County and local governments everywhere are experiencing grim and harsh challenges, which are proving to be painful, frustrating and unsettling. Many county officials hope, when better financial times return, everything will return to "normal." Those who entertain this hope will experience a rude awakening and will have completely missed the signals of change; a really big wake-up call.
Several astute county associations (Oregon, Minnesota and Washington among them) have sensed that a fundamental shift is occurring in how local governments will be defined and how they will work together in the future. The outcome, as yet, is unclear for two reasons: First, uncertainty is a natural component of change. Secondly, change can be influenced by innovation and choice rather than being left to fate.
Currently, local governments mostly are reacting to the changes being imposed upon them. But, through leadership, they can initiate proactive changes that will bring about a new order in how they work together and relate to state governments.
The evidence strongly suggests that local governments, and especially county governments, are entering a period of profound transformation potentially and dramatically redefining or reframing their role, operations, and relationships with other governmental entities and the publics they serve.
The five signals or emerging mega-trends that indicate change - big change - is coming are:
The historical partnerships that existed and were honored for decades among the federal government, state governments and local governments have been eroded by devolution, mandates, pre-emption and initiatives. In some cases, the outcome has become open hostility and intense competition between state and local governments.
State legislatures and governors no longer perceive, nor respect, cities and counties as partners in the delivery of services. Local governments no longer can rely on the state to assure that they will be able to provide services. As one local government manager noted recently, "Counties and cities want to focus on positives, but spend so much time defending themselves against state attempts to erode local control." Couple this with the next trend.
Some feel this trend is the result of a substantial economic downturn. Partially, but the real forces driving the erosion are more fundamental, perverse and permanent. First, tax structure and revenue distribution systems in many states are just broken, even silly. They are counter-productive to ensuring local government fiscal stabilityÐsustainability, create bad tax policy, and pit state and local governments against each other.
Secondly, harmful initiatives are reducing taxing capacity and removing taxing and expenditure decisions and authority from elected officials. Thirdly, costs, especially health care costs, continue to increase substantially. The net effect is a direct assault on the fiscal sustainability of local governments especially those highly dependent upon property tax.
Current service-delivery models are not sustainable fiscally, politically and logically. Citizens see service-delivery models as complex systems that should function in an integrated, coordinated, seamless manner irrespective of what agencies or entities contribute to providing that service. Public safety, land use planning, transportation, economic development or human services should, in the public’s view, function in this way. They expect local governments to work within a framework of partnerships producing efficiencies, economies of scale, and cost-effectiveness in service delivery. They don’t feel they are getting that.
Instead, they perceive service delivery balkanization, turf battles and disconnects. They "just know" reform is needed but, they can’t define what that reform should look like. A recent poll in Minnesota, for example, suggests the public does not believe local governments are even willing or capable of reframing their perspectives to those needed to provide such system-oriented and collaborative service delivery leadership and reforms.
Yet, county governments, as reflected in new leadership models being initiated through the Association of Oregon Counties, are positioned ideally to provide the very leadership needed. Oregon counties are attempting to invent and apply new perspectives and models designed to reshape how local governments work together and with the state.
They start with a basic premise: County government is the only local entity that meets the service needs of all the people and all the land and is accountable directly for results through locally elected officials. In most states, everyone who lives in or receives services from other local governments (cities, school districts, special purpose districts, townships) also lives in a county. County government shares their entire constituencies with these other entities. County governments and officials are positioned uniquely to assert leadership in creating new service-delivery models and partnerships because they represent the interests and needs of all the people who also simultaneously live in and are served by all these other jurisdictions.
Local governments must think, plan, and budget strategically to ensure long-term perspectives are reflected in their decision making and the sustainability of their service delivery commitments and models. Also, they must rethink their service role, especially as future fiscal capacities may prove insufficient to maintain current arrays and levels of services.
The Association of Minnesota Counties has launched The Futures Project, through which it seeks to create ways and models that will enable county governments and officials to become change agents in framing a viable future for local governments; a future in which they work together in productive partnerships and are respected, understood, and supported by the public.
The public - taxpayers - do not feel connected to local government, do not understand local government, sense reform or change is needed, and lack faith in local government’s will and ability to work together to shape a reform/change agenda. So they allow or look to others to do it - to fill this very real leadership void.
State legislators, special interest groups, and tax opponents rush in to impose their agendas on local governments. The result: More and more local governments are being starved fiscally and relegated through regulation and constraint to progressive impotency in exercising local, grass roots control over issues important to their communities. Their capacity and options to represent and respond to the needs and desires of the people they serve erodes.
Local governments have to institute processes that engage their constituencies and curry their support for what local governments are doing for them. They must also be seen as providing value, real value, in service delivery and performance.
This nation was founded upon and has cherished a principle that, as de Tocqueville observed, distinguishes it from all other societies. It believes good government leadership that represents and serves people best starts at the grassroots (local) level. Tyranny, autocracy, and control start at the top and reign downward.
Currently, a redefinition of government relationships, with power and authority being usurped upward, is occurring by default and, in some cases, intent as the prerogatives and authority of local governments are being eroded. Federal and state governments no longer see a need to act as partners with local governments, nor are they capable of representing the real interests or needs of the people from the grassroots’ perspective engendered in local government.
This has a chilling consequence: Government becomes a policy-wonk abstraction and ceases to be the means by which people associate with each other and assert influence over their lives in the communities in which they live their daily existence. Grassroots governments see, serve, and relate to people in the first-person sense. Non-grassroots governments and agencies relate to people in the third-person sense. Citizens want to be seen and dealt with as people, not service or program abstractions framed in terms of statistical outcomes and objectives.
Two hundred-plus years after our nation’s founding, the need to frame a new national working order has become self evident. We must write and proclaim a Declaration of Interdependence. People want reform. They want change. They want local government to work.
Change is necessary if county and local governments are to sustain themselves, retain the principles of grassroots government, and proactively engage the public, legislators, and other units of government in new service-delivery and financing models upon which the future of local government and democracy will exist in the 21st century. These conclusions are reinforced by the experience and insights driving the leadership efforts initiated by county associations in Minnesota, Washington, Oregon and elsewhere. County government and local governments can no longer rely upon current models to sustain them in the future. Times, conditions, and expectations have changed. Communities are built upon and prosper through relationships of interdependence.
The institutions that serve them must also develop these partnership-based interdependent relationships among themselves, with state government, and with other community groups such as nonprofits and the private sector. This concept needs to be recognized, revisited, and reframed into the Declaration of Interdependence revitalizing, rather than eroding, local governments. Counties can and must be instrumental in drafting and implementing that declaration.
County officials have the power and ability, if they muster them, to change the course that the five trends discussed above are taking presently and redefine the appropriate roles of, and relationships among, local governments and their partnerships with state and federal governments. The first requirement is to keep our commitment to local government as the strength and hallmark of the America Democratic Experiment created for our benefit by the nation’s founders. The second requirement is for county leaders to assert themselves, in conjunction with other local government leaders, as the "refounders" who now put local government back on track by reforming it to meet changing conditions and public expectations.
Are you willing to do this? Or, will you let others control and shape your future? State and county associations are the catalysts moving county officials to act and invent the ways necessary to define the future role of county governments.
Thomas Jefferson referred to local governments as the "civic laboratories of democracy" in which the means to sustain the future of our country would be invented. County officials are among the inventors he envisioned working in those civic laboratories. They are the ones best positioned to hear and answer the wake-up call with courage, innovation, and leadership.