Putting the Public Back into Public Administration
By Deborah Witte and Bob Mihalek
Most public administrators think their job is to manage an institution. But, in fact, they're responsible for building community.
That's what one administrator, Jim Ley, who oversees a county government in Florida, said during one of our group interviews for the "Readers' Forum." It's a striking statement because it gets at the heart of the disconnect often found between administrators and the public. If administrators are managing an institution, it becomes easy to view people as the clients to be served. But if they are building community, then citizens are partners critical to their success.
Ley, a 33-year veteran, acknowledged his role in perpetuating the customer-service model found in many public agencies. The problem is there's "no reward for risk," he said, so public officials simply do what they've always done, and that means continuing to focus on service. "Eighty percent of the people in this profession are maintenance managers," Ley said.
The administrative profession, he said, does not celebrate those managers and agency directors who have embraced public engagement and made it a part of their governments' regular routines.
Indeed, our interviews with several current and former government administrators and school superintendents made it clear that the customer-service model has become pervasive in government agencies at least in part because administrators have become complacent. Ley, for instance, wasn't the only one in the "Readers' Forum" interviews who described the timidity found in the administrative profession.
Charlie Irish, a retired school superintendent from Ohio, said there's a "great fear on the part of school officials to act differently from how they have always acted," a statement that could have easily been made by a city manager or county administrator. Somehow public officials need to be inspired to take risks, they need something that will "take that fear away," Irish said.
Ley is trying to get officials in his county government to act differently. For the last few years, he said, the government has been trying to "break through the old model" that sees citizens as customers and take a new view that sees citizens as stakeholders. He said this type of change is difficult to implement because the boards that oversee public governments approach problems differently than citizens might and often prefer to satisfy people rather than engage them about problems.
"Throwing money at [a problem] makes the board feel good," Ley said. "It's quick, easy, and gets good editorial responses." He has found that his board wants to create clients because "it's easier to give than to engage." While this may be a quick and expedient method, he said, "it doesn't solve a thing."
Kim Sebaly, an associate professor in the Department of Education Foundations and Special Services at Kent State University in Ohio, wondered whether citizens really want something other than the customer-service model. After all, he said, it's comfortable for citizens as well as for public officials. He suggested that we need to know more about the other side of the coin we call bureaucracy; we need to know more about citizens who don't engage. Are citizens simply lazy?
Price of Being Too Good
The customer-service model allows professional government staff to play the role of experts responsible for solving their communities' problems, crises, and challenges. Experts often respond to problems by saying, "this is our job," we will tackle this issue because that's the "way the system works," Irish said. This attitude creates a disconnect between professional administrators and citizens, who are basically told, there's nothing for you to do here.
Irish compared this mentality to the complaint that Washington, D.C.'s "Inside-the-Beltway" culture is disconnected from the rest of the country. Beltway mentalities also have emerged in communities around the country, he said, leaving citizens outside looking in and feeling powerless to make decisions in their community because, they believe, that authority belongs to those on the inside.
Mike Robinette, a former director of the Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission in Dayton, Ohio, said experts either do have all the answers or think that's the case, so they see citizens as "roadblocks."
He told the story of an attempt to regionalize the 911 emergency call service in a large Ohio county. Everything he knows professionally as an administrator told him that this move would be good for all the communities involved: it would save each municipality money and manpower and allow them to pool their resources and improve services.
From the perspective of public officials, there seemed to be no downsides to the plan. But when the plan was presented to the public, they balked. While the public understood all the benefits of a regional 911 plan, they valued their security more and were concerned that a regional emergency system would treat them as a number while being less effective. They were concerned that what they saw as a large bureaucratic system would actually make them less secure, so they pushed back. To his colleagues' way of thinking, the citizens had prevented progress.
The complacency that one interview participant described as plaguing the administration profession could be blamed on the fact that the profession itself is full of skilled, well-meaning administrators. They have become experts in running agencies, municipalities, and counties. Administrators "have gotten too good at what we do," Ley, the county administrator in Florida, said. "We have gotten too good at solving problems, and we have forgotten about engaging citizens."
Leaving Citizens Out
Listening to the public and getting the public's input is often put off because of time constraints, admitted John Gordon, a former school superintendent who now works for the Arizona School Boards Association. Similarly, several people who participated in our interviews described how local boards of education often fail to hear the voices of their citizens. They find it difficult to function in a deliberative manner because they are sometimes factionalized. Often, they only want citizens to rubber-stamp their decisions.
Jule Zimet, an active National Issues Forums participant in El Paso, Texas, said that experts don't purposefully try to exclude citizens, but in some decisions, citizens don't feel qualified to participate. "By accident we've created a citizenry that doesn't know they're wanted, they're qualified, and that their values are all they need" to get involved, she said.
Adding to the many pressures already facing administrators are special interests that work hard to rally around pet issues. Ley said issue advocates have taken over the role experts often play on issues that concern them. When public officials open up a process for citizen participation, he said, issue advocates can often dominate that space, squeezing out the citizens. Not surprisingly, public administrators find it easier to relate to special interests. At the same time, public officials are drawn to advocates, which also leaves citizens behind.
Ley recalled one effort his administration launched in which citizens were invited to participate in small-group conversations around the county. These weren't your typical conversations because they focused on involving people who were not considered the "usual suspects." However, once a local arts organization got a handle on the engagement process the county was using, the arts organization's members attempted to take over the process "because their agenda wasn't showing up" in the conversations.
Robinette, the former regional planning director in Dayton, presented this problem in simple terms: public officials don't know what strategies they should use to engage citizens, so they approach advocates.
"Breaking Chains and Locks"
If administrators are going to embrace citizen participation as part of their work, said Sebaly, the Kent State professor, they need to learn to make a "mental shift." He suggested that public agencies are really "expert agencies." He wondered, how do you turn expert-based agencies into citizen-based agencies?
Making such a monumental change in most government bureaucracies is bound to be difficult. Robinette reflected that there was no institutional structure to facilitate a process that gets two sides talking about an issue. There is no way to begin to craft a different relationship between agent and citizen, where each could begin to understand what the other holds valuable. More than simply a mental shift, he saw the need for structural change. He asked himself, how far could he go, as an expert, in disengaging from the accepted procedures of his profession? Where could his roles as bureaucrat and citizen merge?
As Ley said, you have to "break chains and locks" and create discomfort in an organization to change it.
But the only way there's going to be a "real dynamic structural change" within institutions, Robinette said, is through grassroots citizen involvement. Those who run public institutions protect both the status quo and themselves, so it's up to citizens to demand change. Unless citizens "wake up and get engaged," he said, "we're going to struggle to go forward."
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