Alan Joplin
Opportunity is the keystone, as it were, of a priority system for public action: opportunity for personal fulfillment, opportunity for economic satisfaction, opportunity to live decently and safely. The foundation on which opportunity must rest is a strong and healthy economy. Any general threat to the city's economy, any substantial slippage, would represent a threat to the welfare of the city. The fact that the economy of the city is, in general, doing well, that there appears no imminent danger of a mass collapse, does not mean that it can be ignored or that it does not require the attention of government. On the contrary, the economy requires close attention and a continuing program of public action calculated to achieve maximum results with minimum public expenditure.
The achievement of such results depends neither on magic nor on wishful thinking. It depends rather on a strategy of building economic growth around the city's strong point--its role as the regional center. The aim will be to deliberately make the fullest possible use of the driving force represented by private economic initiative by encouraging it through the provision of necessary services and a hospitable environment, by freeing it from unnecessary inhibitions or restrictions, by steering it so that it doesn't do thoughtless or inadvertent damage to its own self-interest, and by harnessing it where feasible to achieve multiple benefits.
At the same time, the city government will have to buttress, where it can, the weak spots in the economy--particularly the manufacturing and goods-producing industries. Those with growth potential, or at least some long-term strength, should be encouraged or assisted; those in decline should be protected from actions which hasten their demise or make their transition more difficult. But this effort must be selective, realistic and unsentimental. It should not squander government resources and energy by attempting to turn back a tide of history. In general, the most critical and costly public efforts aimed at economic development--although not the only ones--will be in transportation, the provision of space for expansion, and manpower development and training. These are the city's top priority jobs in economic development. The transportation jobs are to improve mass transit service to business districts for the people who work there, to improve internal circulation in these areas of both people and goods, to serve the city's escalating demands, and to give priority to those arterial highways which will best serve the industrial areas of the city.
In a city as developed as Davenport, the provision of adequate space to meet the needs of activities important to the city's well-being becomes increasingly difficult and critical. In the case of providing for the continued expansion of office buildings, the demand is not so much, if at all, on the city's fiscal resources as it is on its resources of foresight, planning, and intelligent guidance.
The city must anticipate the expansion needs of its downtown not just for the next few years, but for the next quarter century. It should take advantage of private activity by providing a planning framework that can link together individual private developments so that the total benefit achieved will be more than the sum of its parts. It should also use its powers of regulation and inducement to insure that the development of highly profitable economic resources such as office buildings will help stimulate and revitalize, rather than destroy important functions of the regional center. The test of the market place can sometimes be short-sighted and not in the best long-term economic interest of the city. A more difficult, expensive, and in some ways a more immediately critical problem, is to provide expansion space for industrial activities. There are many active and dynamic industrial firms in this city that are seeking to expand, and that will leave the city if they cannot find additional space here. Even though, unlike office building users, they are sharply limited in what they can pay by the highly competitive nature of industry in Davenport, they include firms whose retention is of real importance to the city's economy and its job market.
The city needs to develop new programs to selectively assist those firms that can provide the kind of jobs needed here, that can provide the kinds of service that other sectors of the economy require, or that otherwise can contribute to the city's economic growth. It needs both to find ways to implement an embryonic industrial park program, and to more efficiently utilize existing industrial districts, or mixed districts suitable for industrial expansion.
The city's most critical economic problem at present and in the immediate future, is the mismatch between people and jobs. Rectifying this mismatch by developing effective job training programs is a task of the highest priority. It is also the most immediate and direct link--indeed a common area--between the city's economic development and opportunity development roles. It is more than a waste to have businesses jeopardized because they cannot obtain the capable, skilled, and trained help they need--whether clerical or blue-collar--at the same time a growing segment of the population is becoming alienated and desperate because it cannot find decent jobs and opportunity. It is a tragedy to which we had better address ourselves with all our resourcefulness, ingenuity and determination before it completely tears apart the fabric of our urban society.
Government must be concerned with opportunity for all. But it must direct its efforts where opportunity is lacking or is endangered. The development of opportunity for those who lack it--mostly the city's current " minority " poor and the elderly population--must be top priority of city government today. Education is the key to opportunity development, job training being a special form of education. Job training programs are directed to young adults and to school drop-outs. Whether operated directly by government, by community corporation financed by government funds, or, hopefully a growing trend, by private businesses on their own or under some arrangement with government, job training programs should have some specific results.
They should lead to real and existing jobs, to jobs with advancement opportunities and a future, and they should preferably lead to jobs in growing sectors of the economy. Job training is but one aspect of what must be a massive and sustained effort to make education work for those it is now failing. New and more effective programs must be developed from the pre-school level through the community and senior college levels which meet the needs of today's minority groups.
While education, including job training, is clearly the highest priority need in meeting the challenge of opportunity development, there are a number of other high priority needs. Among these is the development of much more effective programs for the delivery of health services. Far more than is generally recognized, poor health handicaps the urban population and impairs its ability to seek and take advantage of opportunities for status improvement. Health care that is readily and generally available, and competent, must be profitable.
Continued vigor and vigilance in enforcing anti-discrimination laws, and in improving and broadening them remains a high government priority in the development of opportunity. However violently the pendulum may swing from integration and bussing, to quality education and self-sought separation, full opportunity can never exist where freedom of choice does not.
Freedom of choice is also an important element in the development of Davenport as a better place to live. In dealing with the city's living environment, just as in dealing with its opportunity environment, the essential strategy of government action is to give highest priority to the weak spots, to the places where it is breaking down.
In the urban Community--the very name of which denotes a feeling of suppression and being hemmed in--a new and massive effort to upgrade both the environment and the people it houses is required. It will mark a new effort at instituting a coordinated program of physical, social and economic improvements on a broad and sustained scale. As indicated earlier, the point of danger is not only the urban community; it is the area in transition as well. To guard the interests of both the old and the new population, programs will have to be instituted that will protect and upgrade the basically sound physical conditions and amenities of these areas. These programs should be locally based and combine code enforcement, physical improvement, city-services, and social programs.
The priority Job--easier stated than accomplished--is to stem rolling blight by upgrading living conditions that are below minimum standard and protecting them where they are basically satisfactory, but threatened. Its goal is clear: to enhance, not inhibit, real freedom of choice for all. Additionally, continuing and more effective programs are needed to curb threats to the general environment, particularly air and water pollution, and to insure that the city's basic ubiquitous services-water supply, food distribution, and waste disposal--will continue to meet the city's needs.
Developmental Coordinator for the City
In direct response to the demands being put on it by the critical priority needs of the city, the role of the city government is changing. The traditional American pragmatic approach to government has evolved in the past in response to former needs. The real question is whether it is changing--indeed, whether it can change--far enough and fast enough to meet the urgent developmental demands confronting the city in this last decade of the twentieth century.
These major developmental problems--the development of the economy, the creation of the kind of opportunities needed to help a new generation of disadvantaged people get into the mainstream of the city's life, and improving the quality of the city's environment, both in the neighborhoods and city-wide--are not being met at all adequately either by the public or the private sector. Their solution must be seen--as it is starting to--as the prime concern of municipal government, with first call on its attention, its energy, and on all the resources it can bring to bear.
This means that the city government must deliberately and self-consciously emphasize a new role for itself--that of coordinator and manager of the city's social, economic and physical development. It must become a full-fledged partner in the development of the city. Even though city programs in the past have had significant developmental consequences, the major emphasis of city government was not in that direction.
It was, rather, on providing society with those basic support systems such as transportation, streets, water supply, sewers, and general services (police, fire fighting, education, public health) which could not profitably or feasibly be provided by the private sector. It was on providing personal support and remedial services to those unable to meet their own needs, from the poorhouse of the revolutionary period to the social service system of today. It was on providing, or assisting in providing, educational and cultural enrichment--great museums, libraries, municipal colleges.
There are three forces that have shaped the evolution of government in the city. First, there is the steady growth in the sheer numbers of people living in the city who required services. The second force shaping the role of government has been the condition of people, particularly that portion of the population which was not able to support itself in an urban setting. In the growth periods of the city, governmental institutions had to play the major role in helping very large groups of people who were not able to support themselves immediately on coming to the city, or who were not able to operate in a competitive economy. The great systems of health services, welfare, and other social services, were all a response to this pressure. The third force shaping the role of government has been the way private investment and enterprise has operated in the city over the course of history.
It is difficult for government to give up a responsibility once it has acquired it. The urgent needs of one generation become the commonplace services of the next. The government's involvement in parks and playgrounds, health services, mass transportation, today is routine and grew out of the crises of earlier periods. The government is not in a position to abdicate responsibility for any of these. This accretion has resulted in a large governmental apparatus, an ongoing set of major services responsibilities, and huge expenditures of public funds.
Now the job is to find ways to bring this power to bear on the key developmental problems of the city. The traditional approach and programs just do not get at the city's real problems. Despite the expenditure for education, children are reading below grade level. Despite enormous expenditures for welfare and support, there are still families below the poverty line.
Despite the construction of public and publicly-aided apartments and the expenditure of millions, barely a dent has been made. For every household that we can help via traditional renewal and housing programs, there are six who either can not meet public housing eligibility standards or who can not afford to pay minimal rent increases following traditional rehabilitation. Despite rising expenditures for health care, average life expectancy in many parts of the city is below the national average. Infant mortality is up among the poor. Despite new programs, neighborhoods continue to deteriorate.
Government must use its great energies to strike at
the roots of the city's problems, rather than simply
delivering a standard set of services. Its concern
must be the total result achieved, not the number of
programs delivered. The question is not the number
of units built, the number of clinic visits, the number
of arrests, the number of garbage pick-ups.
The question is the quality of neighborhood life, the
reduction in crime and juvenile delinquency, the increase
in the safety and cleanliness of the streets, the decrease
in infant mortality.
The question is not the number of industries, the number of training Programs, the number of training centers. It is the number of decent jobs available to serve as an entry into the mainstream for Davenport poor, and the number of poor equipped to take them. The question is not how many schools and how many teachers. It is not even the teacher-child ratio. It is how many children enter school equipped with the skills to learn. It is how many children are at or above grade level in reading and arithmetic. It is whether increasing numbers of children stay in school instead of dropping out. And it is what percentage of kids graduate and how many of these go on to some form of higher education or to a job with a future.
The developmental role will put tremendous demands on the city government. But the city government is taking on a job, not as the sole agent, but as a partner in development. Individuals, business, private institutions, quasi-independent public agencies, and the state and federal government must all continue to play a major role in city development. The city government, however, will have to accept prime responsibility for directing and guiding this development in the interest of the city's businesses and residents. It is toward the responsibility for this obligation that the development plan is directed.
Supply and Demand
For all practical purposes, demand--that is, the city's
developmental needs--is inexhaustible. Supply--the
resources to meet those needs--is sharply limited.
That is the basic equation we have to work with. Over
the next ten to twenty years, the traditional functions
of government in Davenport will require at least as
much of the city's executive and administrative energy,
fiscal resources, and staff as they do today.
The quality and quantity of basic services is important to the " livability " of the city, and the city government is going to be under considerable pressure to deliver its traditional services at standards that are higher than previous times. Not only will the provision of basic services require major outlays in the future, but also, the number of persons requiring some form of support is going to continue to increase. While the federal and state governments will assume a larger part of this increased support burden, the total governmental effort in this area will likely be much larger than it is now.
Over the next decade, public expenditures for income support in Davenport will exceed millions. Similarly, the remedial programs are going to require increasing public allocations. With increasing leisure, society is going to demand a more developed governmental program for cultural and educational enrichment. While government must share this burden with private sponsors, it is unlikely that governmental allocations for enrichment programs will fall short over the next ten years.
Thus, the pressure for expansion of current commitments to government's basic functions in Davenport could very easily call for a tripling of the public's current expenditures over the next decade. The resources now available to the city come nowhere near meeting this total need. They are not insubstantial, but the government of the city of Davenport is only one level of government that provides important services in the city.
In addition to these services, government at all levels is providing large amounts of direct and indirect subsidies to spur private actions of various kinds. To support housing and development, for example, there are federal mortgage guarantees and low interest loan programs, state and municipal loan programs, tax abatement, rent supplements, land acquisition and write down programs, and small business loans. There are a vast array of other governmental actions to control, regulate, promote, and in other ways influence the course of life in the city. Each of these programs has a specific reason for being, and in concert, they add up to a formidable amount of power.
However, the city must still meet a significant share of its needs from its own budget, and here the picture is not good. Even if we simply extrapolate recent expenditures reflecting cost increases, projected revenues will fall far short of meeting this need. A close look at the revenue picture confirms this overall judgment.
The city has been taking steps towards modernizing its tax system by finding continuing and increasing courses of revenue, streamlining the structure for efficient administration, and improving the equity of its taxes. Because of its inequity as well as its effect on key industries, the gross receipts tax was abolished and replaced by a far more reasonable business income tax. But an even more important step was the shift away from prime reliance on the real property tax and introduction of the personal income tax. Real property, traditionally the major tax base of American cities, reflected the wealth of the city up to around 40 years ago.
Today it is no longer the true measure of wealth in our urban society. The decline in the relative share of national governmental revenues raised by cities parallels the change in the definition of wealth. In this period of boom and expansion, which saw the development of the large remaining areas of the city's open land, the returns from the property tax paralleled the growth of the economy and the expansion of city needs for revenue. But the city has passed beyond this period when the property tax reflected the growth of the national and local economy. Since this wealth now rests, not in property, but in the earnings of businesses and individuals, the institution of a city tax on income provides the best and most equitable way to raise city revenues.
However, there are basic problems and limits in the city's own revenue raising potential. Increases in income taxes, property taxes, and other local tax rates will be self-defeating for the city, for every increase in taxes brings with it the normal reaction from wealthier residents and business firms to move outside the city. This does not help the city or its more dependent population who must rely on the jobs and income supplied by existing businesses to provide their livelihood.
Because this is such a sensitive situation today, the city cannot afford to increase the taxes that make relocation decisions economically easier on the part of the city's businesses and reduce the number of jobs that are vital to keeping large portions of the population off the public payroll. Thus, the city appears to be faced with a serious fiscal gap, despite substantial cost economics, predicted increases in federal and state aid, and the expanded use of the property tax.
A Strategy for Government Operations
It is the very magnitude of the need compared to the limitations of resources that makes it critical for government to develop a well - calculated strategy for its own operations. As rich as we are as a society, we cannot afford to waste public resources on ill conceived or misdirected programs or on inefficient, wasteful, or competitive operations. The imperatives of city development require not simply that we set a dollar's worth for every dollar spent, but that for every public dollar expended we seek a return of two, three, five, or ten dollars in value received. This may at first appear a statement of glib exhortation or pious hope. It is not.
It states a realizable objective--provided that we use our resources where they will have a " multiplier " effect, apply our programs where they will exercise the maximum leverage for development, deliberately seek programs that will do double duty, insure that the various levels of government work toward common goals, not at cross purposes, and harness the developmental energy and efforts of the private sector to achieve broader public purposes.
The key factor is the willingness and intent to evaluate the delivery of public programs and services on the basis of performance. To make performance the test of method--that is, to accept what works best--is not to do the obvious or the simple, as any public administrator caught in the web of ideology, tradition, or administrative and political theory can testify. But it is necessary if we are to make the most of limited resources. New schemes of public-private interaction, and city-regional partnership; different mixes of centralization and decentralization; different degrees of agency independence and inter-agency operations; functional versus geographic organization will be required depending on the nature of the service and the most effective way to reach those to be served.
The nature of the problem must fundamentally determine the vehicle for delivery. If health services are better delivered by private institutions with public funds, this should be the direction. If mass transit services are better provided on a regional basis with the city's own system integrated into a regional set up, this must be the direction. If education in the urban setting is best provided through decentralized control of certain kinds of administrative and programming decisions, this should be accommodated. If welfare funds intended for rent can be better used to maintain the housing stock occupied by welfare clients, ways should be found for this to be done.
More specifically, there are ten basic principles of government operation that can help the city to achieve its developmental goals:
1. Reorganization of departments and agencies of municipal
government into basic, general purpose administrations
While this reorganization of municipal government will improve its operating efficiency, its main purpose is to structure government so as to facilitate achievement of its basic goals. Government functions grew by accretion. Agencies proliferated as new demands were put on government.
They tended to have single-purposes or limited-purpose
revisions and focused their attention on the particular
services they rendered, not on the goals they were
intended to achieve. The new administrations will
be responsible for broad problem areas, for seeing
the inter-relatedness of problems, and for seeking
fundamental solutions.
2. Maximum decentralization of government operations.
Government, like the big private corporations, has now discovered that it is necessary to decentralize to achieve operational efficiency. In order to avoid bottle-necks and to achieve flexibility, decision-making should always be pushed as far down the line as possible. A practical corollary of this axiom is that to the extent feasible, decisions affecting a local area or a field operation should be made in the local area or the field, preferably by those responsible for their implementation.
It should be understood, however, that improved decentralization depends upon improved
centralization, as paradoxical as that may appear.
The chief executive of an organization--whether the
president of GM or the Mayor of Davenport--cannot delegate
responsibility without being sure of what he/she delegates
and without retaining the central responsibilities
which are uniquely his or hers. The basic framework
of policy, the basic allocation of resources, must
be made centrally. Once secure in the basic splits,
resources and authority can be delegated, releasing
local initiative and resulting, hopefully, in swifter
and more flexible responses to local needs.
3. Coordinated neighborhood delivery
Steps must be taken to make sure that all the actions
the city takes in a particular neighborhood operate
to supplement, not conflict with, one another and are
part of a single plan and program for achieving real
improvement in the area. The planning and execution
of this program is being done with the neighborhood,
not simply for it.
4. Maximum citizen participation is essential
Government must be brought closer to the people. Many
of the complaints of people about their government
stem from its bewildering complexity, from the sense
of isolation an individual has due to not being able
to relate to a system that he neither understands nor
has the capability to deal with. Not only illiterate
newcomers, but sophisticated citizens as well, do not
know which governmental agency to approach or how to
register a complaint. The reorganization of departments
into larger units, while making the government less
complex, is not going to make the government seem more
" human." The impersonality of a huge distant
bureaucracy grinding out decisions and actions that
have little relevance to the day-to-day services they
supervise or to the people they are presumed to serve,
should be as frightening to the highest officials as
it is to the individual citizen. To counter the dangers
of a remote, faceless, and isolated central government,
the city should also embark on a broad program of citizen
involvement in the on-going processes of government.
5. More effective use of existing resources
Given the city's tight financial situation and the great
pressures on the increases the quality and quantity
of all traditional services, the city could easily
dissipate all of its energy.
6. More rational division of responsibility among
the federal, state and city government
The basis for which levels of government finance various kinds of programs in the future must be more consciously related to the problems, effects, and equities of methods of raising revenues. For example, the federal and state governments raise their revenues primarily from the income of the residents of their jurisdictions, while the city still raises most of its taxes from the owners of property and businesses. Because of this, we expect that programs (like those concerned with providing economic opportunity, income support, and job development) that are designed to fill the gaps in income created by the operation of our social and economic system, should be united using state and federal funds which are generated out of the wealth of the nation.
The funding by the federal government of Medicare and Medicaid is a step in this direction. Problems that the city shares with the rest of the region that result from the changing economy, the push of middle-income population outward across the city's boundaries, transportation needs, and the disposal of wastes in the air and water can be solved only by simultaneous and coordinated action both inside and outside the political jurisdictions of the city. The state, interstate and regional authorities must be the prime focus for policy-making, funding, and coordination.
7. The federal, state and city governments will have
to develop closer relationships on basic policy and
program matters
The federal and state governments are continuously making policy which affects a range of city problems. The solution to many of the city's problems rests literally in the hands of higher authorities-national policies influencing the distribution of income, the allocation of the nation's resources, the types of national and state programs that are given publicity and emphasis at any one time are major forces in determining what happens in the city. But federal and state goals currently defining program priorities have commitments and timetables which often force Davenport into inappropriate patterns of resource use.
8. Davenport must be permitted to use federal and state
funds more flexibly and purposefully to support basic
developmental programs
This is almost as important as the vast increases in
federal and state aid called for by the urban crisis.
Single purpose grants do not adequately support
the city's urgent need for much more inter-related
and flexible actions. Many urban leaders have called
for block grants to be used by city governments as
they see fit. Such open ended grants would tend to
be absorbed by the on-going service responsibilities
of local governments. We need more grants to be
aimed at a clearly specified problem of the city,
but used in any way which is appropriate.
9. Partnerships between non-profit institutions and
the city of Davenport
The city is the headquarters of many community service
organizations, medical institutions, and universities.
Over time they are increasingly using their home-town
as a laboratory for their resources and services, a
practice that can mean significant contributions to
the city's future development. This kind of involvement
and relationship is already the practice in health,
where non-profit hospitals are assuming more and more
of the burden of providing health services. The pattern
of affiliation of municipal and private hospitals is
an example of the kind of partnership that can be extended
in other areas. The city's great private universities
are beginning to move towards the use of their research
and training capabilities to aid in city development.
City government should encourage this process and
use its powers, where appropriate, to aid institutions
that are helping the city achieve its developmental
goals.
10.Private enterprise must be harnessed to help achieve
public developmental goals
In the past, the city was satisfied to use its regulatory
powers mainly to prevent what it felt undesirable.
But it has begun to appreciate that by the using of
its own regulatory powers imaginatively, in combination
with the economic threat of a private development trend,
it can create a unique source for achieving a broader
public purpose, whether the development of pedestrian
arcades and plazas, the establishment of training programs
for young people, or the building of viable communities.
Original file name: roleofgov - converted on Monday, 9 June 1997, 23:22