Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

A Reservoir for Civic Progress

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If you want to see how civic projects can move communities forward, take a look at the Bridge Center in Baton Rouge, La. Or, at least, at what it will be when it opens next year.

The Bridge Center will be a place for people suffering from mental illness or substance abuse, and, in particular, an alternative to police and EMTs taking them to jail or an emergency room. This “third option,” as advocates like to call it, should bring a cascade of benefits: relieving overcrowding at emergency rooms and the county jail while dealing with the region’s addiction and mental illness issues more humanely and productively.

It will even be easier for the cops. Processing a prisoner at the county jail can take an hour’s time or more; waiting at an emergency room can take even longer. The Bridge Center’s aim: Complete the handoff in 15 minutes. And did I mention that it will save money? One study estimated that the Bridge Center will save up to $55 million in its first decade over incarceration or emergency room treatment. Little wonder then that nearly every public official, from the mayor to the county coroner, supported it.

But it’s also an example of how hard such things can be. The project began five years ago when a group of law enforcement officials, mental-health advocates, public-health experts, judicial-system leaders, and elected officials met to study Baton Rouge’s problems and identify solutions. Experts from around the country were brought in. There were group visits to a center in San Antonio, Texas, that became the Bridge Center’s model.

A clinical-design team outlined a series of services the Bridge Center could offer and how they could work together. A study suggested how the center might be funded. A nonprofit board was assembled that included the district attorney, the sheriff, mental-health care advocates, physicians, and other stakeholders.

With this mountain of testimonials, documentation, near-unanimous political support, heartrending stories of loved ones lost in the jail, and favorable news coverage, supporters asked voters in December 2016 for a modest tax increase to get the center started. They said no. It took two more years and a massive citizen-engagement effort to get a different result. Last December, voters in East Baton Rouge Parish, where Baton Rouge is located, finally said yes to a 1.5-mil increase in property taxes. Looking back, local officials are convinced the Bridge Center was worth the effort. “It was absolutely a step forward,” says Mayor Sharon Weston Broome.

Then again, local government leaders could afford to be patient with the slow pace. They have an ally, an organization that managed the Bridge Center proposal from first meeting through months of research and two referendums and will stick with it through ribbon-cutting: the Baton Rouge Area Foundation (BRAF), a community foundation that has evolved into a kind of research and development center for civic progress. BRAF’s fingerprints are on numerous projects, from a plan for downtown Baton Rouge to a nature center that takes visitors into a Louisiana swamp. It is trying to launch passenger rail service from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. And this is just a partial list.

By managing so many civic projects, BRAF applies the lessons of one initiative to the next. (One lesson: Don’t take referendums for granted.) Along the way, it has gained a reputation for getting things done, which opens even more doors. As foundation President John Davies says, “When the Baton Rouge Area Foundation asks people to come to a meeting, they will usually come.” And these advantages grow over time. While elected leaders come and go, BRAF Executive Vice President John Spain notes, “we are consistently here.”

Mayor Broome is a fan. “We are extremely fortunate to have a strong foundation like BRAF in our community,” she says. Still, she’s careful to add that the foundation doesn’t dictate to local government; it collaborates. As she sees it, the city and the foundation are “co-creators” of civic progress.

I’ve seen other organizations play this R&D role in a community, at least for a while. Typically, it is a business group such as a chamber of commerce. Occasionally, a university will step up. But most communities have no organized way of learning how civic progress works. They depend on extraordinary leaders (some elected, most not) to figure things out. And here’s the problem with that: In a lifetime, an extraordinary leader may take on one or two big civic projects before drifting out of civic work. When she leaves, her knowledge, skills, and relationships leave with her.

So you may want to ask: How does my community pass civic knowledge from one leader to the next? How do leaders build relationships? How do good ideas find funding? How do they survive disappointments?

If there isn’t an organization or at least a process for learning from successful projects and storing civic knowledge, good ideas may come like rain striking parched ground. They make a splash, raise hopes and then evaporate. Is it time to build a reservoir?

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by Charley Lhasa licensed under Creative Commons

How Odd Couples, Complementary Needs, and Chance Can Change Cities

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On a Sunday morning a few weeks from now, the 47th running of the New York Marathon will begin on Staten Island as 50,000 runners and wheelchair athletes thunder over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn. They’ll loop through Bay Ridge and into Williamsburg, then cross into Queens like an invading army. They’ll begin thinning out in Long Island City before heading into Manhattan across the high-arching Queensboro Bridge (the heartbreak hill of New York marathoners).

In Manhattan they’ll turn right and head north until they reach the Willis Avenue Bridge and cross into the Bronx, where they’ll basically make a U-turn back to Manhattan. The rest of the 26.2-mile run will be, comparatively speaking, a breeze, through Harlem, into the Upper East Side, with a triumphant finish in Central Park. The world’s best runners will finish in under two and a half hours. Mere mortals will take a while longer.

It’s an amazing spectacle. And if you’re lucky enough to see it (or better yet, participate in it), you may wonder: Where did the inspired idea of running a marathon through five boroughs and all these neighborhoods come from? And what does it tell us about how things like this happen in cities?

Answer: It came from a meeting in 1975, where two people found a way of connecting their entirely different needs in a way that created not just a common solution but a sensation. The central figures were Percy Sutton, the Manhattan borough president, and Fred Lebow, head of the New York Road Runners.

The two could not have been more different. Sutton was a polished lawyer and politician. Lebow was a Romanian refugee who made money in New York’s garment district before falling in love with long-distance running. Sutton knew power; Lebow knew showmanship. In short, they were the odd couple.

Their needs, too, were completely different. During one of New York’s worst years ever, Sutton was looking to change the narrative about his city, to give it something hopeful in the Bicentennial year of 1976. (He also hoped to become New York’s first black mayor.) Lebow wanted something to distinguish New York’s marathon from the much older and better known Boston Marathon. At the time, New York’s race was run entirely inside Central Park, with runners dodging cyclists and families pushing strollers.

What brought them together was a misunderstanding. Lebow and others were talking about running the marathon in the streets (as Boston’s was). By the time the idea reached Sutton, it had somehow become a race through every one of New York’s boroughs. Sutton was intrigued by the idea; Lebow, once he heard what was on the table, was horrified. (The cost, the logistics, the likelihood that something would go wrong . . . this was a crazy idea.)

And here’s where the magic happened. Once they sat down and started talking, the two men found answers to every objection. And more: They found greatness in the idea. This wasn’t just a partial answer to New York’s image problems or a way to make the New York Marathon distinctive. This was a way of creating a spectacle that could rival 1945’s V-J celebrations in Times Square . . . and, if successful, could be held every year.

Their relationship held Sutton and Lebow together as they worked through the security, logistics, organizational, and cost issues. But the opportunity of a great civic spectacle became their driving force.

If anything, the New York Marathon has grown beyond anything Sutton and Lebow could have imagined: it’s a showcase of great runners (and tens of thousands of average ones) and great urban neighborhoods, an economic and tourism boost for the city, an irresistible draw for the news media, and a civic celebration. But it also is an illustration of how legendary civic projects come about: when odd-couple leaders find ways of connecting their needs and creating solutions that become greater than the problems they began with. You see it in the origins of Atlanta’s Beltline project and the reinvention of Denver’s Union Station.

There is no way to plan for these things. Having an open door and lots of relationships helps. So does having a creative mind that can connect needs in creating solutions. But luck plays a role. How else can you account for the fact that, had Percy Sutton not misunderstood Fred Lebow’s original idea, we would not today have one of the world’s greatest athletic events and urban celebrations?

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by Peter Miller licensed under Creative Commons.

How to Manage a Crisis Before It Happens

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I like crises. Mind you, I don’t like being in them; I just like reading about them and thinking about how I might manage them. I don’t read Stephen King novels, but I suppose the effect is the same.

You, too, should think about crises because, knock on wood, you are likely to find yourself in one at some point in your public-leadership career if you haven’t already. And these things go better with a little forethought.

So, what is a crisis? You may have your own definition, but mine is that they are unexpected events that seem to defy the standard solutions and must be dealt with immediately. It’s the middle part that makes them so scary: For a time at least, the normal processes don’t work. You can imagine what fits this description: natural disasters, riots, system breakdowns (think back to this summer’s Toledo water crisis), economic disruptions (say, a major local employer shutting down), and scandals.

So what do you do when business as usual breaks down? You work hard to restore order, promise a full inquiry into what went wrong, and speak directly, clearly, and fully to three audiences: those dealing with the crisis, those most affected by it, and everyone else in your community.

This sounds simple but isn’t. That’s because, first, there’s no assurance what you do will work. You may have to try, fail, and try again. Second, you must speak to citizens and those working on the crisis without promising the unknowable (how and when the crisis will end). Finally, people around you will be demanding that you not say anything at all. After all, it’s a crisis. Why are you standing in front of TV microphones? Oh, and by the way, they’ll tell you, there are bound to be legal consequences, so it really is better to keep your mouth shut.

Ignore them. The difference between private management and public management is the public part. As a result, what you say to citizens about the crisis and your efforts to resolve it is every bit as important as what you do. In fact, I would argue that having someone in charge who is thinking about what he or she will say in public an hour later makes for better decision making.

So the first thing you can do to prepare for your first crisis is to think about how order might be restored in a range of calamities. The second thing is to think about how you would communicate these things to a frightened or angry public.

The third thing is to get to know those you’ll depend on in these situations—police, fire, public works, civil defense, key city hall staff (including communications staffers), disaster-relief organizations, and so on. If you’re in a position to do so, suggest mock disaster exercises. (One reason then-New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was so cool headed on Sept. 11 was that he, his staff, and the police had practiced for disasters.)

Finally, you can build relationships in areas where, if worse comes to worst, you may need help: minority communities, charitable organizations, faith communities, and so on. In almost any major crisis, you’ll need these groups’ support and assistance, but in a particular type of crisis their support will be critical. That’s when government itself is seen as the cause of the crisis (think Ferguson, Missouri or a city hall scandal). In these cases, you’ll need friends in a hurry. Do you have a list of community leaders who’ll stand behind you on a podium as you explain your actions? If not, it’s time to get busy.

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by Lieven Van Melckebeke licensed under Creative Commons.

Lesson Six: The Secret of Government Success

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It is often said that Americans don’t like government. While that may be true in the singular, we certainly like it in the plural. That is, we like governments—and lots of them. There are more than 90,000 local governments in the United States: 38,910 “general purpose” governments (cities, counties, towns), 12,880 school districts, and 38,266 “special purpose” governments.

If you dig around in the U.S. Census Bureau’s Census of Governments, you’ll find some interesting trends. After World War II, the number of local governments declined, due mostly to school-district consolidations. (Believe it or not, we have one-fifth the number of school districts we had in the early 1950s.) Then, in the 1970s, the trend reversed itself and the number of local governments grew, slowly but steadily. The largest number of new governments were special purpose governments (things like sewer, parks, and transit districts), but there was also growth in municipalities.

I’ve seen it in Atlanta, where I live, which in recently years has sprouted cities in unincorporated suburban areas, brand new cities with names like Dunwoody, Sandy Springs, Johns Creek, Peachtree Corners, and so on. Atlanta has a lot of governments, but we are by no means the most fragmented region in the country. That title belongs to St. Louis, where there are 90 municipal governments in St. Louis County alone—not including the actual city of St. Louis. These are mostly small places, anonymous even to those a short distance away. One, the town of Champ, has somewhere between 12 and 14 residents, depending on who’s counting. Not kidding.

If you look around your own region and start counting the governments, you may be surprised by how many you find. Keep in mind: It isn’t just cities and counties, but those rapidly multiplying special districts as well. And don’t forget the federal and state governments. Almost any big issue—transportation, economic development, public safety—will involve multiple governments. As a test, next time your district attorney announces the results of a major drug bust, count the federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies represented on the podium behind her. You’ll need a tally sheet to keep track.

Point is, we live in a country that believes power is best exercised by a herd and not a shepherd. And while your city may be the largest member of the herd, it is still dependent on others—and most likely lots of others—if it wants to do anything important. The word we use for this cooperation by interests not compelled to cooperate is collaboration. If you want to take your reporting to a higher level, try seeing this cooperation (or its absence) and reporting on it. In doing so, you’ll find yourself at the heart of what makes governments successful, which is their ability to work together.

Caution: I’m not talking about, well, talk. Government leaders are good at praising cooperation. After all, most of us have had it drilled into our heads since kindergarten that we should play well together. Words, though, are one thing, actions another, and your job is to find where your city hall is doing important things with others, where it should be working with others but isn’t, how the effective collaborations work, and who’s behind them.

To understand the mechanics of collaboration, you might begin with a couple of things I’ve written. One is on how collaborations get started (and, yes, talk is a first step but only a step); the other is about the central skill involved in putting collaborations together. (You have to ask the right way.)

Then just start looking around. You may be surprised by the number of collaborations at work in your region and their importance in getting things done. I wrote a book a few years ago about how one civic project changed a city; what I discovered was it was created by a web of collaborations involving state and local governments, a public university, a host of elected officials, and numerous interests outside of government. My challenge in writing the book was to figure out who put these collaborations together and how they did it.

That’s yours, as well: See the collaboration, then figure out why it works and who made it happen. The result, I promise you, will be some of the most insightful reporting of your career—and probably the first of its kind for your news organization.

So, how do you find collaborations? I suggest two ways. First is the way I suggested in Lessons Two, Three, and Four (on where civic ideas come from, the role of city councils, and the art of compromise): Identify some big civic improvements of the last few years and reverse engineer them. This time, instead of looking for the idea path, the deal brokers, and the key compromises, ask: Who was involved in this effort? Why did they cooperate? And how were they persuaded to join in? To make the reporting interesting, look for those who did the persuading and ask: What did they say and why did it work?

This will work for big civic projects, but you’ll also learn there are everyday collaborations in your region. To find these, you’ll have to ask around. Start with the city planner’s office (planners have a good eye for these things). If your city has a downtown business improvement district, ask the BID’s director. (Like planners, BIDs are usually good at collaboration.) And, of course, pay a visit to your region’s council of governments. (Don’t know what that is? Read this.)

Then just look in some likely places for collaboration. Does your school system work with the local government on issues like pedestrian safety or recreation? Does your mayor ever meet with mayors from nearby cities? What comes from these meetings? If your region has more than one transit system, how do they manage transfers, and how do they manage fare-sharing? As you ask around, you may find that there are organizations that help with collaborations. The most obvious are the councils of governments, but you may find that civic leagues, professional organizations, and municipal associations also help introduce government leaders to one another.

Then ask this question: Where should governments be working together—but aren’t? You can interview public administration professors at a nearby university for their suggestions, but the answers may be obvious as you look around. Transit systems, for example, need to work with city planners so they can anticipate demand. Well . . . does yours? If so, how? As children walk to schools, they need safe passages. How does your school system work with the city to be sure they have them? How do your city’s public works officials coordinate with nearby cities on things like snow removal and street resurfacing projects? What kinds of mutual-assistance agreements are there between your city’s police and fire departments and those in cities nearby? How well have these worked in crises?

As you get into these stories, you’ll see the hidden structure of government, the way things actually work day to day, for better or worse. What you’ll discover is that this world is different from what is discussed at city council meetings—and radically different from what is talked about in campaigns. And during the next election cycle this will present you with a challenge: Do you bring this new understanding to your political coverage? And if so, how?

A postscript: Every region needs collaboration, even places like North Carolina and Texas where city governments tend to be big and powerful. After all, there are multiple governments even in those places, from school systems and transit authorities to state and federal agencies. But in places with lots of smaller governments, as in the Atlanta and St. Louis areas, collaboration isn’t just a good thing, it’s critical.

Because it is so fragmented, St. Louis has worried about its government structure for more than a half-century. Over that period, it has made numerous attempts at doing something about it, including full-scale government consolidation referendums. In fact, it’s still at it, through an organization called Better Together, which appears to be mounting yet another attempt at municipal merger. Good luck, since every other effort has failed, usually overwhelmingly.

If I could advise St. Louis leaders, I’d tell them to stop putting so much effort into consolidation and invest instead in collaboration. There are two reasons: First, this is likely to be much more successful in the short run. Second, in the long run, collaboration may be the best route to consolidation. That’s because as long as local leaders don’t know one another or the strengths and weaknesses of the city next door, they’re going to resist combining anything. But if their police and fire departments start coordinating activities and their planning departments work together, they’ll build the familiarity and trust that opens the door to combining services. And when there are enough combined services, who knows? The voters may decide it’s time to take the final step and just merge the cities.

This is one of a series of postings about better ways of understanding local government and writing about local politics. To read the introduction, please click here.

Photo by Vu Nguyen licensed under Creative Commons.

The Art of the Ask

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There are probably many reasons to be fascinated by John F. Kennedy’s life and brief time in the White House. Here’s mine: I’ve long wondered how this one-time high-society party boy ever got to be such a good politician.

Chris Matthews, the TV commentator, may have finally answered my question. In his book, “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero,” Matthews said World War II changed Kennedy by placing him in charge of men not at all like him, mechanics and farmers, factory workers and truck drivers, Southerners and Midwesterners. That taught him empathy, which is a key to leadership. And somewhere along the line, Kennedy picked up a second skill: He learned how to ask people to do things.

This came in handy when Kennedy ran for office, and, Matthews writes, “realized that the key to forging loyalty within his (campaign) organization was the invitation itself. The mere act of asking someone to become a Kennedy person was the step that mattered.”

You may never run for public office, and if you do you may not need the political skills of John F. Kennedy. But asking people to do things—and getting them to do them—is a skill every civic leader and government manager needs to master, now more than ever.

Why? Because big urban problems can’t be solved by organizations acting alone; they can only be solved by collaborations. And collaborations—which are, after all, joint efforts by interests not compelled to work together—don’t come about on their own. They exist because someone brought the participants together. Simply stated, somebody made “the ask” and did so successfully.

So what’s an effective ask? It has three parts. First is finding the right person to ask. Second is asking the right way, so the person accepts the task. And third is asking again—the “second ask.”

If there’s an art to asking, it’s in that first part. That’s because finding the right person is a mixture of strategy, knowledge, and judgment. You have to know the objective (the task the collaboration will undertake), the organizations or interests that can best contribute to the objective, and the right person to work with inside those organizations and interests. (Hint: It may not be the person whose name is first on the letterhead.)

Then there’s the ask itself. Here again, it’s a mixture, usually including an appeal to altruism (imagine the good we can do) and self-interest (here’s what’s in it for you and your organization). But it has to go beyond artful phrasing because few will say yes to likely failure. So you have to show that you have a roadmap to success. That might mean facilitating meetings and offering other resources; at the very least it means deciding the number of meetings and what each will address.

And that brings us to the final part, the second ask, and back to JFK. Kennedy didn’t ask people to do things once. He asked them again and again. That’s how he built the intense loyalty that characterized his campaigns and his presidency.

There’s a bit of psychology here: When people say yes to an ask, no matter how little you’ve asked of them, they’ve investing in you. If the task is successful, your value rises in their eyes. By asking a second (or third or fourth) time, you are deepening your value . . . and building support. There’s also a bit of economics: You’ll spend much less time finding and asking people to join you a second or third time, so there is what economists might call a marginal efficiency in the second ask.

These benefits accumulate over time. But the first step, as JFK might remind us, is to ask—and ask well.

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by Andreas Klinke Johannsen licensed under Creative Commons.

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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You can find Otis White’s urban issues updates by searching on the Mastodon social media site for @otiswhite@urbanists.social.