Public Policy and Governance – Page 324

Salience

Wednesday, Emmis Communication’s chief Jeff Smulyan came in to address my class in “Media and Public Affairs.” It was a wide-ranging discussion, focusing primarily upon current business challenges posed by changing technologies, consolidation of ownership and the like, as well as the contemporary policy environment. When a student asked why it was so difficult to pass laws even when those measures were favored by significant majorities of the electorate, Jeff’s response pointed to the importance of salience.

Salience simply means the importance we attach to a particular issue. We have an excellent example of its importance here in Indiana; when Governor Daniels convened the Kernan-Shepard Commission to study government reorganization, one of its recommendations was elimination/consolodation of Indiana’s 1008 townships. Townships are an artifact of the days when travel to the county seat (by horseback) took half a day. Their responsibilities have steadily shrunk, and today they do little but run (some) fire departments and administer (with documented inefficiency) poor relief. Poll after poll confirmed that most Indiana voters agreed with the Commission. Abolishing townships should have been a no-brainer–except we still haven’t managed to do so.

Why? Salience, that’s why.

Although a large majority of voters agreed that townships should go–that they wasted money better used elsewhere–it was a rare individual for whom this was a burning issue. For the Township Trustees and members of their Advisory Boards, however, it was issue #1. Eliminating townships would eliminate the livliehoods of the Trustees (and the relatives many of them employ). It would eliminate the inflated fees paid to many Advisory Board members for attending three or four meetings a year. They focused like lasers on lawmakers, marshalling their forces, bringing in people to testify, hiring lobbyists and calling in political favors. For them, the issue was salient. And we still have townships.

In Washington, this same scenario plays over and over. Most of us disapprove of the special tax breaks that benefit Big Oil, but how many of us have written or called our Senators or Representatives about it? Spent money lobbying for repeal? Very few. But Big Oil (and Big Pharma and Big Banking, etc.) certainly have. It’s not unexpected that people will rally to defend their financial interests, but when those with lots of resources focus those resources on derailing a proposed bill, the likely result is that the bill will be derailed.

On those rare occasions when one of these issues becomes salient to a sizable number of voters, it’s possible to win these contests. The issue is: how do you make “good government” salient?

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Easy Answers are Rarely the Right Answers

The various contenders for the Republican Presidential nomination have been falling all over themselves to attack the Environmental Protection Agency, joining their congressional colleagues in a race to see who can call loudest for abolition of the agency. According to these critics, the continued existence of the EPA is a leading reason job creation has lagged the recovery.

It’s so nice to have a simple explanation for our current economic lethargy. Get rid of the tree-huggers! Everyone knows that scientists just made up stuff like global climate change anyway. (What no one seems to know is why they would do that, but let’s not think too deeply or we might get headaches…)

Let’s assume the EPA is really enforcing policies that hinder job growth. I’ve seen no evidence to that effect, but let’s play “what if.” Does that mean we should NOT protect the environment? Wouldn’t it make more sense to evaluate EPA regulations, to do a cost-benefit analysis to see how we can continue to protect the earth while taking care not to unduly hinder the economy? Of course, that sort of analysis is complex. It requires analytical skills. And it doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker.

If we don’t emerge pretty soon from this era of stupidity, we’re doomed.

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TMI

I have been working on an upcoming speech on government accountability, and I have been mulling over a seeming contradiction. In our public management courses here at SPEA, we stress the importance of transparency–and the reason for the First Amendment’s specific grant of freedom to the press/media. It stands to reason that journalists need to watch government officials and activities, investigate possible wrongdoing, and then report what they find to the voters. Journalists–whatever their warts–were considered essential to accountability, because they supplied the information needed to keep citizens informed and government agencies accountable.

Today, we have more information available than ever before–and less accountability. Why? I think it is because we have lost what Clay Shirkey has called “the journalism of verification.” Yes, there are mountains, oceans of information available to us. But we have no uniformly trusted source to verify its accuracy. Between the journalism of distraction–who slept with whom, how to groom your pet, who celebrity X is dating now, etc. etc.–and ‘news’ that is really just political propaganda, the sheer volume of sources competing for our eyes and ears has drowned out the news that is both verified and necessary to our ability to hold government accountable.

As Shirkey also noted, “the transformation of newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster of communities, each engaged in its own kind of ‘news’–and each with its own set of ‘truths’–will mean the loss of a single national narrative and agreed upon set of facts.” Daniel Moynahan famously said that we are all entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts. Evidently, he was wrong.

TMI–too much information. And much too much misinformation.

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Ballard Administration, Part 2

After my post yesterday, I got an email from a former Republican who is evidently no fan of our Accidental Mayor.

He had read the recent IBJ article–which he characterized as a “puff piece”–in which the reporter uncritically repeated the administration’s claim that the parking meters are “netting” additional revenues since they were privatized in a 50-year deal with ACS. As he wrote, the claim doesn’t hold up under even cursory scrutiny.

The IBJ wrote, in part: “Total revenue from meter operations grew to $1.7 million in the quarter ended June 30 from $1.3 million in the same time frame a year ago. The city’s share of that revenue totaled $498,273, compared with $108,265 it made from meter operations from March through June a year ago—a whopping 360-percent increase.”

As my friend pointed out in his email, the IBJ simply ignored a number of issues, most significantly that these numbers were “apples and oranges” and accepted the 360% “increase” at face value, without noting the following: (1) Hours were increased from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM every night and ACS added a day to the week (it used to be Mon.-Fri., now it is Mon-Sat.); (2) the rate increase by $0.25/hour in Broad Ripple and most of downtown. Clearly, these increases would yield substantially more revenue whether ACS or the City had increased hours and raised rates–and if we hadn’t privatized the meters, the City would keep all of the increased revenues after the relatively modest investment in new meter technology.

The final point made in the email was that the math makes no sense: As he wrote, “According to the IBJ, the administration claims that revenues increased a total of $400,000 (from $1.3MM to $1.7MM) – which is a total increase in revenues of 30% ($400K over $1.3 million) TOTAL; however, the IBJ reports that the City’s revenues went from $108K to $498K – something doesn’t add up here… I think the IBJ is comparing apples and oranges (i.e., comparing (A) the City’s old “net-of-all-expenses” revenues after all costs and before increases in rates and hours, against (B) the City’s gross revenues under the ACS deal after increases in rates and hours that they could have instituted without sharing revenue with ACS), and even more significantly, (B) not asking what in my mind is the most pertinent question: HOW MUCH HAS THE CITY HAD TO CREDIT OR GIVE BACK TO ACS DUE TO BAGGED METERS? Do the “totals” reported exclude the amounts the city is contractually obligated to remit to ACS as compensation for bagging meters under the terms of the contract?. ”

The email raises some pretty important questions, to which I’d add another. There is a rumor floating around that in addition to control of our parking meters, the City also handed over to ACS the collection of past years’ parking fines that remain uncollected. Does anyone know whether this is true, and–if it is–whether receipts from those collections are part of the reported numbers?

I do wish Indianapolis still had real reporters covering government……

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THIS is Troubling……

The Indianapolis Times posted a fairly lengthy piece today devoted to some troubling questions raised by the award of city contracts to Ballard’s largest contributors. For example, this paragraph:

“Ballard Raised More Than $1.3 Million From Contributors Who Have Received $300 Million In Contracts: Ballard has received $1,368,693 in contributions to his reelection campaign from businesses and/or the employees of those businesses contracted with the city while in office. The total sum of the contracts those businesses have had with the city is $309,476,510. (Marion County Election Board, Ballard Campaign Finance Reports, Indianapolis Contract Database)”

Now, the Times is a Democratic blog, and it can be expected to spin reports to make Republicans look bad, just as Republican leaning blogs can be expected to spin in contrary direction. But if these numbers–and others reported in the same post-are accurate, this behavior raises still more ethical issues for an administration that is facing several other allegations of impropriety. There’s the garage deal in Broad Ripple, the lease of space in Eastgate, and the shenanigans that allowed the parking meter deal to squeak through by one vote (cast by a member of the contractor’s law firm…).

Can we spell “appearance of impropriety”?