Mayors – Page 3

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.

Why You Should Learn to Think like a Politician

January 17, 2012 By Otis White

In his engrossing new biography of John F. Kennedy, Chris Matthews tells us that, in 1958, after he won re-election to the U.S. Senate and was preparing to run for president, Kennedy dropped by Congressman Tip O’Neill’s office. He wasn’t there to talk about public policy; he wanted to know from the congressman’s political aide, Tommy Mullen, precisely how neighborhoods in O’Neill’s Boston district had voted.

Together, Kennedy and Mullen went over the vote totals from Irish, Italian, and Jewish neighborhoods, precinct by precinct. Years later, O’Neill was still amazed by the sight of the future president and his own aide combing through the numbers. “I’d never seen anybody study the voting patterns of ethnic and religious groups in a systematic way before,” O’Neill told Matthews, “and I don’t think that most people realized then, or appreciate now, that Jack Kennedy was a very sophisticated student of politics.”

The key word is “student,” because Kennedy wasn’t a natural politician the way that, say, Bill Clinton was. Before running for office in 1946, Kennedy’s social world was pretty much confined to Harvard, Palm Beach, Hyannis Port, and London. He knew little of working class Boston and, surprisingly, not much about Irish Americans. He also knew next to nothing about how people got elected to office. So he set about learning by visiting local politicians and asking their advice.

Along the way, Kennedy wrote what he heard in a notebook. Here are some of the things he jotted down:

“In politics, you don’t have friends, you have confederates.”
“You can buy brains but you can’t buy loyalty.”
“One day they feed you honey, the next (you) will find fish caught in your throat.”
“The best politician is the man who does not think too much of the political consequences of his every act.”

Of all of the things that made John Kennedy a compelling figure, perhaps the least appreciated was his devotion to the craft of politics, something that became, in Matthews’ words, “an essential part of him.”

What does this have to do with cities and leadership? Just this: As we’ve grown in recent decades in our knowledge of urban economies, street-level planning, city design, the value of diversity, government finance and management, we’ve lost an essential leadership skill—the craft of city politics. Put another way, we now have a great storehouse of what ought to be done, but less and less knowledge of how to do it.

We’ve tried to fill in for that missing knowledge with citizen engagement, by asking citizens what they want, and how they’d like it delivered. (I know. I’ve been part of a number of citizen-engagement projects.) But while engaging citizens is helpful, it’s not enough. That’s because, at the end of the day, we still need someone—elected officials, mostly—to put together specific initiatives, explain these proposals to the public, sell the initiatives to other decision makers, work through the details with bureaucrats, make compromises, get the initiatives enacted, and oversee their implementation. You can use any term you want, but I’m pretty sure that JFK would have called this “politics.”

I’ll offer some ideas about dealing with our political knowledge deficit, but let me begin with two caveats. First, city government is not the same as a city. Cities are complex human environments made up of many dynamic parts, from economics and demographics to technology and culture. And cities are themselves nodes in much larger environments—regional, national, and global.

But if local government isn’t the sum of a city, it is surely the most influential part. That’s because only government has the mandate, platform, and most easily mobilized resources for addressing the issues facing a community. Think of government, then, as the rudder of the ship and some of the sails. And politics? That’s how we decide who gets to be helmsman . . . along with a good portion of the crew.

My second caveat is that politics is about two things. First, it’s about electoral politics, which is what brought Jack Kennedy to Tip O’Neill’s office in 1958. In other words, how people get elected. But second, politics is about legislation, which is how groups of elected officials, government regulators, and other decision makers come to consensus (or don’t) about what to do.

Everyone who wants to be a serious civic leader at the neighborhood, city, or regional levels needs to know both kinds of politics: How people get elected, and how government decisions are made. And not in a textbook way. You need to know how your current mayor ran for office, how she put together a winning coalition, and who was part of the coalition. And you need to know how your city’s most important ordinances were crafted, who was part of the discussions, and how the proposals changed as they moved through the process.

Why is this knowledge important? Because you need to be involved in picking the right helmsman to steer your city. And if you’re going to serve on the crew—along with people from government—you better know how they work so you can do your part.

But how can you learn about the two kinds of politics in your city? First, you can learn it as JFK did, by visiting politicians and asking them. (You’ll be surprised by how candid they’ll be if they trust you.) Second, you can hope for more media attention to the craft of politics. This probably won’t come from the traditional media but it might from new media, such as civic websites, podcasts, or even some alternative weekly newspapers.

Finally, you can create your own discussions. I have some experience with this. For a number of years, I moderated a panel of mayors for the annual International Downtown Association conference called “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Politics But Were Afraid to Ask Your Mayor.” We got together three or four mayors from around the country and let downtown executives ask them difficult questions.

My favorite came from a woman in Iowa who said, “Our new mayor ran on a platform of putting our organization out of business. How should we deal with that?” I was amazed by how candid the mayors were, offering advice for dealing with politicians, advancing ideas, talking with the public, and a hundred other practical tips on politics. They were so candid that I worried a little about how it might affect their careers. (I’m happy to report that, of the 20 or so mayors who appeared on my panels over the years, two are now governors, one is a U.S. senator, and several are still mayors. To my knowledge, no one suffered from participating.)

Every civic organization could do something like this—put together panels that teach politics to people who don’t want to run for office but want to be effective in their communities. And let me make a distinction here. This is not the same as candidate forums at election time or issue forums at other times. These forums are more like seminars in practical politics, where three or four elected officials talk about how politics really works—and civic leaders learn how they can work better with their elected officials. (If your current political leaders are too cautious, invite some former politicians.)

And it’s not just civic leaders who need to know how politics work. So do people who work in city halls, many of whom are surprisingly uninformed about their mayor and city council. Every college planning department and government management school ought to have seminars with politicians who explain how they got elected and how they put together legislation. And every government professional organization (yes, I’m talking about you, American Planning Association) needs to offer refresher courses at its annual conferences.

Finally, it would be a good idea if politicians talked more about politics among themselves. The thing I noticed about the mayors on my panels was how attentive they were to each other’s stories and advice; it was as if they were taking notes. This kind of peer learning is important because, if we had better politicians, we’d have better cities. And it’s particularly needed on the legislative side of politics because it’s hard to get big things done in communities. Many well-intended politicians aim too high and fail—or too low and accomplish little. Get the politicians together, let them talk about what worked and what didn’t, and they’ll improve each other’s winning percentages—and that of their cities.

John Kennedy would have understood the value of peer learning. For all his eloquence and glamour, JFK was a cautious politician who left little to chance. If someone said he’d vote with Kennedy on a major bill, JFK wanted to be absolutely sure he could depend on it. Apparently, this was something he had learned early in his career from talking with Boston politicians. Something about being fed honey but winding up with a fish in your throat.

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.

From Provider to Partner

August 5, 2010 By Otis White

There’s a vast change underway in how local governments relate to their citizens, as governments move from being providers to partners. Almost everywhere you turn, you see this shift. Here are three examples:

The rise of business improvement districts. I’ve heard former mayors who served in the 1960s and 1970s talk about how shocked they were to learn that businesses would voluntarily raise their taxes in order to improve their surroundings. And yet, by the 1990s the BIDs were everywhere. The original idea was to take over services that cities could no longer afford (like cleaning up graffiti and planting trees), but BIDs have grown into surprisingly effective planning organizations as well.
The vast expansion of public-private partnerships. Cities have been creating public-private partnerships for decades; it’s how stadiums and civic centers were built in the 1980s and economic development programs were funded. But we’re now into partnerships that couldn’t have been imagined even a decade ago, like building toll lanes on highways and privatizing downtown parking meters. Some of these ventures will prove to be bad ideas, but they demonstrate how far you can go in marrying profit motives with public purposes.
The arrival of philanthropy in government services. Again, this is the sort of thing that leaves former mayors shaking their heads, but cities everywhere are turning to non-profits and foundations to fund—and manage—public assets. Name a major municipal service area that touches the lives of citizens, and you’ll likely find philanthropy at work, from park conservancies and public land trusts to police and library foundations. I haven’t seen donors lining up to support solid waste, but surely it can’t be too far off.

I could go on and on—there are many examples—but the shift is undeniable and the implications are clear: Governments no longer “own” local problems; they “share” community problems with others. And as you move from owning to sharing, new skills are required of government leaders: that they be able to identify others to share the burden, and that they be able to work as partners and not directors. And for that, they must learn patience and restraint, and this is much, much harder than you might think.

I’ll talk about restraint shortly, but first a bit more about the great role shift. I ran across a good description of the change in a report by a group called PACE, which stands for Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement. In it, the city manager of Ventura, Calif., Rick Cole, said the difference was between a vending machine and a barn raising:

“With a vending machine, you put your money in and get services out,” says Cole, a former alternative newspaper publisher and mayor in Pasadena. “When government doesn’t deliver, they do what people do when a vending machine doesn’t deliver,” says Cole. “They kick it.”

“The more useful metaphor,” he adds, “is the barn raising. It’s not a transaction, where I pay you to do work on my behalf, but a collaborative process where we are working together. Government works better and costs less when citizens do more than simply choose or ratify representative decision makers.”

Which are the next great barns to be raised? There are two areas where governments will make great partnership strides in the future. First is in neighborhood improvements; second is in bringing volunteers inside local governments.

With neighborhoods, this means letting residents take the lead in listing and prioritizing their needs, and insisting they take a major role in providing the solutions. I know, I know. We’ve tried for decades to find a workable model for neighborhood involvement without much success. But that’s because we’ve only done the first of these two things—we’ve asked people what they want and haven’t insisted they share the burden. To use Rick Cole’s metaphor, we’ve let people describe the soft drinks they want and the price they’d like to pay (essentially nothing), and when local governments failed to deliver, we’ve watched them kick the vending machines. We need them to grab a hammer and start raising the barn.

I’ll write in the future about the idea of volunteers in government. I know it sounds far-fetched, but I would point out that we already have volunteers in a range of government work, from volunteer firefighters and parents who help out in classrooms to volunteer librarians. (Next time you’re at your public library, ask the librarian to point out who works there for free.) Governments haven’t learned to ask for volunteers, but when they do, they’ll be surprised how many step forward. Here’s the key, though: They can’t manage volunteers like employees. So add to the list of skills governments must learn things like volunteer training, motivation and coordination.

Final thought: I first saw a local government acting as partner and not provider in 1994 when I wrote a magazine article about a South Florida city called Delray Beach. (You can read the entire article here.) The key to change in Delray Beach was a mayor, Tom Lynch, and a city council that had learned to be a dependable partner without becoming a dominating presence. Here’s a glimpse of how restraint works:

When a problem becomes apparent, civic leaders help the people most affected organize themselves to study it and come up with solutions. When the citizens arrive at some solutions, the city offers to be part—but only part—of the resolution. The group that’s most affected must accept the bulk of the responsibility.

It’s in this constant tension over responsibility—is everyone doing his part to solve this problem?—that Delray Beach generates both solutions and leadership. No one looks to city hall to figure out what to do or even to do it once it’s figured out. But they do keep close watch to be sure the city, the business community and non-profits live up to their ends of the bargain.

City hall is willing to “facilitate” the problem-solving process, help find resources and take some of the responsibility when the solution is arrived at. But it won’t tell people what to do or take on the work for them. As Mayor Lynch explains, “If someone comes to us with a problem, our role isn’t to solve the problem but to connect them with other people who can help them solve their problem.”

A decade and a half ago, I was amazed by this approach and even more by its results: not only a popular and well-managed local government in a city that had turned itself around—but a much happier citizenry as well. It turned out that, in Delray Beach, people preferred being partners to constituents. Come to think of it, they probably would have enjoyed barn raisings to vending machines, too.

Photo by Load Stone licensed under Creative Commons.

Rereading a Classic About Community Leadership

May 10, 2010 By Otis White

In 1991, I read Alan Ehrenhalt’s brilliant analysis of who runs for public office, “The United States of Ambition.” (Note: Alan is a friend and occasional colleague.) The book begins with a description of candidates of the 1990s and how they were different from candidates in the past, and continues with chapters profiling the changes at the local, state and federal levels, including who runs for president.

When I reread “The United States of Ambition” recently, I was surprised by how much I remembered of Alan’s book—and a critical part I had forgotten.

Here are three most important things I remembered:

Few political analysts spend much time looking at who runs for office, Alan wrote, but a lot could be learned from looking at this “supply side” of politics.
The key change was in what Alan called “the decline of deference” and the rise of “freelance” politicians who represented no one but themselves.
This change in who runs for office, Alan said, resolved an old debate between sociologists and political scientists on who makes decisions for American communities. In the 1950s and 1960s, a number of sociologists studied cities and towns around the country and came to the conclusion that most important decisions were made by a handful of people, the “power structure.” Political scientists did similar studies and found that important decisions were made by shifting coalitions, not cohesive groups. Alan’s answer: The “structuralists” (sociologists) were describing the past, while the “pluralists” (political scientists) were describing the future.

It’s a smart book that’s brilliantly reported and well written. If you like local politics, you’ll be fascinated by Alan’s description of how places like Concord, Calif., Sioux Falls, S.D., Greenville, S.C. and Utica, N.Y. changed, sometimes overnight. At the center of the stories are the politicians. One year, elected officials are people with deep connections to a traditional group of community leaders. Then an election comes along and, bang, the voters put in a group of politicians no one had recruited and few had even heard of before they ran. (You’ll particularly enjoy the story of how in 1974 the voters of Sioux Falls tossed out a longtime mayor who sought and followed advice from a group of business leaders, replacing him with a “shaggy-haired, 27-year-old disc jockey who had run because a listener dared him to on a weekday morning call-in program.”)

The “mutiny of 1974” wasn’t peculiar to Sioux Falls, Alan wrote; it was part of a generational shift away from people who served on school boards, city councils and county commissions out of obligation to the community and toward candidates who ran for office because they loved the game of politics. These new-style politicians, self-motivated and self-sufficient, excel at campaigning.

The skills that work in American politics at this point in history are those of entrepreneurship. At all levels of the political system, from local boards and councils up to and including the presidency, it is unusual for parties to nominate people. People nominate themselves. That is, they offer themselves as candidates, raise money, organize campaigns, create their own publicity, and make decisions in their own behalf. If they are not willing to do that work for themselves, they are not (except in a very few parts of the country) going to find any political party structure to do it for them.

And this is a dramatic break from the past, Alan added:

. . . (T)he successful candidates a generation ago were those who bore the stamp of approval of the town’s informal leadership organization. “When we were kids growing up,” a Sioux Falls businessman in his forties recalls, “everybody knew who would win the elections. The person who had been in Rotary and had been endorsed by the Chamber of Commerce always won.”

These were the things I remembered from my first reading: the decline of deference and the sudden jolting changes as a new, “freelance” type of politician emerged in communities.

What I had forgotten was Alan’s caution that this new style of “unbossed and unbought” politician—which independent-minded Americans tend to like—carried a risk. The risk: That in overthrowing the “power structure” we would settle for no power at all. Here’s how Alan describes the downside of the truly independent political leader:

(P)ower can evaporate. When it breaks loose from those who have held it in concentrated form, as has happened in American politics over the last generation, it does not necessarily change hands. It may be dispersed so broadly that it might as well have disappeared into thin air. And leadership, which ultimately depends upon the existence of power, may disappear along with it.

The irony of pursuing office in the 1990s is that one may reach a position of influence, find no established elite or power structure blocking its exercise, yet discover that it is more difficult than ever to lead.

In the cities he profiled, that’s what he found: Newcomers with “no strings attached” also had no ability to pull strings to get things done. “Unbossed and unbought” sometimes meant unmoored and adrift. ” . . . (T)he mayor who doesn’t owe anybody a thing doesn’t have many tools to govern with either,” Alan wrote. “Candidates nobody sent can be very appealing; leaders nobody sent can be dangerous.”

The result, in city after city, were elected officials with too few connections and little in common to work together.

We have replaced governments that could say yes—and make it stick—with governments that offer a multitude of interests the right to say no. We have elected and empowered a generation of political professionals whose independence and refusal to defer makes concerted action, even when necessary, quite difficult.

I think this is exactly so, and it’s why I believe leadership has become the single most important factor in communities today—because it’s so easy to stop things and so hard to move things forward. We can’t depend on a power structure or elected officials to lead anymore. The first doesn’t exist in most places and the second often can’t deliver. It takes a broader group of people working together, using new skills to lead our cities and towns.

I’ve already talked a little about what those new skills are; we’ll talk more about them in the future. But the need for new leaders and new leadership skills is greater than at any time in my memory. Thanks to Alan Ehrenhalt for telling us why.

Photo of sign by Mark Sardella licensed under Creative Commons.

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

Why You Should Learn to Think like a Politician

The Mayor as Manager

From Provider to Partner

Rereading a Classic About Community Leadership

About Otis White

The Great Project

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