Lights Out For Free Public Goods?

Most American local governments and transit agencies are struggling to balance their finances. In addition to the economic downturn, revenues are often limited by property tax limits or political resistance to tax or fee increases. Meanwhile, costs have been ballooning. Many fixed costs, such as the price of energy, health care, and other employee benefits have expanded dramatically in recent years. The result has been a quiet crisis, which is sowing the seeds for future problems. Here in Boston, last year the MBTA only had enough funds to fix six of the agency’s 56 infrastructure projects that were ranked as most important for public safety on an internal 10-point rating scale. At the MBTA and other agencies, important upgrades and maintenance are being delayed. Similar patterns are playing out in cities and towns making hard decisions about upgrades to critical road, water, and other infrastructure.

However, the financial distress is also provoking government officials to create new forms of revenue generation. The most notable example relates to streetlights. Although desired by citizens for safety, the increasing cost of electricity has pushed several cities to deactivate them. In the face of citizen complains, several allow local residents to directly pay for the cost of their operation. Presumably the capital costs are “sunk” so the marginal cost of operation is electricity and a small maintenance fee. Concord, Massachusetts is deactivating many, and providing residents the option of sponsoring a streetlight of their choosing at the cost of $17 per light per month, or $204 a year. Colorado Springs, Colorado is making deep cuts to a range of public services, including deactivating over 30% of the city’s streetlights. (At right, crews disconnect a streetlight in the city.) As in Concord, citizens can adopt local streetlights at a cost of $100 to $240 per year, depending on size.

When I proposed this as a model for raising public funds to a group of graduate students recently, they immediately raised concerns. On the surface, the transaction does look like an example where government provides services for a fee instead of safeguarding the public interest. Will poor neighborhoods lose out? However, on closer examination I think the arrangement is more nuanced. Although the streetlight adopter provides all the funding, they by no means enjoy all the benefits. The nexus between who pays and who benefits is indirect at best. In both of the cases above, governments decided which streetlights should remain on for safety purposes (at intersections, for example). Officials in Concord admitted to adding streetlights where they may not be needed during better times. In addition, in already relatively homogeneous communities like Concord (where only 2% of families were below the poverty line in 2000), the equity effects are muted.

Policymakers could also affirmatively address such concerns, while allowing residents the freedom to fund their local streetlight. In this arrangement, the price charged would be slightly above the true cost (say 10%), and the extra money be used for lighting elsewhere in the city, or even to subsidize the purchase cost for low income households adopting their own streetlights.

Similar scheme could be used in transit. The public good funding model is in crisis, with too little revenue to support the desired level of service. One approach could be to create a discrete fund for the maintenance and improvement to each bus line and rail station. Anyone who wanted to – neighbors or otherwise – could donate to these “earmarked” accounts. However, the agency would implement a tax on the donations that would be shifted to the stations and lines receiving the least. That way institutions and riders could donate to support “their” station or line, and the system as a whole could gain access to scarce unconstrained funds.

Many bus and rail lines connect rich and poor neighborhoods, so donations for these may already have equalizing effects. This approach may be troubling because it may seem to encourage differentiated levels of service for different neighborhoods. However, the practice of paying for transit service in general is not unheard of, in Washington, D.C. sponsors of major events have made cash payments to keep the subway system open later in the evening. Private groups dedicated to augmenting public services are already well-established for parks (private conservancies), schools (PTOs), and urban neighborhoods (BIDs). Why not for transit?

I’m not sure whether such a scheme could be workable. However, in the absence of reform our current system is under stress. If we don’t like the alternatives (such as a simple fee for service), advocates for public transit and local governments should consider innovative alternatives that satisfy both the fickle voters and the public interest.

Thanks to Libby for the post title idea

What Government Data Should be Transparent?

At an event I attended in March, Massachusetts’ Chief Information Officer Ann Marguiles raised a simple yet profound issue. Although they’re committed to open data, the Commonwealth was still to figure out which datasets to post online through their new data portal mass.gov/data.

Plenty of transparency advocates would say the answer should be “all of it.” However, I think this answer is unsatisfactory for a couple reasons. First, Massachusetts faces very real resource constraints. Administrative data is managed by hundreds of legacy systems across over 100 independent agencies. Many of these systems contain personal or otherwise sensitive data that precludes throwing open the doors, and requires time to create public reporting scripts. Second, the “free it all” position overlooks the government’s role as data collector. Plenty of information is collected and released merely as a public service: environmental data, population statistics, etc. Instead of just focusing on making paper records digital, we should discuss the larger issue: what types of information should governments make available?

I think there are several basic categories of types of data government should release. Each has its own logic, and a review of the categories can emphasize the multiple purposes of transparency.

1. Data “About the World” To Inform Research and Policy Debate
For a variety of reasons, governments often collect some of the most accurate and up-to-date descriptive data about communities. This includes vast array of geographic data, school and testing data, demographic data, employment and economic statistics, and more. It should be released primarily because it enhances our ability to create good policy, or collective understanding more generally.

2. Data Released to Improve Service Delivery
Some data should be released because it improves access to government services. This includes cases where the data itself is the service (e.g., research reports), but also includes more technical forms such as transit system data, government facility locations, and service details.

3. Data to Help Hold Government Accountable
A host of budget, voting, and performance data should be released to hold government accountable. However, metrics produced internally as part of stat-type programs introduces the problem of mixed motives. Why would governments want to release the data that can be used against them? This problem can be partially avoided by separating the data from the operations within the government organization. This concern also introduces the important issue of presenting information in accurate ways, and including metadata about definitions and collection methodology.

4. Data to Change Private Decisions to Achieve Policy Goals
In their book Full Disclosure, Archon Fung, Mary Graham, and David Weil argue many transparency policies fall into the new category of “targeted transparency.” Including mortgage reporting requirements, nutrition labels, and automobile crash ratings, these efforts make information available with the deliberate intention to achieve a public objective by influencing private decisions. These policies succeed when they provide people facts they want in the “times, places, and ways that enable them to act.” They stress these aren’t limited to policies seeking economic changes, but also include campaign finance reporting laws which work through political channels. Although implemented with the intention of reaching end users, the ease of citizens to access this data ranges widely. Some data are readily available, but governments rely heavily on intermediaries to analyze and present more complex (and politically-charged) data like the toxics release inventory or mortgage lending data from banks.

5. Data Posted to Improve Access Within or Across Government
Although it’s rarely discussed, I think an important use of available data is to help break down barriers within and between government agencies. This will be an unintended use so long as our governments are separated into layers and silos. This purpose explains why so much of the data on the HUDUser website are specific to certain policies or programs: the intended users are state and local governments and nonprofits, not the general public.

What do you think? Are these the right categories, or have I omitted something important?

See also:
> Data and Decisions in Government
> Does Data Matter in Urban Policy?
> What is Government 2.0?

Open Government Reading List

I posted an open government reading list to CoLab Radio, a blog run by the MIT Community Innovators Lab. Suggestions or comments are welcome!

Who Needs ‘Centralized City Planning’? Everyone.

The always-interesting Witold Rybczynski has a provocative piece up on Slate arguing that the failure of government-led urban planning means that “in a democracy, a vision of the future city will best emerge from the marketplace.” I don’t disagree with his observation that private organizations and real estate developers have taken the lead in shaping our cities, however I don’t believe it follows that the government has no role whatsoever.

Such an argument erases the many ways governments are deeply involved in planning urban spatial structure: designing and operating streets and other infrastructure, regulating urban land markets through enforcement of property rights and zoning, shaping the location and character of development through wetlands and other environmental regulations, subsidizing and shaping the housing finance system, and establishing and enforcing building codes and standards, to just name a few.

Although Rybczynski is right the government has largely withdrawn from the business of directly engaging in architecture and urban design (and that’s a good thing), the lesson isn’t that government should (or will) withdraw completely. The stark contrasts of quality of life between well- and poorly-governed cities illustrates just how important these more subtle processes of planning remain. His argument reminds me of Peter Montgomery’s thoughtful analysis of Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Although her critique of Robert Moses and heavy-handed modernist city planning is important, Montgomery argues her celebration of the urbanity of her neighborhood omits the government processes that establish the framework of urban life (zoning, subway system, urban services, etc). In this way it can be read as a neoconservative tract, writing out the role of government. (In addition, Montgomery argues she ignores corporations, class and race divisions, and metropolitan equity).

To be fair, Rybczynski does stress the importance of government for “management” and “little plans,” and to a degree I’m just rejecting his definition of planning. But the point I hope to make is the “urban visions” created by real estate developers aren’t a pure product of the market, but derivative from government-determined transportation systems, zoning, and metropolitan spatial structure.

The more interesting and accurate conclusion to draw from the failures of modernist city planning is to consider which forms of government planning are still active and desirable. In this sense, Rybczynski’s article is a bit behind the times. The tremendous interest in high speed rail, urban transit, green building codes, the government’s role in wind power and broadband, and housing finance regulation has reminded us of the central role of government in shaping our cities. Hopefully this will be the legacy of the Obama era: that the choice between government and the market is a false dichotomy. Because the two are mutually dependent, addressing public problems (such as city planning, and yes, health care) requires attention to the design of each.

> Witold Rybczynski – Don’t Plan On It: Centralized city planning is not the answer to the problems facing America’s cities.

RSVP Now for Government 2.0 Camp New England

Registration just opened for Gov 2.0 Camp New England, a one-day unconference I’m helping to plan. It will be held Saturday, March 6th at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in Harvard Square. The others involved in planning are Yasmin Fodil (KSG), Laurel Ruma (O’Reilly Media) and Sarah Bourne and Jessica Weiss (Commonwealth of MA). Thanks to this great group we’ve already got an interesting list of attendees registered, and a number of topics percolating on the wiki. In true unconference style the sessions won’t be finalized until the day of the event, but we are encouraging collaboration on the wiki.

What is government 2.0? I attempted to define the topic earlier this month, but I’m not hung up on definitions. If you’re interested in applying Internet technologies to the business of government, we hope you’ll attend.

> See Conference Wiki or Registration

What is Government 2.0?

With last year’s Gov 2.0 Summit and the explosion of social networking service GovLoop, “government 2.0″ has become a buzzword in technology and government circles. What does government 2.0 refer to? And what exactly was the government 1.0 that we’re improving on? This article attempts to define the term and unearth some of the hidden assumptions and implications that result from applying concepts developed in Silicon Valley technology startups to the complex and age-old problem of governance.

The term government 2.0 is a deliberate reference to the term “web 2.0,” coined by publisher Tim O’Reilly to refer to interactive, social websites like Wikipedia and Facebook, which have revolutionized how people use the web. Before delving into the meaning of government 2.0, we should consider government 1.0, the government analogue to web 1.0. Although less common now, the term most often used for this initial approach to technology in government is e-government.

The Center for Technology in Government defined e-government as having three components: e-management, e-services, and e-democracy. The first two have been largely realized. Governments have adopted, to varying degrees of sophistication, internal information technology systems such as networks, databases, and intranets. As we will see, government 2.0 practices often rely on these underlying systems. Governments have long provided e-services to constituents through websites, email, or APIs, including tax payments, service requests, and digital applications and paperwork. The last component, e-democracy, has been more elusive. In the web 1.0 world, this has most often meant emailing elected officials or signing petitions on topics. These activities have grown, although in the U.S. context exist mainly outside of government websites or structures.

At a lecture hosted by the Kennedy School Government 2.0 Professional Interest Council this fall, Nicco Mele suggested we adopt Tim O’Reilly’s web 2.0 principles as a starting point for government 2.0. My essay builds on his interesting lecture.

1. Government as Platform

O’Reilly’s first principle is “the web as platform,” adjusted for our purposes to be “government as platform.” The most obvious examples of this are where government agencies provide data or host competitions to encourage creative ideas that serve the public interest. The “apps” competitions in Washington, D.C. and New York and sponsored by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, are a start to this trend. In these competitions, government provides the data, and an ecosystem of third party developers and tools helps unleash the value for the public, creating new tools, resources, and analyses.

Another example where government acts as platform is the phenomenon of participatory budgeting, pioneered by cities in Brazil and now has spread to a number of cities around the world. This approach puts budgetary decision-making, or some part of it, directly in the hands of citizens, bypassing existing representative models of decision-making. The technical dimensions of this are only now being explored, and in the Brazilian case above deliberation and voting online complemented conventional public meetings.

When it comes to service delivery, it is less clear what “government as platform” means. It may echo a broader political agenda that has sought to re-define the role of government through systematic privatization of formerly government functions, such as education or public services. After all, when governments provide educational or housing vouchers, aren’t they acting as the intermediary, or a platform? The political implications of shifting government from a service provider role to a facilitating role deserves consideration. This issue is connected to a host of issues surrounding contracting and public private partnerships. Governments may want to retain some types of service delivery if the good cannot be contracted for, or the public wants to enforce certain service standards.

2. Harnessing Collective Intelligence

The second principle is “harnessing collective intelligence.” Obama’s Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government identified collaboration as a policy goal for the federal government. In fact, Obama’s Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government Beth Noveck experimented with collaboration tools to create an open government policy last summer. In other areas there are limited successes of citizen-government collaboration. The Peer to Patent program pools expert opinion to speed the patent process. The Next Stop Design project in Salt Lake City, Utah used crowdsourcing to select the design for new bus shelters. One of the people involved in the project, Daren Brabham, is writing a PhD dissertation on the application of crowdsourcing to public problems. In Melbourne, the consulting firm Collabforge ran a wiki as a component of a conventional planning process to generate the new city plan.

Fundamentally, this trend will face several types of powerful resistance.

First, it can run counter to traditional concepts of representative democracy, where elected officials work “down” through an expert bureaucracy to create and implement policy. Archon Fung has proposed “empowered participation” can be deployed as a governance method for specific issues, such as Chicago’s school committees or neighborhood policing committees. However, creating these structures depends on modifying existing forms of governance. Existing projects have avoided this in several ways. The apps competitions aren’t about creating policy, and the government hosts can always disavow responsibility. Idea-generation contests usually reserve final decisions to designated juries. Policy-creation projects retain the final decision-making power with conventional authorities. However, pushing this further into what Beth Noveck calls “wiki government” will require addressing this tension with existing practices.

Second, a host of public problems require technical expertise to analyze or solve. The question of how to integrate technical forms of knowledge with citizens is far from resolved. The cutting edge involves putting modeling tools in the hands of citizens, who use them as “decision support tools,” but this runs counter to existing models of professional practice and the very real need for significant expertise to complete complex analyses.

Lastly classified data and national security, a major governmental function, may never be opened to the public. Interestingly, Department of Defense has been interested in the collaborative potential of internal communication across their vast bureaucracy through wikis, for example launching a wiki to improve the Army Field Manual.

3. Open Data Standards

The third principle is the use of data standards. Expanding access to government data is a major trend, with initiatives underway at the federal, state, and local level to create data portals. The concept of linked data, emerging out of the Wikipedia project, seems poised to move into government datasets. In fact, greater linking and cross-comparison among the expanding amount of available government data will create a positive pressure to ensure cross-compatibility. Within Massachusetts state government, for example, town-level data has become a standard for comparison and analysis. With the federal government in setting metadata and other standards already, this may happen slowly but some signs are already in place. Using this to evaluate government may be misleading: the primary purpose of government isn’t to create data, although it is an important one. The technological viewpoint threatens to be reductionist, viewing the government as primarily engaged in collecting and hosting data. In reality, most money and effort in government is spent on delivering healthcare, education, national defense, grant programs, and regulatory actions, where data can play a supporting role (perhaps as indicators) but is not even always a mandatory input to governance.

In Boston, the author of a recent major report studying the city’s transit agency said in November he wouldn’t ride the busy Red Line due to serious maintenance issues that threaten to cause a train derailment. At roughly the same time, data enthusiasts were demanding real-time data about bus and train arrivals at the MassDOT developers conference. When our transit systems are in real danger of catastrophic failure, shouldn’t we spend all available funds preventing disaster for the existing riders, rather than inventing technology to make use more convenient? How can these important goals be balanced properly?

4. Customer Service

The last principle discussed by Nicco is customer service, based on O’Reilly’s “rich user experience.” An emphasis on customer services is undeniable at all levels of government. Cities have launched successful 311 systems for managing citizen requests, and governments have been subscribing to the “plain language” movement make government information more understandable and usable to citizens. However, just like “government as platform,” this principle too often reduces government to a consumer-producer relationship where the government provides services just like private firms might in the marketplace. Customer service is important, but so is engaging with citizens to generate ideas and implement solutions. In exchange for expecting service, citizens have the responsibility to understand the resource and legal limitations of government.

5. Incremental Policy

O’Reilly has several additional principles: end of the software release cycle, lightweight programming models, and software above the level of the single device. Of these, I think the principle for government is the advent of more iterative forms of policy making. The field of planning has developed theories of incrementalism or “muddling through,” to reflect the real-world pace of change. The web supports both short bursts of activity but also long-term archiving, and professionals are only now learning how to use the tools to develop sustained interest and engagement through ongoing conversations and communications.

Conclusion

What do we learn from this exercise? First, I’m not sure government 2.0 is yet a new type of government, instead a collection of promising trends. The adoption of new social and technical approaches of idea creation and governance don’t resolving age-old questions about what government should be doing, and how it should approach principles of equity and justice. In fact, what could emerge is a new, technically-enabled model of in the tradition of the “developmental state,” the concept that the state itself is engaged in economic and community development. This is perhaps the most important lesson of these trends: existing government processes should be examined and where they are not working be re-invented to take advantage of the ability of technology to expand the activity of governance beyond the institutions of government.

Proposals for Reforming D.C.’s Advisory Neighborhood Commissions

Summer is always a good time to blog about things that have been bouncing around my head for a couple months, or in this case, years. The topic: reforming Washington, D.C.’s Advisory Neighborhood Commissions, or ANCs.

The ANC system was created in 1976 as part of the D.C. Home Rule Charter. In order to provide a means for local engagement and participation in public policy, the city established 37 commissions across the city, each representing a portion of a ward. (The names are the ward number followed by a letter, such as 1C, 2A, etc.) Each commission is composed of people elected from Single-Member Districts (SMDs) of approximately 2,000 people. Thus, across the city every resident is represented by exactly one ANC and one of the 270 commissioners. This map, showing the ANC and SMDs of the Mid City neighborhoods of U Street, Adams Morgan, and Columbia Heights, illustrates the dense geography of the ANC system.

I was reminded of the topic when a friend sent me this blog post about the latest ANC scandal, about an ANC commissioner and his partner apparently trying to obstruct the renewal of a liquor license for two popular restaurants. Indeed, the area of liquor licenses is often an area of intense conflict. Local residents oppose loud, noisy bars open late, and the attendees of loud, noisy bars open late aren’t a particularly organized constituency. The result is (unknown to most D.C. residents) that some neighborhoods (specifically, Dupont Circle, Georgetown, Glover Park, and Adams Morgan), have moratoriums in effect for new liquor licenses. The effect of the limited supply is the existing bars are even louder and busier, but that’s an issue for another day.

Before describing potential reforms I think it should note that most ANCs function relatively well most of the time. They are groups of citizens, serving unpaid, who have regular meetings to discuss issues of neighborhood concern. It’s important to note the critical role the ANCs create in providing a forum for neighborhood-level discussion, and to allow city government a formal way to communicate with local residents about proposed developments and policies. In fact, the intense emotion surrounding some ANC races speaks to the important role they provide. Although some throw up their hands and call for them to be abolished, I believe they play an important role and should continue to exist in some form.

Since no political system is perfect, this post serves to discuss some potential improvements. Here are too general categories of criticism.

First, too often ANCs are not representative. As a result, ANCs disproportionately represent the views of older, more affluent property owners. The views of the significant renter population in many neighborhoods is limited in many ANCs. Additionally, because of these biases the views of all may not be represented. In Adams Morgan, 1C is all white despite the huge diversity of the neighborhood. (See members today). In other neighborhoods, the patterns are different by no less troubling, with ANC commissioners not representing every facet of the community.

Second, ANCs are highly varied in their operations. The ANCs are independent, receiving only a small amount of support from city government. As a result, the quality of their websites, publications, location and openness of the meetings, and other aspects of operations varies widely, resulting in frustration and making them susceptible to manipulation.

Partly responding to these criticisms, below are four possible avenues of reform:

1. Modify the structure of Single Member Districts. The SMDs ensure every resident exactly one ANC commissioner to report to, however they suffer the same problem of any geography-based electoral system: diffuse interests are often not represented. (renters, immigrant populations, etc.) For this reason many city councils, including D.C., have at-large seats. The ANC boundaries could remain the same and all commissioners could be elected at-large within the ANC. Or, a compromise option, each ANC could have one at-large commissioner in addition to those elected from SMDs. The number of SMDs could be reduced, or the total number of commissioners in each ANC increased by one.

2. City government should enforce greater transparency and consistency in operations. The city could mandate the ANCs report their budgets, agendas, and other documents to a central repository. Access to these documents is often uneven. ANCs could be provided access to a system to allow them to set up a website through city resources. The ANC office in general takes a very hands-off approach, which is understandable given limited resources. However, a more active ANC office could standardize the operations of each without threatening their autonomy.

3. Reduce the number of ANCs or enlarge SMD sizes. Although some neighborhoods enjoy active ANCs, others are less active and successful. Each ward contains 4 to 6 of the groups, perhaps the total number should be reduced and the corresponding SMDs enlarged. Currently many neighborhood civic organizations and ANCs cover similar areas, making the ANCs slightly larger would reduce this apparent redundancy. Having fewer ANCs might also increase the quality of their participation in public policy as it would cut down on the number of meetings necessary to reach every neighborhood in the city. It would, however, dilute the power of individual votes and reduce the number of elected commissioners.

4. Term Limits for ANC Commissioners. In Shaw, and other ANCs throughout the city, ANC commissioners can be very long-served, with mixed effects. Although they can be trusted voices and amass deep historical knowledge, long-serving ANC commissioners may prevent others from getting involved. The same arguments for and against term limits for any representative seat applies. Commissioners could have term limits, something fairly long but enough to ensure some turnover, perhaps 5-10 years.

These are just some tentative proposals based on my limited knowledge and experience with the system. Additional viewpoints are welcome. ANCs should be recognized as a valuable D.C. institution that is become a critical part of the local political life. However, like any political system their structure and operations need not remain static and fixed.

Note on boundary maps: The D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics has this gallery of maps of the district boundaries. However, I think they are inferior to an older series that has been removed. For example, the new maps don’t contain labels for all the SMDs. Luckily, these maps are preserved in the Internet Archive here. For the technically inclined, KML and ESRI Shapefile versions are available from the city here.