Planning

Units of Civic Progress

August 5, 2015 By Otis White

In March, Mayor Bob Buckhorn dedicated the latest section of Tampa’s Riverwalk, which now stretches nearly two miles down a river and along a channel leading to Tampa Bay. As he cut the ribbon, Buckhorn said something that must have puzzled some in the audience: “This is a day that we have waited for, for decades.”

For decades? Actually, yes. You see, the Tampa Riverwalk was proposed in 1975 by then-Mayor Bill Poe . . . as a Bicentennial project. The Bicentennial was in 1976. The Riverwalk has, well, taken longer than expected.

By all accounts, the Riverwalk is spectacular. It loops under a bridge and over the Hillsborough River, giving strollers the sensation of walking on water. It ties together several parks and museums, a performing arts center, and the city’s convention center. It offers downtown Tampa a gathering place it has long needed, and it has already sparked development of new restaurants and nightclubs.

But why did it take 40 years to complete? The simple answer is that it was more or less forgotten for 30 years before another mayor, Pam Iorio, revived it and drove it to completion.

But the more interesting story is this is how many great civic projects proceed, in fits and starts. That is, they are launched with a bang, only to lose momentum and fall into a deep sleep until a new leader comes along and figures out how to revive them. It’s a little like Prince Charming. But instead of a kiss, the new leader applies strategy, persuasion, persistence—and an occasional kick in the pants.

This is just one of the surprising patterns I’ve found in the last four years from interviewing leaders of successful civic projects. Here’s another: The leaders learn almost exclusively on the job.

This is puzzling considering how important these projects are. Civic projects are a basic unit of progress and, really, the only way cities make purposeful changes. Think about your own city and its milestones. They might include things like creating a modern transit system, building a new art museum, overhauling the government’s structure, bringing in professional sports . . . or building a riverwalk. Each of these things was a civic project, with a beginning, middle, and end—and clearly defined results.

And, yet, most mayors, city managers, chamber of commerce executives, nonprofit directors, and foundation leaders come to their jobs knowing little about creating these basic units of progress. Why? Because no one teaches it. There are no graduate schools of civic project management, no seminars, no books, not even a website you can visit. And this, I’ve learned, is why many great projects begin with a long hibernation. Once the idea is formed, nobody knows what to do with it.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Civic projects are complex undertakings operating in difficult environments. They require a set of talents and skills that must be assembled: people who can think strategically, apply a jeweler’s eye to tasks and details, and muster the political skills to steer projects around obstacles. Every community has these people. What they don’t have is a template for putting these efforts together.

Want to do your city a favor? Find an organization willing to create just such a template (or set of templates) by interviewing the leaders of successful civic projects. Then make the templates widely available, so the next mayor with a great idea doesn’t have to wait 40 years to watch his city walk on water.

A version of this posting appeared on the Governing website.

Photo by Matthew Paulson licensed under Creative Commons.

How to Cover City Hall

May 28, 2014 By Otis White

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.

Why the Goals of Citizen Engagement Are Not What You Think

November 20, 2012 By Otis White

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Realistic But Hopeful Place

October 10, 2012 By Otis White

There are times when cities and organizations face a kind of abyss, when things they had counted on suddenly don’t work anymore. For a city, it might be when a major local industry shuts down. For an organization, it could be when its primary service is no longer valued. What usually follows (after a period of anger, recrimination, and denial) is an avalanche of ideas and advice about setting things right.

You can imagine how these ideas fly in from all directions: Let’s be a tourism city, or a high-tech center, or a retirement community—or all three. If it’s an organization, let’s try our old mission in a new way, let’s try an entirely new mission, or let’s try a bunch of missions and see which works out.

One thing seems clear in moments like these: You must focus your efforts. But on what? How do you decide which path to take when the past is no longer a reliable guide?

My advice is to search for a “realistic but hopeful place,” a place where ambition, success, and demand overlap. You find these places in the answers to three questions:

What do we want to do?
What are we good at?
What does the world want or need?

If answered honestly, these simple questions will take you into a deep analysis of your community or organization and a focused look at the world. Be careful, though, to ask them in the right order.

The first question, “what do we want to do?” requires that you talk to as many people as possible who know and care about the city or organization. You can do this in person or in groups. (I advise both; start with in-person interviews with a cross section of respected leaders, then convene groups. The interviews will give you some starting points for the group discussions.) What you’re searching for is not so much strategic advice (that is, exactly what we should do) as insight into what motivates people. A good way of getting to it is to ask: “Given that we’re going to make major changes, what is the best that that our organization (or city) can be?” Consider it a quick form of visioning.

The second question brings some specificity to the vision by forcing leaders to look for current successes, however modest they may seem. Some research will help. If you’re concerned about a city’s economy, look for local employment sectors that are growing, especially among businesses that export goods and services (that is, that sell things to people elsewhere). If you’re concerned about an organization, comb through the financial statements and talk with employees: Are there things your organization is doing, perhaps as a sideline, that people are demanding more of?

Just by answering these two questions, you can usually see some possibilities. Let’s say your city has traditionally been an auto manufacturing center. When you talk with people, their hearts are still in making things. (“We’re still a great manufacturing town, and we ought to be the best one in the state.”) As you look around, though, you don’t see many big companies that are growing, only a handful of small ones, a few of which make high-quality bicycles. Could that be a growth industry for your city?

It works the same way for organizations. Let’s say you’re on the board of a human-services nonprofit that, because of a change in reimbursements, is threatened. The first thing you want to know is, do others (board members, staff, and those the organization has worked with over the years) want it to continue in this field? Or is there something else they’d rather the organization do? Second: Are you already doing something, perhaps in a small way, for which demand is growing?

The third question then takes a hard look at the bright spots. Will the world want or need high-quality bicycles in the future? Will your organization’s sideline services be valued in the years ahead? Be careful not to focus too much on present demand. If people in your city spent generations making cars, bicycles will seem inconsequential. If the organization provided health-care services with reimbursements in the millions, then providing services for thousands of dollars will seem like small potatoes. The thing to focus on is growth, not current demand.

And let’s be realistic. If you are fighting for your city’s or your organization’s life, the choices are bound to be difficult. Whatever you do (including doing nothing) will involve wrenching changes. The question is, at the end of those changes, will you be in a realistic but hopeful place . . . or still in crisis?

Asking what you want to do, what you’re already good at, and what the world wants will help point out that place.

Footnote: Knowing the direction and reaching the destination are, obviously, different things. Discovering the hopeful place is an important first step, but that’s when the real work begins. How does a city help a small but promising industry to grow faster? How do you turn an organization’s sideline into its primary service? What do you do with all the infrastructure and processes that have grown up around the things that are ending? These are the hard choices of strategic planning. But it starts with hope and a dose of reality.

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

Like/Unlike

September 18, 2012 By Otis White

Thinking is hard work, and if we had to think our way through every thing we did, we couldn’t keep up. That’s why we use mental shortcuts, which come in two forms: Framing for making sense of things and models that give us strategies for action.

Most of the time, these things work so well that we hardly notice them. We see something new (merchants complain about teenagers loitering near their stores), we frame it (public safety threat) and know what to do (send in the cops to warn the teens and, if that doesn’t work, write tickets). But what if the usual models don’t work or if the thing that pops up doesn’t appear to fit any previous frames? That’s when it’s time for something I call “Like/Unlike.”

To understand why this is helpful, you have to know how the shortcuts work together. The key step is the framing, which is a fancy way of saying we’ve put something into a category (teens loitering = public safety threat). The point of putting things into categories is to limit our options for response. There’s nothing wrong with that—it gives us a manageable list of actions to take—and as long as we put things in the right categories, these actions should work. Mind the caution: As long as we put things in the right categories.

If you look around, you can see this framing process at work in cities. One of my favorites is the dilemma posed by food trucks for city regulators and health inspectors. Are food trucks more like restaurants or hot dog carts? If you put them in the hot dog cart frame, then you should regulate where they operate but not worry too much about health inspections. If you put them in the restaurant frame, then you shouldn’t say much about where they operate but you should be diligent about health inspections. (My suggestion: Consider them a third category with their own set of regulations.)

The key is to pause before applying the frame. And Like/Unlike will help with that. It’s a simple way of checking your assumptions. You can do it through a quick mental checklist or you can pull together a group and do it more formally.

Either way, it involves listing attributes and categories, then asking whether the attributes fall into any of the categories. In the food truck example, food trucks are like hot dog carts in that they do business on public rights of way (which raises concerns about location) but like restaurants in that they prepare food in non-standard ways (which raises concerns about public health).

If you have enough attributes and categories, you can make a grid and do check marks. When you’ve finished, you should be able to stand back and see if the evidence points toward an obvious category (and resulting set of actions) or if you should approach the problem as something entirely new. (Don’t be too surprised if you find that you need more information. After all, why are those teenagers standing on that corner?)

Again, the key is the pause. The best leaders are those who are thoughtful, who don’t rush to judgment, who see dimensions to problems that others don’t. The thoughtfulness doesn’t paralyze good leaders. They understand full well the need for action, but they want to be sure the analysis that drives the actions is as accurate as possible.

And what makes it accurate is putting things in the right categories from the start. Like/Unlike will help.

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

Units of Civic Progress

How to Cover City Hall

Why the Goals of Citizen Engagement Are Not What You Think

The Realistic But Hopeful Place

Like/Unlike

About Otis White

The Great Project

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