As I write this, we’re having our house painted. And also as write this, I’m working on the work program for the APWA Leadership and Management Committee for the next year. There are similarities and significant differences in both activities.
In my private life, I manage the facilities under my care the way many people do. I mow the lawn and fix obviously broken stuff. Occasionally, we have the house painted, or get a new roof or replace worn out stuff. We try to take care of our stuff so that it lasts longer but sometimes we just live with things that are past their useful life because we have decided not to worry about it.
I think I’m typical of a large group of people in my income range who approach home maintenance in roughly the same way. There is also, I think, a large group of people who have a much greater tolerance for household fixtures that are damaged, worn out, or past their useful life in other ways. Then there is, I think, a smaller group of people who are much more proactive and maintain things in optimum shape at all times. They are constantly improving their homes and cost doesn’t seem to be a major consideration. However, even they don’t usually have a formal asset management plan and long range capital improvement plan.
In my public sector life, I dealt with maintenance plans and capital plans all the time. They were necessary if our public improvements were going to be maintained properly. Public agencies as a whole are still a long way from having such plans that are optimized, and integrated, and sustainable, and perfect in every way. In fact, one of my chores on the Leadership and Management Committee is to find new ways to admonish public works officials to be better at leading our communities to a better future and to be better at managing the resources under their care.
Thinking about my own home maintenance “strategy” has made me realize the huge problem we face in trying to achieve perfection. It has also made me understand once again why we have had difficulty in the past getting adequate funding for public works.
At this point, I need to take a short trip down memory lane. Years ago, we had something in Clark County called the Sewer Guidelines. This was the official title of the ordinance but it was really a euphemism for an urban growth boundary roughly modeled after Portland’s. The idea then was that the urban boundary is determined by the maximum extent to which gravity sewer could be extended. Therefore, pumping was seldom allowed because it would allow developers to beat the system. This approach caused planners to spend an inordinate amount of time, in my opinion, talking about sewer service.
My analogy then to make my point that they were missing the point is this: We don’t design our houses around the plumbing. We design our dream house to have the features we want. The plumbing is then installed to serve those features. Of course, if the house is estimated to cost significantly more than we thought it would and the cost is due to expensive plumbing because we’ve located our hot tub in an inconvenient location; we’ve got some decisions to make. Is the hot tub such a major part of the whole house that we just have to suck it up and pay for it? Or is the hot tub a nice-to-have feature that we can do without or relocate? Answering those questions places plumbing in its proper place in home design. The more important question will always be the home itself and how it satisfies our needs.
I used this analogy then to point out that the key question in community design is about a vision for the community and not about its plumbing. I now realize that the analogy applies not only to building a new home as a comparison to building new communities but also to maintaining them.
The difficulty, however, is that if we look to home maintenance as the ideal for community maintenance we have two problems: First, there are at least the three maintenance models I mentioned above to choose from. Second, none of the three models is the ideal model.
As we approach direct democracy this becomes even more important. Our citizens expect us to be better organized than they are, but which group of citizens am I talking about? We have the high maintenance, low maintenance and no maintenance schools of thought in all of our communities. In the past, the loudest voice was that which elected officials paid attention to. Then as citizen activism grew and mail merge was invented, elected officials started to view their representative role as ‘followership’ (neat play on words, eh?). They tried to find out where the public was going and then lead them there. They followed from the front.
Not everyone did or does this, but the trend is there. In this era of followership, the methods of becoming the loudest voice have changed and become somewhat more sophisticated. The problem is that there are still at least three schools of thought in society about the right way to approach community maintenance. The difficulty is that even if the three schools were equally divided, they do not all participate in the democratic process equally and in the same way. This tends to confuse public officials. I do not have an answer for this but I am hopeful that you will draw some comfort from knowing why you are confused.
Not all communities are alike either. Very wealthy communities could be inclined to spend more money on maintenance but there is no guarantee of that. I know of one very wealthy community in California that spends very little on public facilities because community support is not there. We always need to look a little deeper at these things to see why the general statement does not hold up. In this case, most of the wealthy people are only wealthy in the sense that they own very expensive homes. Many of them bought those homes when they were younger and had more money and the home was expensive but not outlandishly so. Now many of them are living on fixed incomes in very expensive homes with property taxes based on a mildly inflated original cost. As time goes on this community will change but for now public spending translates into higher taxes and that’s not popular. I point this out because it only makes things more confusing and I thought you ought to know.
If/when we become a direct democracy, this division in our communities into the three schools mentioned above will become more important. We are probably a long way from real direct democracy but the technology to make it work is available now. The reason we still have elected officials is that the political structure in America is built around having them. Over time, they may fill a different and exclusive role as the people we blame for everything. If this becomes the case, term limits will be an absolute necessity because no one will want to serve in such a role for very long.
As this plays out and you want to have fun instead of frustration, let me give you a way to observe one political aspect of public works over the next few years. Citizens and media complain about pork barrel politics and scandals driven by pork barrelers grab headlines. We once needed the federal government involved in building public works but we really do not any more. The money going to the federal highway program could be distributed by an annual allocation driven by an objective national needs study. This would eliminate federal staff, local government lobbying and congressional set-asides. In other words, it would take all the fun (read politics) out of the process.
What you will want to watch over the coming months and years is the double talk that ignores this blunt evaluation of the current system. Politicians will talk about the need for set-asides to make sure that important projects don’t fall through the cracks of a mechanical allocation system and other words to that effect. And many of you public officials will be out there too, arguing for your set-aside project because it’s really unique. They’ll say it’s not pork; it’s some new kind of new white meat we’ve never seen or eaten before and other words to that effect.
Enjoy the show.
As usual, comments suggestions and any other fun things to watch can be sent to me at ostrowj@pacifier.com.