THE ROLE OF CITY GOVERNMENT: SOMETHING WORTH THINKING ABOUT./Priorities for Public Action.

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.