Author: Pete Peterson

In
the history of misleading newspaper headlines, it’s not exactly "Dewey Defeats Truman", but this weekend the Los Angeles Times put itself on the
medal stand. "Voters want tax plan to go on the ballot", blares the Times’ front page headline, supposedly describing the
results of the newspaper’s poll, co-sponsored by USC’s Dornsife College. The
headline of the story’s follow-through page proclaims, "State voters favor
taxes." Catching only these declarations at your Starbuck’s newsstand, or
casually flipping through the paper looking for news on Andrew Bynum’s knee
troubles, you may conclude that those radical partisans (usually those who hew
right-of-center) in Sacramento are preventing a moderate path through the
state’s fiscal disaster.

But
is this what the survey results actually shows?

The
headlines seem to rely on responses to a trio of survey questions. The first –
"To close the remaining $14 billion of the budget deficit, which approach do
you favor?" – reveals that while 33% of respondents supported "cutting spending"
only, a full 53% back a "combination of both" cuts and tax increases.  A paltry 9% of respondents supported a "taxes
only" plan to balance the budget. The first response has indeed diminished by
11 percentage points from the answers Californians gave last November.

An earlier version of this
essay appeared in City Journal
Online.

Sometimes the local government staff I have the great pleasure of
working with say the darndest things. 
Prior to giving a speech on civic participation for a group of city and
county employees just north of San Francisco, I chatted with a county volunteer
coordinator about her job. "It sounds like fascinating work," I offered, "you
must interact with a lot of different people on a variety of projects."

Debra Bowen’s term as California’s Secretary of State started with fanfare. Upon assuming office in 2007, Bowen was greeted with the task of approving the implementation of electronic voting machines throughout the state.

Over $400 million had been invested in the initiative, but the new Secretary of State took a step back and commissioned an independent study of the machines, uncovering several problems with the new technology. 

Confronting the machines’ manufacturer and unhappy county officials, Bowen decided to restrict implementation of the new voting system prior to the state’s February 5 presidential primary. It was a gutsy call, and for it, Bowen earned plaudits from around the state, and even nationally – receiving a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award at the Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston.

The story of $800,000.00 per year city officials and $100,000.00 per year elected officials in the small Los Angeles-area city of Bell has become news from California to China. While legitimate scorn has been heaped on these 6-figure "public servants", and both the Los Angeles County DA’s office as well as the Attorney General, Jerry Brown, have ordered investigations into possible illegalities, initial reviews of how things got so bad in Bell reveal an inconvenient truth: it’s the citizens’ fault.

As the head of the LA district attorney’s Public Integrity Division, David Demerjian recently told the Los Angeles Times,?"We deal with the crime. What people consider corruption may not be a crime. I tell them, ‘Any dysfunction within the government has to be handled by you.’ The residents have a lot of power."??

It was that great chronicler of the American democratic republic, Alexis De Tocqueville, who once noted, "in a democracy, the people get the government they deserve", but reading some of the reports and opinion pieces about the current fiasco, one is left to wonder whether this long-accepted axiom is still true. Within days of the Los Angeles Time’s cover story blowing the lid off of Bell’s City Hall, defenders arose to protect the civic virtue of its residents for reasons both self-serving and condescending.

In another sign that California’s city governments are finding new and creative ways to engage their residents on excruciating budget decisions, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has been attempting to drum up participation in the city’s, Los Angeles Budget Challenge website. Utilizing the “Budget Challenge” software developed by Next Ten, the website is a facile survey-based platform that asks budget cut and revenue questions while it tracks the actual fiscal impact of your choices.

As Mayor Villaraigosa recently encouraged, “I believe community participation in the city’s budget process is essential." But is the “community” really participating in this process? After going through the site myself, there are definite “Good”, “Bad”, and “Ugly” aspects to the initiative.

Do my eyes deceive me? Did I just read the Los Angeles Times proclaiming not only that the era of big government is over in the City of Angels, but also that non-government organizations – from the business community to civic organizations – must take a stronger role in service delivery and public policy?

Yes, I think I did.

In a startling editorial, entitled “A lean, not mean, City Hall”, the Old Tan Lady concludes, “Even in the best of times, it makes sense to move some city services away from the restrictions of the City Hall payroll and instead tap into the city’s underutilized business and nonprofit resources.” So, where exactly were these calls for department consolidation and civil society empowerment during the “best of times”? I don’t remember, but one is left to wonder whether George Will took over the Times’ editorial board, when it recommends, “A successful Los Angeles will have to turn, increasingly, to that model for providing quality-of-life programs while focusing the budget on core functions such as public safety, street services and sanitation.”

Did you ever have the experience of reading about two seemingly unrelated subjects, but having the one bring the other into sharper focus? Perusing Sunday’s Los Angeles Times I came across an interesting article on page A35 about Senator Fran Pavley’s latest effort to reduce our energy consumption: SB 488. Entitled, “Keeping up with the Joneses’ electric bills”, the article describes the bill, signed by Governor Schwarzenegger, which will change the way our energy (and in the future, water) bills will look like in the near future.

SB 488 creates a series of pilot projects through the California Public Utilities Commission and California Energy Commission in which our gas and electric bills will not only tell us how much energy we used, but how this compares (generally) with our neighbors. Utilizing software from a company called OPOWER, the new statements will give consumers far better and clearer information, but, at the same time, based on a psychological concept called “norm to conform”, hopes that these comparisons will reduce our energy use through, essentially, peer pressure. As Alex Laskey, president and co-founder of OPOWER put it, “The utility bill we get in the mail is inscrutable. We thought there might be some opportunity to provide people with a better context for understanding their consumption and, in doing so, motivate people to take action.”

For folks like me who work with or for local government, the new NBC sitcom, “Parks and Recreation” has become a guilty pleasure. The show follows the humorous trials and tribulations of Parks & Rec Director, Leslie Knope (played by Amy Poehler) in the mythical town of Pawnee, Indiana. But when a recent episode focused on a local “town hall meeting” about the building of park, my mind leapt to those other so-called “town halls” being staged around the country.

In this particular installment, entitled “Canvassing”, Pawnee has received Federal Stimulus monies and is looking for “shovel-ready” projects. The city sees the conversion of a dump into a park as such an opportunity, and Leslie is directed to get public support by promoting a “Town Hall Meeting”. Though cautioned by the City Planner not “to go to the public too early” – as no architectural plans or environmental assessments have been made for the site – Leslie pushes on fearlessly, believing that no one could oppose a park. Within minutes of beginning the forum, things begin to disintegrate as residents realize that they are not going to engage in an honest dialogue about the park, but were simply invited to accede to a project pre-ordained by their government. Even though they are fictional the well-intentioned officials of Pawnee offer some great advice to our Congressional leaders who are fanning out across the country:

Let me be the first one here to issue the call to the current leader of Britain’s shadow government, David Cameron, that if his current quest for prime minister fails, we have a nice little state for him to run. I can see the bumper stickers already: “Cameron for Governor: A funny accent, but we’re used to that”. The reason I am proffering the British MP to lead the Golden State, though, is less about how he speaks than what he has been saying.

In an interesting essay he wrote recently in the Guardian newspaper, entitled “A New Politics: We need a massive, radical redistribution of power”, Cameron demonstrates a grasp of two of the major policy challenges facing this state: devolving decision-making power to regions and cities, and calling on civil society to play a stronger role in governance. Of course, Cameron is responding to the current expense scandal that is racking parliamentarians from all parties, but it is not a recent epiphany – he has been pushing his “New Federalism” (to borrow a slogan from a past California governor) for years.