Puppies, Ponies and Trojan Horses

[XLFD]

Free puppies sound great.  Free ponies sound even better.  Until you realize that the new free things come with a lot of hidden expenses, and that you were barely getting by before.  Get too many of these free puppies and ponies, you're bound to wind up in the doghouse yourself in a far from stable situation.  Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn looked at the problems with city hall taking on too many free puppies this week in a piece entitled:  "How we crowd out the best local investments".   The article follows, slightly condensed, with commentary and analysis afterwards as to how it applies to Ludington.

Last week it was announced that my hometown of Brainerd was chosen for the location of a new children’s museum being built in the area. Your reaction might be to congratulate me – after all, we were the ones chosen out of supposedly nine other potential locations in a five-county area – but I’m not inclined to find this something to celebrate. It has all the hallmarks of: Congratulations, you just won a new puppy!

The question I want to focus on today isn’t whether or not we should want a children’s museum – I love children, love museums, and also love puppies – but just how my city council found themselves wrestling with the notion of just what it meant to win a puppy. How did we get so lucky?

Part of answering that question is to understand that it wasn’t something we sought. Last fall, the city adopted a new comprehensive plan. I was on the steering committee for the plan, and while I’m not going to stand up and promote the document as a vision representative of the community (I didn’t vote for it), there is one thing I can say for sure: It doesn’t mention a children’s museum anywhere.

In fact, I made nearly every meeting where the plan was discussed. I reviewed the public comments from multiple listening sessions. I sat through public hearings in my role as a planning commission member. At no point through any of this was a children’s museum, or any facility remotely resembling a children’s museum, ever discussed. Not once.

So, on the way to answering the question “how did we get so lucky,” I’m going to put forth an observation: A children’s museum is not a priority for the residents, businesses, or property owners of Brainerd.

It might be a priority now that we know we can have a puppy, but before that option was dangled in front of us, as we were assessing our own challenges and the many opportunities we have, the idea of a regional amenity serving families with young children was never put forth.

That’s because we were all too busy focusing on more pressing needs. Housing is a major issue, both the quality and the ability of people to afford a home. Basic economic development, job creation, and workforce development were things investigated at length. And the often cited – but never really addressed – need for neighborhood revitalization throughout the city’s struggling neighborhoods.

Essentially, city residents want to be able to work at a job that pays enough to cover their basic needs living in a neighborhood that might not be wealthy, but is at least improving in overall prosperity. That seems reasonable, and not a very high bar, but despite nearly every council member campaigning on such a platform, action remains elusive.

We’re too busy dealing with all these free puppies we’ve won.

And that’s the way it’s worked in recent decades. We can’t keep the streetlights on overnight. We can’t keep our fire department staffed the way we would like. We must defer maintenance, not fully fund our parks, struggle with basic upkeep on our public buildings, and experience annual tax increases that never seem to stabilize our budget. Our neighborhoods are desperate for basic maintenance – paint crosswalks, fix broken sidewalks, plant street trees – yet we continually find ourselves sucked into these kinds of “big” projects.

Brainerd recently finished a financial fiasco of a project to extend sewer and water services out to the airport on the far reaches of town. The project never needed to happen – the problem it “solved” could have been addressed with a couple hundred thousand dollars of storage capacity instead of $13+ million in utilities – but the money was there and so the project took on a life of its own.  Ultimately the city got in too deep to back out so and now rate payers spend decades paying for millions in cost overruns. Money better spent elsewhere.

And if there is a little local match, so be it. We’re already into this project for $20,000, plus whatever staff time and resources we’ve spent on it. That’s the ante to play this game.

I describe this situation in Chapter 5 of my book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity.

"Local governments are bribed to take on unpayable long-term liabilities so that the national economy can experience growth today. In the name of efficiency, they are stripped of nearly all means of ingenuity. Our cities orient up the government food chain, allowing themselves to be positioned at the bottom, grateful for the crumbs they receive. This is backward.
To build Strong Towns, local leaders will need to take steps to opt out of these systems. This is difficult because it’s the water we all swim in, and the current gets stronger as things become more desperate. Still, if we are to truly serve the people in our communities…. we need a new path to prosperity."

To “opt out of these systems” requires an intentional reorientation of local government.

Fortunately, it’s one that aligns with how nearly all local leaders view themselves best serving their constituents: by tending obsessively to their needs.

The Strong Towns approach to public investment is part of an overall strategy of shifting our local energy from chasing the next project to building wealth. From building new to making better use of what we’ve already built. From raw growth to productivity as a more sophisticated measurement of success.

Public investment in a Strong Town never begins with the puppy. We should never start with the state or federal program, the priorities of the consultant or developer, or the dream of the front row.

If we use a Strong Towns approach to build momentum in our neighborhoods, we’ll also find the confidence to say “no” to those who are trying to give us a free puppy that we know is never free.

And if you find that habitually your community can’t say no to free puppies, then stop walking past the pet shop. Direct your staff and your cadre of front row advisors to stop bringing you free puppies and instead focus on the things you have already prioritized. Better yet, direct them to go out and humbly observe where people are struggling to use the city as it has been built.

ANALYSIS:  Charles Marohn came to our town for a full day in January to speak of his approach to solving city problems to our local community leaders.  Our City Manager, Mitch Foster has been actively touting Marohn's Four Step Approach which runs counter to the orthodoxy that has been in place in Ludington for at least the last two decades.  But can he convincingly sell the new policy with one hand while with the other hand signing paperwork sinking nearly $2.5 million into somewhat bizarre cosmetic improvements to the James Street Plaza, an area that already is rather flexible in serving as a city center?

Maybe the purebred puppy is 90% off, but is the old dog already there really that bad?  Then there's the free pony courtesy of the DNR down at the west end of Ludington Avenue.  We spent some big bucks to put a fancy corral where premium farmland was before and for the second year in a row, we will not see the pony being used, just costly maintained.  

Then there's the Trojan horse of the splash pad being created in Copeyon Park.  We had a 'private' committee and a couple of standing committees making a lot of decisions out of the public eye about this future drain on the city's resources.  The public was able to see it approved at council without knowing anything about it until it got there several years in the making.  Like the other projects, our leaders tell us that this will be funded and maintained solely by donations while waving one hand and writing grant applications with the other hand.  

The Greeks led by Indebticus come out of the gift horse shortly thereafter:  somebody needs to pay for the project shortfall since the passport grant failed (including a $150,000 concrete fishing pier that hasn't been well conceived or received), somebody needs to cover water & sewer costs, somebody needs to pay for the $400,000 upgrade planned for the park's restroom facilities (an upgrade not contemplated before the introduction of the stealth splash pad). 

"Local governments are bribed to take on unpayable long-term liabilities so that the national economy can experience growth today."

[Du Wright]

A Trojan Horse can be considered a good thing, if you are Greek.

If the Strong Towns concept of Charles Mahrohn is pushed too hard, it might be rejected by the makers and shakers (front row people) because his plan seems to take budget into account, as a strong part of a strong town.  Not doing these big projects and counting the cost of all other things.  The shakers could be looking for a new city manager in a couple of years if he pushes too hard.  The shakers dont want to have budget be considered in their plans.  Their Daddy (the taxpayer) has deep and endless pockets.

[stump]

  What gets me is the total waist  of money. Lets take the NEW public bath room proposal. What could be up dated? It will be built with concrete blocks with a roof. Have doors and stalls inside with toilets. All the same as we have now. From when my dad put in the first toilet in our farm house probably 65 years ago , toilets and sinks still look and work the same. So , why is a update needed?  Just to say we have a NEW bathroom ? Paint the walls with a $25 gallon of paint and it'll look the same as new.   Spend, spend, spend. Tax .Tax , Tax.  Someone is going to pay and that someone is YOU.