Strong Towns

9Place-Oriented Government

There was skepticism in the room when I finished a presentation to a group of city managers in Mississippi. These are the unelected professionals appointed to manage the day-to-day affairs of cities. They were not impressed with the engineer from Minnesota.

I told them that their cities were insolvent, that they were making bad capital investments, and that they needed to change their approach to growth and development if they wanted to get out of the financial hole they were in. I had shown them the math – all the data and charts – but they weren’t buying it.

One of these city leaders took issue with the entire narrative. In a deep Southern drawl, he argued that he and his colleagues were good stewards of the taxpayers’ money. He suggested that the capital projects they had done all followed accepted practice and had a positive return on investment. He was quite assertive, and very insistent.

I tried a different approach. I offered that, if these were such great investments, if they all paid solid returns, instead of borrowing the money or raising taxes, they could redirect their pension funds as a source of capital. Then their pension funds could capture the great returns from their wise management. It was a way for them to have skin in the game, to align their own future with that of the communities they serve.

The room went quiet for a moment, then exploded with laughter. The city managers slapped each other on the back and nodded enthusiastically. ...