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CONNECTING AMERICA’S LEADERS November 2010 $4.50

PUBLIC OFFICIALS

YEARof the

Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett

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11.2010

FEATURES28 BURNED OUT

A new incinerator was supposed to earn Harrisburg, Pa., $1 billion. Instead, it’s a cautionary tale for what happens when an infrastructure project goes bad.By John Buntin

36 PUBLIC OFFICIALS

OF THE YEAR 2010 John Covington Mick Cornett Jerry Madden John Whitmire Sonny Perdue Diana Urban Steve Fletcher Ana Gelabert-Sanchez

46 FARMING FOR VOTESRedistricting is not likely to be kind to the political clout of rural areas.By Josh Goodman

VOL. 24, NO. 2

DA

VID

KID

D

Georgia Gov.

Sonny Perdue

GOVERNING | November 20102

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PROBLEM SOLVER

56 How Rules Demean Public Workers Laws, arbitrary rulings and contracts keep employees locked in an unrewarding work environment.

60 Smart Management States and localities should prioritize top goals and revamp the budgeting process.

62 Idea Center Knoxville, Tenn., will soon be home to about 350 public charging stations for electric vehicles as part of the EV Project.

64 Tech Talk Consolidation comes in two forms: a centralized model and a federated approach.

66 Public Money Plunging real estate values have devastating consequences for government fi nance.

68 Player Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.’s vision of “intelligence-driven prosecution” could do for prosecutors what CompStat did for policing.

DEPARTMENTS

6 In This Issue

8 Letters

10 Dispatch Despite polarization, politics is still the way to get things done.

POLITICS + POLICY

13 Observer In Philadelphia, Sugar- House Casino’s story refl ects the mixed emotions surrounding legalized gambling.

17 Ballot Box A new eff ort is under way to encourage young adults to start voting and keep voting.

18 Potomac Chronicle As problems cry out for solutions, we need more Richard Daleys.

20 At Issue Is fl ying the Gadsden fl ag a protected nod to America’s past? Some states’ laws are unclear.

22 Health As states implement health benefi t exchanges, they’ll likely look west for guidance.

24 Green Government Sportsmen in the U.S. are in decline. Will a new generation materialize to fuel state conservation eff orts?

26 Economic Engines There are infrastructure projects, and then there are infrastructure projects that transform.

27 Urban Notebook Renting and returning to urban living—where energy costs are lower—could be in the offi ng.

24


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IN THIS ISSUE

And the Honorees Are …

This is my favorite time of year. Every year since 1994, Governing has honored individual state and local gov-ernment offi cials for outstanding accomplishment by naming them Public Offi cials of the Year. Let’s face it—

2010 has been a trying year for state and local offi cials. They’ve had to ask the tough questions and learn to do more with less. Our eight Public Offi cials of the Year not only confronted these tough questions head on, but also answered them.

This year’s honorees feature a governor who’s turned his state into one of the best managed in the country; a mid-sized city mayor who’s made great strides toward improving the quality of life in his city, including a grand $777 million plan to remake his downtown; a transformational public school superinten-dent; a city planner who designed and won approval for the

nation’s most ambitious new urbanist zoning code; a chief information offi cer who’s succeeded at keeping govern-ment running fi ve days a week despite offi ces being closed; two legislators who teamed up to end a prison building binge and reform corrections in the unlikeliest of states; and a lawmaker who brought results-based legislating to her state. Turn to page 36 for profi les of this year’s Public Offi cials of the Year.

Also in this issue is an interesting fea-ture by John Buntin that looks into what happens when a major infrastructure

project goes wrong—and what state and local offi cials can do to ensure that doesn’t happen. Harrisburg, Pa., is dealing with such a conundrum. It owes almost $68 million this year—more than its annual budget—for the fi nancing of an incinerator plant. The facility, which is the root of Harrisburg’s fi nancial crisis, has more than $280 million in overall debt. The city is doing every-thing it can to avoid declaring bankruptcy, including seeking ref-uge in its state’s oversight program for distressed cities. How did a city of less than 50,000 people fi nd itself in such a fi scal mess? Turn to page 28 to fi nd out.

Over the past decade, the population has shifted from rural areas to suburban and exurban ones. With the once-a-decade redistricting process set to reshape legislative district lines, political power is about to shift in the same direction. The shift will leave rural areas grappling with a future in which the fate of issues they care about are at the mercy of people who rarely catch a glimpse of a cow. What does this mean for rural lawmakers and their causes once even the famously rural states—Georgia, Texas and Virginia—are dominated by the suburbs?

Enjoy our November issue, and let me know how we’re doing by sending me an e-mail at [email protected].


Publisher Fred Kuhn

Editor Tod NewcombeEditor-at-Large Paul W. TaylorManaging Editor Elizabeth DaigneauSenior Editor Zach PattonAssociate Editor Jessica B. MulhollandPhoto Editor David KiddChief Copy Editor Miriam JonesCopy Editors Elaine Pittman, Sarah RichStaff Writers John Buntin, Josh Goodman, Andy Kim, Tina TrenknerCorrespondents Katherine Barrett, Richard Greene, Jonathan WaltersContributing Editors Penelope Lemov, Steve TownsColumnists William Fulton, Peter A. Harkness, Donald F. Kettl, Alex Marshall, Girard Miller, John E. Petersen

Creative Director Kelly MartinelliDesign Director David KiddSenior Graphic Designer Crystal HopsonGraphic Designer Michelle HammIllustrator Tom McKeithProduction Director Stephan WidmaierProduction Manager Joei Heart

Marketing Manager Jenna AlifanteEvents & Program Manager Jennifer Carman

Founder & Publisher Emeritus Peter A. Harkness

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Reprint Information Reprints of all articles in this issue and past issues are available (500 minimum). Please direct inquiries for reprints and licensing to Wright’s Media: (877) 652-5295, [email protected]

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Governing (ISSN 0894-3842) is published monthly by e.Republic Inc., with offi ces at 1100 Connecticut Ave. N.W., Suite 1300, Washington, D.C. 20036 and at 100 Blue Ravine Road, Folsom, CA 95630. Telephone: 202-862-8802. Fax: 202-862-0032. E-mail: [email protected]. Web: Governing.com. Periodical postage paid in Washington, D.C., and at additional mailing offi ces. Copyright 2010 e.Republic Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher is prohibited. Governing, Governing.com and City & State are regis-tered trademarks of e.Republic Inc.; unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. U.S. subscription rates: Government employees—free; all others—$19.95 for one year. Foreign subscriptions: $74.95 in U.S. funds. Post-master: Send address changes to Governing, 100 Blue Ravine Road, Folsom, CA, 95630. Subscribers: Enclose mailing label from past issue. Allow six weeks. Member: BPA International. Made in the U.S.A.

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‘Alleged’ ToxicityI appreciated your recent article about bedbugs in New York City [Sleep Tight …,p. 16, September 2010], especially since my daughter lives there. She had to endure the itchy red bumps and buy some new furniture this summer because of a terrible infestation in her apartment. It is indeed a serious problem that most peo-ple aren’t aware of.

I also wanted to comment on your reference to the use of DDT to eradicate the problem after WWII. You refer-enced the “toxicity” of DDT as a reason for the cessation of its use. A more accu-rate explanation would be that DDT’s “alleged” toxicity led to it not being used for bedbug eradication.

No scientifi c study has ever been able to link the use of DDT with any negative human health impact, and in fact, the use of DDT between the end of WWII and 1970 practically eliminated malaria. According to the National Academy of Sciences, in those years, DDT saved more than 500 million lives worldwide.

An article from 2006 sheds consider-able light on the tragic history of the DDT ban [Hooray for DDT’s Life-Saving Come-back by John Stossel] and also shares the good news that the World Health Organi-zation ended its ban on DDT.

Being a West Coaster, I had no knowl-edge of bedbugs until this year, but thanks to my daughter and you, I’m much better educated about this pest.

Thank you again for your timely piece.— Craig Johnson

What Families Do NaturallyThank you for your thoughtful piece on the potential and pitfalls of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs [Cashing Out of Poverty, p. 28, September 2010]. The author described the initiative I lead, the Family Independence Initiative (FII), as a program “that combines the use of CCTs with peer support networks.”

I’d like to clarify some of the distinc-tions in how and why FII transfers funds to families.

Families in FII are able to earn funds by doing tasks for which most organizations hire professional staff , thus reducing our costs and empowering families. Instead of having staff call or visit families monthly to measure progress, FII pays families small amounts ($30) for reporting progress online and keeping documentation of the progress they report. The FII staff ’s role is to audit what families report.

Unlike CCTs, FII’s intent is not to incent particular behaviors, but instead to learn what families do naturally. And so the menu of what families can report includes more than 200 documentable actions that help us create policy recom-mendations that would help families lead their own change.

— Maurice Miller, Family Independence Initiative, Oakland, Calif.

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LETTERS


Correction: In the October issue of

Governing, John Buntin’s article Louisiana’s

Great Reset incorrectly stated that Louisiana

Gov. Bobby Jindal’s middle name was Amrit.

Jindal does not have a middle name. His given

name is Piyush Jindal. In the same article, it was

stated that Jindal was appointed secretary of the

Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals in

1993 at the age of 25. He was actually appointed

secretary in 1996 at the age of 24.

21October 2010 | GOVERNING20 GOVERNING | October 2010

On Thursday mornings, a clutch of Afri-can-American preachers gathers for breakfast and conversation at the Bayou Café. It’s a cozy place in a decidedly non-affluent neighborhood in north Baton

Rouge, La. The ministers—and others who may join them—hash over issues of mutual concern and relax amid the cooking sounds and scents from the kitchen.

But on one particular Thursday morning in August, the atmosphere is anything but calm. Angry words filled the air as the talk turns to Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s decision to close the Earl K. Long Medical Center—an aging, state-run hospital just up the road that serves the poor and uninsured. Among the kinder things the min-isters call Jindal is “hypocritical.” His refusal to back a renovation to the outmoded hospital—via a minor hike in a revenue source—is particularly galling. “Anyone can be against taxes in the abstract,” one pastor says. “But what’s the solution without more money?”

Jindal is “driven by ambition,” says Rev. Tommie N. Gipson Jr., senior pastor of Donaldson Chapel Baptist Church. “He’s putting promoting the Republican agenda above the needs of Louisiana.”

As the ministers see it, the primary needs of this neigh-borhood—a community where one-third of the residents live below the poverty level—are accessible health care and the jobs that the hospital provides. And that’s how Rep. Regina Barrow, who represents north Baton Rouge and sits in on the morning get-together, sees it too. “The hospital has been the economic engine here,” she says. “It’s a marker in the community—a beacon of hope. It provides services for those who do not have anywhere else to go.”

But the hospital represents more than that. It has an iconic name and history. If people are treated at the medical center regardless of their ability to pay, it’s thanks to the man for whom Baton Rouge’s public hospital is named: former Gov. Earl K. Long.

The Longs—first Huey and then his younger brother Earl—ruled Louisiana for decades, from 1928 when Huey was elected governor through 1960, when Earl died.

Louisiana’s Great ResetBobby Jindal took

office with a mandate

to change state

government. Three

years later, it’s the

governor’s approach

to leadership that has

changed instead.

By John Buntin

DAVID KIDDAP IMAGES

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It is all over but the shouting. Beyond the congressional midterms, there were gubernatorial races in 37 states, and 6,115 state legislative races in 46 states

this election season. This is a month for resolving close political races and analyz-ing the rest.

Even as the ink dries on the fi nal tal-lies, there’s a tendency to use the results as a Rorschach test and impose our per-ceptions on trends gleaned from voting patterns. Often, perhaps unintentionally, we look for evidence in the numbers to support our preconceptions.

The dominant narratives this politi-cal season, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, have been that politics is not the solution to our problems; politics is the problem. By extension, this view holds that com-promise is fraught with unacceptable political risk, even if it might come with the makings of a reasonable solution. Our politics are apparently so polarized that they attract candidates who you wouldn’t want to represent you. Further, in a confu-sion of politicization with politics, if there are too few good actors in public service, then there are even fewer worthwhile (or even appropriate) acts by government. All of this can be explained, so the story line goes, by a collective straying from the ide-als of the country’s founding.

Yet politics is still the way things get done and has proven to be amazingly resilient against daunting odds.

Consider the honorable compromise. Lately this political strategy has been den-igrated, which is shortsighted because, frankly, we need it to survive. On a recent visit to the seat of government in North-ern Ireland, known as Stormont, I saw that lesson in bold relief. My host was Roy Beggs Jr., a sometimes controversial Ulster Unionist member of the Northern Ireland Assembly. Beggs has served in the

By Paul W. Taylor

Against All OddsDespite polarization, politics is still the way to get things done.

DISPATCH

sense that they all contested the election because they thought their ideas were better for the country than those of their opponents. As an added bonus, none of them seemed shrill or sarcastic enough to be a viable guest on much of what passes for cable news.

We can also be encouraged by the dueling marches on Washington, D.C., in the lead-up to this year’s election. People came from all over the country, sometimes on alternate weekends, to stand with like-minded crowds in support of par-ticular visions of what this country could

or should be. Some rallies skewed right,others skewed left and a pair of parody rallies skewered them all.

Interestingly they all gravitated to the National Mall, a place where the nation’s traditions, values and aspirations are carved in stone. The Mall was more than a common backdrop. It refl ected what they—and we—have in common once everything else has been said. Those com-mon values maintain a platform for poli-tics in its noblest sense—as both the art of compromise and the art of the possible. G

E-mail [email protected]

assembly since it was re-established in 1998 under the Good Friday Agreement, which created a process for power sharing between two former enemies.

Standing in front of a painting of the members of the 1998 assembly, includ-ing both nationalists and unionists, Beggs explained that “everyone was brought into politics” so that “violence would be a thing of the past.”

“Northern Ireland is a much better place today for all our children, but the compro-mises and complex nature of Stormont can make political change and improvement

diffi cult,” Beggs recalled. “But slow poli-tics is better than what happened during the Troubles.”

Back home in Washington state, I spent time during the primary season with can-didates of both parties running for state and federal offi ces. They didn’t fi t today’s caricature of a politician. In fact, they knew their community, understood its issues and spoke knowledgeably about the interplay of local and national problems.

Moreover, they spoke with conviction about what they believed and how those beliefs had been formed through a life-time of experience. There was a genuine

WIK

IME

DIAThis Ulsters Past Defenders mural in East Belfast, Ireland, shows the Ulster

Defence Association and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, both now renamed.



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2010Congratulations to the 2010 Public Offi cials of the Year from our sponsors!

The 2010 Public Offi cials of the Year awards dinner will be held on Nov. 18 at Washington’s historic Willard InterContinental hotel.

Be sure to check out governing.com/events to watch a video from the awards banquet.

For more information, go to governing.com/poy

J. Wm. Covington Superintendent, Kansas City,

Missouri Public Schools

J. Stephen Fletcher CIO, State of Utah

Mick Cornett Mayor, Oklahoma City,

Oklahoma

Ana Gelabert-Sanchez Planning Director,

City of Miami, Florida

Jerry A. Madden Texas House of Representatives,

State Representative, District #69

Sonny Perdue Governor,

State of Georgia

John Whitmire Senator, State of Texas

Diana S. Urban Representative,

State of Connecticut

Winners


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OBSERVER By Josh Goodman

The Gambling Predicament

a destination casino,” says Dan Hajdo, a spokesman for Casino-Free Philadelphia.

In 2004, state lawmakers actually approved the construction of two casinos in Philadelphia. SugarHouse is the fi rst, located in a former industrial area along the Delaware River near a residential neighborhood. The second casino, however, has been stymied by location questions. One proposed site, in Center City, drew local opposition because of its proximity to Independence Mall and Chinatown. Plus, casino backers wanted lots of parking despite all of the transit options in downtown Philadelphia. Opposition has stalled another possible site in South Philadelphia, where the casino would be placed among big box stores in an area where roads already are clogged. For now, it’s unclear when or if the second casino will ever be built.

Perhaps the biggest concern is something less tangible: that as a proud, historic city, there’s something not right about invit-ing in legalized gambling. Philadelphia has been wrenched by the possibility that SugarHouse will compromise its identity. But Alan Greenberger, Philadelphia’s deputy mayor for planning and economic development, says he’s confi dent that won’t happen. “Philadelphia is a major city with a casino,” he says. “That’s very diff erent than being a casino city. This place is not going to be Biloxi. It’s not going to be Atlantic City.” G

P hiladelphia’s fi rst casino fi nally opened this fall after six years of legal and political disputes. The SugarHouse Casino’s story refl ects the mixed emotions about legal-ized gambling that have kept casinos out of most major

American cities.Casinos are common in big cities in Australia, Canada and

Europe. London alone has more than 20. A few American cities have casinos too, including Las Vegas, Detroit, Milwaukee and New Orleans, but they’re the exceptions to the rule. Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City have none. With SugarHouse, Phila-delphia, the nation’s sixth most populous city, is now the biggest with a casino.

The SugarHouse debate makes it clear why most cities are reluctant to legalize gambling. SugarHouse comes with some obvious benefi ts: It employs 900 workers and provides a new source of revenue for the city without raising taxes.

Skeptics, though, wonder whether the benefi ts are worth it. No matter where they’re located, casinos prompt fears about gambling addiction and crime. In Philadelphia, those fears are magnifi ed by the casino’s proximity to hundreds of thou-sands of poor people. That proximity raises a question: Will SugarHouse attract much outside money or will it just redirect money from the city’s citizens? “It’s a convenience casino, not

Politics+Policy

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A look at the people, events and ideas that shape state and local government.

13November 2010 | GOVERNING



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When federal offi cials indicted Cuyahoga County Commis-sioner Jimmy Dimora on corruption charges in Sep-

tember, it was the latest indication that the government in Ohio’s most populous county was broken. That wasn’t news to the citizens of Cuyahoga County, though—they approved a plan a year earlier to fi x it. As a result, the form of government is changing in Cuyahoga County, which spans Cleveland and many of its suburbs.

Under the old system, county commis-sioners and a multiplicity of other offi ces, including county coroner and county engineer, were elected countywide. The result was a government that was simulta-

neously fragmented and lacking in checks and balances, says Martin Zanotti, a for-mer mayor of Parma Heights and archi-

tect of the reform plan. Each elected offi -cial ruled over an independent fi efdom. Hiring decisions were decentralized,

A fter the rape and murder of Chelsea King, a San Diego County teenager, California legislators decided they had to do something. Amid the emotions of the trag-

edy, they passed a rational, thoughtful law.That was an unexpected outcome, because many of the

approaches that states take to prevent sex crimes are based more on fears than hard evidence. That’s as true in California as any other place. There, with the support of most of the state’s key politicians, voters approved a 2006 ballot initia-tive, known as Jessica’s Law, that barred sex off enders from living within 2,000 feet of schools, day-care centers, parks or churches.

Researchers and law enforcement groups overwhelmingly say that residency restrictions don’t prevent sexual assaults and, in fact, are counterproductive because they drive sex off enders underground, making them more diffi cult to track. In 2006, though, that message didn’t get through. “[Jessica’s Law] was a knee-jerk reaction that went against almost every-thing we know that is eff ective in dealing with sex off enders,” says Robert Coombs, a victims’ rights advocate and former chair of California’s Sex Off ender Management Board.

This year the response was diff erent. Chelsea’s Law began as a bill focused on tougher sentences, and its fi nal version still takes that approach, including a provision that will man-date life sentences without the possibility of parole for sex off enders who violently attack children. But thanks to a col-laboration between Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher, a San Diego County Republican, and Sen. Mark Leno, a San Fran-

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cisco Democrat, it also includes a broad rethinking of the way the state manages sex off enders who will return to society.

The law adopts a “containment model” that researchers in the fi eld describe as the most promising approach to reduce sex off ender recidivism. The approach couples mandatory treatment with intensive monitoring and regular lie-detector tests. While state policies often treat all off enders the same regardless of the nature of their crimes, the containment model is diff erent. Parole offi cers and therapists place restric-tions on off enders and pursue a treatment strategy based on their individual situations.

Leno says Chelsea’s Law is just a fi rst step. He and Fletcher have discussed teaming up next year to try to mend some of the fl aws of Jessica’s Law. Does that mean sex off ender policy in California is fi nally headed in a more rational direction? “I could answer that question with more authority,” Leno says, “a year from now.” G

Cuyahoga’s Comeback

Politics+Policy | OBSERVER

Reforming Sex Offender Laws


Martin Zanotti

crafted the

reform plan for

Cuyahoga County,

Ohio’s broken

government.

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THE FREEDOM To GIVE.

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Election reformers have devised an idea to encourage more young people to vote—one that just might make life easier for election administrators.

The idea is to allow 16-year-olds to “preregister” to vote. The teens would automatically be able to participate in elections once they hit the

federal voting age of 18. As it stands now, states have a wide variety of rules: Some let 17-year-olds preregister and some let anyone who will be 18 by the next general election register. But until recently, only Hawaii allowed 16-year-olds to sign up.

That’s starting to change. Florida, Maryland, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., all have approved laws allowing 16-year-olds to preregister in recent years. Florida’s move was especially notable because it took place in a state with a Republican Legislature and a then-Republican governor. Young voters tend to favor Democrats.

The shift comes as technological and administrative advances have made it easier for states to keep preregistrants separate from the regular voter pool. Sup-porters say there’s little risk that those under 18 would actually cast a ballot. The

shift also occurs at a time of lingering concern about youth political participation. Voter turnout among young adults long has lagged behind the general population, and supporters view preregistration as a partial answer to the problem. Research by George Mason University’s Michael McDonald suggests that they’re right. In a study published in 2009, McDonald found that preregistration programs in Hawaii and Florida encouraged young adults to start voting and keep voting.

Reformers envision expanded voter registration drives in high schools, and teen-agers preregistering when they receive their drivers’ licenses. McDonald’s research shows that preregistration programs conducted through schools are especially eff ec-tive. “Our goal is to get every eligible young person registered before they hit voting age,” says Rob Richie, executive director of FairVote, a group pushing the changes.

If they even partially succeed in that goal, some of the biggest winners may be the people who run elections. Today voter registration drives often are conducted by partisan groups, whose work can be sloppy and timing inconvenient for adminis-trators—whose elections offi ces are inundated with registrations just before a major election. If young people begin to sign up years in advance, there’s a good chance that

some of the election season’s administra-tive chaos would be diminished. —Josh Goodman

Preregistering the Teen Vote A new effort is under way to encourage young adults to start voting

and keep voting.

Get your state andlocal politics fi x atgoverning.com/ballotbox

| BALLOT BOX

creating ineffi ciencies and opportunities for patronage and corruption.

People in positions of power took advantage of those opportunities. That reality started to become clear in July 2008, when federal agents conducted a massive raid of county offi ces. Since then, more than 30 county offi cials and contractors have pled guilty to a variety of corruption charges. County Auditor Frank Russo faces more than 20 years in prison after admitting to accepting bribes and kickbacks. And Dimora, who doubled as head of the county Democratic Party, stands accused of using his elected offi ce for personal gain. He says he’s innocent.

But corruption isn’t the only thing ailing Cuyahoga County. Cleveland has long suff ered from all the familiar prob-lems of the industrial Midwest: popula-tion loss, poverty and economic stag-nation. Even wealthier suburbs aren’t immune. “Cuyahoga County is having to grapple with some of the problems that have aff ected Cleveland for years,” says Jennifer Bradley, co-director of the Brookings Institution’s Great Lakes Eco-nomic Initiative.

Starting in January, Cuyahoga County will have a single county executive as its top elected offi cial who, proponents hope, will provide energetic leadership and serve as a focal point for much-needed economic development. It will have an 11-member County Council with mem-bers representing distinct districts, giving the county a legislative branch to check the executive. Most of the old countywide elected offi ces will become appointed positions, which will be fi lled by profes-sionals instead of politicians. The changes are similar to ones made a decade ago in Allegheny County, Pa., where Pittsburgh is showing signs of economic rebirth.

Still, no one in Cuyahoga County is naive enough to think a change of gov-ernment structure is a comprehensive solution to the region’s problems. The system’s success may hinge on who county voters pick as the new fi rst county executive in an election this month. “Any form of government,” Zanotti says, “is ultimately only going to be as good as the people you elect.” G

November 2010 | GOVERNING 17

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Who Will Lead?As problems cry out for solutions, we need more Richard Daleys.

By Peter A. Harkness

Leadership is the kind of lofty and abstract subject I don’t usually ponder; most of my thoughts are far more mundane. But recent events and experiences have made me consider it.

First, curiosity led my wife and me to political commentator Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally on the National Mall. We wanted to see how this odd—some would say unhinged—hyper-emotional media personality and promoter, who started out in Top 40 morning zoo radio, was able to summon so many people from around the country to a rally that’s purpose was so vague—even to Beck. He admitted in his speech that, “We didn’t know what we were going to do when we got here.”

A fascinating analysis by civil rights historian Taylor Branch in The New York Times reveals that Beck evidently experienced some kind of transformative moment while planning the event, deciding to make it spiritual, not political, and to embrace the civil rights movement rather than disparage it as he had done so often in the past. Instead, he and other speakers invoked the memory of Martin Luther King Jr., who had spoken from the same spot 47 years earlier. “We must get the poison of hatred out of us,” Beck implored the vast crowd. “Go to your churches, your synagogues, your mosques, anyone that is not preaching hate and division, any-one who is not teaching to kill another man.”

This isn’t exactly what I expected to hear, nor I suspect did many others in this very polite, nearly all-white crowd of middle-

class Americans. I have no idea what this will mean for Beck and his “restor-ing honor” movement. Will it presage a more permanent change in tone and direction or not? And either way, will he remain its leader?

Then we went to see Invictus, the fi lm about Nelson Mandela’s bold move to unite white and black South Africans after his release from 27 years in prison, the ensuing demise of apartheid and his election as the new nation’s fi rst president. Mandela embraces, of all things, the nation’s rugby team and hosting this year’s World Cup, even though the sport and team are closely associated with the white minority Afrikaners who had imprisoned him. In an understated, yet moving way, the fi lm explores leadership—both Mandela and the

rugby team’s young captain, who is inspired by what he learns of how much his new president overcame in all those years in that tiny cell. Needless to say, this young man of conscience leads the South African team to an upset victory.

Then came the surprising news on Sept. 7 that one of the nation’s pre-eminent political leaders, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, would be retiring after 22 years in offi ce. It prompted another unusually strong and blunt mayor, New York City’s Michael Bloomberg, to call Daley a transformational leader. “He’s

a doer, has gut s, has beliefs. … If you called Central Casting and said, ‘Send me a great, forward-thinking mayor who does the job and doesn’t pander,’ that’s who they’d send.”

This is all true. Daley is a visionary who remade his city—not only its dazzling downtown, but much of its public housing, parks, libraries and other amenities. He did the “soft” stuff , like adding

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All levels of government are

facing signifi cant challenges that,

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Daniel ConnellEngineer/Project Manager

CONSOL Energy – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Dan should know. He’s part of an international effort

working toward the successful capture and storage

of CO2 on a large commercial scale. The technology,

called carbon capture and storage (CCS), will allow

us to continue using coal, one of our most abundant

and affordable fuels, in an even more environmentally

responsible way. And power plants using natural

gas will also need to employ CCS to meet

stringent CO2-reduction goals.

As Dan is quick to point out, we are making

progress toward that goal.

“We have technologies today that can capture CO2,

and we have coal-fi red power plants that already

capture and store CO2 emissions. We can store

carbon dioxide underground and do it in a safe way.

“I am confi dent, based on the number of scientists and

engineers around the world working on this solution,

that we can get there. That is what my job is all about.”

Dan agrees that driving down the cost of capturing and

storing CO2 on a widespread basis is the next task. And

with people like Dan leading the way, we will succeed.

To learn more about Dan and his work

on building a clean and affordable energy future,

visit americaspower.org.

“The coal industry and

the electric power industry

have a vision of the ability to

use coal with near-zero emissions.

And we’re on a path to get there.”


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miles of bike trails and thousands of trees, but he also took on the dangerous task of making improvement in the schools his responsibility. He is one of the outstand-ing political leaders we’ve seen in the past two decades.

It’s a time when we sure could use more like him. All levels of government are facing signifi cant challenges that, if not met, will only become increasingly serious. Washington, D.C., must invigo-rate an anemic economy while devising a plan to prevent what now is being called the most predictable fi nancial crisis in our history—the implosion caused by our mushrooming national debt. States and localities will have to confront their imbalances, which increasingly are seen as structural, not cyclical. From the White House to the smallest county courthouse, solutions must come from people willing to lead and ask for sacrifi ces for the com-mon good.

A recent article in The New Yorker about the U.S. Senate, titled The Empty Chamber, vividly describes the dysfunc-tion and myopia that defi nes Washington today. There’s a huge surplus of special interest money, but very little trust. The chamber, a generator of ideas and inspi-ration three or four decades ago, has become the domain of ideologues and charlatans. Senators of good will who want to practice the time-honored poli-tics of compromise and consensus are pressured into uncomfortably rigid ideo-logical positions. There is little interest in crafting solutions.

As noted by David Rothkopf, a Carn-egie Endowment for International Peace visiting scholar, the debate between the two parties “is about assigning blame rather than assuming responsibility. It’s a contest to see who can give away more at precisely the time they should be ask-ing more of the American people.”

Given the level of discourse in these elections, it’s hard to see where the lead-ership we need throughout our federal system—the leadership that in diff erent ways Daley gave Chicago or Mandela gave South Africa—will come from. G


By Tina Trenkner

AT ISSUE: Flag Flying

Don’t Tread on Flags Is fl ying the Gadsden fl ag a protected nod to America’s past? Some states’ laws are unclear.

This summer, an Arizona homeowners association (HOA) told one of its resi-dents, Andy McDonel, to remove “debris” from the front of his home or face fi nes . The debris in question was a Gadsden fl ag, or the “Don’t Tread on Me” fl ag, which has military signifi cance and has also been linked to the tea party movement. McDonel has promised a fi ght, but the incident raises a larger ques-tion: Is the Gadsden fl ag a protected military fl ag that should be fl own freely?

The distinction is important because a few states defi ne which fl ags and signs HOAs and other organizations can and cannot restrict in their bylaws. In Arizona’s case, state law allows Arizonans the right to fl y the American fl ag , the state fl ag, fl ags representing Native American nations and U.S. military fl ags. Arizona’s list of acceptable fl ags stems from earlier disputes in which residents were challenged by their HOA for fl ying various fl ags . The state Legislature stepped in and passed the Community Association Flag Display Statute, with amendments added over the years.

Depending on one’s interpretation, the current Arizona law could allow HOAs to prohibit the Gadsden fl ag from fl ying since it isn’t considered “an offi cial” military fl ag-one of the statutes stipulations. Before tea par-tiers adopted it, the Gadsden fl ag was being hoisted above ships during the American Revolution, and has since been prominently used by the Navy and Marines. “We believe that the lan-guage of the law would permit this fl ag,” said Dan Pochoda, legal director of the Arizona chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who assisted McDonel with his fi ght to fl y the fl ag, asserting that the Gadsden fl ag is a his-toric military fl ag.

McDonel’s case follows several documented cases over the past year regarding the Gadsden fl ag. In Connecticut , a group of former Marines fought a decision to block the Gadsden fl ag from being fl own over the state Capitol. In Colorado , where an incident similar to Arizona’s played out this summer, an HOA sidestepped a lawsuit and eventually allowed residents to fl y the Gadsden fl ag . In McDonel’s case, the HOA has backed off, lifting the fi nes it had imposed. Otherwise, Pochoda says, the ACLU wuld be considering legislative action.

McDonel has yet to receive any additional correspondence regarding the status of his situation , but has blogged that he continues to fl y the Gadsden fl ag outside his home.

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By Jessica B. Mulholland

A National Model?As states implement health benefi t exchanges, they’ll likely look west for guidance.

On Sept. 30, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger launched Cali-fornia to the forefront of the debate surrounding states’ role in implementing a key part of the federal health-care reform package known as the Patient Protection

and Aff ordable Care Act. He signed two bills that together create the framework for the California Health Benefi t Exchange.

California was the fi rst state in the nation to pass legislation to develop the Health Benefi t Exchange and now will be the fi rst to implement it. This exchange, described by the San Francisco Chronicle as a “virtual marketplace where consumers will be able to buy coverage under the new federal health law,” won’t be avail-able to consumers until January 2014. But because it’s the fi rst exchange being set up in the U.S. since the federal health-care reform law passed, it likely will serve as a model for other states.

California jumped quickly on this legislation because it had aggressively pushed for health-care reform three years ago—reform that Schwarzenegger says included requiring all Californians to have coverage, making coverage aff ordable for low-income families, ensuring that individuals with pre-existing conditions weren’t denied coverage, emphasizing prevention and wellness, and containing costs.

“I’m proud that health-care reform is now the law of the land—not just in our state, but in all 50 states in the United States,” Schwarzenegger said at the press conference. “In the end, nearly all of the objectives in our reform plan were included in the federal reform plan.”

Janet Coff man, a professor at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco, echoed this sentiment.

“State health-care reform ultimately was not successful here in 2007, but the health exchange was part of that discussion,” she told The Sacramento Bee. “Leaders had spent a lot of time defi ning what they wanted to see. While other states still are wrestling with some of the concepts behind federal health-care reform, some of our politicians who considered many of these provisions three years ago are some of the same people we have in offi ce now. They’ve been able to move swiftly from contemplation to implementation.”

And as other states consider their options, they’re keeping an eye on the Golden State, according to Kathleen Stoll, director of health policy for Families USA, a Washington, D.C.-based health advocacy group.

“The two bills that California passed and the governor signed provide guidance not only on how to set up an exchange governing board with strong confl ict of interest guidelines,” she says, “but it also provides a model for how to set up an exchange that ensures that consumers will get good value for their premium dollars.”

When legislative sessions begin in 2011, many state legisla-tures will likely begin pulling together their respective basic frameworks, fi lling in the details after receiving guidelines from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Joy Johnson Wilson, health policy director at the National Confer-ence of State Legislatures, told Congressional Quarterly (CQ) that she predicts state lawmakers will start working on their exchange structures in 2011, but the process could last into the following year. By January 2013, exchanges must be certifi ed by the federal government, and Jon Kingsdale, the former executive director of the Massachusetts Health Connector, told CQ that the exchanges must be doing test runs by October 2013.

California’s legislation can assist other states, Stoll says, because it authorizes the exchange to use selective contracting, which means that the exchange can leverage the purchasing power of everyone within it.

The legislation also permits the standardization of plans, which Stoll says helps make the whole process of selecting a plan that meets citizens’ needs easier. And the exchange is protected against adverse risk selection, so that it consists of a mix of both healthy and sick people. “Those are all really important issues,” she says. “So I think states across the country will really look at this California legislation for guidance, and I think [the legisla-tion] creates a foundation that other states can begin to look at.”

California, the nation’s most populous state—and one that has led the country on so many fronts, from higher education to pollu-tion control—could be breaking new ground regarding health-care reform, and other states just might follow. G


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By Elizabeth Daigneau

Hunting for HuntersU.S. sportsmen are declining. Will a new generation materialize to fuel conservation efforts?

Every fall, millions of Americans dust off their crossbows, rifl es and fi shing nets to hunt wild turkey in Ohio, deer in Texas, pheasant in Montana and spiny lobster in Califor-nia. It’s the start of hunting season, a pastime so universal

that schools still close on opening day in some parts of the coun-try and presidents annually proclaim one Saturday in Septem-ber National Hunting and Fishing Day. But the enthusiasts who have ventured into the wild this autumn are fi nding the woods an increasingly lonelier place to be.

For 60 years, Americans pushed steadily into the suburbs. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and teens and adults alike are more likely to pick up a Nintendo Wii handset than a rifl e. As a result, hunting is declining. According to the most recent national survey taken by the U.S. Fish and Wild-life Service, only 12.5 million Americans age 16 and older hunted in 2006. That’s down from 17 million in 1975.

For states, it’s about more than just a waning tradition. With fewer hunters in the nation’s forests, the conservation eff orts of state fi sh and wildlife departments also are in danger. State game department budgets are almost exclusively dependent on the millions of dollars hunters annually spend on licenses, tags and permits. Since 1934, hunters have paid more than $700 million for duck stamps alone, fi nancing the addition of 5.2 million acres to the National Wildlife Refuge System. Sportsmen contribute more than $250 million annually in excise taxes on guns, ammu-nition and other equipment, which largely goes back to states to

purchase, protect, maintain and restore habitats, improve wildlife populations, conduct research and educate hunters on safety.

As a result, states are actively trying to boost interest in hunt-ing. With money tight and funding being pulled from state parks at record levels, state game departments are more dependent on hunters’ fees to conserve wildlife than ever before. And the easiest way to do that may be to shore up hunters’ ranks. In just the past four years, 30 states have established formal mentoring programs, 29 have waived minimum hunting age requirements and several states have shortened safety courses. Hunters are also moving to preserve their numbers by protecting their sport. Four states—Arizona, Arkansas, South Carolina and Tennessee—voted this month on whether to enshrine the right to hunt and fi sh in their state constitutions (although there aren’t any looming legislative threats against such a right). Ten states have already extended constitutional protection to hunting and sporting.

The eff orts may be working. While there’s been no mass run on deer stands, the number of young hunters is ticking up. Since the inception of youth mentoring programs and the lowering of age requirements, the number of new youth hunters has grown by about 388,000 since 2005, says Families Afi eld, an alliance of hunting organizations that works to reduce regulatory barriers to youth hunting. The group’s latest report found that apprentice hunting licenses increased by 100,000 in 2009. G


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lion-dollar bond issues for schools, parks, roads and even aff ordable housing. So if we’re going to make big progress on the economic development front in the near future, we’re probably going to have to do it by leveraging big infrastructure.

However, the record on using big infrastructure for economic develop-ment is decidedly mixed. Besides the Erie Canal, there are many other trans-formational examples—both national (the Transcontinental Railroad and interstate highway system) and local (the Houston Ship Channel, Port of Los Angeles and Dallas/Forth Worth International Air-port). But there are also many make-work examples. The New Deal spent billions on public works projects to keep people working and left us with many national treasures, but it didn’t pull us out of the Depression. And of course, wherever there’s big infrastructure there’s also big pork. State and federal funding for infra-structure projects is rarely distributed with long-term economic transforma-tion in mind. Short-term political benefi t is usually the order of the day.

The challenge facing state and local government today is not merely to spend money on infrastructure, but to spend that money in a way that will foster economic development. Economic development leaders often approach this in a one-off way—an off -ramp, rail spur or property that benefi ts a business they’re trying to attract. Such an approach may help a specifi c business, and in turn, help the community. But it’s not likely to lead to transformative economic development eff orts. Transformative eff orts are usually systemwide, and they generally do one of three things:• Make it easier to move goods and

people, as the Erie Canal, Transcon-tinental Railroad and interstate high-way system did.

Where’s the Next Erie Canal?There are infrastructure projects, and then there are infrastructure projects that transform.

Upstate New York’s declining industrial landscape masks one of the greatest contributions to economic development in

American history. Across it lies the old, struggling industrial cities of Buff alo, Syracuse and Utica, as well as once-proud small towns like Lockport and Palmyra. What these cities and towns have in common is a prosperous history created in large part by the Erie Canal’s opening in 1825. And that prosperous history holds a lesson for economic development today.

The Erie Canal is usually characterizedas America’s fi rst great infrastructure project—but it was much more than that. It was America’s fi rst great eco-nomic development eff ort. The canal’s pace seems glacial to us today: A 5 mph speed limit meant it took the better part of a week to get from Buff alo to Albany by horse-drawn barge. In fact, the canal transformed the time and geographical restrictions on the movement of people and goods—connecting the Great Lakes and America’s Midwest to the Atlantic coast and Europe for the fi rst time.

When we think of economic devel-opment, we don’t always think of the transformational infrastructure project. We think of recruiting businesses and factories. Or we imagine nurturing the ecosystem of researchers, educators, entrepreneurs and fi nanciers. Repeatedly throughout history, however, Americans have turned to infrastructure to stimulate economic development. And at a time when voters are resistant to higher taxes and skeptical about subsidies to business, they remain enthusiastic about building big infrastructure projects.

The American Recovery and Reinvest-ment Act was heavily tilted toward capital projects on the theory that “shovel-ready” projects could put people back to work—mostly for private contractors rather than government agencies. The Barack Obama administration is also using federal trans-portation money to promote “placemak-ing”—the creation of parks, plazas and squares that attract people in addition to simply improving travel. In California—a state that’s perpetually bankrupt—state and local voters regularly resist taxes, but constantly vote in favor of multibil-

By William Fulton

Politics+Policy | ECONOMIC ENGINESM

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Philadelphia’s $300 million Center City Commuter Connection, a rail tunnel

built in 1984, transformed how people and rail traffi c moved through the city.



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November 2010 | GOVERNING

In the 1948 fi lm, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, Cary Grant and Myrna Loy play two naive city dwellers who have had enough of family living in the city and decide to move to the country. Problems ensue as the apartment-dwelling city slick-ers try to become homeowners. If the movie were remade today, its premise wouldn’t work: There are hardly any middle-class families living in urban apartments. But some think the situation could change.

Homeownership boomed during the postwar period as millions of Americans moved to the suburbs to live in a home with a yard and two-car garage. Thanks to subsidies, such as the home mortgage deduction, and cheap gas, the march to the suburbs has continued unabated for nearly 50 years. In the spring of 2004, the homeownership rate reached its highest level ever at 69.2 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Today, post-recession, that rate has dropped to 66.9 percent and could drop further as the dream of living in a home far from the city looks less aff ord-able or desirable.

In September, Time magazine examined what a post-homeownership America might look like, and speculated that renting and returning to urban liv-ing—where energy costs are lower—could be in the offi ng. “Cities aren’t for everyone,” the magazine reported. “But maybe they would be for more people if we didn’t all feel as though at some point we were supposed to move to the suburbs and buy a house.”

If you’ve visited a large city in the past decade or so, the growth in apartment living is nothing new. From Boston, New York City and Washington, D.C., to Chicago, Salt Lake City and San Francisco, sky-lines have changed as new (and mostly expensive) apartment towers have risen. Typically the new wave of apartment dwellers includes youthful singles and couples, as well as returning baby boomers, who have left their empty nests in the suburbs.

Missing from the mix is a crucial demographic: the middle-class family. In Euro-pean cities, apartment living for families is normal and widely available. A couple North American cities—New York City and Vancouver, Wash.—have reported a recent uptick in families seeking to rent or buy apartments. But most American urban centers have little to off er the middle-class family in the way of aff ordable and roomy apartment living, and it’s likely to stay that way, according to architect and University of Maryland Professor Emeritus Roger Lewis.

Lewis, who is also a columnist for The Washington Post, says two challenges stand in the way of the return of families to cities: the lack of good schools in city centers and the high cost of building multibedroom apartments. “The problem is large and it’s nationwide,” he says. Simply promoting family-friendly development in cities won’t work. What’s needed are subsidies to expand the inventory of large-sized rental apartments that are comparable in cost to an average suburban home and stronger public-sector interest in developing urban communities that support family life, Lewis says.

The market for family-sized apartments in cities may never grow large, but it may take some nudges from government to make it grow at all. G


• Make it easier to move information vital to commerce. Think of the telegraph, telephone and Internet.

• Radically reduce the cost of doing business—or alternatively, greatly increase the capacity to do business. The introduction of electricity as well as the Internet served both of these purposes.Of the many infrastructure invest-

ments on the table today in the United States, only a few serve any of these three purposes. The creation of a high-speed rail system is one. The conversion of the electricity system to a smart grid is another. Both of these are not small proj-ects and are likelier to be eff orts led by states—using federal funding in the fi rst case and working with private electricity providers in the second.

Where does that leave localities and metropolitan areas—today’s Syracuses and Lockports? These days, any metropolitan-level eff ort toward big infrastructure—the Houston Ship Channel, for example—is likely to include state and federal involve-ment. But that doesn’t mean these can’t be instigated locally. With major metropolitan areas facing unprecedented congestion, perhaps the most compelling infrastruc-ture projects—at least from an economic development perspective—are those that fi ll small gaps but break big logjams.

Think, for example, of L.A.’s Alameda Corridor, a $2.4 billion infrastructure project, which took 30 miles of congested rail traffi c out of the L.A.-Long Beach Harbor and put it underground. Or look at Philadelphia’s Center City Commuter Connection. This two-block transporta-tion tunnel built in the 1980s, at a cost of $330 million, allowed a complete rerouting of all commuter rail traffi c in Philadelphiathat led to a much better use of the entire region’s rail system.

High-speed rail and the smart grid may turn out to be tomorrow’s Erie Canals. But in a mature society such as ours, it may be that small infrastructure connections—expensive though they may be—will be transformative in the future. G


By Tod Newcombe

| URBAN NOTEBOOK

Renting the New American Dream

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A new incinerator was supposed to earn Harrisburg, Pa., $1 billion. Instead, it’s a cautionary tale for what happens when an infrastructure project goes bad.

By John Buntin | Photos by by David Kidd



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The Harrisburg Authority’s

Resource Recovery Facility

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Standing atop Market Square Plaza, an 18-story skyscraper that opened in 2005 in downtown Harrisburg, Pa., former Mayor Stephen Reed surveys the city he built.

“That’s Harrisburg University,” he says, pointing north to an impressive 16-story building that houses the university he almost single-handedly created fi ve years ago. Restaurants and bars stretch west to the state Capitol. Virtually every one was built on his watch. “Three-quarters of the lots on this street were vacant—unused,” says Reed of one restaurant-fi lled artery. Vacancies lined many other streets too. Things were so desperate in Harrisburg when he took offi ce in 1982 that on his fi rst day as mayor, he found on his desk a plan for declaring municipal bankruptcy.

He ignored it and today Harrisburg is a city transformed. Upscale hotels, Class A offi ce buildings, bars and restaurants fi ll the streets near the Capitol building. The old Holiday Inn, which was on the cusp of being transformed into a complex with a strip club on the bottom two fl oors and subsidized housing above, is now a Crowne Plaza, one of the city’s two convention hotels. Law-yers and lobbyists occupy the historic federalist townhouses that look out over the Susquehanna River. Bicycle-riding hipsters and state employees walking to work share the narrow sidewalks of the historic district. The renaissance is Reed’s legacy.

Yet despite the outward signs of prosperity, all is not well in Harrisburg. Last year, after 28 years as mayor, Reed was turned out of offi ce. Several things contributed to his downfall, among them a rising dissatisfaction with Reed’s autocratic management style and an economy gone sour. But what really doomed Reed’s bid for an eighth term in offi ce was an infrastructure project gone bad.

In 2003, the Harrisburg Authority, a public entity charged with providing solid waste management services and whose board was handpicked by the mayor, approved a plan to retrofi t Har-

risburg’s incinerator for $120 million . Today Harrisburg, a city of about 49,000, owes more than $280 million on the project and has amassed a per capita debt burden more than three times the second most indebted city in the state, Philadelphia.

Harrisburg isn’t alone in piling up debt. Over the past fi ve years, state and local governments have been on an epic borrow-ing binge, bringing outstanding debt to a formidable $2.4 trillion—that’s a 35 percent increase since 2005.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with borrowing money, par-ticularly to build infrastructure. Done properly, it’s one of the best tools governments have to boost productivity and by extension, raise incomes. Done improperly, there’s no better way to destroy a balance sheet. And that’s where Harrisburg is today. Pennsyl-vania’s capital is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, a prospect that has spooked bond markets and worried Gov. Ed Rendell, who recently warned that “If Harrisburg fails, every other municipal-ity in Pennsylvania is in danger.”

The story of Harrisburg’s debt-driven downfall is a cautionary tale of how a city—even one run by a mayor who considers himself a builder—can fall prey to the vagaries of a large-scale project. It also raises provocative questions about the context in which key decisions are made: Is Harrisburg the victim of fraud and malfea-sance? Or is it the victim of a political climate so poisonous as to make problem solving impossible?

For more than three decades, the city incinerator’s lone smokestack has stood in the center of south Harrisburg. Technically it’s not an incinerator at all, but a waste-to-energy resource recovery facility that burns garbage and

uses the heat released to generate electricity. When it opened in 1972, the plant was seen as a way to convert what is a municipal expense—garbage disposal—into a profi table product—electricity. But the project seemed troubled from the beginning. Breakdowns were frequent. Tests established that the dark plumes of smoke that occasionally wafted over the city were rich in mercury and dioxins, two highly toxic materials. By the time Reed took offi ce, the incinerator was actively losing money.

Reed managed to stabilize operations and return the incinera-tor to the black by bringing in more professional management. In the early 1990s, the city sold the facility to the Harrisburg Author-ity. Doing so provided a cash infusion into the city coff ers and moved the politically sensitive task of raising trash disposal rates


Former Mayor Stephen

Reed transformed Harris-

burg from a struggling

city full of vacant lots into

a regional destination,

complete with museums,

a university and a lively

restaurant row. Now Reed’s

successor says it was all

“a shell-game.”



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How can our community become an example for the nation?

siemens.com/answers

Every year, in partnership with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Business Civic Leadership Center, we celebrate the small, midsize and large communities that best balance their economic, social and environmental goals. This year, at an event in Philadelphia, we will honor three winners whose achievements in sustainability serve as national examples. So while their efforts may directly benefit only their communities, the effects will be felt far beyond. To enter, please visit siemens.com/sustainability

The Siemens Sustainable Community Awards recognize the towns and cities that provide a higher quality of life for all who live there.

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of action that would cause city leaders budgetary pressures. They would either have to reduce spending or increase taxes. Or they could double down on the incinerator, issuing $120 million in new debt to retrofi t and expand the facility in order to generate new revenues that would cover both the old and new notes.

The city decided to double down. In 2004, the Harrisburg Authority awarded the contract to ret-

rofi t the incinerator’s two existing boiler trains and build a third unit to Barlow Projects Inc., based in Fort Collins, Colo. Barlow Projects had developed a patented boiler and stoker technology that minimized moving parts (a common cause of breakdowns) and provided innovative pollution controls. But what made Barlow’s off er most compelling was its price: The company was willing to

build the new facility for $77 million—about one-third less than other major players in the industry.

To Reed, Barlow checked out. True, it had never built a project as large as the one Harrisburg envisioned, but the company had a good track record with smaller proj-ects. Its founder and CEO, James Barlow, an electrical engineer and ordained min-ister, was a man of impressive conviction. Engineering fi rms hired by the city, author-ity and county signed off on the technology and certifi ed it at that price, modernizing the incinerator and expanding its capacity would cover the note’s costs.

Not everyone was smitten with Bar-low’s off er. Fred Clark, a Reed protégé and a member of the Harrisburg Authority, was worried by the low-ball bid. “It was $40 million less than the other bids,” says Clark. “You don’t have to be a rocket scien-tist to think, ‘What the hell?’”

Another Reed protégé, newly elected councilwoman Linda Thompson, who is now Harrisburg’s mayor, was worried too. When the Harrisburg Authority went to the City Council with a request for the city to guarantee a $120 million bond for the retrofi t, Thompson hesitated. Ultimately though, Barlow’s bid seemed to off er the


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out of elected offi cials’ hands. But the incinerator soon encoun-tered a new problem—more stringent emissions standards of the newly amended Clean Air Act. At fi rst, the city scrambled for a loophole: It sought to be “derated” by reducing its burn rate to no more than 500 tons a day. But one of its two boiler units continued to struggle to meet U.S. Environmental Protection Agency dioxin guidelines. In December 2003, environmental regulators shut the facility down until standards could be met.

Local environmentalists, worried about the potential health problems associated with the facility, argued for leaving it shut-tered. But there was a problem with that approach. The city still owed $104 million on it. As a result, the city’s elected leaders faced a choice. They could shutter or sell the facility at a loss, a course

At a recent City Council meeting, Mayor Linda Thompson appealed to councilmembers to hire a city fi nancial adviser.



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only aff ordable way for the city to proceed. “I kept coming to the conclusion that there was no way we could pay for this, particu-larly if we had to ask the taxpayers to pay for it,” Thompson says.

In short, Harrisburg’s residents were simply too poor to pay a higher price. If the plant cost more, the authority wouldn’t be able to pay off the note. So despite her reservations, Thompson joined fi ve of her seven colleagues on the City Council in voting “yes.” The county signed on too, as a secondary guarantor for some $95 million in debt. Responsibility for overseeing the retrofi t fell to the Harrisburg Authority and its fi ve-member board. But de facto responsibility resided with the mayor, who appointed all of the board members.

By 2005, Reed had become the capital’s indispensable man, the Richard Daley of Harrisburg. But the arbitrary nature of his

reign was put on display when Reed used Harrisburg Authority money to purchase items for a rather exotic economic develop-ment initiative: a Wild West museum that would include a replica of Tombstone, Ariz., on the day of the famous shootout at the OK Corral. Unbeknownst to the public, Reed had spent more than $7 million purchasing such items as the gates of the OK Cor-ral and gambler Doc Holliday’s dentist chair for the museum, using funds provided by the Harrisburg Authority. But even such extravagant rule bending failed to dent Reed’s popularity or reputation for competence. A May 2005 editorial in the local Patriot-News described Reed as “practically a legend in his own time” and asked where Harrisburg would be “without the juggler in chief?”

Meanwhile, the incinerator retrofi t was falling apart.


Instead, a majority rejected the mayor’s plea.



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There are numerous ways state and local governments seek to ensure that contractors perform their work correctly on large

infrastructure projects. One is to hire a project manager. Unfortunately for Harrisburg, Barlow Projects was its own project manager. From the beginning, it struggled to oversee local subcontrac-tors and manage a project far larger than any it had ever done before.

Another means is to write a contract that fi nes companies for failing to meet deadlines. Harrisburg’s contract with Barlow included provisions of this sort, but there was a problem the city had not anticipated: The company was too fi nancially shaky to pay such fi nes.

A third provision is to withhold a retainage fee, typically 10 percent of the total cost of the project, until the job is completed. The Harrisburg Authority’s contract included a provision that left $7 million in its hands. But in late 2005, the authority released the money to the struggling company as part of a desper-ate eff ort to help it complete the project.

A fourth provision that most municipalities insist upon—and probably the most important—is for a performance bond, which protects against loss in case the contract’s terms aren’t fi lled. It was here that the Harrisburg project went terribly wrong. Barlow didn’t qualify to be bonded.

Rather than stop the process altogether, city offi cials and the authority devised a workaround. Instead of a performance bond that a bank or insurance company would guarantee up to the bond limit in the event of a default, the city cobbled together a series of less impressive guarantees.

According to Thompson, the City Council never knew the performance bond was missing. “Countless hours of tapes prove that the council went through very intensive public hearings,” she says. “How that got away from us is mind-boggling to me.” But Clark says the lack of a performance bond was something discussed, and that even though the city’s legal counsel OK’ed it, it should have been a red fl ag. “It didn’t have a performance bond, ‘Hello!’” he says.

By late 2006, the project’s construction was not going well. On-site problems at the incinerator could no longer be ignored. That December at Reed’s behest, the board voted to fi re Barlow Projects and bring in a major national player, Covanta Energy, to take over the project. When the Covanta team arrived at the site, it was shocked by what it found.

“I don’t want to say I was scared,” says Covanta Vice Presi-dent Jim Klecko, “but I had reservations about physically going through the facility.” Streams of water fl owed through the facility, amidst piles of ash. Worse of all, the all-important third boiler had

been “completely scavenged” to main-tain the two existing boiler units. The third boiler was the linchpin of the plan to pay the note by expanding burning capacity from roughly 530 to 800 tons a day. But with the third boiler incom-plete, the facility was operating at about two-thirds capacity and losing roughly $1 million dollars a month.

Rather than address the problem, the City Council and mayor went to war.

To Reed, the failure of the incin-erator retrofi t was a regrettable but unforeseeable engineering failure. When asked, “What

went wrong?” Reed demures, saying, “to this day, I must tell you candidly, I have yet to hear a rational explanation.”

The City Council, led by Thompson, who later became the council president, and then-Councilmember Dan Miller, identifi ed a diff erent root problem—the mayor’s leadership style. To Thompson and Miller, Reed had built a house of cards. “Everybody was so impressed with the new buildings and additional

restaurants, and the excitement in the main downtown corridor,” Thompson says. “No one was checking the facts.”

In January 2007, the City Council, acting on a legal opinion provided by the city solicitor, passed a resolution that stripped the mayor’s authority to appoint the Harrisburg Authority’s board. Reed vetoed the measure, but the following month, another councilmember came over to the majority, providing a veto-proof majority. A new board was installed. Reed sued. Three years of legal battles followed, which led to the seating and unseating of several boards. (Earlier this year, the state supreme court fi nally ruled in the mayor’s favor.)


“Everybody was so

impressed with the

new buildings and the

additional restaurants

and the excitement in

the main downtown

corridor,” says Mayor

Linda Thompson of

her predecessor’s

tenure. “No one was

checking the facts.”



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During a series of editorial roundtables produced by Governing in Sacramento, Calif.; Albany, N.Y.; and Olympia, Wash., legislators, regulators, CIOs, economists and other government and industry leaders came together to discuss wireless broadband’s impact on the economy and government’s role in shaping the policies that will allow the greatest impact. There was broad agreement among participants that if the U.S. is going to participate in the future “innovation economy,” it’s going to have to make significant investment in wireless broadband infrastructure. There are significant challenges, but the opportunities are immense.

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cine, transacting business or just making family plans, it seems every part of life today is touched by wireless commu-nication. And as fourth-generation (4G) wireless technology rolls out across the nation, people will be able to do with smartphones and mobile devices what they currently do on high-speed fixed networks — opening up the potential to drive innovation in numerous industries.

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Telemedicine is revolutionizing how the health-care industry delivers service, and mHealth, which reflects the convergence of health-care and mobile technologies, is a critical component of this transformation. For example, high-speed wireless networks will provide those living in underserved rural areas in the U.S. access to top medical experts, as well as new and sophisticated diagnosis and remote monitoring tools, and help to promote healthy lifestyles. And in an era when health-care costs are on the minds of consumers, practitioners and policy-makers alike, Ovum has estimated that the use of mobile broadband in medicine, generally, is saving the U.S. health-care system approximately $7 billion a year, a number that is expected to grow to more than $27 billion a year by 2016.

Wireless technology can also help contain spiraling costs and inefficiencies in the energy market. Wireless will play a significant role in building “smart grids,” which take advantage of two-way communication systems and sensors to monitor grid performance based on real-time network data. Access to real-time energy data will boast grid efficiency and reliability. In addition, wireless technol-ogy will provide consumers with real-time consumption and pricing data from smart meters and connected appli-ances and devices, thus allowing them to adjust their behavior accordingly.

In education, wireless will extend the ability to offer courses, training and opportunities for interactivity to virtu-ally anyone, anywhere, 24/7. Wireless products and services offer a flexible and personalized educational experience to maximize a student’s ability to learn and help an educator teach from any location.

Combined with remote sensor technology, wireless tech-nologies are bringing major advances to transportation sys-tems. Whether it’s bridges that report back on stress, wear

and tear, road networks that reduce traffic jams and provide wireless subscribers with real-time monitoring, or GPS applications that allow better trip planning, the power of wireless technology to promote advances in transportation efficiency and safety will be huge.

All this activity has significant economic impacts. Industry experts estimate that wire-less will create productivity gains of nearly $900 billion from 2005 to 2016. And in an

era when joblessness has become front and center in the national political debate, the wireless industry directly and indirectly employs nearly 2.5 million Americans, jobs that, according to several analysts, pay at least 50 percent more than the national average of other production workers.

And as a number of presenters and participants noted at the three roundtables, perhaps one of the most important impacts wireless will have on the economy is the potential it brings for yet-to-be-conceived innovations in mobile appli-cations and business models.

Fueling InnovationWireless technology has added some $2 trillion to the

nation’s gross domestic product since 1995, and according to former FCC Commissioner Harold Furchtgott-Roth, it is currently adding more than $100 billion a year to GDP. In light of wireless technology’s contribution to the economy, policy and investment issues surrounding wireless ought to be front and center in the national discussion and debate, argued U.S. Rep. Paul Tonko (D-21st) of New York in his opening remarks at the Albany event.

Tonko, who served in the New York State Assembly and now sits on the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology, said wireless broadband should be getting the nation’s full attention as the country considers future eco-nomic growth and global competitiveness. “We should be moving into an innovation economy led by high-tech and energy,” Tonko said. “Our economy is at a painful juncture right now, and wireless broadband is absolutely key to our future economic growth and productivity.”

In Olympia, state Sen. Jim Kastama (D-25th District), who chairs the Senate’s Economic Development, Trade and Management Committee, also said that emerging technolo-gies, including wireless technologies, need to take center stage for the economic viability of our country.

Most Olympia participants believed the state’s tech economy was well suited to adapt to the coming age of mobility, but participants cautioned that complacency could derail progress.

Kastama said government does have a role to play in a tech economy, and that role is to attract and promote the development of local talent and technology companies. He said the state should invest in programs like the Strategically Targeted Academic Research (STARS) program, which has set aside money to draw top scholars to its universities — an initiative he says has paid off manifold.

“For what amounts to tiny sums compared to the massive outlays of traditional economic development programs, we’re laying the foundation for new industries that position our state for the future,” he said.

ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT

U.S. Rep. Paul Tonko at the Albany event.

Wireless products and services offer a flexible and personalized educational experience to maximize a student’s ability to learn.

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But there are limits to what wireless can deliver absent significant political and continued capital investment in new and upgraded broadband wireless infrastructure and technology.

Broadband Must Be EverywhereWhile technology businesses in western Washington can

gain a lot from mobile technology and applications, so can the rural areas of the state, said the Washington Department of Information Services’ Enterprise Program Office Director Jim Albert.

“It’s not just about promoting the technology industry,” said Albert, “it’s about promoting logging, farming and all the other industry that we’ve made millions and millions of dollars of investment in in this region.”

In California and New York, much of the discussion cen-tered on how to bring broadband to underserved areas of the states.

“We need to view broadband as akin to other infrastruc-ture, including roads, water, electricity — that it’s not accept-able not to have it,” said Melodie Mayberry-Stewart, CIO for the state of New York.

Some challenges that have hampered efforts to roll out the necessary infrastruc-ture include locating and coordinating the use of assets — such as tower sites and existing fiber-optic infrastructure — that can enable broadband infrastructure buildout. A recent FCC ruling requir-ing local governments to meet certain deadlines for deciding on applications for tower sites should help expedite per-mits, but challenges still exist in locating

assets, their rightful owners and coordinating their use. But the most significant challenge appears to be funding the infrastructure necessary to bring broadband to rural areas.

The topic of funding was heavily debated. While both California and New York received stimulus funds for broad-band, states and localities will still have to come up with some of their own funds to ensure universal broadband coverage. Sacramento participants debated the funding possibilities, some even positing that bonds might be a legitimate way to fund broadband initiatives — including wireless buildout — because it is infrastructure necessary to economic develop-ment. Others cautioned that while bonds are legitimate for long-term infrastructure, technology’s rapid advances mean governments that opt to use bonds will likely be paying for the technology long after its useful life.

Some participants were leery of too much government involvement in what has traditionally been a private-sector venture.

Jed Kolko, economist and associate director of the Public Policy Institute of California, noted that with the rollout of 4G wireless technologies, the issues that have created the digital divide between populated and unpopulated

areas might not be as big an issue going forward. The high costs associated with fixed broadband are responsible for the lack of a fair and sustainable business model for com-mercial carriers in sparsely populated areas, he said. “A lot of that diminishes, and might even go away, with wireless technologies that can serve outlying areas, like WiMAX,” said Kolko. “Those are much lower fixed-cost technologies.”

Several participants put forth the notion that federal sub-sidy programs, such as the universal service programs, could be revisited and revised to ensure broadband buildout in underserved areas. As the FCC has observed, in large part, this will be accomplished with wireless technology.

In New York, while the state received a significant amount of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding, with the current economic strain on state coffers, it has been difficult for the state to come up with the additional funds needed. However, New York state awarded $5 million in state funding for broadband in 2008 and made an addi-tional $7.5 million available for a second round of funding to advance broadband priorities.

A significant part of the investment gap problem is that it’s hard to get state legislative attention on the topic, said state Sen. Neil Breslin (D-Albany). Legislators, noted Breslin, “tend to focus on what’s directly in front of them at any given time,” rather than on investments that might pay off in the long run.

In Washington, Kastama said the short-sighted political window was also a hindrance to good economic policy. He said that while politicians are pressured to deliver “election-

Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (left), and Washington state Sen. Jim Kastama join the discussion in Olympia.

Wireless technology is leading to major advances in smart transportation, such as providing drivers with useful information on the go to be more efficient and avoid traffic congestion.

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ready” results in a six- to 18-month time frame, lawmakers have to resist the temptation to take the short view — even if the public demands quick results.

“The public perception is that we can address this reces-sion as we have other recessions, and I think they have to realize that it is a whole new world environment,” Kastama said. “We have competitors in areas we never thought we’d be competing in.”

While government’s role in the wireless economy was heavily debated, most attendees agreed on the need for collaboration and coordination among government, broad-band service providers — including wireless carriers — and stakeholders from the economic sectors.

In California, a Broadband Council has been proposed to facilitate that kind of coordination and maximize the eco-nomic opportunities broadband technology presents inde-pendent of political cycles. California state Sen. Alex Padilla (D–San Fernando), in his opening remarks at the Sacramento roundtable, said the proposed council stemmed from the California Broadband Task Force, which was formed by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger several years ago. Some progress has already been made since the task force made its recommendations, but as the state elects a new governor in November, broadband could get overtaken by other priorities when the new governor takes office.

The Broadband Council would harness the existing momentum and help coordination within state government, Padilla said.

“There are so many people who want to be involved, but ultimately it has to be a strategic handful of state officials to make sure we’re maximizing our opportunities and not duplicating efforts and looking for collaboration opportuni-ties — as it pertains both to technology and resources,” Padilla said.

4G FutureNo matter how wireless systems are funded, who builds

them and who uses them, policymakers in almost every realm — from public safety agencies, to health-care agencies to legislators — will face a bevy of new issues related to the technological advances.

Law enforcement and health agencies, for example, will have new privacy and security issues with which to contend. They’ll also have to consider the impact on their workflows and processes as new types of data and channels for deliver-ing it are made available in a mobile world.

Legislators will have to reconsider taxation issues and examine the impact taxes will have on wireless usage pat-

terns and adoption. The issue of net neutrality will take on a whole new dimension with the convergence of voice and data networks. With converged networks and the rapid expansion of wireless services, network traffic must be managed and prioritized based on the type of data being transmitted over the network. Applications are also becoming far more bandwidth intensive. Policymakers will have to be careful not to stifle new business models as they go about set-tling the issue in a 4G world. In addition, because of the physical bandwidth limita-tions on wireless networks, regulators and legislators must consider the impact any regulation of network traffic could have on the user experience.

Spectrum allocation and the capacity to accommodate more bandwidth require-ments will also be a challenge for wireless providers and policymakers. Laptops oper-ating on a cellular network, on average, use approximately 1,300 times the amount of bandwidth as a typical cell phone user. According to Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation who presented at two of the events, some experts estimate that in the next five years we’ll need 30 times the current wireless broadband capacity, and significant challenges around building that capacity remain.

Policymakers in the White House, the FCC and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration have all recognized that significant additional spectrum will be needed to meet the explosive demand for mobile wireless broadband services.

All of these issues will have to be carefully examined as we move forward into a mobile world. Governments, industries and consumers will all have a role in shaping a mobility-driven economy. Consumers in both rural and urban areas will have access to resources that were previously unattain-able. Access to health care, educational resources and even public safety services will be transformed for the average citizen in the coming years. Governments will have the opportunity to make their operations more efficient and provide better more accessible services to citizens. All of these things will be drivers of new business models, indus-tries and the nation’s economy. Government and all of the various stakeholders will have to work together to ensure that our nation retains its place at the leading edge of the wireless world.

To find out more about the issues discussed in this report, please visit www.ctia.org.

This e.Republic custom publication is sponsored by CTIA. © 2010 e.Republic Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

Jed Kolko, economist and associate director of the Public Policy Institute of California, at the Sacramento roundtable.

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Meanwhile, Reed was trying to solve the problem. As a step toward paying off the incinerator debt, he proposed leasing the city-owned garages downtown (which serve state government agencies) for 75 years, a step that would have netted the city around $100 million. The City Council rejected the measure out of hand. Nor could the mayor and council agree on a new board for the Harrisburg Authority. What had been an engineering project management failure became something more serious—a political debacle.

In February 2009, Thompson announced that she was run-ning for mayor against Reed. Emboldened by 3,000 new voters who had registered one year earlier to vote for President Barack Obama, and by a skillful campaign that targeted Harrisburg’s min-isters and African-American majority, Thompson won the Demo-cratic primary. With a 4-1 Democratic-to-Republican advantage in voter registration, Thompson’s election should have been ensured. Instead, she defeated the Republican candidate, a lob-byist, by just more than 800 votes.

As mayor, Thompson slipped with alarming speed into the same groove that had frustrated her successor. An early attempt to sell or lease assets and raise property taxes and water rates was rejected by the City Council. After Thompson vetoed the council’s modifi ed version, the budget reverted to what Reed had proposed instead. The City Council expected the mayor to return with a new plan after her initial rejection. She didn’t. The city then hired a consulting fi rm to prepare a detailed plan that outlined the city’s options, which went nowhere. Soon councilmembers were openly questioning the new mayor’s ability to do the job. It was a skepti-cism that the mayor herself sometimes seemed to share, noting on at least one occasion, “This is above my pay grade. It’s above the City Council’s pay grade or the controller’s pay grade too.”

Meanwhile, the debt payments keep adding up. Harrisburg owes $34 million on Dec. 14. For the past year, however, the city and authority have failed to make payments on the $288 million debt, and that has forced its other guarantors, notably Dauphin County and bond insurer Assured Guaranty Municipal Corp., to make millions of dollars in payments on its behalf. Earlier this fall, Dauphin County commissioners, furious about Harrisburg’s fail-ure to craft a solution to the crisis, authorized Assured Guaranty Municipal to fi le a lawsuit against the city.

A majority of Harrisburg’s City Council has reacted with defi ance, criticizing Wall Street for lending Harrisburg “exces-sive” sums of money. So dysfunctional has the relationship between the mayor and City Council become that when the state off ered to provide the mayor with $850,000 to hire fi nan-cial consultant Scott Balice Strategies to advise the city, the City Council rejected the money, infuriating Rendell. In an appear-ance with Thompson after the vote, Rendell, the man who saved Philadelphia from fi scal failure in the 1990s, attacked the City Council for saying that an outside consultant would want to pay off bondholders fi rst.

“That’s what cities do,” Rendell said, in a hastily called press conference. “They borrow money, and they meet their obliga-tions: They pay off the bondholders. If you don’t do that, a city will have no long-term or short-time viability. The city will crumble.”

Indeed, one of the most notable things about Harrisburg’s crisis is how little pain the city has endured. Trash disposal rates have been raised. At $200 per ton, they’re now considerably higher for the city than the county. But property taxes haven’t gone up, service cuts have been slight and no assets have been sold. And yet, the city owes bondholders more than it can aff ord to pay. The original $120 million project has ballooned to more than $280 mil-lion in debt, thanks to the $104 million the city already owed on the old incinerator, $25 million for the new operator to complete the incinerator and an additional $31 million that was borrowed to pay maturing debts and restructure some of the remainder.

A declaration of bankruptcy is one talked about solution to the debt problem. As Thompson sees it, that ought to be “our last option,” and she’s criticized the City Council for treating it as a fi rst option instead That ultimately may be Harrisburg’s true trag-edy. The incinerator’s problems are the result of bad choices and bad luck. But the problem’s persistence has been caused by poor leadership, including an unwillingness to confront citizens with the reality of the problems Harrisburg faces.

“With [Reed] going down, no one knows how to deal with poli-tics in Harrisburg,” says former Councilmember Dan Miller, now the city controller. “He was it. He was the kingmaker.”

Sitting in his offi ce off Front Street in the upstairs parlor of a historic home where both former President Abraham Lincoln and Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson once slept, Reed sits, wreathed in cigarette smoke. Shades are drawn as Reed, dap-per with a pencil thin mustache and wearing an enormous, dia-mond-encrusted Mason ring, shakes his head in disgust. “Yes, it is frustrating,” he says of the city’s plight and the criticism directed at him. “But I have moved on.” As for the criticism that the closely held way in which decisions were made under his tenure contrib-uted to the problem, Reed dismisses it out of hand.

“Closed door?” he says in response to a question about his management style. “I wouldn’t say closed door. ‘Autocratic’ would be the word. It’s an autocratic style based on a certain level of impatience. I am not one who is fond of, ‘let’s have formal com-mittees and study this problem for the next three years and let’s have a hundred people serve on this committee.’”

Reed may not be dwelling on the enormous fi nancial prob-lems wrought by the failed incinerator project—or on the break-down in government that has thus far prevented Harrisburg from addressing the issue—but the rest of the city is. Along with his many accomplishments, these too are Reed’s legacies. G


“Closed door?” says Reed, in response

to a question about his management

style. “I wouldn’t say closed door.

‘Autocratic’ would be the word.”



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PUBLICOFFICIALS

YEARof theWhat makes a good public official great? There is a whole range of qualities—from

leader and consensus maker to change agent and collaborator—that have stood out over time.

But times are diff erent in 2010. The ongoing fi scal crisis has pushed state and local government

into uncharted waters, leaving little room to maneuver when it comes to governing. With fewer

choices, public offi cials are being called upon to make some of the hardest decisions of their

careers. It isn’t easy, but those who are willing to tackle the right problems and follow through

can generate positive results.

Great public offi cials make tough choices. Often they go against the grain when it comes to

planning, launching and implementing new programs and reforms that serve the public. And they

don’t back down when their eff orts challenge the status quo. Connecticut Rep. Diana Urban puts it

aptly: “If you’re not willing to run into the wall and fi gure out how you get around that [problem],

you’re never going to get there. It takes an enormous amount of tenacity.”

Tough. Dogged. Tenacious. Wise. These are the words that describe the class of 2010 Public

Offi cials of the Year. Texas legislators John Whitmire and Jerry Madden teamed up to end a

prison-building binge and reform corrections in the state that puts the “t” in tough. Mayor Mick

Cornett worked tirelessly to pass a tax increase to remake Oklahoma City into a walkable urban

center. Kansas City, Mo., school superintendent John Covington made the diffi cult decision to

close more than two dozen schools in just three months to move a troubled district toward a

brighter future. For Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, it was about making tough decisions on fi scal

reform so that when the recession hit, the state’s budget withstood the blow. Governing is proud

to honor the accomplishments of eight great men and women in the public sector.

2010

Read full Q&As with all of our Public Offi cials of the Year atgoverning.com/poy



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2010P U B L I C O F F I C I A L S O F T H E Y E A R

Schools in Kansas City, Mo., have been suff ering for years. The district is only pro-visionally accredited and meets just four of the state’s 14 standards for academic perfor-mance. Only a quarter of its students score at the profi cient level on state exams. The system has been hemorrhaging students: Enrollment has fallen by half in the past 10 years. And by 2009, the district faced a $50 million defi cit.

What the system needed was nothing short of a complete overhaul. Fortunately it had John Covington.

Covington was brought on as the district superintendent last year, and he knew he needed to make some drastic decisions. And he wanted to make them fast. “While we’re waiting—you know, three years, fi ve years—to implement reform initiatives, we can lose a generation of children in the process.”

So this summer, Covington essentially rebuilt the school system from the ground up. He closed nearly half of the city’s 61 schools, ended more than 5,000 vendor contracts and cut the workforce by nearly a third. He rewrote curriculums and shifted the seventh and eighth grades out of elementary schools and into high schools.

On top of that, Covington is pioneering an innovative “standards-based” approach at fi ve elementary schools in the city. The new method does away with traditional let-ter grades. And it eliminates grade levels altogether, grouping students instead by what they’ve learned.

No other school district in the country has made such wholesale reforms, and cities everywhere are watching to see if Covington’s bold experiment pays off . Missouri education offi cials say they’re encouraged by Kansas City’s progress so far. For Covington, though, the decision was clear: Go big and do it now. “[We have to] move with all deliberate speed and continue to make those decisions that we know are going to be in the best interest of children,” he says. “Why wait? ”

—Tina Trenkner

J O H N C O V I N G T O N Superintendent of Schools, Kansas City, Mo.

The Headmaster

P h o t o g r a p h b y S t e v e P u p p e



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In 2006, Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett stepped on a scale and came to a realization: “I was obese.” Cornett’s epiph-any wasn’t just personal. Oklahoma City had begun appearing on multiple lists of the country’s fattest cities, and the mayor decided it was time to do something about it. His idea? Put the city on a diet. (To drive the point home, Cornett held a press conference standing in front of elephants at the city zoo.) The results of the weight-loss initiative are impressive—43,000 participants already have lost a combined 600,000 pounds and counting. Cornett himself has shed 40 pounds, down to 180.The mayor’s crusade against obesity became the cornerstone of a whole new vision for the city’s future. “We had an automobile-centric culture, a drive-through restaurant mentality,” he says. “We hadn’t built a pedestrian-friendly community.”

So Cornett crafted a bold idea to remake Oklahoma City as a walkable urban center. His ambitious $777 million plan included an extensive new downtown streetcar system, side-walks throughout the city, a 60-mile network of bicycle trails

and walking paths, a new convention center and a new 70-acre park downtown.

Cornett spent much of 2009 trying to convince voters to fund the plan by extending an existing 1-cent sales tax. First elected in 2004, Cornett, an Oklahoma City native and former sports broadcaster, garnered a record-high 87.6 percent of the vote in his 2006 re-election. He put his popularity on the line by backing the new plan, says Roy Williams, president of the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce. “He was so pas-sionate about it that he was willing to risk his political capital.”

Voters approved the new plan in December 2009. Cornett says he’s just continuing the city’s existing momentum: With two similar tax increases in the 1990s, Oklahoma City has been on an upswing for the past 15 years. Still, he recognizes the revo-lutionary nature of his vision. “It’s all part of this culture shift where we’re creating a healthier community. This is a renais-sance time for Oklahoma City. We’re in a golden age.” —Zach Patton

M I C K C O R N E T T Mayor, Oklahoma City

The Placemaker

P h o t o g r a p h b y B r e t t D e e r i n g



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It was a large funding request but notan unusual one, at least not for Texas. Over the course of the previous decade, Texas had more than doubled the number of people behind bars, increasing its inmate population from roughly 64,000 in 1993 to 154,000 in 2007. Now the Texas Department of Criminal Justice wanted the state Legis-lature to provide $523 million in additional funding for three new prisons, which would allow the prison population to grow to more than 168,000 by 2012.

The department had good reasons to expect a positive response. The chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, John Whitmire, was a conservative Demo-crat from Houston and the author of Texas’ famously tough penal code. His counterpart in the House was a conservative Republican from Plano, Jerry Madden. Gov. Rick Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst were on board.

But instead of OK’ing the request, Whit-mire and Madden did something unexpected. They teamed up to convince the Legislature, governor and lieutenant governor to spend $241 million on treatment, mental health and rehabilitation instead. Three years later, the state that once put the “t” in tough is widely seen as a model of corrections reform.

Whitmire and Madden’s emergence as corrections reformers is the story of an unusual partnership between two very dif-ferent men. Whitmire is one of the Legisla-ture’s most colorful members. Being with him “is like being with a hurricane,” says Tony Fabelo, research director of the Coun-cil of State Governments Justice Center and a self-professed friend. Hyperactive, bril-liant and fun, Whitmire was fi rst elected to the House in 1972. But in the winter of 1992, the legislator once known as “Boogie” had an experience that set him on a diff erent path: Pulling into his garage one evening, Whitmire, his wife and their 9-year-old daughter were accosted by a masked gun-man. “I literally begged him not to shoot me,” recalls Whitmire.

J E R R Y M A D D E NRepresentative, State of Texas

J O H N W H I T M I R ESenator, State of Texas

The Correctionists

Jerry Madden



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P h o t o g r a p h s b y D a r r e n C a r r o l l

The gunman left, but the experience left Whitmire badly shaken. The follow-ing year, Whitmire led a successful eff ort to revamp Texas’ penal code and cor-rections system. At the time, Texas had 60,000 inmates in the state prison system and another 24,000 inmates locked away in overcrowded county jails. Whitmire’s legislation created a network of state jails to relieve the overcrowding, provide resources for rehabilitation and establish some of the toughest penalties for violent crime in the nation. While the measure relieved the overcrowding, it also doubled the state’s prison population.

Madden’s path to corrections reform was more indirect. In 2005, House Speaker Tom Craddick made Madden chairman of the House Corrections Committee and gave him an order—no more costly new prisons. Being the engineer that he was, Madden began to look into the system. He and his staff also started talking with Whitmire, who by 2005 was dean of the Legislature. The two men identifi ed numerous initiatives supported by both liberals and conservatives, including more resources for rehabilitation and more secure beds for treatment. They believed that these initiatives would hold the prison population steady, improve outcomes and save Texas $2 billion over the course of fi ve years. More remarkable still, the two men teamed up to sell the Legislature, governor and lieutenant governor on their plan.

Three years later, Texas’ prison popula-tion has declined rather than risen by 15,000 inmates as projected, and probation recidi-vism has fallen by nearly one-quarter. It’s not surprising that states such as Ohio and South Carolina are beginning to follow Texas’ example. In a bitterly partisan environment, corrections reform, done Texas-style, may be the one sweeping reform lawmakers from both parties can agree on.

“This is not a Republican or Democratic issue,” Madden says. “It’s about what’s smart for Texas.” —John Buntin

John Whitmire



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The journey to Georgia’s statehouse began reluctantly. “I wasn’t one of those 16-year-olds who shook the hand of a presi-dent and was inspired to run for offi ce from then on,” says Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue. “I was certainly tuned into current events, but I had absolutely no early interest in politics.”

But if public service wasn’t exactly a call-ing, the 63-year-old governor certainly got the hang of it quickly. Term-limited out this January, Perdue has developed a reputation for taking a state bureaucracy and working hard to make it leaner, smarter and more citi-zen focused, while keeping the state on sound fi scal footing.

“I think my experience in overall man-agement of a small business—where you do everything from sales, to operations, to accounting, to personnel, to fi nance, to strat-egy, to cleaning the bathrooms—really helped shape what I wanted to do,” Perdue says.

Two things in particular helped the gover-nor get a handle on fi scal and administrative operations, thinks Rogers Wade, chairman of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation. Perdue created the Commission for a New Georgia, which Wade says didn’t produce fat reports, but rather “made recommendations for fi xing things as they found things to fi x.”

Since the commission was bipartisan and stacked with diverse interests from business, government and nongovernmental organiza-tions, it was given heft and credibility. At the same time, Perdue added a chief operating offi cer and chief fi nancial offi cer to the state’s organizational chart, allowing him to get a better handle on overall state operations.

It’s an approach to government that allowed Perdue to keep the state’s fi scal house in order in the midst of the worst fi nancial crisis to hit the nation—and Georgia—in generations.

“At the end of the day,” Wade says, “I think Sonny’s legacy is that he’s created a better managed state, and therefore, one that’s going to be easier to manage in the future.”

—Jonathan Walters

S O N N Y P E R D U EGovernor, State of Georgia

The Businessman

P h o t o g r a p h b y D a v i d K i d d



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2010

Whenever Diana Urban drives to work, she’s listening to her local NPR station. And anytime talk turns to the state bud-get, the Connecticut representative calls in to chat. “The hosts now say, ‘OK, it’s Rep. Urban again, we know this is going to be about RBA!’”

The fi ght for RBA—results-based accountability—has been the defi ning aspect of Urban’s career. Upon arriving to the Connecticut Legislature in 2001, she saw a broken system that would never achieve accountable, transparent and effi cient government. She also saw the answer in RBA. “I started in on performance, standards, results, accountability, and I backed it up with my knowledge of economics,” she says. “And that is a potent combination—somebody who’s willing to fi ght for an issue and has a lot of ammunition from 20 years of teaching economics.”

Eff ective January 2011, RBA will require all Connecticut agencies to submit performance metrics with their budgets.

“You have a result you want to get, like a clean and healthy Long Island Sound,” Urban says, “then you start to work backward and say, ‘Are the programs we have here getting us there?’”

RBA has been a work in progress for six years, and Urban fought hard for its implementation. Her willingness to take on a fi ght can be seen in her other favorite cause: animal rights. Beyond legislation, Urban has rescued and sheltered horses, dogs and cats at her farm in rural Connecticut. “If you’re not tenacious, if you’re not willing to run into the wall and fi gure out how you get around that [problem], you’re never going to get there. It takes an enormous amount of tenacity.”

That tenacity proved successful with RBA. It is the fi rst and only legislation of its kind in the U.S., and Urban says it positions Connecticut to target programs that aren’t working rather than making across-the-board cuts. “The idea here is to say which ones are really great and which ones are crummy.”

—Jessica B. Mulholland

D I A N A U R B A NRepresentative , State of Connecticut

The Performance Artist

P U B L I C O F F I C I A L S O F T H E Y E A R

P h o t o g r a p h b y D a v i d K i d d



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Thanks to CIO Steve Fletcher, Utah state government is still open on Fridays. Yes, that’s a bit of an overstatement. But in a cost-cutting move two years ago, then-Gov. Jon Huntsman implemented a four-day work-week for state employees, leaving most offi ces open only Monday through Thursday. It was up to the CIO to fi ll the gap.

Fletcher swallowed hard when the gover-nor asked if the state’s website was ready to replace physical service counters. “We were in a Cabinet meeting and he said, ‘Can we do this?’ He’s looking at me, and if I commit to it, then I have to deliver,” Fletcher says. “It was the coolest thing in the world—and it was a little scary. Luckily we could say yes.”

Huntsman named Fletcher CIO in 2005, arming him with legislation to consolidate Utah’s disjointed computing facilities and reorganize the state IT workforce. Over the next two years, Fletcher brought 1,000 work-ers under direct control of the CIO’s offi ce, reduced staff head count by 20 percent, cut the number of servers from 1,900 to fewer than 500, all of which were upgraded. Perfor-mance improved even as costs dropped.

By the time Huntsman asked if e-gov-ernment could replace brick and mortar on Fridays, Fletcher’s offi ce was off ering 850 services through Utah’s Web portal. “We could do that because we had created a fl ex-ible and motivated organization—and we knew our population wanted electronic ser-vices,” Fletcher says. “If we couldn’t provide those services, the plan would have failed miserably.”

Instead, the plan commenced in August 2008 with relatively little public grousing. Utah offi cials credit the shortened workweek with cutting energy consumption for the state and its car-commuting employees. And it’s become a powerful recruiting tool, Fletcher says. “I’m generally competitive for IT talent, but I can’t always pay like the private sec-tor. Instead, I give them a chance to work on great technology and have three-day week-ends. ” —Steve Towns

S T E V E F L E T C H E RChief Information Offi cer, State of Utah

The Web Master

P h o t o g r a p h b y M . B r y a n T h o m p s o n



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In the late 1990s, Miami was booming like never before, with massive new developments springing up seemingly over-night. But the growth was all over the map. Twenty-story apart-ment buildings shot up next door to single-family homes. High-rise parking garages sprouted in residential neighbor-hoods like mushrooms. Blank concrete walls stretched along sidewalks for entire blocks.

Ana Gelabert-Sanchez knew something had to be done. Tapped as the city’s planning director in 1998, she saw that the unchecked growth was an issue. “It was pretty much anything goes,” she says. “There were really no guidelines, and there was no way to control how the development happened.”

The real problem, she found, was the city’s outdated, “one-size-fi ts-all” building code, which treated commercial property the same throughout the city, regardless of the surrounding buildings or neighborhood. So Gelabert-Sanchez began working with then-Mayor Manny Diaz on a new code. What they came

up with was Miami 21, a form-based code that formally incor-porates walkability, sustainability and neighborhood context for new development, as well as the preservation of existing struc-tures. Gelabert-Sanchez then spent the next four years doggedly selling the plan to residents, developers and the city commis-sion. “She never wavered, and she never gave up,” Diaz says. “No one could ever doubt her commitment to making Miami a more sustainable place to live.”

The hard work paid off . The plan was approved in October 2009, and this spring Miami became the fi rst major U.S. city to implement a form-based code citywide. Gelabert-Sanchez, who has now left city government after 25 years of service and is cur-rently working on a planning and design fellowship at Harvard, says she’s confi dent that Miami 21 sets a new path for her city. “It will transform the way that Miami builds and shape the way we grow for the next 50 years,” she says. “This gives us a blue-print for the future.” —Zach Patton

A N A G E L A B E R T - S A N C H E ZFormer Planning Director, City of Miami

The Codebreaker

P h o t o g r a p h b y T o m S a l y e r



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Patsy Ticer is a pretty powerful Vir-ginia state senator, representing an economically vital part of her state: the Senate’s 30th district. That dis-

trict includes Alexandria and parts of Arling-ton and Fairfax counties—inner-ring suburbs directly across the Potomac River from Wash-ington, D.C. Her district is home to federal workers, defense contractors, immigrants and young middle-class couples. It has subway sta-tions, dog parks, farmers markets and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

But after the 2007 elections, when Ticer was named chair of the Virginia Senate com-mittee in charge of agricultural issues, she found herself teased by a lobbyist.

The lobbyist asked, Ticer remembers, “Now Sen. Ticer, have you found out how many cows there are in Virginia yet?”

A senator from District 30 fi nding her-self in charge of agricultural issues partially refl ects the vagaries of the legislative com-mittee system. Ticer’s committee is Agricul-ture, Conservation and Natural Resources. Ticer has a long-standing interest in con-servation issues, and agriculture comes with the territory.

But her chairmanship also refl ects the way Virginia is changing. In a state once defi ned by its tobacco fi elds, Virginia’s population and political power has moved to Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads. Those regions increasingly have become urbanized and sub-urbanized. Rural interests aren’t as important in Virginia’s Capitol as they once were. The story is the same in many other states such as Georgia, Illinois and Texas, where suburban and exurban areas have boomed while rural ones haven’t.

Next year, that population shift will have lasting consequences. With the once-a-decade redistricting process, state legislatures will be charged with redrawing the nation’s political lines to refl ect where people live. A proportion-ally smaller rural population will mean that fewer state legislators and congressmen repre-sent rural areas in the next decade—and likely for many decades to come. The shift will leave rural areas grappling with a future in which the fate of issues they care about are at the mercy of people who rarely catch a glimpse of a cow.

REDISTRICTING IS NOT LIKELY TO BE KIND TO THE POLITICAL CLOUT OF RURAL AREAS.

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VOTESFARMING FOR

By Josh Goodman



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The U.S. Census Bureau is still weeks away from report-ing its numbers, but pundits already have declared the winner in this round of reapportionment: Texas. Preliminary estimates show that since 2000, the state

grew more than twice as fast as the national average. That growth will put Texas in line for perhaps four additional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and four extra votes in the Electoral College. But not all of Texas will win.

Texas’ growth is powered by the outward expansion of its major metropolitan areas. The nation’s 25 fastest growing coun-ties over the last decade include Rockwall and Collin counties near Dallas, Williamson and Hays counties near Austin, and Fort Bend and Montgomery counties near Houston. Large parts of Texas are becoming one giant exurb, especially along the high-way that connects Dallas to Austin to San Antonio. “If you look back 10 or 20 years ago and you were to drive the Interstate 35 corridor, there were vast areas where there really was very little,” says Lloyd Potter, Texas state demographer. “Now you see devel-opments of big box stores and subdivisions.”

Texas’ big cities aren’t growing quite as fast as these surround-ing counties, but they’re still growing impressively. In Texas’ fi ve biggest cities, population growth this decade ranges from 9 per-cent in Dallas to 34 percent in Fort Worth. In this regard, Texas is a microcosm of the nation. Despite the exoduses from a few Detroits and Clevelands, the last decade has generally been kind to the nation’s big cities. Overall, the nation’s 50 largest cities have

seen their populations grow by 7.5 percent, only slightly less than the national average of 9 percent.

Amid all the growth in Texas, it would be easy to miss that more than 100 counties in the state lost population over the last decade. Of these shrinking counties, only two have populations of more than 100,000. Most of the shrinking counties are in the vast area west of I-35. Young people are fl eeing these areas to look for jobs.

Kel Seliger knows better than most what these trends mean for political representation. Seliger is a state senator from Ama-rillo. His current district comprises 26 counties stretching from the Oklahoma border nearly all the way to the Mexican border—“slightly smaller than the state of Indiana” is how he describes it. Next year, when it comes time for redistricting, Seliger’s old lines won’t contain enough people to support a district, which means it will have to grow larger still. It may add another 10 to 15 counties. This massive area of West Texas will have only one state senator in Austin.

That’s only half the trend. Rural areas aren’t just losing some of their population—they’re ceasing to be rural at all. Located about 35 miles from Washington, D.C., Loudoun County, Va., used to be known for its horse farms. Today, as the nation’s fi fth fastest growing county since 2000, it has become famous for its new subdivisions, town centers and traffi c jams. Ticer’s inner-ring suburbs are experiencing moderate growth, but Virginia’s fastest population growth is in suburbs that weren’t suburbs 20 years ago. The trend is similar in many other states, from Illinois and Minnesota to California, Georgia and Florida. Just six of Illinois’ 102 counties, all of them suburbs and exurbs of Chi-cago, account for the entirety of the state’s 500,000 net growth in population over the last decade.

All of this is a source of economic and political anxiety for people who live far from the nation’s population hubs. So it was considered a small coup for Texas’ rural communities that the person picked to lead

the Senate committee in charge of redistricting is a West Texan himself: Seliger.

The senator, though, doesn’t want anyone to view him as the savior of rural Texas. “Numbers dictate redistricting,” Seliger says. “That’s something nobody can do anything about.” Most rural legislators echo Seliger. The principle of “one person, one vote,” prevents lawmakers from doing any more than manipulating lines along the margins to preserve rural power.

The shift has major implications for a variety of policy issues, most of which have little to do with counting cows. Will educa-tion funding formulas favor urban districts or rural ones? Will states spend on mass transit or rural roads? Will rural broadband and telemedicine be priorities? Those are the sorts of topics Seli-ger cites as his concerns. “I don’t represent a district from the 1940s,” he says. “I represent people that live and work and go to school today.”

Georgia is a good case study for why the balance of power between rural areas and urban and suburban areas matters. Rural Georgians—or at least some of them—have long asked why Atlanta gets the lion’s share of the state’s roads, jobs and water. They view


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the city as a hotbed of corruption. For their part, many Atlantans have long viewed the rest of the state as backward, unappreciative of their economic contributions and probably at least a little bit racist. Some of the tension has centered on Atlanta itself—a bas-tion of liberalism in a conservative state—but tension also exists between the broader Atlanta metro area and the rest of the state. “There has been a long-standing saying in Georgia that there are two Georgias,” says state Rep. Jay Roberts. “You have Atlanta, and you have outside the doughnut.”

As chairman of the Georgia House of Representatives Trans-portation Committee, it was Roberts’ job early this year to make the two Georgias one on the nettlesome transportation funding issue. For the last few years, the top priority of Atlanta’s busi-ness leaders has been to fi nd new money for roads. They wor-ried that congestion was slowly killing the economic vibrancy of the South’s capital. But rural Georgians didn’t want their tax dollars to fund roads in a part of the state that, in their view, already received more than it deserved. Eff orts to raise the sales tax statewide stalled.

Finally, this year lawmakers reached a compromise. There won’t be two Georgias, but 12. Each region will vote on whether to raise its sales tax to fund a list of transportation projects in its own region. Atlanta’s leaders celebrated the breakthrough as a historic victory. Still, they had to battle for years merely to gain permission to tax themselves. Rural lawmakers held enough sway to veto any plan that put their communities at a disadvantage.

After Georgia elects a Legislature with the redrawn lines in 2012, that power will be diminished. State Rep. Roger Lane, chair-man of the Georgia House’s Legislative and Congressional Reap-portionment Committee, says the 29-county Atlanta region could control as many as 100 of the House’s 180 seats, giving the region a clear majority for the fi rst time. That won’t mean that Atlanta will simply be able to run roughshod over the rest of the state. Those 100 representatives will come from diff erent parties and

diff erent jurisdictions with diff erent interests. Still, on topics like water and transportation policies, rural Georgia may be playing defense. “It can’t be us against metro Atlanta,” says Lane, whose district is nearly 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, “because they have the votes.”

The question for rural legislators is how to protect their interests with the members who are left. One option is solidarity.

That’s the message preached by Maryland Delegate Sally Jameson, who recently chaired the National Conference of State Legislatures’ (NCSL) Agriculture and Energy Standing Committee. Jameson says the creation of the Maryland Legisla-ture’s Rural Caucus about a decade ago helped check the power of lawmakers from Baltimore and the big Washington, D.C., suburbs. Legislators from the state’s far-fl ung places—south-ern Maryland, the Eastern Shore and western Maryland—real-ized that they shared common interests on subjects like rural broadband. They also realized that together they controlled about half the seats in the House of Delegates. “It doesn’t mat-ter that we’re Republicans or Democrats,” says Jameson. “If we pull together as rural legislators, with just a couple of people from other parts of the state, we can win a vote.” This summer, Jameson preached the value of active rural caucuses at NCSL’s annual meeting.

If you know Maryland’s geography though, Jameson is a some-what unlikely rural champion. She represents part of Charles County, a jurisdiction in southern Maryland that’s directly across the Potomac River from Fairfax County, Va. Charles County isn’t shrinking—its population has jumped from around 120,000 in 2000 to more than 140,000 today. That’s because it’s quickly sub-urbanizing. “Sixty percent of my community commutes out of my county every day,” Jameson says. “They drive into Washington, Baltimore, Northern Virginia to jobs.”


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That a lawmaker for Charles County still thinks of herself as rural is a hopeful sign for the future of rural interests. Lots of lawmakers in booming suburbs and exurbs still will have rural pieces to their districts after redistricting. Many of them may still have an affi nity for rural life, even if it’s disappearing around them. Whether these legislators are oriented toward the cities or the country will likely determine the fate of rural causes in legislatures over the next decade. “We don’t have but fi ve or six truly rural members left,” says Texas state Rep. Sid Miller, a former chair of the state’s House Agriculture and Livestock Committee, “but we don’t tell them they’re not rural.”

Even if some suburban lawmakers continue to think of them-selves as rural—and at times, vote like their rural colleagues—some rebalancing of political power will come with redistrict-ing. Many legislatures have been dominated by rural members

for decades. In most states, those days are over. To get anything done going forward, rural lawmakers will have to fi nd common interests with suburban colleagues or even urban ones.

Ticer, for one, says she’s eager for compromise. She notes that in Virginia, environmentalists and farmers have joined together to prod the state to provide more funding for eff orts to limit runoff into the Chesapeake Bay. She’d like to see more eff orts like that. “I really do subscribe to the idea that we are a commonwealth, and it’s very important what happens in all parts of the state,” Ticer says. “And certainly agriculture is a very important part of our economy.”

But did Ticer ever fi nd out how many cows there are in Virginia? “No, I didn’t,” she says. “Quite frankly, I didn’t maketoo big of an eff ort.” G


It’s the decennial exercise in political shenanigans that for eons has vexed reformers: state and federal legislative redis-tricting. Ever since former Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry invented his now-infamous “Gerrymander” on Boston’s North Shore, state legislators and governors have, with new census data, exhibited a sort of free-form artistic creativity that would be the envy of the most talented avant-garde abstract painters.

And so the question remains: How can redistricting be han-dled in a way that at least blunts the worst of that creativity? That is, can district lines be drawn so that they are not stretched across implausible geographical boundaries in order to tilt the political balance of power in a particular district in favor of Democrats or Republicans?

Two interesting experiments in reform are pending, although neither carries any guarantee of success. The fi rst—California’s Proposition 11—is garnering the most initial attention. Passed in 2008, the proposition creates a 14-member citizen commission overseen by the state auditor’s offi ce that will handle the job of drawing up state legislative districts, taking the whole process out of the hands of politicians.

The way the commission is chosen is diabolically clever and convoluted. The method was designed with the assistance of the citizens’ lobby organization, California Common Cause, and complexity was built into it to defy politicization. At the same time, there’s been plenty of citizen enthusiasm about joining the commission’s ranks. “We thought we might get 500 or 1,000 applicants,” says Kathay Feng, executive director of Common Cause California. “We got 30,000.”

Whether Proposition 11 is allowed to work its prospective apolitical magic, however, depends on what happens this Elec-

tion Day. Two ballot initiatives will be voted on—they will either expand Proposition 11’s reach or kill the idea altogether. Propo-sition 20 will extend the commission’s jurisdiction beyond just state legislative districts to congressional districts. Proposition 27—which is backed by the California Congressional Delega-tion—will rescind Proposition 11 altogether.

But if citizen commissions can’t play in the fi elds of redistrict-ing, there will at least be more opportunity for a hot stove-style approach. The second reform idea involves the simple applica-tion of a little sunlight. That is, it would allow regular people to use Web-based tools and their computers to come up with their own plan for a state’s legislative and congressional electoral boundar-ies. That means for the fi rst time in any redistricting cycle, citizens will be able to weigh in with their ideas on what maps should look like.

There will be no weight of law behind it, but through websites like Dave’s Redistricting App, posted on Gardow.com, anyone with a computer can play governor. Players choose their state and get to use speculative U.S. Census Bureau data to make their moves.

Meanwhile, the Brookings Institution and American Enter-prise Institute are pushing states to put their own redistricting plans online and allow citizens to participate in the process. States haven’t proved to be overly excited about the prospect, citing costs.

Proponents of these citizen-participation efforts hope that they will at least get citizens tuned into the importance of what’s now considered an opaque and arcane practice. Maybe, given more citizen awareness, the efforts could spur politicians to be less brazen in their political artistry. —By Jonathan Walters

The Open Way Bringing truth, light and perhaps even fairness to redistricting.


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For those who’ve been sounding the alarm on the issue of the aging and inadequate U.S. infrastructure, President Barack Obama’s announcement last Labor

Day that he would ask Congress for $50 billion in investment in infrastructure was a bit of welcome news.

But if wrangling $50 billion out of Congress seems unlikely in the current “don’t-grow-the-federal-deficit” climate, the presi-dent’s announcement at least brought some much needed attention to what a small, but increasingly influential group of public officials and infrastructure experts have been saying for more than a decade: The United States is woefully underfund-ing infrastructure — whether it’s upgrading sewers, roads, rail or runways — and as a consequence, we are sacrificing our safety, quality of life and economic prosperity.

It is that chronic inattention to, and underfunding of, criti-cal infrastructure that was the subject of a recent series of Governing editorial roundtables held in Houston; Sacramento, Calif.; Boston; Raleigh, N.C.; and Omaha, Neb.

The series was sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), an international professional organization devoted to promoting excellence in the field, and focusing

attention on the nation’s burgeoning infrastructure needs. ASCE President Blaine Leonard said the roundtables were an attempt not only to bring broader attention to the problem, but also to gather some of the best minds from government and the private sector to start discussing ways to solve the nation’s growing infrastructure crisis.

“The real driver for the roundtables is that ASCE has been reporting on and evaluating the condition of the nation’s infra-structure for the past 12 or 15 years,” said Leonard, who is an engineer with the Utah Department of Transportation. “But it has become evident that it’s not enough to highlight the problem. What we need to start doing is really engage people in discuss-ing solutions, and since most of these problems are going to be solved at the state and local level, we thought it was important to convene groups of state and local officials and experts, and try to drill down and get at some potential solutions.”

For some, the conversation can’t happen quickly enough, given what ASCE’s most recent report card tells us about America’s infrastructure. No category of rating gets higher than a C+, and in particularly critical areas, like schools, aviation and roads, grades range from D to D-.

Roundtable Reports | ASCE

SOLUTIONS FOR AMERICA’S INFRASTRUCTURE CRISISWhen it comes to the nation’s infrastructure, it could be the choice between pay now or watch it disintegrate later.

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Overall, ASCE estimates that the country as a whole will invest around $1 trillion in infrastructure — both new projects

and improvements, as well as repairs to existing infrastructure — in the next five years. What is actually needed in investment, however, is at least $2.2 trillion, according to ASCE.

Five Areas of ActionThe roundtables focused on Five Key

Solutions developed by ASCE in the wake of the report card initiative as a way to move the conversation toward strategies to

improve America’s infrastructure, added Andrew Herrmann, incoming president of ASCE and managing partner with Hardesty & Hanover. “We wanted to hear from the field whether or not those five key solutions were the right ones, and then what strategies we might pursue for getting action on them.”

Each roundtable was tasked with tackling questions around:• increasing federal leadership;• promoting sustainability and resilience;• developing national, state and regional infrastructure plans;• addressing life-cycle and ongoing maintenance costs; and• increasing investment in infrastructure from all stakeholders.

Whither the Feds?Probably the most contentious of the five solutions — and

the one that inspired the most heated discussion — was the concept of federal leadership. While the federal government has certainly taken a positive approach in some key areas of infrastructure planning and funding, there was significant frus-tration expressed at virtually every roundtable about the level of micromanagement coming out of Washington when it came to deciding which projects made the cut for federal funding and then how those projects are carried out.

“We need a vision and a performance-based policy set in Washington, D.C., that takes into consideration the challenges facing local communities,” said Omaha Mayor Jim Suttle, himself a civil engineer. “We need broad guidelines and specifications, but we then need to let the locals work out the details. Cities are counting on the federal government to set the vision for infra-

structure policy, keeping in mind the resource constraints that cities face.”

Tight strictures on spending also were a concern. Jeffrey Mullan, secretary and CEO of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, pointed out at the Boston roundtable the fact that Massachusetts’ transportation needs and priorities were vastly different than those in other states and wondered why the feds couldn’t deliver more money in the form of unrestricted grants. “We see these fights in Congress

over transit versus highways. Let the states decide what they need,” Mullan said.

Meanwhile, virtually all roundtable participants agreed that another key role for the feds could be as a leader for innova-tion, research and best practices information on everything from advances in materials and construction techniques, to facilitator of better, more coordinated regional planning.

Low-Bid BluesThe main issue that surfaced on the sustainability and resilience

front is that a little more investment now has the potential to buy a longer-lived and higher-performing project down the road.

Among the main culprits cited was the requirement that proj-ects must be awarded to the lowest bidder, a practice that — to understate the case — doesn’t always get a state or locality the highest-quality construction.

“The low-bid imperative is one of the most damaging that we have to deal with,” said Mark Christiansen, Public Works

director of York, Neb. “There are times when you open the bids and you just groan when you see the contractor that put in the low bid because you know all the work that’s going to be involved in fixing their mistakes.”

Among the suggestions for getting the low-bid requirement changed were to try to make the case to local elected officials that in many cases the low-bid route is a pennywise and pound foolish strategy, a clear educational role that engineers could play, pointed out numerous roundtable participants. In fact, on federal and many state contracts, engineering design ser-vices must be procured using qualifications-based selection (QBS). QBS requires architectural and engineering firms to compete based on skills, experience and ability to perform the required services — not on the illusory economy that a low bid may seem to provide. Low bids requiring substantial change orders or resulting in high construction, life-cycle operating or maintenance costs are not cost effective.

Several participants at the Raleigh roundtable, meanwhile, argued that there ought to be some “sustainability standard” for various types of infrastructure. “Right now, there’s no stan-dard practice around the sustainability of infrastructure,” said James Rispoli, president and CEO of Project Time & Cost Inc.

Jim Suttle, mayor, Omaha, Neb.

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That type of standard would allow proposals and bids to be assessed in light of their potential resilience and longevity, said Rispoli, who was previously the Assistant Secretary of

Energy for Environmental Management in the U.S. Department of Energy.

ASCE President Blaine Leonard noted that on a recent large road building project in Utah, UDOT asked bidders not only for a price on the proj-ect, but also for an estimate on what the project would cost to maintain. “All of a sudden, you had contractors asking themselves, ‘Well, how would I build this if all of a sudden I’m going to be respon-sible for maintaining it?’”

Several roundtable participants brought up the concept of “the triple bottom line” when it comes to the broadest definition of sustainability and resilience. The way he looks at it, said Wayne Klotz, president of Klotz Associates and past president of ASCE, projects have to take into account environmental and societal impacts, and project sustainability. “You always have to remember, there is a social impact to infrastructure,” said Klotz.

What’s the Plan?If any of the five areas highlighted the jurisdictional complica-

tions behind infrastructure projects and planning, it was during the discussion of how to better coordinate national, state and regional infrastructure plans.

Again, the fragmented and often fractious nature of federal-to-state and state-to-local relationships was a constant theme.

Leaders of a land use commission on Cape Cod, Mass., pointed out, with some exasperation, that the commission’s goal was to try to coordinate land use and infrastructure planning for 15 extremely autonomous towns, but that task has proven exceedingly difficult. For example, with two-thirds of the nitro-gen-sensitive watersheds crossing town lines, the commission has been trying — without much luck — to get towns to agree

to a regional approach, said Paul Niedzwiecki, executive director of the Cape Cod Commission.

Participants at several roundtables sug-gested that help with promoting a more regional approach should be, and has been, a role for the federal government. For exam-ple, C. Dale Jacobson, an Omaha-based civil engineer and founding principal of Jacobson Satchell Consultants, noted that when the Clean Water Act was first passed, the Environmental Protection Agency strongly encouraged and sup-ported regional planning, and he pointed out

that the planning came with financial incentives, something that the federal government ought to consider across other infrastructure funding programs.

However, you don’t necessarily need a regional plan for all infrastructure, pointed out Mike Talbott, director of the Harris County Flood Control District. Ideally, he said, you want a tiered program, because some issues are state issues, some regional, and some don’t cross any boundaries. The trick is to analyze

which projects require broader regional or statewide planning and which don’t, so that officials can focus their energy on the right partnerships.

Cycles of LifeThe tension between the old and new was

also much on the minds of roundtable partici-pants. When it comes to addressing life-cycle costs and costs of ongoing maintenance, there is one obvious problem with infrastruc-ture like sewer and water, noted Gregory Williams, Chief of the Engineering Branch with

2009 REPORT CARD FOR AMERICA’S INFRASTRUCTURE

Gregory Williams, chief, Engineering Branch, Wilmington District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

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Mike Talbott, director, Harris County, Texas, Flood Control District

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James Rispoli, president and CEO, Project Time & Cost Inc.

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Aviation DBridges CDams DDrinking Water D-Energy D+Hazardous Waste DInland Waterways D-Levees D-Public Parks and Recreation C-Rail C-Roads D-Schools DSolid Waste C+Transit DWastewater D-

America’s Infrastructure GPA DEstimated Five-Year Investment Need $2.2 Trillion

Notes: Each category was evaluated on the basis of capacity, condition,funding, future need, operation and maintenance, public safety and resilience.

A=ExceptionalB=GoodC=MediocreD=PoorF=Failing

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This e.Republic custom publication is sponsored by ASCE. © 2010 e.Republic Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.ADVERTISEMENT

the Wilmington District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “It’s out of sight, out of mind,” he said at the Raleigh event. This is a clear impediment to winning support for the invest-ment necessary to preserving and upgrading sewer and water systems, Williams said.

In general, the consensus was that officials must simply do a better job of educating the public on the needs of ongo-ing maintenance, with the strong support and backing of the

engineering community. Waiting until a car falls into a sinkhole caused by a water main leak isn’t the best way to get the message out.

Roundtable participants generally agreed that coming up with well documented main-tenance schedules and then making the case to the public for continued funding — while often not easy — is the most productive approach to ongoing maintenance and oper-ations. All the while, officials must keep in mind what new infrastructure will be adding to maintenance and operation costs.

Show Me the MoneyThe difference between the $1 trillion that ASCE estimates the

U.S. will spend, and the $2.2 trillion that it estimates should be spent was the final, formidable topic tackled at each of the five roundtables. The issue of boosting the federal gas tax did come up at each roundtable, but given the current political environ-ment, most participants were of the opinion that at this point, pushing for an increase in the federal gas tax (which hasn’t gone up since the early 1990s) probably isn’t a viable strategy.

Several roundtable participants did point out that state and local governments have stepped up and either funded priority

projects themselves, or worked with local federal officials on ensuring that priority projects received funding. For example, continuing levee repairs around Sacramento, funded primarily at the state level, are an ongoing project that state and local officials have worked closely on with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Again, when it came to garnering support for increased infra-structure funding, most roundtable participants regarded it as a matter of better educating the public, with Tim Stuart, man-ager of transportation development and policy research with the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce, making the point that his city had an excellent record of passing infrastructure bond proposals when the public knew specifi-cally what the money was going to.

Using public-private partnerships as a way to find funding for infrastructure has clear poten-tial, agreed roundtable participants. Examples of these partnerships ranged from toll roads, to asking developers to contribute to the cost of project amenities like parks and sidewalks.

In many cases, though, finding money to invest in infrastructure may just be a matter of political courage. In Houston, one of newly elected Mayor Annise Parker’s first official acts was to shore up the city’s water and sewer system with a 35 percent water rate hike. Parker concedes it was a difficult political decision, but she was convinced the increase was absolutely necessary to maintaining the city’s water and sewer systems.

Houston Council Member Stephen Costello, who also voted for the rate hike, said he believes it’s easy for the public and decision-makers to determine the right course of action when they are presented with the facts, and he credits the Parker administration with making straightforward information about the increase available.

“The message that we ought to be giving other communities is not worry about your next political job, just do what’s right because that’s what was done,” said Costello.

Kicking the Can Down the RoadUltimately there was widespread agreement among round-

table participants on two fundamental themes: First, that first-class infrastructure is absolutely necessary to a healthy, thriving civil society and a globally competitive economy. And second, as Rob Roscoe, general manager of the Sacramento Suburban Water District, put it: “Right now, we as a nation are doing a really good job of kicking the can down the road and mortgaging our children’s and grandchildren’s future.”

Rob Roscoe, general manager, Sacramento Suburban Water District

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Annise Parker, mayor, Houston

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To learn more about the ASCE’s Report Card for America’s Infrastructure and the Five Key Solutions, please visit www.infrastructurereportcard.org.

ASCE was founded in 1852 and is the country’s oldest national civil engineering organization. It represents more than 144,000 civil engineers individually in private practice, government, industry, and academia who are dedicated to the advancement of the science and profession of civil engineering. ASCE is a non-profit educational and professional society organized under Part 1.501(c) (3) of the Internal Revenue Code.



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See an interactive map here: governing.com/innovationnation

Building the

Innovation Nation Discover which states

are the leaders in digital

government innovation.

Underwriting provided by

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Problem SolverReal-world solutions and ideas for government managers.


Public employees work in a cocoon of rules—a thick layer of safe-guards designed to protect them. Sadly this wet blanket of laws and

practices can smother worker initiative. Instead of empowering workers, these rules demean them. The ultimate result is an unrewarding work environment that increases the price and decreases the responsiveness of government.

At a time when massive budget short-falls demand better results, the scales are tipped heavily against allowing line work-ers to discover creative ways to increase productivity. The ideal solution would be to streamline operations and avoid layoff s by keeping within the normal rate of attri-tion. Doing this would require working in tandem with employees and their unions to boost effi ciencies and help transfer employees in one area to match the needs and openings in another. But state laws, arbitration rulings, civil service classifi ca-tions and collective bargaining contracts make this almost impossible. In light of

budget cuts nationwide, the only option left is the sort of layoff s all these rules were supposed to avoid.

Because unions play such an infl uen-tial political position in New York City, I assumed when I became deputy mayor that the work environment would include a high degree of worker empowerment and involvement. Surprisingly, the situation is precisely the reverse. These multiple levels of legal protections create a barrier to col-laboration between management and labor.

This is unfortunate, because those actually doing the work have great insights on how to improve work processes, which management often fails to unlock or implement. The key to producing public value lies in giving talented line employ-ees discretion, listening to their ideas and holding them accountable.

In the 1990s, Indianapolis received much acclaim for dramatically cutting the cost of government while signifi cantly improving the quality of public services. In many cases, those most responsible for

these remarkable gains were members of organized labor—the workers and their union leadership.

In trying to emulate Indianapolis’ suc-cess in New York City, I spoke to local union presidents and suggested ways to wander through various departments, both physically and virtually, to capture suggestions from front-line employees.

The city’s lawyers soon warned me to beware of the “direct dealing law,” which they explained could circumscribe my ability to discuss improvements with the people who do the work. This law is intended to keep public offi cials from doing an end run around unions by bar-gaining directly with workers.

In a rule-infused, legalistic work envi-ronment, even simple conversations can become a minefi eld. These walls between managers and workers undermine eff orts to fi nd better, faster and cheaper ways of providing public services. Even talking to employees about how to do things better can be against the rules.

How Rules Demean Public WorkersLaws, arbitrary rulings and contracts keep employees locked in an unrewarding work environment. By Stephen Goldsmith

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Equally demeaning is a civil service system that punishes good workers by rewarding those who are not. Do we really need the elongated disciplinary system that protects the incompetent and lazy, thus shoving work on the rest? Take the fellow who has shown up late 40 times to answer calls in New York City’s 311 call center. Don’t you think the hardworking operator next to him—in the same union—must feel a bit demoralized? She is treated the same way the slacker is. Is such a sys-tem fair? The vast majority of public work-ers do a great job. These protections are insulting to them.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It is pos-sible to have meaningful accountability without returning to the bad old days of arbitrary political fi rings. In Toledo, Ohio, the teachers’ union partners with district offi cials fi rst to help mentor tenured teachers with serious performance prob-lems, but then does not stand in the way of terminating teachers who still do not make the grade. The review process is a collaborative approach governed by both union and management—avoiding the sort of confrontations that plague so many districts. Other school districts have gone even further, introducing teacher-led schools—the ultimate in empowerment.

Management shares responsibility as well, of course. The all-too-common hier-archical command and control approach not only trivializes labor, it also causes management to dismiss suggestions from union leaders for workplace changes. In Indianapolis and New York City, managers have too often rejected innovations that originated from the local union represent-ing the workers who actually did the work.

Government work is knowledge work, and it takes place in an environment of rapid change. The civil service system, with its thousands of rigidly defi ned jobs, is an anachronism. In today’s rapidly shift-ing, technologically-based environment, jobs are constantly changing to meet the circumstances—except in the public sec-tor. The civil service testing system and “rule of three” forces promotion of those who test well, regardless of their past per-formance or leadership skills. The eff ort to make sure promotions are not based on favoritism has managed to produce a sys-tem where workers are often supervised

by less capable colleagues who are good at taking tests rather than good at the job.

Regardless of whether one operates in a highly unionized civil service envi-ronment or not, the key to success for a 21st-century workforce is the same: listen to front-line workers, provide them the discretion and tools to do their jobs, and ensure accountability. When we reward the mediocre, promote the less qualifi ed, restrict problem solving discretion and

turn the public’s work into a mechanical production of commodities, we demean public servants, degrade the quality of service and cheat taxpayers. G

Stephen Goldsmith, former mayor of Indianapolis, is deputy mayor of operations for New York City.

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about a $3 billion gap, which is plenty of impetus.

Many lessons were learned the fi rst time around, and the process has been substantially redesigned. Methods for get-ting public input have been revamped, and the number of goals and activities have been pared down. Washington divvied up what it does into 1,000 activities that are being prioritized into six diff erent goals—called value areas—compared with the old version’s 1,900 activities and 10 goals.

In the previous recession, the state set up an informal guidance group of half a dozen individuals. For the 2010 version (in preparation for the 2011-2013 bien-nium), the state established a 35-member committee consisting of business, labor and tribal representatives; police chiefs; a newspaper publisher; medical associa-tion members and the like.

By Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene

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Problem Solver | SMART MANAGEMENT

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In a term-limited environment, inex-perienced legislators also had trouble getting a grasp on the diff erent budgetary trade-off s.

Another attempt had mixed results. In the last recession, the Washington state executive branch plunged into a process it called “Priorities of Government.” It was time consuming, and though there were

positive aspects for the executive branch, it foundered when it hit the Legislature. The experience was suffi ciently positive, however, for the executive branch to give it another shot. For its biennial bud-get that begins July 1, Washington faces

The Big Picture on BudgetingStates and localities should prioritize top goals and revamp the budgeting process.

It’s time for states to give serious thought to fi xing their budget processes. We could have said that 20 years ago. Or 10. Or fi ve. But the cliché applies: A crisis

is a terrible thing to waste. With anguish-ing strains on state and local budgets, tax collections still down from two years ago and receding federal stimulus money, the time couldn’t be better.

Numerous governments have turned to a process that was outlined in The Price of Government by David Osborne and Peter Hutchinson. The components of the process are common to many out-come, results-oriented, budget-reform eff orts. If you can get people to look at funding outside of agency silos, they can then set and prioritize governmentwide goals and catalog and analyze the organi-zation’s activities. The result is that inter-nal and external groups prioritize and revamp the activities to accomplish the top goals. This all sounds rational. But the distance between a good idea and a happy outcome is in the implementation.

Back in 2005, The Price of Govern-ment ideas sounded great to the Michi-gan Chamber of Commerce, which joined with the Michigan Association of Real-tors to pay for the Legislature to give it a try. The eff ort was a resounding failure, according to Mitchell Bean, director of the Michigan House Fiscal Agency. The Senate lost interest. Funders took a dis-cussion of taxes and tax incentives off the table, which veered away from the vision of considering every aspect of the budget.Prioritization was diffi cult to imple-ment, given the number of constitutional and statutory requirements for funding.

The distance between a good idea and a

happy outcome is in the implementation. “

State Capitol, Olympia, Wash.



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An important change was to also include four legislators on the commit-tee. Given the built-in strains of using a diff erent budgeting framework for the Legislature, it just seems reasonable to ensure that some high-level legislators are familiar with the process—and perhaps even buy into its conclusions. Meanwhile, four budget hearings, which drew at least 400 people a piece, were held across the state, with the governor attending all but one.

The jury is still out on the impact that this ultimately will have on Washington’sbudget. But we’re encouraged by some evidence that it works rather well in smaller governments—particularly city manager governments where the tensionsbetween the legislative and executive branches are less pronounced.

Vancouver, Wash., designed a prioriti-zation approach that it’s calling Horizons. The city of 165,000 has the advantage of having a strategic plan that was laid out by the City Council in 2008. Using that docu-ment, it outlined six areas of strategic com-mitment and divvied up what it does into 300 activities. The six areas have now been prioritized based on public input.

At press time, no budget had been approved yet, but the eff ort has dramati-cally changed the way the decision process has worked. Instead of fi ghting exclusively for funding of their own agencies, the direc-tors are now part of a leadership team that’s responsible for the whole budget. With the knowledge that cutbacks are essential even in the top priority area of “a safe and pre-pared community,” the fi re chief bought into the idea of closing a fi rehouse, and the police chief proposed a restructuring of the department to roll back ranks and create a fl atter organization.

“A common approach to budgeting is an across-the-board reduction, but that doesn’t refl ect a priority of programs,” says Lloyd Tyler, Vancouver’s chief fi nancial offi cer. “It says all programs and services are identical in priority. Our process says there is a diff erence in programs and ser-vices. The budget process refl ects that.” G


By Andy Kim

Plug It InKnoxville, Tenn., will soon be home to about 350 public charging stations for electric vehicles. Chosen as one of 16 cities, Knoxville is part of the EV Project, a nationwide electric vehicle infrastructure program. Offi cially launched in late 2009, the three-year project started its initial infrastructure build this past summer. With a completion date set for late 2012, almost 15,000 charging stations will be created in Arizona, California, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Washington state and Washington, D.C. In addition, the project will deploy more than 8,000 electric vehicles, and those who buy the electric cars are eligible to have free charging stations installed in their homes. The project will analyze how the cars and charging stations are used, test various revenue systems for charging stations and evaluate the overall effectiveness of the infrastructure changes. The program is supported by more than $110 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy and millions more from private- and public-sector investors.

| IDEA CENTER

Paint or Recycle ItHow often do you buy a bucket of paint and actually use it all? Oftentimes, half-empty paint cans end up hogging space in garages or are thrown illegally in the trash. The San Joaquin County, Calif., Solid Waste Division spends about $450,000 annually to collect and dispose of excess paint. In an effort to curb these costs, the county implemented a pilot program that offers residents various drop-off locations for unwanted paint. Ten retail stores partnered with the county to collect up to fi ve gallons of latex (water-based) paint per resident, which is then recycled and resold. Since the program’s launch in March, the county’s drop-off locations have already collected more than 2,200 gallons of paint—saving the county more than $17,000. The program is intended for residents only, but commercial par-ties can turn in paint and other hazardous materials at the county’s Household Hazardous Waste Facility. Funded by a $400,000 grant from the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, the pilot program also set up nine drop-off locations in Tehama and San Francisco counties. Oregon

launched a similar program this summer, thanks to a statewide paint stewardship law passed in 2009.

Find more ideas forcreative programs atgoverning.com/ideas

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The EV Project’s Blink

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62 GOVERNING | November 201062



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By Steve Towns

More Than One Way to ConsolidateIt tends to come in two forms: a centralized model and a federated approach.

Problem Solver | TECH TALK

a federated approach that gives the CIO authority over IT policy and key statewide resources like data centers and networks, but leaves agencies in control of many mis-sion-specifi c computer applications.

The good news is that either approach appears to work.

Utah earned one of only two A grades in the 2010 survey, which evaluated states on technology effi ciency and eff ective-ness. Utah CIO Steve Fletcher controls

all IT resources—from data centers and networks, to software applications and telephones. The state’s entire technology workforce reports to Fletcher’s offi ce. On the other hand, California managed a B+ using the federated approach. CIO Teri Takai’s offi ce runs major state data centers and computer networks, sets policy, and performs capital planning and review for state IT projects. But state agencies oper-ate specialized computer applications and continue to run their own IT departments.

Both states can point to signifi cant results. Utah now supports statewide IT operations with fewer than 500 servers, down from 1,900 before the consolida-tion. That move alone shaved $4 million from the state’s operating budget, according

Consolidation has been a domi-nant force in government IT over the past decade, but a new survey suggests there’s more

than one way to get there. Since the early part of the decade, most state govern-ments have steadily aggregated technol-ogy resources and eliminated redundant equipment and operations. The Center for Digital Government—which is owned by e.Republic Inc., publisher of Govern-ing—has tracked this and other technol-ogy trends since the late 1990s through its Digital States Survey.

The 2010 data, released in Septem-ber, shows that technology used by state governments is more consolidated than ever. In 2004, 46 percent of states said their technology systems were highly decentralized, with individual agencies

operating their own—sometimes duplica-tive—systems. Only about 20 percent con-sidered themselves highly consolidated. This year, those fi gures are reversed, with 42 percent viewing themselves as mostly consolidated and 21 percent predomi-nantly decentralized.

That movement, by itself, isn’t surpris-ing. The idea of operating multiple state e-mail programs, human resources systems and other common computer applications is less and less acceptable to state policy-makers—not to mention too expensive to support. More interesting is the fact that consolidation activities tended to come in two forms: a centralized model that puts responsibility for nearly all IT equipment, staff and budget under the state CIO, and

to Fletcher. California’s consolidation isn’t as far along, but state offi cials say they’ve already cut data center space require-ments by 75,000 square feet over the past year. The space savings eliminated the need for a new data center facility, cutting more than $40 million in capital costs.

It’s important to note that these initia-tives aren’t just cutting expense—they’re making important state computer systems work better. For instance, Utah sank some of its savings into better equipment and higher pay for IT professionals, Fletcher says. Now the state runs its entire payroll in less than fi ve hours where it used to take 30.

The 2010 survey shows a good number of state governments making similar prog-ress thanks, at least in part, to some fl avor of these two consolidation approaches. In all, 13 states earned a B+ or higher under the survey’s grading system—a respect-able feat given the economic turmoil of the past few years.

The news isn’t all rosy, however. State CIOs polled in the survey were pessimis-tic about their ability to maintain this momentum. Almost half of the respon-dents said they expect to have trouble fi nding enough funds to meet their state’s future IT needs. Another 25 percent expect funding to be just “somewhat ade-quate.” So, while there may be two roads to IT success, it looks like neither of them will get any easier. G



These initiatives aren’t just cutting expense

—they’re making important state computer

systems work better.

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By John E. Petersen

Lots of ink is being spilled on the housing market’s two-year dra-matic slump. Beyond harm for homeowners and communities,

the plunges in housing prices and home sales have had devastating consequences for state and local government fi nances, which have long relied on increases in property values and construction activity.

The drop in real estate values and its impact on property taxes is easy to envi-sion. But that’s just part of the problem. Deeper seated is linkage between hous-ing construction, and the many ways that home sales and building activity aff ect state and local government revenues.

Let’s start with housing sales and how they aff ect economic activity that, in turn, generates tax revenue. In 2005, 1.28 million new homes were sold at an average price of $290,000 , according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That meant a total sales volume of $371 billion. Meanwhile, 7 million existing homes were sold in 2005 at an average price of $269,000 , which meant a volume of about $1.88 trillion. The new homes, of course, had a greater per-dollar spending impact since they had to be built. But sales of exist-ing houses count too. Buyers spend thou-sands of dollars on repairs, new appliances, legal fees and sales commissions—which add up to a huge boost to the economy.

By contrast, the annual rate of new home sales in July was 288,000 and the average price was $244,300 . The total dol-lar volume of new home sales was $70.3 billion—an 80 percent decline from the level fi ve years earlier. The annual sales volume on existing houses was $890 bil-lion, marking almost a 60 percent decline. That’s for one month at an annual rate, but it suggests that there yet may be no fl oor on the real estate market.

A result of this horrendous decline in value has been a large percentage of properties going under water—having

less market value than the mortgages they carry. Foreclosure rates are astronomically high, particularly in Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Nevada and New Jersey. Not surprisingly, these states also saw the greatest burdens in terms of mortgage costs to household income during the fever pitch of the housing boom. And all are having severe budgetary problems.

There are other powerful fi scal con-nections. By mid-2010, construction jobs had fallen by 2 million workers since their peak in 2006. Roughly speaking,

construction jobs generate about two additional jobs off site for every worker employed on site. Thus the $800 billion in wages not being earned by active con-struction workers results in a decrease of $1.6 trillion in related industries and per-haps another 4 million jobs. (The blow is somewhat lessened by unemployment benefi ts that replace about 35 percent of wages on average.) These very round numbers add up to 6 million jobs lost in the U.S. economy since 2007.

Then there are implications from lower sales of building materials, house-hold appliances and furnishings, which are subject to sales taxes in most states. In addition, building permits, hook-up fees and titling taxes are part of the state and local revenue mix, not to mention the profi t taxes applied to land corpora-tions and limited liability partnerships.

Impact fees and development charges are another part of the revenue arsenal. Each tax system is idiosyncratic, but for years the ability to load costs on new development has been low-hanging fruit for the tax collector. But times changed. Overall, according the Nelson A. Rock-efeller Institute of Government, state taxes in fi scal 2010 were about 17 percent below collections in 2008. Property taxes showed a year-to-year decline of about 1 percent—and they react more slowly than other taxes. The eff ect on property taxes

has yet to play itself out as assessment practices in many states delay the impact.

The tie binding state and local revenues to the activities embodied in construction spending, high levels of mobility and fast-paced development are long-standing. That suggests we should be doing some basic thinking about what state and local revenue systems should be based on and how much volatility we are willing to accept. We may need to live through many more years of fi scal distress before fi nding a proper balance between what public services we are willing to pay for and how they should be fi nanced. As former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.” G


The Problems That Housing Built Plunging real estate values have devastating consequences for government fi nance.

Problem Solver | PUBLIC MONEY


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68 GOVERNING | November 2010

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Manhattanites seem to like district attor-neys with a pedigree. Robert Morgen-thau, who held the position from 1975 until his retirement last year, was the

son of Henry Morgenthau—President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s treasury secretary. Cyrus Vance Jr., Morgenthau’s successor, is the son of Cyrus Vance Sr.—President Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state. But while he bears a famous name, Vance Jr.’s path to elected offi ce—and his ambitions for it—are distinctly his own.

A native New Yorker, Vance, age 56, spent much of his childhood in Washington, D.C., where he enjoyed such unusual experiences as sleepovers at the White House. (President Lyndon Johnson gave him his fi rst pocketknife.) After graduating from Georgetown University Law School in 1982, Vance became an assistant district attorney under Morgen-thau for six years. In 2004, he returned to New York City after several years in Seattle, and was elected as Morgenthau’s successor last fall.

Since taking offi ce, Vance has focused on what he calls “intelligence-driven prosecution.” The cen-terpiece of his initiative is a special crime strategies unit that works with police and community leaders to target crime hot spots. If it succeeds, Vance may well do for prosecutors what former New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton did for policing—move the focus from process and individual cases to results and lower crime. —John Bunti n

Cyrus Vance Jr.Manhattan DA Offi ce Stats:

Cases per year: 109,690

Attorneys: 517

Appropriated budget: $91.5 million per year



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