Community Governance Takes On City Hall

The last post, the one before and the one before that began working toward a more inclusionary and expansive perspective of community governance going beyond the current paradigm of city councils and elections every four years. This post will begin to take a closer look at the idea of using community governance with city councils and city management. This is not intended to be about any particular community but more as abstract communities, Innovatitown and Parochialville.

In exploring the relationship of the individual citizen to the idealistic future state of local government compared to the grittier, practical reality of today, we have to be careful how we characterize that relationship. In most cases, when speaking of a potentially improved future or some example of bureaucratic wrongdoing, we are speaking in abstract terms. This is by necessity because we want to find principles that we can apply to the degree we see appropriate across a broad range of circumstances.

It is not necessary under new community paradigms to eliminate city councils, only to significantly change how they work and their relationship with the community by giving far more power to the community itself.

In his article “Manhattan Moment: Only politicians can save us now”, Stephen D. Eide wrote on the good intentions gone bad of Early 20th century Progressive reformers (who) designed council-manager government to be good government. To the Progressives, good government required the separation of politics and administration -- a concept central to their strategy to wrest control of city government from the urban machines, whose patronage empires had bred political corruption and incompetent administration.

Eide went on to write in support of politicians, as opposed to city administrators, as being more capable of solving the problems facing communities. The logic being that even though both politicians and administrators, aka bureaucrats, got us into this mess, politicians are the only ones who can get us out as opposed to the professional administrators. The third choice raised here is for governance by the community itself.

This claim for a third path for community governance requires more support. How did Nineteenth Century progressives fail to create a new system of city government based on the separation of politics and administration that resulted in the problems of current forms of city government, whether run by city manager or city mayor? What is different from Nineteenth Century progressives so that Twenty-first Century progressives can today successfully create a system of open city government to replace the current systems?

The problem is that politics and administration did not stay separated from each other but combined into a too often dysfunctional, yet still stable relationship, becoming more intertwined together and more separated from the community itself.  Communities as a result often became discouraged or disenfranchised from participation or adopted dysfunctional processes to attain at least minimal benefits, keeping the existing culture of power in place. This idea will be expanded upon in future posts but for now a summation of the problem will have to suffice.

Many small, local, community governments have been functioning under a disjointed control through political influence, usually by city council, combined with professional management by city managers and administrative staff. Disjointed because city council members can use their political power to force decisions that make poor management sense and city managers will work to protect the political self-interests of city council members.

Each component ends up working to support the disfunction of the other to maintain its own survival and the entire system becomes more closed . This does not always happen, perhaps not even as often or as significantly as my experience leads me to believe but when it does, it creates a culture of entrenched institutional government control and despite appearances to the contrary discourages community participation.

Lack of community participation in city government has a great deal to do with the process of city government itself which has over the decades discouraged many with the so-called truism that you can’t fight city hall as a result of abuses cited under A Ladder of Citizen Participation by Sherry R. Arnstein.

The usual claims that change can come about through elections have little merit in such cases as there are in reality minimal opportunities for true community participation and always under processes controlled by the status quo power culture. Worse, any successful election of a new slate often times only changes the players not the game. There may be superficial changes in policy when one political clique replaces another but it swings back a few years later and the deeper culture of the existing power status quo stays in place.

This is why new community paradigms are required to bring about significant change in many of our communities.

What changed significantly for Twenty-first Century Progressives, as compared to Nineteenth Century Progressives, is the communities with which they work and the tools for community change available to them. Nineteenth Century progressives saw the role of public administrators as protecting the interests of an often times uneducated marginalized, and unengaged public against machines such as Tammany Hall. Many in government today still do if with new players.

Twenty-first Century progressives are more likely today to have access to the internal social resources of a community through social media networking platforms. This provides the means to not only create and develop systems of community governance but also the ability to provide community building tools to those who have been discouraged or disenfranchised. What is more important, it does not have to occur only every four years. There can be real time participation and ongoing engagement in community affairs.

One organization taking major steps in making this a reality is Code for America | A New Kind of Public Service.

Code for America enlists the talent of the web industry into public service to use their skills to solve core problems facing our communities. We help passionate technologists leverage the power of the internet to make governments more open and efficient, and become civic leaders able to realize transformational change with technology.

What is important is that the means or tools provided by Code for America are independent of any specific institution or organization. This prevents their overall development from being restricted by political self-interest or unnecessarily restrictive bureaucratic management control. These tools are available to city councils, city management or directly to the community itself. There is still, however, the issue of having these resources used within the communities they are intended to benefit. Many communities will adopted them but only to the extent allowed by city councils and city management and not necessarily to the extend that would actually be supported by the community.

Civic technology experts have recognized the benefits of sharing technology among governments and institutions. However, instances of successful collaboration and sharing are still few and far between, in part because there is no easy, structured way to share knowledge about this software, let alone the software itself. There is no one place to go to look for civic software that cities need, and no roadmap to share what they have.

The solution to this problem as put forward by Code for America | A New Kind of Public Service will be dealt with more fully in the next post.

Community Governance - Third Path to City Government

Last month this blog featured posts on community governance, both from the perspective of governance through community, which involves community members coming together to deliberate and make decisions, and governance by community, which involves the means of implementing those decisions administratively.  These were admittedly idealistic states that needed to be strived toward.  How to achieve that will be one of the continuing focuses of this blog.  For this to happen requires a move away from current entrenched forms of closed city government to more open forms of community governance.

The two common major styles of city government found today, strong-mayor and council-manager, were featured in two articles, which appeared during the same month in the Washington Examiner, contrasting the supposed strengths of each.   

The first article by Stephen D. Eide, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute's Center for State and Local Leadership, is “Manhattan Moment: Only politicians can save us now” and the other is “In defense of city managers” which Robert J. O'Neill, Jr., the Executive Director of the International City/County Management Association wrote in response.  

Eide explains that under a council-manager form of government, a professional administrator runs the city government. He or she is, however, not elected by voters but appointed by a city council.  Under the strong-mayor government, the mayor, is elected by the people and directs the city's administration while serving as the city's political head.  

As can be deduced from the titles of the two articles, Eide makes the case that communities have come to depend too much on professional administrative staff and that they would be better off if they would instead turn to politicians to overcome the challenges that they face. O’Neill takes the opposite tact coming to the defense of city managers and other public sector administrators by warning “that pitting strong political leadership against professional local government management as a solution is misguided”. 

Eide makes the argument that when a crisis does arise, “political leadership is needed much more than professional expertise”.  Eide points out “Mayors can make case for their vision directly to the public, through elections and initiatives.  City managers' capacity for political leadership is limited. They can't offend the elected officials who act as their bosses”.  

O’Neill asserts that what is of prime importance is “efficiency of administration” using as the basis for his counter argument the article "Smarter, Faster, Cheaper," by David Edwards who reported that “what determines how efficiently a city deploys resources is management, and that communities with the council-manager form of government are nearly 10 percent more efficient than those with strong mayoral forms of government”.

The real crux of the argument for Eide is a desire to address what Eide calls the “fiscal and administrative inflexibility caused by unreasonable union contracts and the unsustainable costs of public-employee benefits”.  The solution according to Eide is to follow the example of San Diego that with the support of a 2/3 voter majority passed Proposition B which was designed to eliminate defined-benefit pensions for all new nonpublic safety employees and save taxpayers nearly $1 billion.  According to Eide, the San Diego passage of Proposition B could not have happened if the change from council-manager to strong-mayor had not been made.  

This is not meant however to be an argument as to whether this is fair or not or whether it is the proper course of action as it is seen as being unavoidable.  This trend, as will be discussed in future posts, will continue changing the nature of public sector employment.  

What is being questioned is whether people could have the type of communities that they can imagine if they were fully empowered with the necessary resources and not turned off or discouraged from community participation? 

Eide focuses on a single policy decision, cutting public sector employee overall compensation and argues that it is better to bet on politicians to get the public to buy into it than to bet on public administrators to get the policy implemented.  

It does not, however, do anything to directly address his concern that “budgets are rising, but productivity and the quality of city services are not”.  The primary driver of community governance becomes a matter of cost rather than of value. Residents are defined as consumers of government services not as citizens.  Seeking better quality service through only cost cutting without finding means of enhancing those services through new means of innovation simply results in commodification where less is done with less and community needs go unmet. Draconian measures maybe possible under a political fix, such as finding ways to cut costs by reducing overall public sector employment compensation but they do not address issues of continued sustainable community governance.  What can happen instead is a constant winner take all pendulum swing from one side to the other or the disenfranchisement of a portion of the community.  

Eide and O’Neill may both distinguish between politics and administration, giving each a different level of primacy, but both fail to make a distinction for the creation of a community vision and setting of policy to implement that vision which is different from using a political approach to decide among policy choices and from the administration of that policy.    

One approach focuses on the effectiveness of politically motivated measures without much regard made for what happens after they are implemented as long as the correct position of  political power is taken and the other approach focuses on the efficiency of administration without much regard made to how effective the policy in question may be.  Each seemingly leaves the other side of that equation to the its counterpart.  Both could claim to have the best of intentions in mind but still assign only a passive role to the community which is either to be sold to or managed.  Both systems of government focus more of their energy into making sure the current system and its players stay in place than addressing the needs of the community. 

With regards to professional staff, I can agree that we should resist what Eide calls the urge to "trust the experts", at least not to trust them indiscriminately.  I can’t agree though that only politicians, whom Eide himself admits are to blame for much of the trouble American cities are in today, are the only ones that can save us now.  A guiding principle of new community paradigms is that not only should a more substantial role be taken on by the community itself, it is also now more possible than ever before.

Eide claim that the professional is not as accountable to the populous as the politician also falls flat, as it is the politicians who appoint the administrators with the power to fire them and even though residents only get to hold the politicians accountable every four years.  

The framework O’Neill suggests for our cities to be successful does begin to meet a new community paradigms standard though with a change in emphasis to focus first on:

• A strategy for representing and engaging every segment of the community
• A commitment to transparent and ethical government 

A new community paradigms approach still recognizes the importance of:

• Strong political community leadership 
• Strong policy development
• A relentless focus on execution and results

O’Neill says that, “Under any form, the citizenry must be involved in their local governments and select the best possible local elected officials possible. “  No argument as far as it goes but, new community paradigms asserts that we now have the ability to go even further and have a more direct say in real time about how our communities are formed and developed through direct community governance.