Otis White

The skills and strategies of civic leadership

Lesson Three: Seeing the Unseen City Council

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Here’s where I deliver the poli-sci lecture I never got in college, the one titled “Introduction to Local Governments.” There are two types of local government, and if you are as puzzled by your city council as I was as a young reporter, it may be because you are looking at one type and expecting the other.

The type you most likely have is a council-manager form of government, where there’s a full-time city manager and a city council that includes someone called “mayor.” The one you may be expecting is a mayor-council form of government (sometimes called a “strong mayor” system), where the mayor functions both as political leader and government executive, the way the president does in Washington.

What’s the difference? Well, to begin, there’s that city manager person, who is probably a professional (in the sense that she went to college, possibly studied public administration, and may hold a certificate or two). But in truth, mayor-council forms of government have such professionals as well.

The real difference is the manager’s relationship with city employees and the city council—and the city’s council’s role in public policy.

In council-manager governments, city managers are hired—by city councils, of course—to run governments the way CEOs run corporations or superintendents run school systems. That is, with a free hand, more or less. If things work as they should, a council member’s only contact with city employees will be through the city manager or at city council meetings. (Story alert: If council members are phoning city employees directly, that’s a management problem and could be an ethics violation. Call your state’s city managers association or a nearby university’s public management department to find out why.)

Another important feature: When it comes to proposing budgets, suggesting changes in city policies, or offering new ways of structuring city departments, it’s the city manager who proposes and the council that disposes. That’s why she sits at the dais along with the council. She is constantly bringing them things to consider.

Let’s turn now to the other type, the less common mayor-council (“strong mayor”) form of government. Here the mayor is the one who is the full-time employee with responsibilities for administration and proposals of policy and procedure. AND he’s elected—not beholden to the city council for his position.

I won’t get into the strengths and weaknesses of the systems. It’s an interesting subject but not relevant for most city hall reporters. After all, you have the system you have; your job is to understand it. (If you are interested, I can point you to a good book: “More Than Mayor or Manager: Campaigns to Change Form of Government in America’s Large Cities.”)

Where I would focus your attention is on the city council, which may be the least analyzed yet important part of city government. This may seem like an odd statement because, as a city hall reporter, you’ve probably sat through countless council hearings and meetings. (I did as well.) And you’ve reported what council members said and did. You may have interviewed every council member at one time or another.

But here’s where your reporting may have fallen short: You probably haven’t tried to understand the council as a political body—how it makes decisions, who brokers compromises and deals, how the deals come about, how rewards are offered to those who go along and punishments meted out to those who don’t. And here’s a key insight: These things happen differently in council-manager systems than in mayor-council ones. And they happen differently in places that elect council members by districts than in those that elect them citywide.

Places that elect their councils citywide (and until recently that included such big cities as Detroit and Seattle) tend to have councils that work on consensus, a bit like the ruling party in a parliamentary government. After all, everyone represents the same interests and has pretty much the same power.

District elections change that calculation. People in the southern parts of the city may be very different from those in the northern, with wholly different concerns and interests. So consensus becomes more difficult in councils elected by district, and brokering becomes more common (these are deals where you get what you need, and I get what I need—even though what you get and I get may be different and unrelated).

When you have brokering, you have brokers. Who are they on the city council you cover? How do they work? When the council casts split votes, are the splits predictable? (City council votes are one of the easiest things to analyze since they’re public record.) What do the patterns tell you about politics in your city? Are the divisions ethnic, economic, geographic, generational, ideological, partisan . . . or some combination? If you go back further in time, have some council members drifted from one faction to another? If so, why?

Interview the council members. When they are divided, whom do they look to for compromises or deals? Is it the presiding officer, the mayor (who may or may not be the presiding officer), a factional member or two, a senior council member, or someone outside the council?

There’s something else about district elections that’s important. Districts often usher in something called “council member prerogative,” where the council defers to the district representative on issues relating exclusively to his district. (For a glimpse of how prerogative works in Philadelphia, read this.) What does it mean? It means the council member is pretty much the boss of his ward. If you need the city’s permission to do something in that district, such as rezone property, you need that member’s blessing or you can forget about it. Does this suggest any stories to you? It should.

If district elections change how city councils work, then mayor-council governments change things even more. This has to do with the mayor’s independence, which comes from two sources. First, he’s elected separately from the council. Second, the city charter in a strong mayor form of government almost certainly spells out the mayor’s duties, and they’re likely to be . . . well, strong.

Hold on, though. Don’t council-manager governments also have mayors? Yes, but they usually fail one or both of the independence tests. That is, they’re either not elected independently (they are selected from among the council members), or they are given few powers other than presiding at city council meetings and representing the city at ceremonies.

Compare that to a strong mayor system. These mayors manage the city bureaucracy, propose budgets, and may even have veto power over council decisions. But their greatest power may lie simply in their sense of the job and the council’s sense of its job. To understand, let’s go back to the poli-sci lecture.

In a council-manager government, the responsibilities for leading the city are divided between the council and city manager. The manager is usually the “inside” leader and expected to offer proposals on improving government performance. But it’s not common for a city manager to accept responsibility for the larger city—the place whose central issue is people and places and the interaction of the two. That usually falls to city council members who are, after all, elected by that larger city.

In a strong mayor government, the mayor assumes both sets of responsibilities. That is, he’s both inside manager and outside leader, the one who worries about government efficiency, police procedures, and budgets, but also downtown renewal, neighborhood revitalization, the city’s image, economic development, social unrest, and a dozen other things.

Where does that leave council members in a strong mayor system? Some seek to be issue entrepreneurs, searching for problems or opportunities the mayor isn’t working on. A few take up the role of political brokers within the council. But most are happy just to tend to their districts and let the mayor worry about the big things. (If you’ve ever wondered what Chicago aldermen do with their time, read this to find out.)

And what does this mean for you as a reporter or blogger? I hope it leaves you with newfound interest in your city council as a political body. Why do people run for council in your city? Where do they devote their time once elected? If the council has at-large members, do they work in different ways than district members? What happens to council members when they leave? Do they run for higher office, and are they elected? Of the past five mayors, which served on the council at some point? How does that compare with cities similar to yours? (Call a local government expert at a state university—or just do a little Internet research.) If your city’s council is a dead-end political body, why?

If it’s a council-manager form of government, who looks for projects to improve the larger city, the realm outside the city government? (As I explained in Lesson Two, most of these ideas originate outside of city government, but at a point someone in government has to become their champions.) Do members play predictable roles when a big project is proposed? Is one a blue-sky thinker, another a bottom-line worrier, another a let’s-get-it-done sort, and yet another the one who worries about its impact on the disadvantaged? How do they come to agreement?

If nothing else, consider this good training as a journalist. What you’re doing is making the obvious apparent—looking at something everyone knows something about but few truly understand or appreciate. This is what great journalists, like Robert Caro and, before him, John Gunther, did so well. And who knows? If you get really good at understanding how your city council works, we may ask you to move to Washington . . . and explain Congress to us.

Footnotes: One of the most interesting stories in council-manager systems is the role of the mayor. If she is given the title by a vote of council members, it signifies something. But what? That this person is a good representative for the city? That she’s good at presiding (which usually means she’s viewed as fair)? Or is it something else? Good questions for the mayor . . . and her fellow council members.

And nothing is more fascinating than a mayor who doesn’t know what kind of government he has—or knows but won’t accept it. You see this sometimes in cities with council-manager governments that elect their mayors independently or on county commissions with an elected chair. The mayor or commission chair comes to office thinking he’s in charge of management and policy development, only to find a council and city manager who won’t defer to him.

In Dallas, Laura Miller spent one miserable term acting like a strong mayor and berating the city council for not making her one. Miller never accepted her role. Occasionally, some mayors do and we say of them, after a while, that they’ve “grown in office.”

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 John Ramspott licensed under Creative Commons.

Lesson Two: The Switching Yard of Change

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If you accept that the central issue for cities—and their governments—is people and places, how they interact, and how they can be made to interact better, then there are two obvious questions:

  • How can people and places be made to interact better?
  • How will those changes come about?

Let’s deal with the first question. If you read Lesson One, you know my answer is that cities must find ways of using land more intelligently and creatively. What does that mean for your city? Answering this is your job as reporter or blogger. I gave you some starting points. Now go forth, observe, question, and write.

Now, about that second question: How will changes in land use (or, really, anything important to a city) come about? In other words, setting aside the changes themselves, how does change come to a city?

This is a big subject and one I’ve spent years writing about. This blog is filled with entries about how communities change, who is involved in the process, what aids change, what hinders it. I’ve written a multimedia book about a civic project that changed a city. If that’s not enough, you can consult the podcasts I did with the Georgia Municipal Association, which were interviews with people who’ve changed something big in their cities, focusing on how they did it.

I got interested in this subject in 1990 as I watched the greatest civic long shot I’ve ever seen take shape: the campaign to bring the 1996 Summer Olympics to Atlanta. I was editor and publisher of a business magazine at the time, which gave me a perfect position from which to watch this crazy idea and its nearly anonymous father (a mid-level lawyer named Billy Payne) work their way methodically through a city’s complex decision-making process and eventually through the even more Byzantine processes of the International Olympic Committee on the way to a stunning result. Honestly, the games themselves were not so exciting.

One of the things I’ve learned since is that this crazy process wasn’t all that uncommon and maybe not even all that crazy. To explain, it helps to divide change processes into three parts. First, where do big civic ideas come from? Who comes up with innovations and big civic projects (say, to pursue a streetcar line, create a major new park, or bring the Olympics to a city)? Second, what happens to these ideas as they move toward resolution? Who gets a voice along the way and how do they exercise it? And, finally, what determines whether ideas are ultimately accepted or rejected?

I’ll give you a few ideas here about these three parts. If you want more, click on “Archives” at the top of this blog, then try searching through some of the tags to find exactly what you’re looking for.

To begin, where do big civic proposals come from? Usually not from city hall. That is to say, big (and especially disruptive) innovations typically don’t come from mayors, city managers, or city council members. They come from broad based civic organizations such as chambers of commerce or more narrowly focused groups like downtown associations, parks conservancies, and transit affinity groups. And sometimes they come from preternaturally determined individuals like Billy Payne—a group I’ve taken to calling “visionistas.“

This is not what I thought when I was a city hall reporter. If you had asked me then for an analogy that explained the public-policy process, I would have hemmed and hawed and said . . . “it’s like a factory.” That is, somebody (the mayor, the city manager, a council member) comes up with an idea or improvement, then runs it through the bureaucracy and city council . . . you know, like an assembly line.

I know now that’s not way it works with most truly big ideas. Turns out, city hall isn’t as much a factory as a switching yard, where political leaders wave a few proposals through, rearrange the cars on others as they load them up with additional freight, and send still others off to the sidetracks.

That’s not to say that politicians don’t have important roles; they do. It’s just that they aren’t (and we shouldn’t expect them to be) the originators of ideas. At their best, they are the recognizers of needed civic innovations and, at the right time, their champions and facilitators. (For a paper about how three acclaimed mayors created change in their cities, please go here.)

So where do the ideas that steer your city in one direction or another come from? That’s for you to find out in your reporting. And here’s a way to get started: Take a look at the three biggest proposals that city hall has considered in the last five years. (If you’re not confident in your ability to do this, poll city council members.)

Then do some reverse engineering. Where did these ideas come from? Who were part of the early discussions? How did they attract enough support to move forward? Were these borrowed ideas (in the sense that they were things other cities had tried first)? If so, how did they come to the attention of civic leaders? (If your city does “intercity trips,” where groups of political and business leaders visit other places, this could be the source.)

Then move along the timeline. How were these proposals modified over time? Who was consulted? Who had to say yes? Did anyone say no at first, only to change his mind later on? Why? At some point, the cost of the proposal had to be considered. When was this done and who were part of those discussions? (If your local government has a city manager, he or she was almost surely in the room . . . probably with the dominant voice.)

In a democracy as tight as a city’s, public reaction had to be considered. When did supporters think about how to explain their ideas to the citizens? Who were part of those discussions? Did the messages change over time?

Finally, the proposals had to be resolved. Who had to say yes to them formally (that is, at an official meeting) or informally (such as among interest groups)? Did a state or federal agency have to approve it? Was there a referendum? And who managed the approval process? Was the same group involved at every step or did its composition change?

This is a big piece of reporting, but it will change the way you cover city hall because you’ll understand that what happens at city council meetings is only the most visible part of processes that stretch across the city and originate months and maybe years before. Not to diminish public decision making, but a city council meeting in some ways is like a performance. This reporting will take you backstage to where decisions are made, the cast recruited, and roles assigned.

What you’ll learn along the way is that your city has political fault lines, interests that, depending on the issue, must be consulted before decisions are made. You’ll find out who these interests are, how they are consulted, and what they want for their support.

And something else: You’ll learn the joy of writing a political narrative. Most of what city hall reporters write about are events, with an occasional issue backgrounder, investigative article, or profile. They rarely get a chance to tell a real story with a beginning, a middle (filled with complications and near-misses), and an end. Writing about how your city makes big decisions by tracing several of them will give you that opportunity. You might like it.

One thing is certain. Once you get a peek backstage, you’ll never look at your city or its government the same way. Nor will your readers.

A postscript: When I was a city hall reporter, there was a flurry of “power structure” studies, where a newspaper would name the “10 most powerful people in . . . (fill in the name of your city).” Most reporters didn’t know this, but the power-structure idea went back to a book written by sociologist Floyd Hunter about Atlanta in the 1950s called “Community Power Structure: A Study of Decision Makers.”

Hunter’s premise was that the same 40 people were involved in decision after decision and that these 40 Atlantans made up a “power structure.” (Hunter used pseudonyms for the 40, but it has long been a sport in Atlanta to figure out who they were.) Hunter’s thesis has its passionate defenders and its passionate critics. Yale political scientist Robert Dahl wrote an entire book, “Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City,” disputing Hunter’s premise, nearly line by line.

So is there a cohesive power structure in your city? Or is power far more free-floating, as Dahl argued, with some people involved in some decisions, others in other issues, with little overlap? That’s for you to determine. But I’d urge you to go into your reporting with as open a mind as possible. Otherwise, you’ll discover only what you believe as you start out.

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 Sookie licensed under Creative Commons.

Lesson One: It’s All About Land Use

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OK, that’s an exaggeration. Some things about local government aren’t about land use—public education, for example, and some local services, such as sanitation and public health. But it’s astonishing how many things in local governments do touch on land use.

Some of these things are obvious, like zoning and building permits, downtown renewal efforts and neighborhood development. But others are not so obvious, such as transportation, parks, sports arenas, and festivals.

Transportation is a good example. During my years as a city hall reporter, I never heard city officials talk about the connection between transportation and land use, except in a broad, economic development context. Oh, sure, they talked at length about highways, sidewalks, roads, and transit on the one hand, and the need to turn around parts of the city on the other—but not once (in my presence, at least) did a mayor, city council member, or even a planning director connect the two. It wasn’t until the 1990s that I heard local officials talk about using transportation to shape the places they passed through.

Today you can hardly avoid the subject if you’re a reasonably perceptive reporter talking with reasonably cognizant local officials. The growing awareness of how transportation shapes land use is why there’s such interest these days in bike lanes, walking, and transit. These forms of transportation concentrate land uses, as opposed to cars, which spread them out. Denser land uses create livelier urban environments. And livelier urban environments change how people interact with place—my description of the central issue for local governments.

And transportation is just one of those things whose connection to land use is more appreciated today. Take parks. Until the 1990s, most local officials saw them as urban amenities. And if you go further back in urban history to the 1800s, they were seen as beneficial to public health. (That’s one reason Central Park has long been described as “the lungs of New York City.”) But shapers of land use? That’s a more recent understanding, dating to the building of Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta in 1996 and Millennium Park in Chicago in 2004, both of which dramatically raised property values and the density of land uses around them. (And, not to put too fine a point on it, created new interactions between people and places.)

I could go on. Even schools and sanitation have a land-use aspect. Ask any residential real estate agent what effect a good neighborhood school has on nearby property values. And sewer line extensions are, along with transportation improvements, the greatest predictors of future land uses.

So how are land-use stories played out in local government, and how could you cover them in new and interesting ways? Well, you know the traditional stories: “NIMBYs” vs. “greedy developers.” You have the neighbors in bright T-shirts at zoning board or city council meetings, waving signs, and complaining loudly about being overrun with traffic. And on the other side, lawyers in blue suits with architectural renderings, property tax projections, and the promise of lawsuits if things don’t go their way.

Who is right here? The side that promises the best possible interactions for people and place—which could be the neighbors or the developer . . . but is likely neither. That’s because neighborhood associations too often stand for the status quo. They don’t want to improve their neighborhoods; they want to preserve them in amber. And while developers favor change, their changes are often the wrong ones, ones that will diminish the interactions of people and place by creating parking lots, inward-looking buildings, and streets with no sidewalks.

So if NIMBYs and build-and-run developers are the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of change in your city—almost equally wrongheaded—who then is rightheaded?

Ah, there are your stories: Who in your city is talking about and working toward a more interesting and attractive urban environment? What are the elements of their vision? What have cities or suburbs similar to yours done to create these environments? What were the obstacles they faced? Who in local government shares the vision? Who opposes it and why? What is the government doing today to create livelier places? What is it doing that hinders such places from developing? (Hint: Check city parking requirements for new retail, office, and residential properties.)

Other story ideas: What is the state of transit in your city? Do transit officials work alongside city officials in planning denser environments? If so, how? If not, why not? Are there developers who want to create walkable, bikeable, transit-oriented developments? (Hint: There almost surely are.) What do they see as the barriers to livelier streets and neighborhoods? What do local architects say?

Are there business improvement districts in your city? (If you don’t know what they are, Google the term.) If so, which have been successful, which have not had much impact, and why? If there aren’t BIDs, why haven’t they come to your city? What about Main Street programs? (Again, Google the term.)

Is gentrification happening in your city? Why did the gentrifiers move to some inner-city neighborhoods but not others? (Take an evening and knock on doors.) Given what you’ve learned, what is the most likely next neighborhood for gentrification and why? (Interview some real estate agents under age 40.) What has been the reaction of longtime neighbors to the newcomers? Is there a backlash?

Who bikes to work? What have they experienced? Who walks to work? What have they seen and learned? Who could afford to drive but chooses instead to take the bus? (These are called “choice riders.” Again, Google the term.) Why do they take transit, and what have they seen? (Hey, ride along with some.) What is the transit system doing to attract these riders?

Find the most successful public park in your city, in terms of usage. (If the parks department doesn’t have statistics, go out after work with a handheld counter and notepad and count the people.) What makes this park so successful? If it’s a large park, find a small one that’s equally successful on a per-acre basis. Again, what are its secrets? Call the nearest university with a landscape architecture program and interview some professors about what makes some urban parks successful and others desolate.

In which neighborhoods do people walk for exercise, entertainment, or to shop? (You may have to use the counter and a notebook.) Why do they walk there but not in the next neighborhood? What is the local government doing to encourage walkability? (Check sidewalk requirements.) If sidewalks are broken, who is responsible for the repairs—and does anyone actually enforce these requirements? What besides the sidewalks are the obstacles to walkable neighborhoods? (As a sidebar, interview public health officials about the connection between obesity and the lack of regular exercise—of which walking is considered the best.)

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. What is your city doing to improve the way people interact with places? Where is it making these improvements, and why is it investing in these locations? What resources is the city bringing to bear on creating more interesting and attractive places? What have been the results, and what have been the responses by supporters and opponents, developers and residents new and old?

Now, stop a moment and think. Wouldn’t writing these stories be a lot more fun than covering the “NIMBYs” vs. “greedy developers” showdowns at the zoning board? Wouldn’t these stories teach readers more about their community and how their government works? Covering NIMBYs-vs.-developers stories is like writing about a baseball game that was played last year. Focus on land use and the forces that are changing it, and you’ll be writing about the game . . . before the players ever take the field.

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 Dylan Passmore licensed under Creative Commons.

How to Cover City Hall

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My first real job, after college, was covering local government for a newspaper in a mid-size city in Georgia. I came to it with a good deal of curiosity and seriousness of purpose but not much genuine understanding of local government. And in the brief time I covered city hall there and in a second newspaper job in Michigan, I’m sorry to say, I didn’t learn much.

Don’t get me wrong. I was energetic, as accurate as I could be, and interested in a lot of subjects (like downtown development, public housing, local politics, race relations, criminal justice, and economic development) that helped me see how cities worked. But I never truly “got” local government.

Partly it was the result of college political science classes that had taught me about Congress and the White House. Where in city hall, I wondered, were the caucuses, the white-shoe lobbyists, the reform groups, the entrenched interests, the partisan battles, the momentous decisions? The men and women I met in mayors’ offices and city councils, budget offices, planning departments, police stations, courts, water departments, and public works agencies seemed sincere and reasonably competent, but not very inspiring. And certainly nothing like what I expected to find if I ever got to cover Congress.

It has taken me a long time to understand local government, aided by side trips into business journalism, magazine publishing, and now consulting. (Thank goodness I got off the journalism track that might have taken me to Washington.) What helped with my education was getting to know some corporate CEOs as a business reporter and, later, editor. Many of the CEOs I met in the 1980s had two interests outside of running their businesses. One was their industry’s wellbeing, which involved them in state and national politics. The other was their city’s wellbeing, which did not seem to be as much about their own narrow interests as something bigger. It appeared to me that they genuinely wanted their cities to be better places (or, at least, what they defined as better), and the things that interested them were physical: downtowns, universities, airports, arenas, highways, transit systems, and so on.

That’s when it first occurred to me that local governments were different creatures than federal or state governments, and not just their kid brothers. And trying to see Washington-style politics played out in a city council or county commission might not work.

But if local government wasn’t about partisan politics, public policy, and the clash of great interests, then what was it about? The central issue for cities, I learned over time, was something older and more basic. It was about people and places, how they interacted, and how they could made to interact better.

Now, let me pause for a disclaimer. I don’t mean to suggest that local politics are always noble. There are ugly aspects to local government in many places. One is ethnic advantage, where one group uses its influence to hold down other groups while favoring its own. Another is corruption, which sees government as an opportunity for plunder.

And beyond the bigots and the crooks, there are the clueless, the perpetually aggrieved, the showboaters, the time wasters, the bureaucratically rigid, the lazy—as well as the thoughtful, the inspiring, the determined, the philosophical, and the dedicated. In other words, local government is a slice of humanity.

But being about people and place and the interactions of the two does mean there’s something that grounds local politics, something missing from state and national politics. This doesn’t mean local governments don’t have conflict. They do, but the conflicts tend to be about things quite different from those in state capitals or Washington, D.C.

In the weeks ahead, I will get into some of these conflicts—and the real forces that drive local politics. I’ll present this as a guide for journalists and bloggers who want to cover their local governments in a more informed way, but these postings may be helpful as well to citizens and leaders who sometimes have trouble seeing the community forest for the squabbling among the trees.

I invite your comments along the way. If I agree with you, I may go back and change some of what I write. After all, this as an exercise in sense-making, not an apology for local government. Like all human institutions, local governments are flawed. But beneath the flaws are patterns we should pay attention to. What follows are some of the patterns I’ve noticed.

This is the first of a series of postings about better ways of understanding local government and writing about local politics.

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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