Governing Magazine/September 1997

FEATURE: FRAGMENTED CITIES

NOBODY IN CHARGE

When everyone seems to be running a city, there's a good chance it
isn't being run at all.

By Rob Gurwitt

In the end, Larry Brown had little choice but to resign as city
manager of Kansas City, Missouri. By late June, when he finally agreed
to give up his office atop the city's oddly graceful, Depression-era
skyscraper of a city hall, Brown was a man beset, openly mistrusted by
the council and sniped at by employees. His imminent departure was a
universal assumption within local political circles.
 There are those in Kansas City who, in hindsight, trace Brown's
downfall to his 1994 arrest for drunken driving, which they contend
cost him the respect of city staff. Others point to his decisions last
year to give his top aides large pay raises and to send them to
California's Napa Valley for taxpayer-supported training sessions--
steps that turned into public-relations nightmares. By April, when a
city council majority lambasted his proposed budget and yanked funding
from his efforts to transform city government, it was just a matter of
time.
 But the truth is that the seeds of Brown's departure were sown at the
beginning, at the very moment he was hired. Never short on ambition,
Brown wanted nothing less than to assert the authority of the city
manager to run Kansas City government as he saw fit. Instead,
encountering more and more resistance the harder he tried, Brown
learned a painful and expensive lesson: Nobody runs Kansas City. And a
complex array of political forces is organized to keep it that way.
 Power rests everywhere within the community--in the corporate
boardrooms, with neighborhood developers and community organizations,
within city agencies, on appointed boards, with the city council, in
the hands of the mayor and in the office of the city manager. Building
consensus on any issue is a time-consuming, frustrating process, and
it is made harder by a structure that deliberately impedes the clear-
eyed exertion of political will. Yet, as Brown discovered, so many
people have a vested interest in the status quo that--for a city
manager, at least--trying to change this state of affairs may be
impossible.
 This is a schizophrenic moment in the political history of America's
big cities. For many of them, even some that were once branded
ungovernable, the 1990s have brought a restoration of managerial
competence, symbolized by New York's attack on crime, Cleveland's
downtown revival, Chicago's school reform crusade and Philadelphia's
return from the brink of bankruptcy.
 All of the surging cities of this decade have had leaders with the
ability to articulate and then enforce their priorities. These may be,
as in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, strong mayors in both the
structural and political sense. Or they may be, as in Phoenix, a
dynamic and widely admired city manager working with an elected
council. But, in every case, there is a palpable sense that someone is
in charge, setting an agenda about what is needed to make them
attractive places to live and work.
 Meanwhile, however, another set of cities, symbolized by Kansas City,
Cincinnati, Miami and Dallas, among others, is stuck at the opposite
end of the scale--mired in bickering, divided responsibility and long-
standing political confusion. Nobody is in charge in these places. And
it seems to take forever for anything to get done.
 For the most part, these cities never fell quite as far as the
Philadelphias and Clevelands of America. As a result, they have not
been forced to look as hard at remaking local government. But, in the
end, they will have no alternative. In the coming years, the struggle
for urban viability will be hard enough, even under the best of
circumstances. The fragmented cities will be at a profound
disadvantage.
 And they may finally be realizing it. In Kansas City, in the wake of
Brown's resignation, popular but constitutionally weak Mayor Emanuel
Cleaver has begun talking about the need to give more authority to his
successors. In Cincinnati, there have been nine attempts during the
past decade to give the mayor more control, and another--with the
quiet backing of the current mayor, Roxane Qualls, and the city's
business leadership--is in the works. Dallas, shocked by a decade of
political incivility following generations of close-knit cooperation,
is openly debating where it went wrong, and what sort of governmental
structure it might need to set things right. The forces backing change
in all of these cities seem to agree that, although there may be no
one formula for success in urban government, there is a recipe for
failure, and it is the absence of leadership.

At first glance, it might seem odd to include Kansas City anywhere
near the top of the list of troubled American cities. The regional
economy is doing just fine, with unemployment in the metropolitan area
below 4 percent. The city itself has seen new employers--Gateway 2000
and Harley-Davidson among them--set up plants in town. According to
U.S. Census Bureau estimates, Kansas City actually has grown in
population since 1990--although pretty much all of that growth has
been in the long-annexed rural and suburb-like reaches north of the
Missouri River.
 Mayor Cleaver has embarked on a revitalization effort that includes
creating a jazz hall of fame and a Negro Leagues baseball museum.
Several of the city's leading businessmen are hoping to launch a huge
hotel and entertainment complex on a dormant parcel of downtown land.
And a committee that draws from both sides of the Missouri-Kansas
state line is overseeing the resurrection of Kansas City's famous
beaux arts Union Station as a hands-on science center.
 Still, beneath the glowing press releases, there is trouble. Kansas
City faces the same disquieting trends as other depressed central
cities. "Projections show an increase in the number of jobs in the
core, but as a share of the region's jobs, Kansas City's will either
not increase or will decline," says David Warm, of the Mid-America
regional council. "Most of the jobs, wealth and people are locating at
the edges of the region. So there is the same clear and continuing
pattern of decline in the center, disinvestment in the inner-tier
suburbs and rapid growth on the edges that you see elsewhere." In the
competition with its suburbs, in other words, Kansas City is, at the
moment, losing.
 On the day he announced Larry Brown's resignation, Emanuel Cleaver
made it clear that there is another competition that weighs on him as
well. Pressed by reporters about what he thought of a governmental
structure that, in essence, makes him merely the most prominent member
of the city council, Cleaver could not hold back his frustration.
"Kansas City is now a big-league city," he said, "and when the mayor
of the city sits around with the president and CEO of a major
corporation trying to get them to relocate here, the mayor is at a
disadvantage, because other mayors can cut the deal at the table. We
are at a disadvantage in many instances when we are out competing."
 The fact is, running Kansas City is mostly a matter of indirection.
Mayors and city managers have to deal not only with a set of
department heads who historically have had great room to pursue their
own priorities, but also with circumstances that couldn't be better
designed to water down their authority. The police are funded by the
city but controlled by a state board. Libraries are under a separate
board. Economic development, which is much of what Cleaver has been
about in recent years, is under the control of the Economic
Development Corp., which has become a sort of independent deal-maker
for the city. The schools have been answerable to a federal court for
20 years, foster care services are in court hands as well, and the
housing authority is in receivership. No one who wants to get things
done in Kansas City, in other words, can do it directly.
 As you might expect, many Kansas Citians have grown to like this
state of affairs--it leaves each player within city government, along
with those who try to affect it, with a fair degree of autonomy. It
also means, though, that when their agendas differ, the city looks
rudderless. "When communities have well-organized voices or a broad
community ethic that's widely shared," says the head of one
organization in Kansas City, "when there's a strong leader with clear
ideas and directions, when there are well-organized plans and a well-
organized and directed civic leadership that pursues those plans,
that's when you get a healthy politics of ideas. Kansas City is not
there at the moment. The city is up for grabs."
 In the year or so leading up to Brown's forced resignation, there
were at least three distinct sets of priorities being laid out in city
hall. Cleaver's had to do with bringing in new economic development,
redeveloping Kansas City's historically black neighborhoods and
tackling the issue of race relations head-on. The city council was
focusing on how to pay for the city's infrastructure needs and shoring
up basic services to residents. With all this going on, Brown was
maneuvering to redesign the entire process by which Kansas City
government worked. In retrospect, there was no way he could have
succeeded.
 In his defense, Brown was doing pretty much what the council had said
it wanted when it hired him, back in 1993. Its members had asked for
someone to bring Kansas City government in line with the movement
toward cost containment and quality service that other cities had been
pursuing. "We wanted someone to take charge and run the city wisely
and economically and efficiently," says George Blackwood, the
council's mayor pro tem. "We said, `We're out of control. Get good
people, get the job done, let's create a lean, mean fighting machine.'
"
 Brown's response was a process he called "transformation." Part of
his goal was to introduce the notions of customer service and
efficient, responsive bureaucracy that have taken hold elsewhere. But
he also set out to break down the barriers that, over the decades, had
grown up among departments that had become accustomed to being treated
as sovereign entities. Most important, Brown wanted to reestablish the
city manager's authority over the day-to-day running of the
organization. Over the years, not only had department heads grown
accustomed to following their own lead but city council members also
had grown accustomed to making requests directly of department heads
and even mid-level managers. The result was a city organization in
which the right and left hands often didn't keep track of each other.
 Brown made every effort to deal with this problem. As it turned out,
though, few of his efforts sat well with others in city hall. Although
some departments and lower-level managers responded to the service-
oriented freedom Brown offered them--the city's fire department being,
perhaps, the leading example--others resisted; they found sympathetic
ears on a council that already saw Brown cutting off its direct
pipeline to city departments.
 The council was especially vulnerable on this point because there was
no real leadership pushing it to embrace the principles that
"transformation" was supposed to instill; indeed, there was no
particular leadership pushing it in any direction at all. A set of
scandals during the past few years--four council members have been
indicted on corruption charges--has created an ominous level of
mistrust, turning the council into a set of 12 independent players who
may come together around specific priorities--fixing the city's
decaying infrastructure or backing neighborhood services--but
otherwise prefer to be seen as individuals, not as a collective
municipal leadership. "It is not an individual responsibility of each
member to be responsible for the next," says Ken Bacchus, whose six-
year tenure makes him one of the council's senior members.
 Given those circumstances, council members' political legitimacy has
rested, in large part, on their day-to-day involvement in city
government; it was Brown's difficulty grasping the importance they
placed on this that, more than anything else, undermined him. The
budget he submitted to the city council this spring is a good example:
It was essentially all text, a budget designed to get the council to
think about policy without worrying about particular line-items. As a
matter of theory, this should be all a council needs from a city
manager in order to pass judgment on the general direction city
government is headed. But as Cleaver points out, "Politics 101 is,
Don't call the politicians stupid. His statement, as I interpreted it,
was, `You guys set policy, I'll worry about the rest.' Well, in 1997,
politicians don't fade into the woodwork. That ain't going to happen
anymore." When it became clear that Brown had no intention of setting
aside his priorities in favor of the council's and the mayor's--that,
indeed, there was no way to reconcile them--he left.

There are those in Cincinnati, too, who have become increasingly
impatient with a political process that treats issues crucial to the
city as though they were mice let loose among a swarm of cats. "I
think that the city of Cincinnati is an essentially scandal-free,
well-managed city with a work force of good, dedicated people," says
Nick Vehr, a recently retired Republican councilman. "But...things get
mired down in endless political debate and a kind of bureaucratic
morass that pounds them to a pulp before they can be implemented."
 Cincinnati, too, is a council-manager city. Unlike Kansas City,
however, its mayor isn't even elected separately. Instead, he or she
is simply the council member who gets the most votes in the general
election. Because no one actually runs for mayor, and because the
mayor is no more powerful than any other member of the city council,
there is very little political accountability in Cincinnati. The
result, says Zane Miller, a political scientist at the University of
Cincinnati, is an "absence of coherent leadership."
 "The city bounces from problem to problem," agrees John Fox, editor
of City Beat, Cincinnati's local alternative weekly newspaper. "The
bottom line is city government becomes a reactionary body rather than
a proactive body that says, `Here's our vision for where we're going
in the next 10 years.' "
 This is not necessarily for lack of trying. For two years, in fact,
administrative staff worked with the council to develop a strategic
planning process that was to produce a clear set of priorities on
which the city manager could focus. In a series of sessions with the
council, however, city hall's vision of the future became muddier, not
clearer. Rather than establish a handful of priorities with a few
"action steps" attached to each, council members decided they had
dozens of priorities. The "strategic plan" sank under its own weight.
 Visiting Cincinnati, one does not get a sense of a city at loose
ends. Its long-neglected riverfront is about to become a new focus for
city life as two sports stadiums--one for the football Bengals, the
other for the baseball Reds--are built there. Main Street, which was
pretty much derelict 10 years ago, now has become a restaurant- and
bar-filled entertainment zone at night. Parts of the neighborhood
known as Over-the-Rhine, which was essentially a ghetto sitting on
downtown's heels, are rapidly being gentrified. A new department store
is going up on a prime downtown parking lot that many had despaired
would never be replaced. "If you look ahead 10 years," says Al
Tuchfarber, director of the Institute for Policy Research at the
University of Cincinnati, "you're going to see a very revitalized
downtown and riverfront."
 Yet, the good things that are taking place in Cincinnati are taking
place more in spite of city government than because of it. The
revitalization of Over-the-Rhine might have materialized years ago had
the city not set up barriers to redevelopment there. The new
department store on Fountain Square West took a decade to materialize
because the council spent most of that decade squabbling over just how
the land ought to be used.
 Perhaps the most troubling example of the city's problems, though, is
the stadium deal. Given a deadline by the Bengals to come up with a
plan that would keep the team in town, the city--after much hair-
tearing--essentially punted. The financing deal was finally put
together by surrounding Hamilton County, which, with three county
board members, can move much more quickly. In exchange, the county
will own the stadiums. "It wasn't until we shifted authority to the
county," Nick Vehr says, "that the sports franchises seriously began
negotiating to stay in this town.... I think there's a general
perception in this community that the ability to manage the future no
longer resides, as it did in the past, in city hall."

There are, to be sure, plenty of people in both Kansas City and
Cincinnati who believe that their cities are better off precisely
because power is so fragmented. "The successful person negotiates
coalitions and puts them together on a given issue," says one former
Kansas City government staffer, "and that's not a bad thing. With
coalition-building, there's some kind of consensus reached. Maybe it
takes longer and demands more skill, but maybe the stuff that results
is more durable."
 It can also, of course, be argued that forceful leadership is hardly
a panacea for American cities. If it were, neither Detroit under
Coleman Young nor Washington, D.C., under Marion Barry would have
fallen into the disrepair both cities now struggle against.
 But for a much larger number of cities these days, it is fractured
leadership--not abused personal power--that constitutes the main
political problem. In Miami, for instance, the fiscal insolvency and
corrupt practices of its former city manager and finance director
flourished in no small part because each major player in city
government was content to go his own way--the manager pursued his own
political goals, each city commissioner was wrapped up in his own
pursuits, the finance director was given a free hand, and the business
community and many onlookers were convinced that the city itself did
not matter. There was, simply put, no one in charge who cared about
Miami as a whole.
 Dallas, meanwhile, has been an exhibit of fragmentation for the
entire decade of the 1990s. Once, it was a prime example of the
opposite: a place where decisive mayors and city managers worked
quietly and efficiently with a single-minded business establishment to
set clear community priorities. Thirty years ago, when Mayor Erik
Jonsson felt he needed a blueprint for long-term urban planning, he
simply rounded up 80 civic leaders, spirited them off to a country
club for a weekend and returned with a short list of major goals for
the 1970s--most of which were implemented.
 But that Dallas power structure eventually succumbed to its own
weaknesses. It was so tightly controlled, so exclusive and so
overwhelmingly affluent, male and white that it bred long-standing
resentments among the groups in town that felt left out of its
processes. When the establishment expired, it set in motion a long
period of chaos during which the newly enfranchised elements jostled
for power without paying much attention to the interests of the
community as a whole.
 In 1991, under court pressure, Dallas switched from a council whose
members were elected at-large to a district-by-district system. Ever
since then, the council's deliberations have been one long bout of
factionalism--ethnic, ideological and geographic. Presided over by a
mayor with little formal power, the council has drifted from one
crisis to another.
 Recently, some of the tumult on the council has quieted down amid
Mayor Ron Kirk's efforts to build a consensus around long-term plans
for the city. At the same time, however, the school board threatens to
explode under the pressure of racial feuding--for the most part
between African-Americans and Hispanics--and much of the rest of the
city's political leadership is finding it difficult to avoid being
dragged into that battle.
 It may be too much to say that all fragmented cities are alike these
days, but all of them seem to be a little like Dallas, Cincinnati and
Kansas City: so enmeshed in rivalries and personal politics that they
are having trouble living up to their potential--or even seeing
clearly just what that potential might be. If they are to remain
competitive when it comes to attracting businesses, rebuilding the
public schools and drawing middle-class residents back to their
neighborhoods, they somehow need to rely upon leaders who can help
them coalesce around coherent visions of where they're going. Such
people clearly exist in all of these cities; the only question is
whether they will be allowed to emerge.
  "Leaders shackled by unreasonable restrictions are forced to engage
in compromises and deal-making that slows forward movement and
inhibits development of wide-ranging vision," the editor of the Kansas
City Star's editorial page wrote not long ago, in a commentary that
just as easily could have been applied to Cincinnati and any number of
other places casting about for direction these days. "The way Kansas
City's government now works," Rich Hood wrote, "there are so many
safeguards built in to prevent dramatic leadership (or risky gambles
that might not pay off) that we too frequently witness government by
paralysis."


CORRECTION (published October 1997)
In September's cover story on fragmented power in local government,
the first name of Cincinnati Mayor Roxanne Qualls was misspelled.

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