genuine partnerships with citizens in their neighborhoods. And it was ineffective because it asked this handful of citizens to do something they weren’t equipped to do—judge what makes a good police officer. Actually, the citizen member who might know something about effective policing was the woman with the ankle monitor. At least she could claim experience with the criminal justice system.

What would have been better? It would have been much, much better if the department had taken the time to engage citizens in discussions about what they wanted from officers in their neighborhoods. If they had listened carefully and worked collaboratively to find better ways of recruiting, training, and retaining officers who fit the new profile. Afterwards, if some involved in the planning process wanted to serve on the interview teams, they should have been welcomed and would have come to the panels in a completely different way—with knowledge of what police officers do and an understanding of how the hiring process was changing. In short, they would have been seen as partners in making a better police department—and not as intruders or nuisances.

But it isn’t only local governments that make a mess of citizen engagement. Sometimes citizens do, too. This brings me to the worst citizen engagement process I’ve ever heard of, designed by a group in Pinellas County, Florida called FAST, which stands for Faith and Action for Standing Together. As the name suggests, it’s an interfaith group, and its heart seems to be in the right place. Founded in 2004, FAST wants to improve low-income parts of the county, which includes St. Petersburg and Clearwater, and has taken on important issues from crime and drugs to transportation and education.

But if its intentions are good, its methods are atrocious. After FAST members (who number in the low thousands) settle on an issue and decide—on their own, with no government officials involved—what the correct solutions are, they haul public officials before them, force them stand on a stage and say only “yes” or “no” to FAST’s agenda. As a final indignity, elected officials are not allowed to touch the microphone, for fear they might . . . you know, try to explain something. A FAST member stands with the microphone in hand, ready to snatch it away.

By this point, most responsible elected or appointed officials will not participate what amounts to one of FAST’s public shaming sessions. Not long ago, though, several Pinellas County school board members came to one of the meetings, where they were told that the best way to instruct children was by using something called “direct instruction.” Would the school board members, on the spot, commit to changing the school system’s entire instructional approach? Yes or no? The answer, thankfully, was no. “I will not yield to pressure,” one board member told the group . . . presumably just before the microphone was snatched away.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t have to be hectoring or patronizing. It doesn’t even have to be adversarial. In my experience, most government officials are perfectly willing to work alongside citizens; they just don’t know how to get started. And most citizens are far more interested in practical solutions than in venting their spleens and would welcome the opportunity to learn more about how government works.

There’s a marriage to be made here between governments and citizens, but like all good marriages it must come with some values. The two most important: respect for each other’s contributions and a belief in the power of partnerships.

Photo by Bytemarks licensed under Creative Commons.

On Her Majesty’s Town Council: How Local Government Works in the U.K.

March 6, 2012 By Otis White

I met Martin Rickerd six years ago. I remember the exact day. It was July 4. It’s easy to remember because we met at an Independence Day party in a large meadow near the Chattahoochee River in Atlanta, and, it turned out, Martin was the consul general for Great Britain. Yes, you read that right: a representative of Her Majesty’s Government was at a celebration of our separation from Her Majesty’s Government.

I learned then that Martin had a good sense of humor and a fair amount of curiosity, which is a wonderful trait in a member of the Diplomatic Service. I, too, have a lot of curiosity, so we had several lunches to fill in the gaps in each other’s learning. And then Martin was gone, transferred back to U.K. and, in time, he retired.

Not long ago, Martin got back in touch through email. He is now a writer, a professional proofreader (yes, there are such people), and a civic volunteer in a small town not far from London with the delightful name of Leighton Buzzard. (You can learn more about him and his work as a diplomat by reading his memoir.)

And once again, I fell back into my habit of peppering him with questions—this time about local government in the U.K. His answers were so good that I suggested we share them on my blog, and Martin has graciously allowed me to do so. I’ve included my questions to give his answers context and have lightly edited his answers so they’ll make sense to American readers. In a couple of instances, he used a word like “tenders” that might confuse Americans, so I’ve inserted its U.S. equivalent in parentheses and italics. But I left his British spellings intact. After all, who’s to say which are the proper spellings, neighbor or neighbour, center or centre? Final note: Her Majesty’s Government refers to the central government in London. It is sometimes abbreviated as HMG.

Otis: If you get a chance, please tell me about Leighton Buzzard. Is it a suburb? A town? A village? As you may remember, I am curious about communities and how they work.

Martin: Leighton Buzzard is a town of about 38,000 located on the Bedfordshire/Buckinghamshire border, about 35 miles northwest of London. That means it’s in the heart of rail commuter territory—several thousand inhabitants travel by train to London every day (as I used to in my pre-Atlanta days). Hardly anybody would consider driving to London daily for work—there’s nowhere to park, the fuel costs the equivalent of $8.00 a gallon, the traffic is terrible on the motorway and there’s the “Congestion Charge” to pay in central London. By contrast, an annual season ticket on the train to London costs about £3,770 (about $5,970).

I actually live in Linslade which, although not recognised by the Post Office as a separate entity from Leighton Buzzard, has a distinct history (it was part of Buckinghamshire until the 1970s) as the Grand Union canal—a major trading waterway in the 19th and early 20th centuries—separated the two communities. When the railway from London to Birmingham was built in the mid-1800s, the people of Leighton Buzzard insisted that the station be built on the Linslade side of the canal as they didn’t want the “wrong sort of people” visiting Leighton Buzzard!

The whole of Leighton Buzzard (i.e. including Linslade) has grown quite fast over the past 10-15 years as it’s in a popular part of the “greenbelt” around London—we are surrounded by the gentle Chiltern Hills—and the town struggles to find a balance between growth and preserving its character. Leighton-Linslade Town Council deals with very low-level issues such as trading permits for retailers and organising local events; but for all important matters including planning (zoning) it plays second fiddle to Central Bedfordshire Council, which covers a much bigger area (of course, “bigger” is a relative term—the whole of Central Bedfordshire’s area is only 275 square miles, about the same size as Atlanta’s suburb of DeKalb County. There’s a big difference in population, though—about 255,000 in Central Bedfordshire, compared to over 660,000 in DeKalb).

Central Beds is responsible for things like police and fire services, roads, education, and environmental services including rubbish collection. Homeowners pay their annual “Council Tax”—equivalent of property tax—to Central Beds, not to the Town Council. Like all county councils, Central Bedfordshire’s funding is topped up (subsidized) by the UK national government.

The mayor of Leighton-Linslade is essentially a ceremonial position, which goes with being leader of the largest political group on the Town Council. To give you an idea of the relative local importance of all this, a by-election held last week to replace a councillor who had failed to attend a single meeting in more than a year attracted a turnout of only 17 percent (which included me and my wife, as we feel quite strongly about these things—if our troops are dying to protect democratic rights in unsafe parts of the world, the least we can do is exercise our own democratic rights).

Bedfordshire is divided up differently when it comes to representation in the UK Parliament—the county as a whole has six MPs, while Central Beds the local government area has three.

I hope all this isn’t too bewildering as a “101” to the local government scene here. If you are a glutton for punishment, you could have a look at the Central Bedfordshire website and the Leighton-Linslade website.

Otis: This is wonderfully helpful. I’ve tried for several years to get my arms around how local governments work in the U.K. I know that, under former Prime Minister Tony Blair, there was a greater emphasis on local government, but I could never get the 101 explanation of who did what, who paid for what, and who decided what. My interpretation from what you’ve written is that local governments function (as they do in the U.S.) by dividing responsibilities, with the “sub-counties” like Central Bedfordshire doing the heavy lifting of basic services like police, fire, sanitation. By the way, what is the common name for these jurisdictions (i.e., Central Bedfordshire)? I see why they’re used—you can get economies of scale by having a larger tax base and managing services over a wider area than a town could—but why not use the counties (Bedfordshire, for example) for that? Are they simply too big—sort of like asking the state of Georgia to manage trash pickup?

And then we have the towns like Leighton-Linslade. In reading your description and visiting the website, it sounds sort of like a U.S.-style “business improvement district” rather than a full-fledged government. That is, it is in charge of making sure a place looks good and develops appropriately, along with providing some fun and games from time to time. Which makes me wonder what the Town Council does when it meets. Event planning and low-level business regulation don’t make for great public policy-setting. Is this why some members go AWOL? (If I counted correctly, there are 20 members on the Leighton-Linslade Town Council. That’s a big governing body, especially if it doesn’t have much to decide.) Of course, Leighton-Linslade has one thing that Atlanta suburbs like Roswell and Decatur don’t: a town crier. Still, managing the town crier, even if you have to sometimes press the robes and tune the bell, can’t take that much time.

Here’s an important question: Who sets land-use policy and decides how specific parcels of land are developed? It looks like it might be the Central Bedfordshire Council . . . it has information on its website about planning and applying for permits . . . but it wasn’t absolutely clear. I don’t know what this is called there, but in the U.S., it’s called zoning, and it is one of the central powers that’s reserved to local governments. If someone wants to build a hotel or a small shopping area in Leighton-Linslade, who decides where it will go? Who draws up 20-year urban plans (where sewers will go, which areas will eventually be commercial, etc.)?

And speaking of large governing bodies, the Central Bedfordshire Council has 59 members. That’s bigger than the New York City Council. Most cities or counties in the U.S. have between five and 15 elected members. Do you have any theories about why there are such big local councils?

Martin’s first response was a laugh that could be heard across the ocean.

Martin: Two points you make would go down really well in the pub here (and have the regulars paying for your drinks), with a variety of colourful answers:

“Makes me wonder what the Town Council does when it meets.”
“Central Bedfordshire Council has 59 members. That’s bigger than the New York City Council.”

I’ll let you have a considered response to your email in a day or two, but those two observations are priceless from a British perspective!

A few days later, he wrote back with detailed answers.

Martin: You asked what is the common name for local government jurisdictions. The answer is simple “local government.” This term is widely understood and accepted to mean everything that isn’t “central government,” i.e. Her Majesty’s Government (David Cameron, et al.) with UK-wide responsibilities. (It doesn’t include the “Devolved Administrations” for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which are different again; don’t get me started on them!)

“Local government” covers a wide range of bodies covering a broad range of services. The two extremes of local government could be illustrated by, for example, Liverpool City Council, in the northwest of England, which covers a dense urban area of 445,000 people (see the Liverpool government website for an idea of the services they provide) and our own Leighton-Linslade Town Council, as previously described.

Most English counties have a single council covering non-urban areas, while the towns often have their own bodies. The County of Bedfordshire comprises several discrete areas, with very different characteristics (urban/rural, industrial/residential, etc.), so it makes sense for it to be administered to reflect the diversity of each area. Thus Bedfordshire is divided for local administrative purposes into:

Borough of Bedford: the county town of Bedford, pop. 80,000, plus one or two smaller immediately adjacent towns, with a fairly high industrial/commercial base.
Luton Borough Council. Luton is in the east of the county, fairly industrial (the British General Motors subsidiary, Vauxhall, was based there, and the town was an important hat-making centre in earlier times) and home to London’s fourth airport. Population, including abutting towns, around 250,000.
Central Bedfordshire Council, for all the rest (it’s actually far more than “central,”covering the middle, south and west of the county, but they wanted one word.)

Bedford and Luton boroughs are “unitary authorities,” signifying that that they cover several towns, bound up as one, due to proximity.

A characteristic common to many English councils, large and small, is that many services are contracted out to private service providers—such as highway maintenance and environmental services such as rubbish collection, drain clearance, school buses, etc. This started under Margaret Thatcher as a money-saving thing (and as a way to reduce the power of the public sector unions) and has become standard practice—and a major source of income for the lucky businesses that win the tenders (contracts)!

Area zoning (planning) issues are dealt with by the Bedford/Luton/Central Beds councils as appropriate, as planning regulation is delegated by national government—although in rare, controversial cases HMG can overturn a local council’s decision. The bigger towns such as Bedford and Luton have their own planning priorities but would coordinate with Central Beds on the basis of friendly neighbourliness (we hope!). There is a major consultation on at the moment by Central Beds to decide the shape of development (residential vs. commercial, etc.) over the next 20 years or so—that’s a Central Beds issue because it covers multiple smaller (town) council areas. It’s a public consultation (period of public comment), and anyone living in the Central Bedfordshire Council area can comment online, by mail or at a public meeting. (HMG is currently proposing a major overhaul of planning regulations, reducing 1,000 pages of guidance to 50. It’s very controversial since “presumption of approval” becomes, for the first time, the starting point for all applications.)

So while permission for an individual supermarket in Leighton Buzzard to expand can be decided by Leighton-Linslade Town Council alone, the question of how many supermarkets would properly serve the population of the county as a whole rests with Central Beds.

Each county (and most large conurbations) has its own police and fire services, and are partially funded by the local “Council Tax” (property tax) paid by every property owner, but the majority funding comes from HMG. Each of the 43 police forces in England and Wales is watched over by a police authority comprising a mix of people appointed by the local council, independent members and magistrates. (HMG wants to introduce elected police commissioners for each force in England and Wales; the scheme is highly controversial, but the first elections are due in November this year.)

As for the size of the councils, it’s important to note that a council like Central Beds represents dozens of small towns and villages, each of which (or perhaps two neighbouring ones) have their own representative/s. Our town council is broken down into eight wards, each with two or three councillors. Councillors are unpaid, voluntary part-timers with full-time day jobs. That also partly explains why some of them don’t turn up all the time! (They can claim expenses and some allowances, but it’s not a way to get rich or famous.) Finally, you asked what do they do at their meetings. I haven’t been to one yet, although I intend to at some point. I attach a sample agenda—this probably won’t be the one I go to, but it will give you an idea! Not a mention of the Town Crier.

Want to know more about local government in the U.K.? You can download an agenda and find other information about the Leighton-Linslade Town Council by clicking here.

Photo by DH Wright licensed under Creative Commons.

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