Author: Pete Peterson

The highly respected City Manager of Ventura, Rick Cole, employs the “vending machine/customer” metaphor in describing what has become the de facto relationship between citizens and their governing institutions. As Cole tells it, “the unspoken mindset of many of our customers is that local government is a like a vending machine. You put your money in the slot and expect to receive the goods and services you desire.”

This shift from citizen to “customer” is fairly recent, originating in the 1980s and early 90s, when governments from cities to the Feds, incorporated the new customer service ideology then used by the private sector. Instead of viewing government as something one participates in, this change produced a scenario where it was just another service provider and taxes became the cost for those services.

As we enter a supposed “post partisan” age in Washington, politicians and pundits have begun yearning for and writing about that “pre-partisan” age – usually set during the New Deal period and following – when our political parties (Republicans particularly) were populated by “moderates,” working together for the common good. Forgotten are these words from moderate icon Harry Truman: “I don’t like bipartisans. Whenever a fellow tells me he’s bipartisan, I know he’s going to vote against me.” But this revisionist effort is not only historically inaccurate; at a time when our politics have become so complex, the linear “liberal/moderate/conservative” nomenclature has proven insufficient, further dividing us.

The British journalist, Harold Evans, once commented, “For America to work, Americans have to participate. If they don’t pay attention, they’re going to get screwed.” This is, albeit crudely, true of America, but it is even more applicable to the Golden State, where Californians appear to sit in stunned silence as we witness (from a distance) the slow motion train wreck that is the state budget process. This alienation from the gears of government – both in Sacramento and locally – has been decried from many quarters, but, for the first time, a statewide report has just been released quantifying disappointingly low levels of civic participation among Californians.

Co-sponsored by the organization I lead, Common Sense California (CSC), and produced by the Congressionally chartered, National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC), the “2008 California Civic Health Index,” measures citizen engagement in several ways. NCoC had published a national version of this study last fall, but the California study, which involved a representative sample of over 400 Californians has just come off the press. The main results reveal that even with the higher levels of participation in the 2008 elections, Californians vastly underperform the rest of the country in habits like volunteering and participating in local problem solving.

In a typically humorous aside, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “citizen participation is a device whereby public officials induce non-public individuals to act in a way the public officials desire.” Of course, there are many examples of municipalities and school districts “marketing” their pre-determined positions under the guise of civic involvement, but current events and several recent conversations with local leaders in California reveal that we are moving into a unique period in municipal governance – one in which officials at the city and school district levels around the state are proactively engaging their residents in policy-making. Most of the reasons offered for this change fit into three main themes.

The first is technological. The growth of the internet as both a communications and research tool has completely altered the relationship between our political leaders and citizens. In his best-selling book, Here Comes Everybody, author, Clay Shirky, declares, “We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race. More people can communicate more things to more people than has ever been possible in the past.” Through blogs, every citizen has a bullhorn and can broadcast her issues with the local government or school system. Through social network sites like Facebook, MySpace, and others, citizens are organizing more easily than ever before. Through email campaigns, citizens can barrage local officials with hundreds (even thousands) of messages.

It was a shocking phone call. I had just finished speaking with a mortgage specialist at my credit union just over a year ago, and couldn’t believe what I was being told. My wife and I were looking at the possibility of buying our first home in West Los Angeles, and the dream that seemed so far out of reach suddenly looked realistic. “Are you sure we qualify for that much?” I asked the agent. “Yes, absolutely,” was her confident reply, “with your credit rating it should be no problem.” I had to go over the numbers several times to make sure she realized the mortgage she was offering would take nearly half of our combined salaries. The agent understood, but I still don’t.

As many know the current financial crisis finds most of its origins in the mortgage crash of the last couple years. Of course, those “Wall Street Fat Cats” share some of the blame, operating within a system that rewards risky investments (like packaged mortgages) when they pay off, but never penalize for a loss. In a recent radio interview, financial “talking head” Larry Kudlow put it this way: “A guy can make $20 million one year for making much more than that for his company, but nothing happens to him when he loses $50 million the next year.” He proposed a salary structure that would be computed over multiple year periods as a way of solving this perverse incentive scheme. This risk/reward scenario is obviously absent for most homeowners who are suffering under the weight of depressed housing prices and imminent foreclosure.