Local government has never been easy. The last couple of decades have made it even harder. The old saying is “all politics is local,” but now most politics feels national. Vicious, friendship-ending arguments over mask mandates, police violence, and what schools should teach have seeped into local politics, from school boards to city councils. And the nationalization of politics has made local governance much, much harder.
It's cost us a lot.
Polarized local politics means that governments have a tougher time doing the basic blocking-and-tackling of administration — police, fire, road maintenance, utilities — and allocating resources to support community needs. The siege mentality that has crept into our politics can cause or worsen the financial problems of cities and towns.
“The elected officials set the tone,” Robert Bobb, a veteran city administrator who now runs his own consulting firm, tells me in a Zoom interview. “That starts with the city’s elected officials understanding the issues in a city and then bringing on board experienced leadership and giving that experienced leadership the runway, as it were, to work on hiring experienced staff and then putting in place the policies, practices, procedures they need.”
Bobb has served as a city manager in Oakland, California, and Washington, D.C. He was the emergency manager of Detroit’s ailing school system and the last president elected to D.C.’s then-independent school board. He’s seen the slow choke of civic governance from multiple angles.
“My bias is always on the financial strength of a municipality,” Bobb tells me. “Do I have a finance department with experienced leadership? And with that experienced leadership, does the experienced leader at the top, has he or she then brought on board other staff that have experience? If we can’t get the financial operation of the city right on the front end, and in the middle and on the back end, then the community cannot provide the services that the citizens of the community require.”
That’s the starting line. But increasingly, city leaders who don’t have an agreed-upon set of principles by which they operate find it harder to reach the starting line. Funkhouser & Associates can help city leaders map their commons.
We draw inspiration from Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics. Her 1990 book Governing the Commons was based on her research of communities around the world that were successfully managing common-pool resources such as fisheries, forests, and water. She found that it was possible for a community to manage shared and scarce resources — that is, to govern sustainably — as long as its leaders followed eight general principles:
1. Commons need clear boundaries.
2. Rules should fit local circumstances.
3. Decision-making should be as democratic as possible.
4. Commons need close watching.
5. The sanctions for violating the commons should be graduated.
6. Conflict resolution should be easily accessible.
7. Commons must have the right to organize.
8. Commons work best when built into larger networks.
Some of these principles may seem abstract, but in working with local-government leaders our team has seen the value of deliberating on these principles, translating them into practical terms and incorporating them into the context of a community.
Take the village of Shorewood Hills, It’s an affluent town of about 2,200 people in south-central Wisconsin, surrounded by the city of Madison and nestled into the banks of Lake Mendota. It’s next to the main campus of the University of Wisconsin. The median family income is north of $120,000 annually. Nearly 90 percent of its citizens have a bachelor’s degree and nearly three-quarters have a graduate degree. But despite its many strengths, the village grappled with divisive political dynamics and strains on service delivery.
The Board of Trustees and the village administrator identified the need for a formal governance framework to enhance collaboration, transparency, and accountability in decision-making, with the ultimate goal of fostering community trust and more effective leadership. What’s key is that village leaders viewed themselves as fiduciaries to their commons. F&A worked with them to sketch out a more robust, contemporary set of rules and procedures to help manage their commons. And the most effective antidote to political/financial dysfunction is the stuff that seems mundane: careful, open planning while using mediation to identify common objectives and build consensus (or, as I like to say, grudging acquiescence).
“These kinds of efforts don’t often draw attention because they aren’t flashy or immediate,” former Salt Lake City mayor Ralph Becker has written, “but when well executed we get satisfying results. I have seen over and over that better, more durable solutions emerge when these process steps are taken.”
In Shorewood Hills, those steps involved a 14-week, three-phase approach that included vision-setting and strategy workshops, group and individual consultations with the Board of Trustees, and mediated dialogue with the community.
The project culminated in drafting and refining recommendations for the governance framework and introducing recommended changes to the community. We placed an emphasis on delivering a co-creative and iterative effort that empowered village leadership, staff and ultimately residents in effectively grappling with questions of contemporary self-governance.
The board plans to gradually implement the governance framework, make relevant changes to village ordinances and committee structure, and deploy our recommended communications strategy to reinvigorate ongoing, meaningful dialogue with residents long into the future. With a new “map of its commons,” village leaders now have a stronger set of guideposts to help them navigate complex problems and tough choices.
Democracy is frightening, to borrow from legal scholar Jedediah Purdy’s famous book title. Through strategic governance, we can turn collective life from being driven by fate to coalescing around our shared values — and making them real. This is important, given that democracy is frightening, and yet, as Purdy writes, “Politics is inevitable if we choose to coexist.”
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