Multi-jurisdictional
intentional regional communities are, in all cases, “Greater Communities” where
“community motive” is at work at a more than a local scale. This newsletter
provides a scan of regional community, cooperation and collaboration activity
as reported in news media and blogs.
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Regional Excellence
Plant an
Intergovernmental Reform Garden Now:
A Modest Proposal for Public
Interest Groups and Their Friends
By Bill Dodge
The National Academy of Public
Administration (NAPA) is preparing a “Memo to National Leaders”. It calls for creating a new intergovernmental
policy council to help restore the health of our ailing federal/state/local
government system. The council would advance
governance reforms to make the system more effective in providing the services
and infrastructure required to restore our equally ailing economy.
Initial
topics suggested for the council’s agenda
-- adopting a Value Added Tax
(VAT) shared by all levels of governments, as it is in Australia, and
empowering innovative mechanisms, such as for-benefit organizations, to bring
old stakeholders together in new ways.
Neal Peirce, the syndicated
columnist, argues that the “unkempt (intergovernmental system) garden needs a plan” and NAPA’s proposed
intergovernmental policy council could prepare and pursue it, given support
from all levels of government, starting with the White House and the
Congress.
All well and good.
But
what will give this new council any better chance at success than its
predecessor, the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR)? Fellow recovering regionalists still look reverently
upon ACIR’s efforts to design, test, and promote new regional governance models. However, they are also haunted by ACIR’s inability
to engage key government partners in controversial discussions -- and
all discussions of intergovernmental reform
are controversial -- and its tragic demise in the polarized
politics of the new century.
Moreover, creating an intergovernmental
policy council could take years and even then it might have difficulty
contending with the dysfunctional dynamics of the Nation’s capital.
Thus
a call to action by public interest groups and their friends.
If
the intergovernmental system is to be reformed, public interest groups that
represent towns, cities, counties, regional organizations and states need to plant
the seeds -- the proven existing and practical new models
for local, state, federal, and especially intergovernmental governance. They need to be the gardeners who will foment
a “revolution from the bottom up”, as opined by Norman Ornstein of the American
Enterprise Institute. And they need to plant
the seeds now as all levels of governance are in crisis, including my beloved
regions.
Regional cooperation has been one of
the positive intergovernmental reforms in my lifetime, providing a new governance
capacity to tackle the tough transportation, air and water quality, emergency
preparedness, sustainable growth and other challenges that cut across all
levels of government and are critical to keeping the United States competitive
in the global marketplace.
It
has had its flaws. Most regional
organizations still have too little power or funding to address the toughest
common challenges. But, these governance
flaws have not thwarted achieving real success, due in no small part to federal
and state government initiatives, along with enough largesse to smooth over intergovernmental
infighting.
Now,
with growing deficits, local governments cannot depend upon federal, state or
other public partners to develop or fund regional initiatives. Nor can they expect other sectors --
private, academic, non-profit, or civic
-- to pick up the slack. And without well-heeled partners helping them
to address the toughest challenges, regional governance flaws will be quickly
exposed and threaten future success.
Bottom
line: Restoring our national economy
requires rebuilding our intergovernmental system.
Local
governments, therefore, need to have access to the best ideas for governance reforms,
ones that can strengthen their capacity to work together until they can address
the toughest challenges, with confidence and limited outside support. They need models for building their
governance capacity to:
·
address
all emerging cross-cutting challenges, no matter how controversial, before they
explode into crises,
·
design
joint action plans to address these challenges and then empower themselves to negotiate
their successful implementation, with each other and other sectors,
·
propose
options for funding priority actions, from primarily local sources, even if
this means taking them to the public for approval,
·
hold
themselves accountable for implementing priority actions, even if this results
in public embarrassment or reduced support for nonperformers, and
·
maybe
most importantly, report to the public on their successes and failures on a
regular basis.
State
and federal governments are still critical.
They need to endorse regional capacity-building efforts and reward them
with supporting legislation and, to the extent available, funding for action
plans to address cross-cutting challenges.
State and federal governments also need to continue to provide
incentives to make sure that more distressed regions, urban and rural, can
complete on a “level playing field” with more affluent ones.
The
same case could be made for similar reforms across the intergovernmental system. Neighboring local governments need to find
better ways to cooperate, and share the benefits, of economic development
initiatives. Neighboring states need to
find better ways to cooperate, especially when their boundaries divide up the
metropolitan regions where over half of us live. And all levels of government need to find
better ways to plan, finance, implement, monitor, and report on initiatives to
address their own challenges, especially those that affect their neighbors as
well.
A
modest proposal.
What
if the public interest groups and their friends sent out a request for ideas
for reforming local/state/federal governance?
Their research centers and members have a long history of governance
reform and would be ideal candidates to advance ideas. So would NAPA, the Alliance for Innovation, the
National Civic League, and academic research institutes, along with active and
retired government, academic, and community leaders.
Simultaneously, the public interest groups
could appoint a working group -- a bottom-up, informal, prototype intergovernmental
policy council -- to select
the best, and boldest, ideas for governance reforms to explore this fall. They could use their research centers to recruit
experts and host dialogues to convert the ideas into practical actions. Then, they could turn to their members and
staffs to test and implement them.
I
suspect that national foundations would welcome the opportunity to provide seed
funding for such an effort. Moreover, I
am sure that I, and my column-writing colleagues, would welcome the opportunity
to share these ideas in our columns and solicit reactions and additional ideas
for governance reform.
Collectively, these actions could
become an informal 2013 Intergovernmental Reform Agenda. It might result in a somewhat messy garden,
but if a few of the reforms quickly bear
fruit across the country, it would help restore confidence that governance reform
has not been fatally poisoned by political infighting and encourage others to advance
good ideas in future years. It could also
provide a compelling rationale for quickly creating an intergovernmental policy
council to keep planting and harvesting a garden of most promising reforms. Finally, it could help demonstrate how the
public interest groups can keep such a council accountable for advancing the
most critical reforms.
Members
of public interest groups are the most important consumers of a bountiful
garden of intergovernmental reforms. If
the public interest groups don’t plant the seeds, who will? And, if they don’t do it now, how will our
intergovernmental system ever build the capacity to address the challenges that
will keep our economy competitive and our communities the best places to live?
***
Bill Dodge
is looking for a few good regions that are interested in designing regional
charters to strengthen their capacity to take bold actions to address tough
common challenges. He is the author of Regional
Excellence, and is writing a new book on regional charters. WilliamRDodge@aol.com
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Basic Geocodes -
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Geocode
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Geography
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Wikipedia
page link
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0000
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Earth
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0900
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Arctic Ocean
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1000
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Europe
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2000
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Africa
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3000
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Atlantic Ocean
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4000
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Antarctica
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5000
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Americas
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6000
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Pacific Ocean
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7000
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Oceania
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8000
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Asia
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9000
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Indian Ocean
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"Global Region-builder Geo-Code
Prototype" ©
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