Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

Lesson Five: Vision and Demographics

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My aim in these postings is to help you, as a reporter or blogger, understand local government and avoid some of the problems I had as a city hall reporter. As I said in the introduction, I never truly “got” local government when I covered city hall. I kept looking for what I’d learned in college political science classes—that government decision making was about interests clashing over public policy. I was disappointed to find city councils focused instead on things that seemed smaller and less interesting: arbitrating zoning disputes, moving small amounts of money among city departments, listening to neighborhood complaints, voting on construction projects. Where were the interest groups, I wondered, the lobbyists, the committee hearings, the position papers, the public policies?

It wasn’t until much later that I understood local governments weren’t smaller versions of federal and state governments; they were focused on something different—not public policy but people and places, how these elements interact, and how they could be made to interact better. Land use, I learned, was the central concern of city and county governments, and it is local governments’ ability to place infrastructure and regulate land uses (not only on public streets and spaces but private property) that gives them power and importance.

A city council’s debate, then, about locating a civic center isn’t a boring discussion about another construction project—it’s a bet on where and how the city will grow. Guess right, and the area around it could be transformed. Guess wrong, and it could be a drain on government revenues and a huge missed opportunity.

And you can go down the list: Where transit stops are placed, sidewalks built, parks located, schools situated; whether to build a performing arts center, start a bike-sharing program, or help the local college expand; how to regulate food trucks and ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft; whether to give economic development incentives to businesses or help a small-business incubator get off the ground. These decisions don’t look like much close up, but collectively they add up to a vision of the city, with each a step toward that vision.

One of your most important jobs as city hall reporter, then, should be to figure out the vision. If your city has been through a full-scale planning process recently, this may be easy. Many will know the city’s intended destination and how it aims to get there. Your task is to put these things into words and explain what they mean, why they are important, and what alternative visions were considered.

If the city hasn’t been through a visioning process or comprehensive planning effort, the vision could be known only to a few. So your first task is to piece together the vision by interviewing those with a say in city decisions and comparing it with the decisions they’ve made and the plans that guide them. (Hint: Talk to the city planning director and the local chamber of commerce president before interviewing the mayor and council members.)

It’s possible, of course, that there is no broadly shared vision, that the city council is feeling its way through important decisions. But trust me on this: Having no direction doesn’t mean the city isn’t going somewhere. It just isn’t going there by design. In these cases, your job is to see where the drift is taking the city, tell your readers what that place is likely to be, and ask leaders if they’re comfortable with the destination.

All of this brings up some questions: What does a vision look like? How would you know if your city is achieving it? And if the city is just drifting along, how can you see where it’s headed?

Actually, it’s pretty simple. Look at the demographics.

Go back to the central issue for cities: People and places, how they interact, and how they can be made to interact better. The tools that a city has are the “places” part of that statement—how it develops public places, regulates private ones, and serves all with infrastructure. The results are the people and what they do with those places. Remember the famous Watergate adage, “follow the money”? If you want to know where your city is headed, follow the demographics.

A vision, then, is an effort to picture who will live in, work in, and visit your city in the future, what they will do for entertainment, how they will relate to one another and the city’s physical assets, how they will move around, and what impressions newcomers will form. And behind the vision should be a plan: In order to make this ideal future become a reality, here are the things we must do.

Describing the vision is important, but you need to know more. Is the vision obtainable? Can the city truly attract those it wants and needs in order to be successful? To answer this, you’ll have to take a deep dive into demographics, starting with where the city is today and how it is changing.

Here are some questions to begin with: Who lives in your city by age, income, educational attainment, and ethnicity? How are these numbers changing over, say, the last 10 years? How do these changes compare with cities of similar size and type? How do they compare with nearby jurisdictions, such as suburbs? (You can find these things from U.S. Census data but call your regional planning agency. It may have additional data and even projections.)

Now drill down a bit: Where in your city are the greatest changes taking place today? If the city is investing in some areas or services (such as transit), how is that affecting the demographics in those neighborhoods? (Again, look not just at population numbers in those tracts but age, income, and education.)

All of this will give you some idea of how realistic your city’s vision is. If the city is aging rapidly and wants to attract more young people and you can’t find a single neighborhood where young people are replacing older families, it’ll be a tough slog—and you can say so. If, though, there are several neighborhoods that millennials are moving to, then there’s your lede. Interview the newcomers, explain the neighborhood’s attraction, and give readers a glimpse of the future.

As you’re getting used to demographics, don’t forget that cities serve more than residents. They’re also centers for work, entertainment, and tourism. Employee demographics aren’t as easily obtained as residential demographics, but governments do track the types of jobs being created as well as the number. I suggest starting with a federal database called County Business Patterns. Be patient: You’ll have to immerse yourself in things like NAICS codes and learn some basic spreadsheet techniques, but pretty soon you’ll be able to figure out how employment is changing in your city. And the same guidelines apply: If your city wants to be a center of technology and can’t show any growth in that area, then you can be properly skeptical.

Tourism and entertainment statistics will be harder still to come by; they’re kept locally and some are sketchy. But it’s worth the effort to learn who comes to your city and for what purposes. You may, for instance, be able to track restaurant sales figures over time, which will tell you whether city efforts to build an entertainment economy are working. If your city has invested in a convention center, the statistics on its use should be revealing.

Armed with a little curiosity and a few spreadsheet skills, then, you’ll quickly master the changing demographics of your city and turn out some great stories. But remember: You’re a city hall reporter, so your aim isn’t just to report what’s happening but to compare the government’s intentions and actions to the results. If there’s a vision, is it obtainable? If the city is drifting, where is it headed? If the city is making investments, are they working? Demographics will give you the answers.

Three cautions about fairness. First, be aware of the lag effect. Depending on economic conditions, a city can wait years after opening a transit station before developers start building transit-oriented buildings, and even more time before it’s reflected in the population changes. Ask independent experts, like academics and consultants, how long the lag should be.

Be aware too that government census reports are backward looking. They can tell you what happened but not what’s happening right now or what is yet to come. That was a big reason so many were surprised by the great urban turnaround of the 1990s. It had been underway for years before the 2000 Census awoke us to it. So if the demographics don’t reflect what you’re seeing in the neighborhoods, it may be because no one has collected the statistics or run the numbers yet.

Second, luck and circumstance play bigger roles in cities than we sometimes acknowledge. Local governments can do all the right things and yet see little return. Or they can do only a little and see huge changes. Williston, North Dakota, for example, was a sleepy little prairie town for most of its history. Then oil was discovered, its population doubled, and rents soared to levels approaching those in Manhattan. How much credit does the city government deserve for Williston’s growth? Probably not much. In the opposite way, we ought to give some credit to cities like Cleveland that have worked mightily to make themselves more appealing. Despite progress (it was named the site of the 2016 Republican National Convention and some of its neighborhoods are reviving) Cleveland hasn’t stemmed its population losses yet. Is it fair, then, to compare Cleveland to fast-growing cities like Miami or Houston—or would it be fairer to compare it to other cities trying to reverse a growth spiral? I think the latter is fairer.

Third, be smart as well as fair with demographics on ethnicity and income. These are politically sensitive subjects—for good reason. All cities that are successful over the long haul are diverse ones. So don’t let your reporting be an excuse for excluding some, as the city seeks others.

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 Corey Templeton licensed under Creative Commons.

Why Blame Is the Death of Reform

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If you want to see what can go wrong with government reform, look at this editorial cartoon.

Notice first the cartoonist’s point of view: that it is condescending and counterproductive for “drive-by” experts to criticize hard-working government employees (in this case, teachers) for their performance.

Then see the teacher’s point of view: She cannot be held responsible if she has to deal with children who are homeless, watching TV around the clock, provided no discipline, pregnant, living in single-family homes, and on and on. In other words, while drive-by experts blame her for education’s shortcomings, she blames the students.

When reform efforts get to this point—all sides dug in, minds shut tight, blame hurled in all directions—you can close up shop. Reform isn’t going to happen.

Is there another way? There is, but it has to be done right from the start. In fact, before the word “reform” is ever uttered. Here are three first steps.

First, you must promise never to blame employees for poor performance. This is critical because you cannot change an organization without the support of those who work in it. In this sense, the cartoonist was right: It is counterproductive to blame the employees.

Second, employees must stop blaming others. Just as it’s a mistake for education reformers to blame teachers, it is wrong for teachers to blame their students for poor performance—or government workers at any level to blame citizens when things don’t work right.

Third, once the blame game has ceased, everyone must work side by side to understand where the organization is falling short, why, and what can be done to turn things around.

This sounds so simple, there must be a catch, right? Yes, and it’s a big one. You have to work against political culture, which is to point the finger at others. Reporters, city councils, and legislative oversight committees will want to know who was responsible when mistakes were made or deadlines missed. If you genuinely want things to work better, there’s only one response: I am responsible. Blame me.

This takes courage in a political environment, but it’s the only way you can move to the second step, where you persuade employees to stop blaming others. If you have their backs, you can say, they must have the citizens’ backs. Always.

And once you reach that understanding and the blame wars have quieted, you can move to step three, where you work as partners. But even then, you must keep working on trust.

One of the earliest trust issues will be about measurements. If you’re going to fix a broken system, you have to agree on ways of measuring brokenness and gauging progress. But once you start measuring things, you’ll raise again the fear of blame. So you have to make another pact: The measurements will be used only for pinpointing problems and measuring progress, not for punishments or rewards.

This requires that you work against instinct, which is to reward your best performers and punish the slackers. But if you go down that road, it will encourage the slackers to resume the blame wars and, in no time, you’ll be back to . . . well, what you see in the cartoon.

In addition to courage, this approach requires faith that the vast majority of people want to do good work and only a small minority do not. If you can enlist the majority in changes that will bring them pride and accomplishment, the organization will make great strides. And, over time, you can weed out the minority.

But nothing will happen until you stop the blame.

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Illustration by E Theroit licensed under Creative Commons.

This is part of a series of brief postings called Rules for Reformers. For an introduction to the series, please click here.

Lesson Four: The Art of the Compromise

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I’d like to persuade you to stop badmouthing the “c” word. The word I have in mind is “compromise.” Done right, a compromise is a way of opening the door to change by reducing the objections of interest groups. And it is the closest thing in politics to an art form.

That doesn’t mean all compromises are good, of course. Some satisfy interests but don’t create much change. In fact, some compromises are designed just to paper over problems. (In Washington, this is called “kicking the can down the road.”) Others appear at first to be ingenious solutions but come apart because they aren’t sustainable. And some look so ungainly that even participants call them “ugly babies.“

But just as you can admire the creative process while sometimes not liking the art, I encourage you to step back and look at how your city hall arrives at these deals. Yes, by all means write about the bad deals and car-wreck compromises. But also develop a little curiosity about why some compromises DO work. Look for patterns in the way they are arrived at in your city. Figure out who your city’s compromise artists are. And by all means, don’t denigrate the art form.

Before we begin, though, a little perspective: If you’ve read the introduction to this series and the first three installments, then you can see some themes developing. Projects and policy ideas tend to flow into city hall from the outside. The city council is at or near the center of decision making, sometimes in the lead role, sometimes in the mayor’s shadow. And the central issues of cities have to do with land and how it is used by people.

This lesson is about the most important work that mayors and city councils (and sometimes others) do, which is creating compromises that allow projects and big policy ideas to move forward.

Now, please don’t charge out the door looking for these things. Major civic projects and big policy changes don’t come along every day. Most of what mayors and city councils do is routine: creating and amending budgets, approving small policy changes, making appointments or approving personnel changes, reviewing contracts, and acting as quasi-judges on zoning matters and development decisions.

But that’s why you should sit up when one of these difficult decisions does come along. That’s when talented politicians do their best work, bringing the interests together, finding hidden areas of agreement, plotting the way forward, and figuring out how to present the results in ways acceptable to other politicians and the public.

And they do this in one of two basic ways, by personality or process. That is, they personally hammer out a compromise, or they send the dispute through some sort of process that the combatants and larger community feel is fair.

Here are two examples of the personality-driven compromise. First, a small but telling compromise authored by Mayor Ed Murray of Seattle allowing ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft to operate in his city while offering taxi owners just enough to quieten their opposition. (Why is it “telling”? Because a mayor who can knock out a compromise like this in his first six months in office demands our attention.) 2023 update: Ed Murray was, indeed, a talented mayor who was undone after three years in office by a sex scandal.

The second, more sweeping example is Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson’s 2012 plan for reforming his city’s schools, which required that he get state legislative approval and the governor’s support after reaching a series of compromises with local business interests, educators, reform advocates, and labor and ethnic leaders.

The personality-driven approach seems to be the way most compromises come about, and in cities with strong mayor forms of government that’s what you expect to find. (Story idea: If your city has a strong mayor system and there are big disputes not being resolved, why? Does the mayor not consider these things important, does he not consider fashioning compromises as part of his job, is he bad at this work, or is there some other reason? What do others in the city say?)

The other way of reaching compromises is with a process. San Diego’s “ugly baby” compromise on housing was a “locked-room” process. Basically, the city council president sent the interests to a room and told them to come back with something they could all support.

Other processes involve task forces, which involve broader community interests, and mediation. Mediation was how Minneapolis resolved a difficult dispute over a light-rail line. In this case, you see the importance of fairness in a process. The compromise was reached after the mediator proposed it, but it was pretty much the same set of ideas others had suggested. When it came this time from a neutral party, city officials took it to heart.

Finally, there are those compromises that are so complex they defy easy description. Detroit’s “grand bargain,” by which it will exit bankruptcy in the months ahead, is a web of compromises involving a federal bankruptcy judge, the governor, the city’s emergency manager, state legislative leaders, foundation leaders, the mayor, business executives, Wall Street interests, labor leaders, and a host of others. Which parts of the bargain were contributed by leaders and which came as a result of the bankruptcy process? Hard to say precisely, but the biggest elements (including the foundations stepping in to support the art museum) were clearly the work of creative leaders.

So, how can you report on compromises in your city in new ways? Well, you can start by reverse engineering them. That is, you can begin with the deal, which is almost always announced publicly, then ask who was involved at each step and how each element of the compromise fell into place. I promise you this will make a great narrative that will tell you and your readers much about how your city works.

Then you can ask not only how the compromise came about but why. People usually agree to things involving sacrifice only because they fear an alternative. So what were the alternatives? And how were they presented to the different interest groups? (This alone may be a fascinating story, as you may see that the alternatives presented to one side were the opposites of what was presented to the other.)

Finally, you can revisit some earlier compromises. Some likely will have failed. Why? Were they too ambitious, not ambitious enough—or were they designed (consciously or not) for failure? If they were designed for failure, what were the design flaws? For those compromises that succeeded, again . . . why? Did the interests find the alternatives so frightening that they stuck with the bargain through good times and bad? Did participants discover over time that there was hidden value in this new way of doing things? Or did the interests just move on to other issues?

What about the personalities and processes behind these compromises? What makes some leaders good at crafting deals? Do they use a standard way (some leaders use anger and threats, others tend toward calmness and reason) or does each situation demand a different approach? If they sent the dispute through a process, what was the process? Why did it work? Why did people accept it as a legitimate way of deciding these things?

This is the heart of civic decision making as it plays out inside city halls. And it’s what makes talented politicians so valuable. Perhaps the best comparison is to business leaders who see markets others can’t and ways of reaching those markets that don’t exist yet. A book ghostwritten for Donald Trump called this “the art of the deal.” (There’s little evidence Trump was much of a dealmaker, but others in business are.) In politics, the compromise that allows progress while sustaining itself is the work of art.

Footnote: So why do reporters denigrate compromises? I’ll let others do the full analysis, but let me offer one theory. It has to do with nonzero-sum contests.

Huh? Most city hall reporters also report on political campaigns, and elections are zero-sum contests. (Google the term.) That is, every vote I get is a vote you have to overcome and exceed in order to win. There aren’t that many zero-sum contests in our lives. Sports, conventional land wars, card games, a few others.

Most of our lives is spent in a nonzero-sum world, where both sides can gain from a transaction and, sometimes as a result of cooperating, the pie grows. I hope your newsroom is a nonzero-sum environment, along with your family life, your relationships with friends, even your dealings with merchants. (If you’re happy with the car you bought and the dealer is pleased with the money, then voila. Nonzero sum.)

The problem for some reporters and politicians is that they have trouble making the transition from the artificial world of zero-sum elections to the more common world of nonzero-sum government. Put another way, they can’t believe that a compromise where no one walks away with a clear win isn’t . . . well, fishy.

If that is so, then every successful marriage, enduring business, and long-term friendship is fishy. Because like good compromises at city hall, they too live in a nonzero-sum world.

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 Cabinet Office licensed under Creative Commons.

The Opportunity: The Door to Civic Progress

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For two years, I’ve been interviewing civic leaders for a podcast. I look for two kinds of people to interview. Most are leaders who’ve accomplished something strikingly successful in their communities; a smaller number are people who, through their experiences, have learned a leadership skill that’s valuable for others to know.

The format is simple. I introduce the leaders. We talk for about 15 minutes about their successes or skills, and I close by asking them for advice: If someone from another community asked how to take on a difficult project or master this skill, what would they say?

In the 23 interviews I’ve done to date, I’ve learned a tremendous amount about what civic leaders do and how they think. I’ve learned that most of their work isn’t heroic or visionary. It’s more like project management, as they move from one meeting, planning session, or presentation to another.

I’ve learned something about the motivations of these people. They seem driven to accomplish something meaningful, and communities offer an ideal stage for these achievements because civic projects often end with things you can reach out and touch—buildings, roads, and parks—things that will endure for decades. This concreteness and sense of permanence appeals to civic leaders.

And finally I’ve learned that despite the long hours of unpaid labor, the tedium of public meetings, and stress of occasional conflict, many of these people consider civic work an escape from their regular jobs. One civic leader told me away from the microphone that his project, which had occupied him for a decade and a half, was, outside of his family life, “the most fun I’ve ever had.”

These are valuable things to know. It explains why cities are undergoing a renaissance these days. Somehow cities have learned to attract and harness the work of these leaders more effectively than in the past. And it assures me that this isn’t a phase. People will always seek meaning in their lives, and if cities continue offering a stage for these seekers, they’ll be successful.

Interesting as all this was to learn, though, it wasn’t why I started the podcast. I’ve actually been looking for something else: the structure of civic progress.

This is an old interest of mine. In fact, I started this blog four years ago so I could think out loud about civic progress, how it worked, and how we could make it work better. Along the way, I’ve made some stabs at a grand theory. A few years ago, I created a map of community change showing step by step how leaders moved from awareness of a need to a widely accepted solution.

Most of the map still seems right to me, but I’ve learned from the interviews that an important element was missing. You can’t, I’ve come to understand, view civic progress simply as a process. You have to see it as a system as well; one that, in the right circumstances, can be mobilized as a process. Leaders, then, have three responsibilities: Make sure the system is healthy, learn how the process of civic progress works, and know how to transform the system into a campaign for community improvement.

And what is the spark that mobilizes the system into a process? I call it “the opportunity.” It’s not the same as a need nor is it necessarily a solution. It’s more like a path to the solution. If civic progress were a sport, we’d call it an “opening” the hole in a line of scrimmage that a running back sees, the pass a point guard makes to set up a score, the moves a chess master sees that lead in five turns to checkmate.

If this sounds confusing, bear with me. It’s harder to understand the opportunity in theory than in practice, and the interviews offer plenty of examples. Maybe the best was in my interview with Cathy Woolard, the former Atlanta city council member (and, later, council president) who stumbled across a transformative project called the Beltline and saw, in an instant, how it could solve many of Atlanta’s transportation and land-use problems.

Here’s how she describes that moment of insight: “It was literally the right day, the perfect council member, the perfect district, for me to be able to look at (this idea) and know immediately what the benefit would be to the residents of my district in particular.” Because she saw the opportunity offered by the Beltline and figured a way through a maze of political and bureaucratic processes, Woolard was able to move this visionary project from grad-school planning thesis to urban reality. Today the Beltline, a circle of trails and parks around downtown Atlanta, is being built, and the sections that are open are wildly popular with cyclists, runners, and strollers.

You can see another opportunity in the interview with Scott Tigchelaar, a movie studio president who talked the small town of Senoia, Georgia into turning itself into a permanent film location. What triggered this, he said, was the sale of some land in downtown Senoia. Over the years Tigchelaar had used the town for movie locations (if you watched the 1991 movie “Fried Green Tomatoes,” you’ve seen Senoia). He feared a new owner would put up something that would ruin the town for movie shootings, so he approached the mayor and council with a deal: Create new design and zoning laws, allow us to buy the land and build some appropriate new buildings, and we’ll bring you a steady stream of movie productions, along with tourism opportunities. (It worked. Filming goes on year-round in Senoia, tourists flock there to see where their favorite TV shows are filmed, and the town has a host of new restaurants and shops.)

And then there’s John Turner, the businessman who helped restore a river through downtown Columbus, Georgia and, by doing so, turned a slow, muddy stream into roaring whitewater. Some had speculated as far back as the 1970s that Columbus might have world-class rapids beneath its downtown dams. But it wasn’t until Turner and others learned 20 years later that those dams were failing that he saw the opportunity to tear them down and create the longest urban whitewater attraction in America.

Opportunities arrive, then, when a long-felt need (to change land use and transportation in Atlanta, to preserve a small town’s unique economy, to do something about a neglected river) is connected with a sudden change in the environment (a visionary plan drops on a council member’s desk, tracts of land are offered for sale, old dams show signs of failing) and a way forward is seen (master the transportation planning process, get the city council to agree to design standards, gain government approval to remove the dams and alter the river).

And who connects these things and sees the way forward? Leaders do.

In fact, this is probably the most creative thing that leaders do in cities. Like great business innovators (think Steve Jobs) or talented politicians (think FDR or LBJ), great civic leaders see paths that are hidden to most of us and connect things others hadn’t put together. Not all civic leaders can do this because it takes a special mind to see an opening to success and a strong will to push an entire community through the opening.

If you’re not that kind of leader, don’t despair. There are other things civic leaders do that are critically important, such as tending the system and managing the process of civic progress. I’ll talk about these leadership roles in future posts.

For the time being, though, keep this image in mind: Civic progress is neither a system nor a process; it’s both. And the door between the two is the opportunity. Trust me on this. I had 23 great teachers who showed it to me.

Photo by lau.svensson licensed under Creative Commons.

Cultivating the Visionistas

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I recently spent time with a man who had changed the course of a river—and not a small river, a big one. He’s John Turner, a businessman and environmentalist, and the river he changed was the Chattahoochee, which flows from well north of Atlanta to the Gulf of Mexico, passing through Turner’s city of Columbus, Georgia.

Fifteen years ago, Turner took charge of an effort to turn the lazy, muddy Chattahoochee into whitewater in downtown Columbus. Or rather, back into whitewater, because, as it turns out, before factories in Columbus dammed the river in the 1830s, Columbus had extraordinary rapids.

I won’t go into detail about what Turner and his fellow citizens did to pull off this feat (year after year of making presentations, commissioning studies, sitting in permitting hearings, lobbying legislators and congressmen, raising money, and finally knocking down some century-old dams). But the results are spectacular. In May, Turner dedicated Whitewater Columbus, the largest urban rafting experience in America. It is two and a half miles of churning, stomach-dropping rapids that are already attracting world-class kayakers and families looking for adventure. It will, Turner is sure, create a boom in riverfront development in Columbus.

If you’re thinking that your city needs someone like John Turner, you’re right. And here’s the good news: Your city may already have one, and maybe dozens of them. What you probably don’t have, though, is a process for cultivating them.

Some call these extraordinary citizens “civic entrepreneurs,” but I don’t think the name does them justice. Starting a company is easy by comparison to what they do. The term I’ve used for a while is “visionistas,” because their motivation is their ideas—the clear visions they have of things that others cannot see, at least in the beginning.

The first visionista I came to know was Billy Paine, the lawyer who in the late 1980s dreamed up the Atlanta Olympics, then patiently brought the games to life. But there have been many others: Fred Lebow, the man who reinvented the marathon in 1976 by running one through the five boroughs of New York; Joshua David and Robert Hammond, who in the late 1990s saw a long linear park in the sky when they looked at New York’s abandoned High Line train trestles; or, more recently, Elisa Beck, who is determined to create a center for sustainability inside an old grocery store on Pittsburgh’s South Side. As Beck illustrates, visionistas don’t always have ambitions as big as a city. Sometimes the vision can be for something in a single neighborhood.

The visionistas’ greatest strength is their drive. As a city council member said of Beck, these people can be tenacious. They are also persistent. Fifteen years is a long time to work on a single project. Most council members wouldn’t do it, and most mayors can’t. Visionistas also tend to be transparently authentic, which draws others toward them and their causes. Lebow was so obsessed with the New York Marathon that he sometimes rubbed people the wrong way, but no one ever doubted his sincerity.

What should city officials do with such determined people? And how can you tell the difference between a crazy idea that’s a great leap forward and a crazy idea that’s just . . . a crazy idea? My suggestion: Encourage but don’t embrace visionistas, at least until they’ve make their ideas viable. And viability means two things: a significant group of supporters (including financial supporters) and a plan. And the plan has to answer three questions: How will this project be paid for? How will we get the necessary public and private approvals? And how will we explain it to the citizens?

Your job, then, is to explain the things that make projects viable, encourage the visionistas to give these things a try, and send them on their way. If they come back a year later with a group of supporters and a somewhat realistic plan, then you have not just a dreamer but a doer. And it’s time to consider investing your time and perhaps some public money in their project.

But even then, be careful not to take the project from them. The projects that succeed most spectacularly do so by living just outside government. If New York’s High Line, which is run by a nonprofit, had been handed over to the parks department in the early days of the Bloomberg administration, we wouldn’t be talking about it today as the creative, inspiring project it is. That’s because, alas, vision, creativity and bureaucracy rarely cohabitate.

If you value neatness and clear lines of authority, this will be uncomfortable. But if you can tolerate ambiguity and a certain amount of creative tension, working with visionistas can be exciting. Not as exciting as hurdling down a two-and-a-half-mile whitewater course. But thrilling in its own way. And along with the thrills, you might do your city some real good.

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo courtesy of Whitewater Columbus.

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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