Tag: public administration

QUIS CUSTODES?

March 28, 2024 / John Jay

Who Guards the Guardians?

One lens through which New York City government in the 20^th Century has been viewed is the decades long clash between elected officials who were products of political machines and self-styled “reformers” The classic discussion of this history is Sayre and Kaufman’s “Governing New York City: Politics in the Metropolis.” Today, there seem to be no reformers – no public voices who advocate for what they regard to be in the best interest of all New Yorkers. They have been replaced by advocates for particular communities and personal interests. How did that happen and is it important?

The machines were political operations built up from neighborhood organizations that whipped votes for their candidates in exchange for patronage and contracts. Jimmy Walker, William O’Dwyer, Robert Wagner and finally Abraham Beame were products of the city’s organization political clubs. The machines generally dealt in ethnic politics and rallied around Irish, Italian and Jewish candidates. The machines were regarded by reformers as corrupt, inefficient and exclusive – particularly excluding Black and Hispanics from power. The most famous reformer was, perhaps, Fiorello LaGuardia. Both John Lindsey and Ed Koch came up each through reform ranks. Reformers saw themselves as advocates of merit hiring, competitive contracting and professional public administration. Before LaGuardia, New York was exclusively a machine politics town.

The reformers had supporting them an array of political and civic organizations. There were “reform” as well as “organization” neighborhood political clubs that gathered nominating petitions and supported their own candidates in elections. But also, importantly, there was a range of “good government” civic organization, the boards of which were dominated by the city’s commercial and social elite, like the City Club, the Women’s City Club, the Municipal Art Society, the Regional Plan Association and the Citizens Budget Commission, among a dozen others, that advocated for merit hiring, competitive bidding of contracts and high-quality service delivery of government programs. [It is interesting to note that among the most high-profile reformers of the first half of the 20^th Century, at least at the beginning of his career, was Yale graduate, Robert Moses]. There was a kind of yin and yang between machine and reform control of city government throughout the second half of the 20^th Century in mayoral elections. The electorate went back and forth between choosing mayoral reformers and organization candidates.

However, this began to break down with the election of the city’s first Black mayor, David Dinkins, who came up through a parallel Black political organization – and was not part of the conventional white ethnic political clubs. With the advent of media driven mayoral campaigns, the strength of the machine and reform organizations broke down, with advertising replacing organizing in turning out the vote. While many of mayor Michael Bloomberg’s initiatives mirrored the priorities of earlier reformers, he was independent of political organizations (in part because he was able to finance his own campaigns) and didn’t come out of reform political clubs (and ran as a Republican, as did Lindsey). But Rudolph Giuliani and Bill DeBlasio and would be difficult to locate on a machine/reform scale.

Our current mayor, Eric Adams is a product of a multi-racial Brooklyn old style political machine which has continued to function into the 21^st Century. He is also, importantly, a former city employee and union member. But significantly, there is no reform counterbalance to his old school political policies. Like previous machine operatives he places loyalty and ethnic politics ahead of reform type of “professional” government. An interesting argument that Mayor Adams occasionally makes is that there isn’t much evidence that “professionally” managed government was actually more responsive to local communities or delivered better services than did community embedded local political club driven machines. I am unaware of anyone today, either elected officials or visible civic organizations, advocating for traditional good government policies. Criticism of Mayor Adams is either political or personal.

Where are today’s “reformers.” There aren’t any, as far as I can see. I would argue that just about everyone involved in local government today has a vested interest in the way things are. There are no serious voices that advocate in “the public interest” in local politics. While there is an important argument that the past promoters of reform were actually advancing the interests of the white, privileged New York establishment (aka “the ruling class”), and there is nothing besides self-interest governing politics and government, I am not so totally cynical. I do believe that there is a place for merit and professionalism in public administration. This absence of activism for professional local government has created a troubling vacuum in our discussion of how local government best might function.

Public spirited individuals came into high profile during the city’s fiscal meltdown of the 1970’s, when people like Felix Rohatyn (an investment banker) and Richard Ravitch (a real estate developer), wealthy, white, Jewish men from prominent families, pretty clearly selflessly got involved in attempting to rescue city government from bankruptcy – with not much in it materially for them. They were willing to take the risk of the possibility of failure and diminished reputations. They were prepared and able to speak truth to power. At that time there were other high-profile leaders who were in it to advance themselves, and who were, by contrast obsequious to power. But there were also a number of individuals who, in my judgement, were selfless and brave in their efforts. Perhaps that’s a difficult distinction to draw, or even bad form to do so, but after decades of work in and around city government, I think I’m in a position to make such an important judgment fairly – between the good guys and the bad guys. I would venture to say that there isn’t anyone around today who could or would want to play that “good guy” role.

Some of this lack of civic leadership has to do with corporate globalization, which has produced business managers who tend not to feel a connection with any particular place. Just for example, while Chase Bank is headquartered in New York, I suspect its CEO, Jamie Dimon, would likely tell you that he is a citizen of the world, and is concerned with national and international issues affecting the bank. This is in contrast to David Rockefeller, a previous Chase CEO (although it was at the time a much more local and smaller enterprise) who was in the 60’s and 70’s active in New York affairs and founded the civic organization, The New York City Partnership. The leaders of the two great New York City universities also, I would guess, regard themselves as world citizens, and likely couldn’t name the Borough President of Manhattan. There are some people today who style themselves as local civic leaders, but I can’t think of one who isn’t using the public sphere to attract attention to themselves, is concerned about staying on the good side of the powerful and seeks principally to advance their personal or institutional interests through their civic involvement. They all have an agenda. They aren’t Rohatyn or Ravitch.

In the past, the boards of civic organizations were very much a creature of the business and institutional elite. Their leadership were personally and financially independent of city government and in a position to be critical of its operations. I might note that I believe essential to being able to play the role of independent public citizen is/was a certain amount of independent wealth. One needs to be in a position to not care about what powerful people in government and the media think about you.

Today, strikingly, the boards of those organizations, while they include a few corporate leaders, have a disproportionate share of lobbyists who very much have a stake in the status quo, and not running afoul of those in power locally, who are the object of their lobbying on behalf of various commercial interests. For example, the highest profile civic organization in New York today is probably the Citizens Budget Commission – which sets itself out as a private sector monitor of the city’s fiscal probity. My recollection is that in the 1990’s its board was composed of representatives of entities with a stake in the business of municipal finance, investment banks and law firms. They had an interest in the fiscal integrity of local government, particularly as an issuer of tax-exempt debt. Today the chair of the CBC is a corporate lobbyist, and I count 11 other such lobbyists on the organization’s board. Because of the nature of lobbying, staying on the good side of elected officials is essential to the business. The same is true in the real estate industry, which is deeply reliant on local government and has about 26 members on the CBC board. It seems unlikely that CBC can be effectively critical of government operations given its governance.

It is worth noting, though, that recently, when Mayor Adams thought that the city was likely to face a serious shortfall of revenues, his first impulse to cut the budget in order to get it into balance. This was not how Mayors Lindsay and Beame operated (that is, deficit spending was seen as a legitimate policy) – and mayoral fealty to balanced budgets is a significant advance in the institutional culture of local government.

Some of the retreat of civic organizations from controversy also has to do with the twelve years of Mayor Bloomberg’s time in City Hall. Mayor Bloomberg came from the business and social world of the boards of civic and cultural organizations – and, importantly, he shared their values of merit-based, data-driven public administration. As a result, the boards of those groups were made up of many friends and social acquaintances of Mayor Bloomberg and were loath to criticize him. This was most visibly true of the Municipal Art Society, which prior to the Bloomberg administration, had been in the business of suing city government when municipal actions were at odds with its advocacy of good public design, intelligent zoning, and historic preservation. MAS fired its in house attorney and dissolved its law committee early on in Bloomberg’s tenure are mayor.

Now, when we have returned to a form of machine politics, there seem to be no prestigious voices articulating the public interest – no contemporary analog to Rohatyn and Ravitch. The city’s personnel and procurement systems are highly dysfunctional. There is no powerful group with the ability and interest in identifying those problems and offering solutions that would require a major overhaul of local government (structural challenges that Mayor Bloomberg, who was professionally ideally suited to address, may have chosen not to take on because they appeared so intractable to him and his team. Bloomberg seemed to be focused on addressing problems he was confident his team could solve during a mayor’s ordinary tenure). The groups that now exist on the public scene have extremely narrow agendas, like the present incarnation of the City Club, which is anti-development and anti-institutional and is exclusively involved with using litigation as a tool to advance its positions.

The diminishment of local press coverage is also a part of the problem. The New York Times, long a bastion of local good government opinion articles, also sees itself playing on a world stage. Most of its voices on local issues have narrow, “progressive” agendas. Certainly, there is no one at the Times with any knowledge (or interest) of the nitty gritty of how local government operates. The Post isn’t a serious newspaper, as actual facts seem to not be a priority in its reporting. The Daily News is both resource constrained and consumed with mayhem and scandal. NY1 relies on a coterie of New York City lobbyists with vested interests to offer opinions on local politics and is oriented towards personalities and horse races. There are a number of independent websites now covering local government in a sophisticated way, like The City and Gothamist. But they have a limited audiences and even more limited resources.

The worst part of this situation is that I don’t see a solution. Almost everyone who cares about New York City government today is someone who has an interest in it and doesn’t want to antagonize it. One of the things I learned mid-career is when there is government dysfunction it is not because public officials are incompetent, it is because those systems are the way they are because it is in someone’s interest for them to be that way. There is always someone or an interest group to oppose almost any change in the status quo. Those who don’t have a direct interest, aren’t interested.

Translatio Erici Adams

March 14, 2024 / John Jay

Translating Eric Adams

In the circle of white Manhattanites among whom I travel, Mayor Eric Adams is an enigma. He doesn’t seem to advance their interests, as they perceive them, and as a result they don’t understand what motivates him politically. Having had the rewarding experience of spending more than a decade working in the Southeast Queens community in which he grew up, I thought it might be something of a public service for me to attempt to explain the world view of that community and how the Mayor represents it, as best I can. Doing so requires generalizing about a community of which I am not a member, which risks, at best, inaccuracy, and at worst pejorative stereotyping – but I am willing to hazard doing so to attempt to make matters clearer to those who are perplexed.

Jamaica, Queens is said to be one of the largest communities of African American homeowners in the United States. Two of its zip codes have among the highest income levels in Queens. It includes the neighborhoods of St. Albans, Hollis, Springfield Gardens, Laurelton and Rochdale, unfamiliar to most white residents of Manhattan south of 125^thStreet. Not only are these the neighborhoods that shaped Mayor Adams, but they are also represented by City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (the City’s second most powerful public official) and Congressman Gregory W. Meeks. Congressman Meeks is the Queens County Democratic Chair, the ranking minority member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. While Queens member of Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,’ name may be more familiar to Manhattanites, Congressman Meeks is a far more influential and powerful figure. Arguably, southeastern Queens is New York City and State’s most politically formidable community – one about which most white Manhattanites know next-to-nothing.

Southeast Queens has been home to many notable New Yorkers. Congressman Meek’s predecessor, former Member of Congress, the Reverend Dr. Floyd Flake, was long the pastor of one of the city’s largest churches, Allan A.M.E Cathedral (succeeded by his spouse Dr. Elaine Flake). Former Citicorp CEO Richard D. Parsons also grew up here. In the past, a large group of well known, successful jazz musicians made Jamaica, particularly St. Albans, their home.

Mayor Adams represents and advances the interests of his constituency well. Many neighborhood residents are government workers – postal employees, teachers, transit employees, police and corrections officers. Among the higher income neighborhood residents are school principals and other senior administrators (and, in fact, Mayor Bloomberg’s schools Chancellor, Dennis Walcott, continues to live there and is now President of the Queens Public Library). The largest private sector employer in the community is jetBlue, whose personnel work at airports run by quasi-governmental entity, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. These folks care about the compensation and benefits received by government and union workers – and the Mayor has gone a long way towards bringing to closure a large number of public employee union contracts that had expired. Residents of Jamaica also care about public safety – both in terms of preventing violent crime, but also in terms of averting the random stopping of Black men by police. Most are car owners and are less invested in public transit. Bike lanes are not their issue.

What they also care less about are the public space issues in midtown and downtown that so bother us Manhattanites – like litter, street homelessness and sidewalk vending – which white Manhattan residents view as being “out of control” and where City government is viewed as failing. Not to say that they these issues don’t matter to residents of southeast Queens and Central Brooklyn, but they are certainly less important than other things. The most important issue to southeastern Queens residents, in fact, is the flooding of the basements of their homes by a rising water table in the decades since the closure of the Jamaica Water Company – a multi-billion-dollar problem with which Greenwich Village residents are entirely unfamiliar.

Mayor Adams is serious when he refers to himself as a “working class mayor,” and when he notes that he neither has nor needs a “degree from Harvard” to be a successful leader of New York City. He has appointed to city positions people whom he trusts with whom he has had long relationships, and individuals who are proven vote getters in areas across the city, presumably with the idea that this will be beneficial in his campaign for re-election. This has been standard operating procedure for New York City politicians for generations, particularly those of the first half of the 20^thcentury who came up through political machines. While Mayors have appointed people to senior positions with prestigious academic credentials and/or high-level private sector experience, this has been a more recent and occasional practice. And I would note first, that it hasn’t been obvious that those Ivy Leaguers have proven to be more effective public servants and second, that the Mayor’s Commissioner of the Sanitation Department, on which many of the complaints I hear from my social set are focused, is an Upper East Side resident with three degrees from Harvard.

The Mayor is also focused on directing government contracts to Black-owned businesses previously excluded from the benefits of government largess. Some of these efforts have come under scrutiny and questions have been raised about them in the media. But pushing public dollars to Black-owned businesses, to which government lip service has been extensively paid in recent years, is definitely part of the Mayor’s agenda. Similarly, I think it can be safely said that some of the practices in which the Mayor and his campaign have engaged that have raised journalistic and white eyebrows, are, in the view of Black folks, practices in which whites in power have long conventionally engaged without public comment. It is only when people of color have taken up the levers of government, in their view, that these have become issues.

It should also be acknowledged that Mayor Adam’s prior position in government was as the Borough President of Brooklyn. Borough Presidents preside over small operations. Much of their time is spent cheerleading for their boroughs, attending public events, making announcements, and issuing press releases on matters of public concern. So, it shouldn’t be surprising that Mayor Adams continues to view these to be central components of his mayoralty. In any event, there is less to mayoral control of city government than might be otherwise obvious because of the decades of accreted bureaucratic structures the constitute city government, particularly in matters of contracting and employment, that tremendously constrict the effectiveness of any mayor. Mayors have all announced great sounding programs that never happen.

It can be accurately said that Mayor Adams is fairly representing his constituency, the folks who voted for him. Further, it should be noted that we Manhattan liberals have long taken pride in our advocacy of empowering people of color and working people – giving them a voice in the deployment of government power. There is something hypocritical about complaining about how they are exercising it now that they have it.

OPUS SUGIT

July 7, 2021 / John Jay

Many have told us that working in municipal public service has been their most rewarding professional experience. They have talked about the opportunity to have a positive impact on their city. They have also more candidly talked about the pleasures associated with the wielding of power. Others have spoken of the interesting nature of the challenges they have faced. When we took on our role in City government we looked forward to this kind of work environment.

However, this not been our experience. We have found working for the City of New York frequently boring and frustrating. We haven’t had much impact. We haven’t experienced that assertion of power. The longer we spent in the service of City government, the less challenging it became.

We have written previously about the ways in which the City is a progressive and humane employer. The City is particularly successful in attracting and retaining a diverse group of employees, certainly reflective of the city’s demographics, and much more so than in the private sector. For all its faults, the civil service system does provide a point of entry for skilled workers from demographic groups otherwise overlooked by the private sector. Many highly skilled recent immigrants, particularly with engineering (civil, electrical, mechanical) educations at non-US institutions are able to find employment with the City.

While not as generous as they once may have been (for non-uniform workers), City employment benefits are still what employees in the 21^st Century are entitled to expect. Health insurance options are comprehensive and inexpensive, paid vacation and sick time can accumulate, protections are in place against harassment, discrimination and retaliation of various sorts. Opportunities for training and advancement exist, particularly for front line workers. Our agency has a professional organizational development team that tries to do its best. Various messaging from employing agencies, as well as from the central Department of Citywide Administrative Service attempts to be welcoming and encourages tolerance and respect.

But, unfortunately, and despite the systems in place, our day-to-day work experience has been of a “hostile work environment.” Generally, City work has been depersonalized, made unrewarding and is subject to frequent arbitrary exercises of managerial authority.

Lack of discretion.

In our position we had very little discretion over our work. In previous jobs in the private sector we could actually make decisions about things. We could decide to buy things. We could initiate programs. We could hire people of our choice to do jobs. None of this was possible in City government. We had no budget authority. We couldn’t buy the tools our staff required. We couldn’t reduce or increase the size of our staff depending on the work available. We couldn’t create new ways to solve problems and attempt to implement them. We had to work with the resources already in place to perform the tasks that they were already doing. We could coach people in how to do their jobs better (which was by far the most rewarding part our job).

For most of our tenure we were prohibited from speaking or meeting with people from outside our agency without permission. We had never experienced this before. This cut us off from information from a wide range of sources. It prevented us from collaborating with others. It made it difficult, often impossible, to solve simple problems that came to us either from other agencies or from the public. This was another means of limiting our discretion over our work. It was infantilizing and demoralizing.

Diluting managerial decision making even more, is the institutional preference for group decision making. Most decisions required multiple large meetings. The radical democracy of City government administration meant that each had their say (although those higher up in the bureaucracy were more closely paid attention to). Often, responsibility for a decision was broadly dispersed – making managerial authority even more circumscribed. This had the advantage of making it impossible to blame anyone for a bad decision.

2.The importance of hierarchy.

Hierarchy was more important in decision making than experience or expertise. Decision making was about power relationships. The higher up in the pecking order one was, the more one was deferred to – regardless of one’s knowledge of the subject matter of the decision. Our experience in the private sector was that even if an individual did not have the most senior title, if they had the subject matter expertise, their advice and counsel were respected and taken seriously. In government, powerful officials made essentially random, willful decisions because they could. Policy making and discretion came with power. At the end of the day, decision making was about the excise of power by individuals who formally had it.

This situation made work unrewarding. The further down in the hierarchy you were, the less discretion and power you had over your work and the more powerless you were and felt. Those on the bottom had their work tightly circumscribed by those above them. Given that, it is no wonder that operations level government employees are often viewed as lazy drones, attempting to cut corners, work less and of having no initiative. The system makes their jobs more boring and enervating than they might otherwise be. As result, people don’t feel invested in their work.

We have never had a job before where going out to lunch seemed like a luxury. Those with power above us expected us to be available from about eight A.M. to about eight P.M., five days a week, and generally to be available on the weekends, if needed. If emails and calls were not responded to immediately, supervisors got annoyed. And, of course, the CityTime system, about we have written, provided no incentives to employees to make themselves available beyond nine-to-five because that time was impossible to record.

Yes, professional employees are generally expected to take responsibility for their work, and to be available to the organization on short notice. But that generally comes with professional responsibility and control over work. Because we had so little discretion over our work, it was essentially not professional. When officials called us, they were looking for data about our work, to complain about a mistake, or to order us to do something. They were not calling to take advantage of our professional judgement; or to confer with us about decision making. Almost always, the subject of the calls had an artificial deadline associated with the work, generated by the power of the people involved – not by the requirements of the task.

3. There are too many people.

We were rarely busy. As far as we could tell, our staff were rarely busy. Everyone tried hard to appear to be busy. Folks talked about how busy they were. Folks complained constantly about the demands made on them by their work. And yet, we spent hours, days during our tenure in City government reading. We tried to keep our reading as work related as we could – so we read non-fiction rather than novels at work. Because of CityTime and City rules, no non-City work could be done during City work hours and the City expected City work to be done at one’s desk. So, ideally, in order to comply with the rules, if one had no work to do, one was to sit at one’s desk with their hands folded, staring straight ahead (and not surfing the internet), something like in first grade. Also, seeking additional work was not done – as it was seen as getting out of one’s lane; straying into other peoples’ domains.

We had too many people for most of the work we had to do. However, for one or two of the functions we managed, we had a very small percentage of the staff required to actually do the job that was our brief. We made do. Assigning underemployed people to the work where we were understaffed wasn’t possible; in part because it wasn’t practical (due to the work sites or the expertise required) and in part because the civil service and union rules prohibited people from working outside of their job description.

In our case, our underemployment was as a result of the hierarchy not taking full advantage of our expertise and experience, the hierarchy’s removal of discretion from our work and the impossibility of taking initiative to take on new projects or do things in new ways. That would be regarded by the hierarchy as impermissible coloring outside of the lines. Most of what we were called on to do in interacting with supervision was providing data about the performance of our business unit up the hierarchy. Often that data was found to be unsatisfactory – but we were rarely allowed to improve the way data was collected or the way in which staff work was organized.

The other task that took up our time was compliance work. Our business unit was frequently audited by both the City and State Comptrollers. Much time was spent providing information to auditors and informing them about the manner in which the work was done. As the audit reports were being written, we were required to respond to drafts of audit reports. The hierarchy was deeply involved in the preparation of these responses, requiring many meetings and drafts. The hierarchy did not contribute to the drafting, or defend the work of our business unit to the auditors and their inquiries. They did not have our backs. They sat back and criticized our work and quibbled over our drafting. They wanted to distance themselves from responsibility for the substance of the business unit’s work, which they micro-managed. We also spent a good deal of time preparing data for internal reports (many of those data points measured things that were important decades ago, but no longer had relevance. It was impossible to change them, we were told by the Mayor’s Office of Operations, because that would make the data “not comparable.” The fact that the data measured nothing of value was unimportant to them.). We took a wide range of required trainings on conflicts of interest, sexual harassment (more than once a year), government ethics and preventing various forms of discrimination. We filled out various disclosure forms.

We spent a very small portion of our time in City government engaging in problem solving, helping people or trying to provide improved services to city residents and visitors. We occasionally suggested ways in which we might be more useful to City government, and those inquiries were never responded to. We were to keep in our lane.

Senior people in the hierarchy seemed to always be busy. Rushing from meeting to meeting. Cutting phone conversations short with subordinates because someone more important was calling on the other line. Supervisors often seemed overwhelmed. They failed to read the many memos they demanded, prior to meetings. They seemed not to have time to respond to emails and calls from subordinates. And yet, meetings that were scheduled for an hour always had to take an hour – even if the business at had took only a few minutes. Meetings with supervisors seemed to meander along, especially late in the day. Meetings involved redundant numbers of people. Air time at meetings was frequently taken up with talk of weekend plans and the weather, as well as with endless self-congratulation about minor accomplishments. Our guess is that even many Commissioners often don’t have enough to do.

4. No recognition of performance.

We had never previously worked in a job for more than a year or two without being given more responsibility, being promoted and having our compensation substantially increased. We recognize that the last of these wasn’t what government service was about. What employees were rewarded for in government, though, was obsequiousness to power. It was the sole currency of the realm. The few people we saw advance were people who flattered their bosses and entertained their willfulness. This sounds naïve, maybe even trite. Of course, this happens in all organizations and bureaucracies. But we experienced nothing like this in any of my prior private sector positions. In City government, responsiveness to power was the exclusive talent being rewarded (we suppose that shouldn’t be surprising in an enterprise that is political at its heart). There was little recognition of a high level of skill, the ability to improve efficiency or increase revenue or, particularly, improving the job satisfaction and performance of employees. Being useful to the boss, or having a political network within government, was what mattered in terms of rewards and advancement. And, as we have discussed, advancement through civil service tests seemed to have little relationship to professional ability. The tests seemed not to measure anything of value for managerial positions.

It was another dispiriting part of the work environment that it seemed not to matter how well you did your job. You did not receive recognition or reward for high performance (longevity was often recognized). We tried to praise our excellent employees for their frequent good work, and this was appreciated and had some value in an otherwise unrewarding work environment – but without the ability to provide tangible rewards they were essentially empty gestures.

For example, at one point, upon a manager’s retirement, we promoted a really excellent first line supervisor into a managerial position. This person was a woman and a person of color. However, the bureaucracy never gave this individual the increased salary or the more senior title that came with the added responsibility. After about a year in the managerial position without the raise, the person asked to be returned to her supervisory position. It was maddening. We were unable to do a good thing, even after the expenditure of considerable effort to get the person into the position.

As a result of this culture, and these often obsolete and often overly restrictive systems, City government work was, unfortunately, generally unrewarding. We suspect that this produces widespread dissatisfaction with work and poor morale. We certainly felt unchallenged and unappreciated. But then again, maybe, despite our fancy education and wide experience, we’re simply a lazy, unimaginative, useless, time serving bureaucrat. Like in the novels of Kafka, the system produces the behaviors it claims that it is designed to prevent.

SPATIO IMPERIUM

June 22, 2021 / John Jay

Our business unit dealt with issues involving hundreds of millions of dollars – a scale that would make decisions about them be deemed to be major in an organization of any size – even one with an almost $100 million operating budget like the City of New York. The revenue in this operation was generated in a highly technical complex markets, and our staff had years of deep expertise as to the operations and regulatory environment of those markets. Some of the important questions with which we dealt rose to the level as having to be made by the Mayor. However, between the individual with the subject matter expertise on the problem and the Mayor there are five or more layers of intermediate executive levels.

First, we would be briefed by our staff on, and have to make an initial determination regarding, the decision. Often times, we would bring a level of knowledge, expertise and experience that the line supervisor lacked to the analysis, and we were able to add some value to the evaluation of the issue. That decision would then be required to work its way up through the layers above us in the Agency, ultimately going to the agency’s Commissioner for review and decision. Generally, the Commissioner would need to be fully briefed on the question, with which he or she frequently was previously unfamiliar.

The Commissioner would then brief the Chief of Staff of the Deputy Mayor, who would in turn brief the Mayor’s Chief of Staff, who would then set up a meeting with the Commissioner and the Deputy Mayor to brief the Mayor. The Deputy Mayor may also consult with other effected agencies, particularly the Office of Management and Budget, when there are revenue implications, and the Corporation Counsel, when there are legal issues involved or there is a possible outcome of litigation to be considered, to both get their perspective and make sure they were on board with the recommended decision. The Mayor usually has a very limited amount of time to be briefed, has very little prior knowledge of the circumstances, and is required to make a decision before the conclusion of the meeting. Generally, a recommendation is brought to the Mayor; occasionally, the Mayor is forced decided between competing agency interests and views.

As the question percolates upward through the bureaucracy, ideally each level should bring a broader perspective and additional information to the analysis. At the Commissioner level, across the agency. At the Deputy Mayor level, across agencies, which may have competing interests. At the Mayoral level, the decision must be considered with a citywide view. The Mayor, being the only official in the chain of command actually elected by the voters, brings the very important political perspective to the process – assessing the impact on the City Council’s members, and the vast array of competing interest groups across the City. But at each level of review going up the chain, the decision maker gets further from the person with the deepest knowledge of the facts and probably the most subject matter expertise.

Generally, at each level a briefing memo is prepared for the decision maker. In the lower orders of review, often the subject matter expert is consulted to look over the memo prepared for each level as the decision moves up the chain. Once the decision leaves the agency, though, the analysts preparing the memos for the Deputy Mayor and the Mayor are within each of their offices, with a review by the Commissioner’s staff before being forwarded to the principal. Also, as the decision rises more closely to the Mayor, the briefing memos get shorter – as the higher up you go the more demands there are on the decision maker’s time. Often, the Mayor gets a “one-pager” that breaks the facts and interests down into a small number of bullet points. My understanding is that the Mayor is generally handed the “one-pager” at the beginning of the meeting at which the decision is made.

Sometimes, as a decision rises through the bureaucracy, there are briefing meetings for each decision maker, and up to the Deputy Mayor level all of the executives at the lower levels are present to answer questions. If multiple agencies are involved, each agency sends a number of subject matter experts to the meeting. Some of these “inter-agency” meetings can have as many as fifty people present – as no one wants the decision to be made without their at least being present, and better yet putting in their two cents. As cumbersome as these meetings can be, we believe they are certainly superior in informing the Deputy Mayor and her staff about the complexities of the issue than a two page, or even a longer memo. But at the meeting with the Mayor there are generally only the commissioners involved, the Mayor’s Chief of Staff, an attorney or two, and on rare occasion the front line person with the most complete and sophisticated understanding of the facts.

This is not a situation that is unique to big city government, as it occurs in all very large organizations; money center banks come immediately to mind as very large institutions with a wide range of operations. The challenges are to i) make sure that the final decision maker has access to the right set of information presented to them and ii) to determine at what level it is appropriate to be made, so as to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of that official’s time. To exaggerate, having the CEO of multi-billion dollar concern make decisions about which copier paper to buy is not a good use of that person’s time, and won’t necessarily result in the best decision outcome (as the CEO is unlikely to know much about copiers or copier paper unless the company is Xerox or International Paper). Also, optimizing the level at which decisions are made should improve the quality of decision making – maximizing the amount information available to the executive and the minimizing the use of more senior executive’s time.

What we have found in City government is that the authority to makes decisions tend to drift upward. At one time in our agency, the Commissioner’s style was to make the final decision on just about every decision. Why would this happen? The Commissioner is likely to think that this minimizes his or her downside risk. If he or she signs off on every issue, he or she will then know about everything that is going on in the organization. If they have confidence in their analytical abilities, they will feel assured that the right decision is being made in each case. Commissioners are often parachuted into agencies with which they have no prior relationship, even if they have deep subject matter expertise. They have no way to judge, particularly at the outset, the quality of staff members’ decision making, or the depth of their support for the new Commissioner’s agenda. Most often, “the outset” is all there is, as Commissioner’s tenure is probably usually about three years. But working in this manner may feel like it is in the political or short-term career interest of the official, but it is certainly not in the best interest of the agency or the City.

This kind of thinking permeates City government – an unwillingness to delegate and a lack of trust in the decision-making capacity of other administrators. The result is that some more ministerial issues (but still important to government functions) get lost in a pile. More importantly, it means more time spent preparing memos to fully inform the executive who may have little to no knowledge of the context of what they are being asked to decide. Even with the best materials and extensive briefing, it also results in the person making the decision not necessarily being the one with the most relevant information to making an informed decision. The further up the chain unimportant decisions get, the more likely they are to get clogged in the system, and for the wrong decision to be made – as a lack of understanding of the facts and context. Managers need to feel that successful agency operations are in their personal interest – which is particularly difficult to do in the absence of the profit motive and flexible compensation systems.

Decisions finding the appropriate level at which they should be made is another issue that requires culture change. It’s a management issue and it has to come from the top down. Government officials, particularly those in elected office, need to work to push decision making down to the lowest possible level that has complete information regarding the content and context of the issue. This takes a long term view. Incentives have to be created to encourage high and mid-level managers to do the same. Getting decisions made at the correct level makes the process move faster and the outcomes better. Doing so, also makes the jobs of those in the lower orders more rewarding – as they have more control over their work and feel like their expertise and experience matter and are being appreciated. Devolving decision making authority within City bureaucracies would go a long way to unclogging the sclerosis that afflicts government.

We have been asked why this type of systemic managerial problem wasn’t solved during the administration of Michael Bloomberg. Mayor Bloomberg known to be a successful manager of a large organization. His administration drew heavily on appointees from the ranks of top-class management consulting firm McKinsey. Our sense is that Mayor Bloomberg made a very reasonable determination that these institutional problems were intractable – and that if his Mayoralty was going to be successful, his administration would have to work around these problems and avoid these structures to the greatest extent possible. As a result, though, these systems and practices remain, and become even more difficult to improve as they accrete further layers.

STULTI FUERUNT OMNES NOS IN DIEBUS NOSTRIS

May 11, 2021 / John Jay

The scandal plagued, $700 million Citytime system (https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/15/nyregion/contractor-in-citytime-payroll-scandal-to-pay-record-500-million.html) was the bane of our work life existence. Conceived of during the administration of the former “America’s Mayor,” and completed during the term of the technocratic, billionaire Mayor, Citytime was an attempt to move the City from the pencil and paper keeping of time records of employees into the blazing efficiency of the mid 20^th Century. The system was designed to maintain the employment records of over 300,000 workers in scores of agencies – from cops to accountants – all in the same system. Citytime is driven by a program design that every city worker should devote every precious minute of that employee’s seven-hour work doing the people’s business – and nothing else – whether walking a beat, teaching a class, inspecting buildings or sitting on one’s butt at a desk. Woe be to him or her found not to be rendering to the City the full measure of 35 hours a week (or, more accurately, given the way the system works, 70 hours every two weeks). Unfortunately for the programmers of Citytime, no one outside of an assembly line actually works that way.

When we first joined the City’s employ, no one provided us with any training as to how to put our hours into Citytime. But, if we wanted to get that paycheck every two weeks (lagged by a week, in order to buy the City an extra week of float, to ensure that payment isn’t received for time not worked, and to make clear to City employees that the City didn’t give a fig about them as human beings from the outset), one had to make sure one entered one’s time into the system. Once logged in (a challenge in itself), on the initial screen in Citytime one sees fourteen boxes below the seven days of the week, where one is to enter one’s start and finish times. Non-managerial employees have stated work hours, to which they must adhere. Thank goodness, being on the bottom tier of managerial workers, we had some flexibility as to when our seven hours of daily toil might take place (with an hour or two of daily leeway). One checks a box to create fourteen more boxes into which one enters the beginning and end of one’s lunch period (mandatory for non-managerial employees).

The system seems to have dozens of toggles, most of which we have never used. It allows for the entry of the normally routine paid vacation and sick days – as well as many other permitted paid and unpaid uses of workdays (like jury duty). Two hours of leave time appeared in the system available for each COVID vaccine appointment (as we got our shots on the weekend, we used the time to go to a museum on a work day). The system made no accommodation for remote work – as until the pandemic, remote work was absolutely verboten for City workers (under the belief, we assume, that without City workers being on-site, in the office, they would be doing the heretical non-city work during city time). This made the system even more ridiculous for the 80,000 City office workers who were required to telecommute during the pandemic. We made do (and took quite a few naps).

We struggled to deal with the system as a managerial employee, who was called on to work non-continuous nights and weekends – since other than for the lunch break, the system only recorded start and finish times. One was forced to provide inaccurate information. For example, if you ended your day at 5:30, and then spent from 8 to 11 on phone calls with the boss, you either put in 11 as the end of the day (even though you commuted and had some quality time with the dog sometime between 5:30 and 8) or you added the three hours onto 5:30 and entered that you ended the day at 8:30, which you actually didn’t do. We constantly wondered whether some timekeeping Gorgon was going to descend on us, dragging us to Citytime hell for gross malefactions in accurate timekeeping.

Our initial major run-in with Citytime occurred during our first long vacation from City employment. Being a responsible person, with (supposedly) managerial responsibility, we stayed in touch with the office while in Europe, spending as much as three hours on a couple of days on City business (much to dismay of Mrs. Publius) during a two-week trip. When we returned, we entered the daily time we spent on City work and recorded the rest of each day as vacation time (which was tracked within the system as hours accrued, rather than days. One earned so many hours of vacation and sick time for so many hours of paid work time). We submitted our data into the system and received back a flamer from the timekeeping Gorgons – “YOU CANNOT DO THAT.” It was then explained to me (for the first time after a year of employment) that the system requires each managerial employee to record seventy hours of work during each two-week pay period (allowing for some flexibility in hours among the two weeks). But equally importantly, one must record at least one hour of work in each day during the pay period. If less than seventy hours were recorded, the balance must be made up with leave time. If an hour a day was not recorded for every day during a five-day week, then the week must be taken as leave time. So, the system was designed to dis-incent working while on leave. In our previous experience in the private sector, while we generally were provided with four weeks paid vacation (the City provides new employees with two paid weeks, regardless of seniority), no one paid much attention to how much vacation time we took, because we were always available while out of the office, and often spent full days working during crises or major projects while at the beach. The City’s gargantuan system provided no means for such flexibility. It actually is designed to punish it. Maybe this makes sense for sanitation workers or police officers, but it is nonsense for senior managers.

Given the weaponization of infractions by jealous or disgruntled co-workers, and the Javert-like mind-set of the human resources Gorgons, it is important to toe the line and do it right. We were often receiving communications from HR that we had not followed the system correctly and were being docked for this or that. The system required doctors’ notes be provided for sick time (like in third grade). The system required one’s supervisor (or in my case, where our supervisor couldn’t be bothered with ministerial tasks, the supervisor’s designee) to check a box in the system next to one’s time record to approve it, in order for a paycheck to be issued. We were often chasing after our supervisor’s designee (a loathed colleague, who was both a bully and the very model of an inflexible bureaucrat) to beg them to approve our bi-weekly pay records.

Making matters more fraught, was the fact that we were rarely kept busy full-time while in the City’s employ. We would estimate that our job called for our complete attention for about three hours on most days. We had to find ways to fill the rest of our time that would make us appear to be busy – but not doing work that was proscribed. This included not only the writing of books or essays which might be published (we had a friend who was heavily fined for writing an op-ed for a newspaper on a City computer – for which he was paid $50. Of course a bureaucratic foe had ratted him out), but also non-profit board service or pro bono work of other kinds. Such work on City time was against the rules. So, we read The New Yorker and books (we tried to make them books at least tangentially related to our work. We did not read news websites or shop on-line during business hours, which appeared to be a major occupation of some of our equally underemployed colleagues). We also took long lunches. The truth can now be told: we almost never recorded a lunch break; first because we felt we were a slave to our iPhone at all times (both to phone calls and emails.) and because if we did, we would NEVER have been able to record 35 hours during many weeks. Because the time keeping system really seemed to prefer that time recorded as working hours be spent at our desks, we also spent many, many days staring at the clock at 5:30 or 6 PM (depending on when we arrived) in order to appear to be performing an actual seven-hour day. We were not presented with the alternative of ditches to dig (and perhaps fill back up) or assembly line widgets to produce when not otherwise occupied with the people’s business.

We do think we provided good value to the City for our work – but we suppose everyone does. We were effectively available to the City seven days a week, during all of our waking hours (the City iPhone lived on our nightstand). We brought to the City decades of relevant experience in a specialized, highly technical role. We were occasionally called upon to work late or on weekends. But we sat at our desk filling time for many unproductive hours without actual City work to do, as a slave to the inflexible (notwithstanding its many mysterious toggles) Citytime system.

FAS EST AB HOSTE DOCERI

April 13, 2021 / John Jay

The use in managerial circles of the term “silo” to mean other than a farm structure is of rather recent coinage. When we were studying at university many decades ago it was an unheard of usage. But the conventional wisdom has become that in large organizations “silos” are bad.

“Silo mentality is a mindset that exists in organizations, which makes people reluctant to share information and resources with other employees of different departments within the same organization. As a result, it reduces the company’s efficiency and, at worst, contributes to a damaged corporate culture. Also known as silo thinking and silo vision, silo mentality occurs when people think that it’s not their responsibility to communicate with their colleagues or other departments. Silos in business restrict people from taking an interest in the overall success of the company.

The silo mentality mainly arises due to internal competition with other teams or individuals. As this inward-looking attitude grows within each department, it breeds an “us and them” mindset, which invariably has a negative impact on the culture and productivity of the organization as a whole.”

The negative results of organizational silos are said to be i) duplicative work, ii) routine, conformist thinking and iii) a lack of responsiveness to external stakeholders.^[1]

Silos, like risk aversion, are a pervasive, systemic phenomenon across New York City government, the result of which is serious, widespread dysfunction. When we first came into public service, among our goals was to take well-considered risks and to encourage as much cooperation among employees in the same business unit, across business units, among agencies and with outside stakeholders as possible. We assumed that with more seniority would come greater capacity for risk taking and collaboration. The reverse was true. The longer we served in City government, the less tolerance there was for unconventional, non-standard managerial practices by the powers that be. Once we were assumed to understand “how things went,” the more we were expected to conform. As years past, we were compelled by the culture to become more risk averse, and less able to work with others (however, we were able to continue to support and encourage our staff to collaborate with each other – the power structure seemed not to care about that and left us to our own devices). Ultimately, all meetings with other agencies and outsiders were subject to the approval of the hierarchy. This forced us to be unresponsive and to resist collaborative problem solving.

The first reason for the creation of an organizational silo is turf. This is self-imposed by a manager. Mid-level governmental managers have so little decision-making authority and are routinely treated so disrespectfully and arbitrarily by their supervisors that building a tiny fortress is a form of psychological protection. A manager maintains his or her self-respect and sense of autonomy by drawing clearly defined boundaries around their jurisdiction. Those who want to enter the feif must pay appropriate homage to the Lord. Their vassals are, of course, abused (as is the lord by his or herliege). Outsiders are regarded with hostility as a threat to the fortress’ sanctity and safety. If outsiders want something from the manager/Lord they must pay proper obeisance to the power of the Lord and be eternally grateful for their patronage.

When we first entered City service, among our responsibilities was signing off on routine, ministerial agreements between another City agency and non-governmental institutions. Our role was to check with legal counsel to make sure that the form of the agreement was in good order, make a record of the existence of the document and return it to the originating agency. Our approval was required because this type of agreement tangentially touched on our agency’s jurisdiction and “attention must be paid.” Our performing of this ministerial function was treated by our colleagues at the other agency as a supreme kindness. Before our accession to this responsibility, these documents would sit on various desks for months before being processed. We found it not particularly taxing to process these agreements immediately and ask our legal colleagues to perform their five-minutes of review within days, rather than weeks.

But this situation was not to continue. The agency changed its policy to remove from our position any signature authority over even the most trivial matters, and to lodge that authority at the highest levels. In order to gain such approval, a series of explanatory memos were required to be created to explain why approval of the agreement by the agency would be appropriate. Even when the correct paperwork was completed, there came a point when the requisite signature was only affixed after a senior executive of the other agency called to inquire as to the status of the document. In one case, such a trivial document languished for over a year between the time it was received by us and time it was returned to be signed to the other agency. For some period of time there was a dispute over the order of signatures to the documents – as to which agency would have the supreme privilege and glory of being the final signatory. Ultimately, when our colleagues at the other agency inquired as to the status of this particular instrument, the inevitable witch hunt was undertaken to determine who was to blame for the delay (this being agreed to be of higher priority than actually finally processing said agreement).

Perhaps, more importantly, and more destructively, silos exist as a result of the universal importance of credit for “accomplishment.” More specifically, who would be noted in the requisite media release as being most responsible for the described achievement. To collaborate with others is to muddy the waters as to the source of the rare, claimed success. A business unit does not want to share credit with agency colleagues and agency heads wish to reserve credit for such accomplishments for themselves. No right-thinking person, seeking to advance themselves within the bureaucracy or electorally, would ever want to assist someone else in their efforts to achieve something – since all others are seen as participants in the all-essential competition for credit and recognition, particularly from the media.

Collaborating with external stakeholders exposes the decision maker to the potential for criticism. Perhaps a stakeholder is politically disfavored by the powers that be, and the manager will be cast into darkness by cooperating with that person. Perhaps the stakeholder has unknown baggage attached to them. Within the bureaucracy, all private sector actors are suspect as self-interested liars (as so many of them are, in point of fact). One can never really know – so why get involved with assisting someone (unless they are a well-established “good guy,” often a lobbyist. The phenomenon of the designation as a “good guy,” we will perhaps discuss in a future writing. Suffice it to say that the principal attribute of “good guy-ness” is familiarity –longevity within or dealing with the bureaucracy)? We have been known to say that of the more than 300,000 municipal employees, not one has the time to return a phone call from someone outside government. The reason they do not do so is that there is little to no upside in returning the call of non-governmental actors (other than lobbyists).

This culture obviously impedes innovation and creative, collaborative problem solving. But without even going that far, reversing of siloed behavior requires remarkably little effort, and little to no actual sacrifice by the parties involved. Returning a phone call is easy. Providing information that is simple for the manager to access, may save the caller hours of research and the possibility of reaching the wrong conclusion. Collaboration prevents duplication of effort among agencies. It enables dedicated public servants to share ideas and be more likely to solve critical problems when all of the requisite information is available to the decision makers as a result of broad collaboration. It takes effort to create silos. Behaving cooperatively is actually easier. You have to work at making silos.

We were once asked by a colleague at another agency for a brief meeting to review a small, relatively unimportant but imaginative project they had under consideration. The project had the potential for being integrated with an initiative our agency had underway. The caller was a talented and friendly colleague who was eager for our collaboration in order to improve his project. We transmitted the request to the requisite agency authority. Those individuals felt that other senior officials needed to be consulted. A meeting was set with a half dozen senior agency managers to discuss whether such fifteen-minute meeting with colleagues from another agency would be appropriate. One participant in the call expressed deep concern that the other agency’s project might draw attention from our agency’s initiative. The question was tabled for further consideration. Meanwhile, the time slots suggested by the inquiring agency had passed by.

As with encouraging intelligent risk taking, eliminating silos doesn’t require changes to formal procedure or processes. Senior managers need to encourage collaborative problem-solving and working with other business units, agencies and stake holders in order to increase the amount of information available when reviewing issues and expedite decision making with all knowledgeable staff involved in reviewing possible options. Managers need to be encouraged to meet with other managers. Information gathering meetings with people outside government need to be encouraged, so that government is able to stay up to date with the most current industry information. Senior mangers need to just eliminate the approval structures that create silos.

It important to note that not every level of the chain of command are required to be at every meeting. Junior managers from various business units and agencies should be able to meet with each other without the need for babysitting from every level of senior manager up the chain. City meetings generally have way too many participants as a result of executives not trusting their subordinates and managers seeking to defend their turf at any meeting that might even tangentially affect their bailiwick. Substantial inefficiencies result from over-staffing of meetings. Over-staffing also makes meetings more difficult to conduct and less likely to come to useful results. The City’s law department is particularly egregious with respect to multiple meeting attendance. The law department in particular would be orders of magnitude more efficient if no more than one, or perhaps two, attorneys were permitted to attend routine meetings, rather than four or five.

We were pleased with the positive results we were able to achieve when we first entered City service and were able to break down barriers between departments and allow for creative problem solving and collaboration. A lot of good decisions were made, and substantial progress was often achieved. But the more we were required to engage in siloed behavior the more bogged down we became and the less our group was able to accomplish to improve the delivery of public services to the people of the City of New York.

^[1] https://www.engagebay.com/blog/break-silo-mentality-business/

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi

April 6, 2021 / John Jay

Fortune rota volvitur;
descendo minoratus;
alter in altum tollitur;
nimis exaltatus
rex sedet in vertice
caveat ruinam!
nam sub axe legimus
Hecubam reginam.

Underlying just about every issue effecting the functioning of City systems is the manner in which risk is handled. There is uncertainty involved in most, if not, all managerial decisions. We have to evaluate, in conditions of incomplete information, the likelihood of various outcomes, and the positive and/or negative consequences of those decisions. Sometimes, those probabilistic outcomes can be evaluated in monetary terms, and as a result, decision making is more straightforward. But often that it is not the case that the fiscal impact of decisions can be easily calculated. In the public sector negative political or reputational consequences of a judgment can be more important in decision making.

We would argue that flexibility, creativity and problem solving are essential to obtaining optimal public policy outcomes. What we most frequently find in City government is, first, a preference for doing things the way they have always been done, and a second, a preference for avoiding dealing with problems if at all possible. We have also observed that middle, and even senior, managers are generally discouraged from offering new ideas.

In the private sector, the evaluation of risk in the course of decision making can be much, much easier. Incentive systems are pegged to positive economic outcomes, either in the short or long term. The better those outcomes, the more reward to the decision maker or organization. Markets, theoretically, reward successful risk taking (and penalize bad bets). The institutional essence of capitalism, the financial markets, are supposedly all about rewarding correct calculations of risk. The public sector has no analogous meta-metric.

That being said, we have long wondered about the characteristic risk aversion among public servants. The avoidance of possible negative outcomes of any kind seems to be an essential part of most public decisions making. This has appeared to us as particularly odd, given that most public employees are insulated from negative sanctions by City personnel policies. There are elaborate processes in place, through civil service and otherwise, theoretically to prevent arbitrary personnel decisions. It is a stereotype about government that employees are difficult to fire or otherwise sanction. While these systems don’t protect elected officials and senior bureaucrats, those positions are only a small slice of public employment. In our observation, only very rarely is City employee negatively impacted by a bad business decision or for excessive risk taking.

So why is the taking of risk by public servants so seriously avoided? At the highest level, there is a culture among the media of exposing mistakes, without much analysis of the circumstances of the error. This is also a function of a rough and tumble competitive political culture, where there is benefit to elected officials, and the most senior appointed officers, seen in criticizing the mistakes of others. Good faith errors are not differentiated from egregious incompetence by even the respected broadsheet newspaper of record. Tabloid journalists seem particularly focused on publicizing errors. This might be a reason. But of the thousands of decisions made on a day-to-day basis by government workers, most are entirely unlikely to come to public attention. Those decicions just aren’t all that important. But even more mystifying to us is the lack of impact of the media on the public at large. No one really takes the reporting of the New York Postseriously, except for a small group of insiders – elected officials and senior bureaucrats. Post stories, for example, disappear quickly and generally have little to no effect on the voters at large – and yet a series of blistering Post stories, no matter how scurrilous or poorly reported, become part of an insider echo chamber that takes on a life of its own – with little resonance beyond the political class.

We have also observed that many elected and other senior public officials are principally focused on receiving positive media attention, even from the tabloids (perhaps, particularly from the tabloids) and are obsessively concerned about protecting their downsides from negative situations which might damage their future career prospects. As a result, they micro-manage their agencies, and demand that their subordinates take no risks at all – in order to avoid any possible negative outcomes. While this is a wide-spread practice, it is far from universal and in very large organizations, does not reach down all that far into the bureaucratic depths. There must be some other reason for the almost complete avoidance of risk by all City employees. We don’t regard the prior sentence as hyperbole. It is a precise statement of fact, in our experience.

An interesting example is the general risk avoidance of the policy administration of Mayor Bill DeBlasio during his last years in office. We have observed City Hall’s unwillingness to delegate authority and difficulty in making close decisions. We found this odd, given that the Mayor was not running for re-election and was unlikely to ever hold political office again. We might think that such a situation would provide fertile ground for bold initiatives and the testing of new policies and programs. There would be no political price to be paid by the Administration if any of these projects were to come a cropper. But City Hall continued to operate as if it were engaged in a reelection campaign, with continued fretting about how decisions might be received by the media, other elected officials and the public. It was if having been in campaign mode for the last two decades, since having been first elected to the New York City Council, the Mayor and his senior political and media advisors could not escape operating as if an election was imminent. As a result, opportunities for seriously addressing the kind of issues regarding equity and service to the disadvantaged, about which the Administration obviously cared, were not fully exploited.

The explanation for the broad phenomenon of local governmental risk avoidance, we have concluded, has to be that while government workers enjoy broad protections as to their tenure, no positive incentives are in place to promote risk taking within City government. There is no reward for those who carefully calibrate risk, proceed with something untried, and as a result improve government outcomes. The system is structured in such a way as to provide some negative consequences from failure, but no positive results from success. Obviously, there are no financial bonuses awarded for high performance, let along successful risk taking in government. Promotions within the bureaucracy come, generally not from high performance, but from length of tenure (primarily), ingratiation with decision makers (small “p” politics), and an absence of disqualifying blemishes on an employee’s record. As a result, a culture of risk avoidance permeates government service.

There are serious negative results from this systematic risk aversion. Change becomes more difficult to implement. Doing the same thing in the same way, no matter how dysfunctional, is simply easier. New ideas are difficult to suggest in a culture that discourages them and are nearly impossible to implement – unless they come from the top. This is a major reason why government is so often unresponsive and sclerotic. We have seen in government a failure to abandon obsolete practices, policies and even metrics, because there is no incentive for doing so, and often loud voices in opposition. With respect to metrics for example, we have seen City agencies insist on continuing to measure things that are no longer relevant (for example, because practices have so improved that the performance being measured meets standards and never varies). Data managers will refuse to alter the metric because “the data will no longer be comparable to past performance,” even though nothing useful is being measured.

This is not an unsolvable problem. A culture of intelligent risk taking could be encouraged at all levels of City government. We would suggest that for a Mayor or other senior City official to make a difference in the performance of local government that early in his or her tenure he or she very visibly reward a middle level manager for making an intelligent decision based on a careful analysis of risk – that didn’t pan out. This would send a message across government that implementing smart new programs will be rewarded – regardless of whether they work. The idea is to encourage flexibility and creative problem solving. Better decision making is more a question of leadership than it is of the establishment of new systems or processes.

The cost is low. In our experience when new initiatives haven’t been successful, the problems created are always relatively easy to solve. In fact, more often than not, even if the initial foray failed, the repair of the failure ultimately produces a superior outcome. Rarely do incorrect decisions as a result of flexibility or creativity in local public administration result in irremediable outcomes. Problems can be fixed. The benefit to the governmental outcomes of empowering managers to solve, rather than avoid, problems would be extraordinary.

Serious consideration needs to be given by thoughtful public officials to practices that support local public sector decision makers to find practical solutions to problems. While this sounds straightforward it would require radical cultural change in New York City government. Doing so requires a commitment to improving people’s lives through government and ignoring the noise created by short term carping competitors and the media. Encouraging risk in City government requires taking a long view that over time, aggerate outcomes of high-quality decision making will improve governmental results.

PUBLIUS REDUX

March 26, 2021 / John Jay

Most people who work in local government are skeptical about its ability to accomplish anything. They essentially believe in governing by press conference – you announce that you are planning to do something, you allocate some resources, and you go on to the next thing. We know that change is possible. We’ve seen it happen. We’ve seen the quality of life in neighborhoods improve. We’ve worked on projects that have improved people’s lives. We want to write about the systematic obstacles to positive change in City government, as well as about what the conditions are for success.

But success is certainly the exception, rather than the rule. When we talked to state government about working in a senior level position several years ago , we were told by a remarkably frank public official, “Oh, you wouldn’t like to work here. We don’t do anything except hold media events.” An individual who is now a high profile elected official (who we will call Abagail Adams), and who was previously a senior aide to an even more high profile elected official (who we will call George Washington) once told us a story about that person. Adams told me, “I once complained to George Washington that all we did was hold press events – and we never actually DID anything. Washington said to me, Abby, when I hold a press conference, I AM DOING SOMETHING.” That story, told to us more than twenty years ago, has stayed with us.

We aspire to write, sometimes in real time, drawing on our thirty years of experience working around and in City government, about how that government works and doesn’t. We’re particularly interested in the ways in which “reform” systems put in place nearly one hundred years ago to prevent graft, fraud, patronage, self-dealing and incompetence in the numbingly boring areas of procurement and personnel, have become obstacles to good policy making and effective governance. Gigantic bureaucracies have grown up around these systems. Sometimes they are even weaponized by the most cynical public employees against those they want to hurt, either to advance themselves or simply out of spite or the sense of empowerment that lodging complaints about others provides. In addition, we like to quip that in any given year the amount spent on preventing waste, graft and fraud in City government has to exceed the amount wasted on waste, graft and fraud in the City’s entire history (leaving out the ten figure “City Time” scandal, which occurred DESPITE, these vast layers of supposed protections). The approval of contracts usually involves as many as a dozen approvals across a range of agencies – many, many hands checking off boxes along the way. Civil service protection is an insider’s game, that takes years to secure, and generally insulates the wrong people – while arbitrary personnel and policy decisions by high level appointees and life-time employees are routine.

More recently, elaborate land use and environmental processes have been established with the idea of increasing the level of engagement with and sensitivity to “community” concerns. Those processes were established very much in response to the destruction and over-reaching of “Power Broker” Robert Moses chronicled by Robert Caro and held up to analytical light by Jane Jacobs. Those regimes, also, have devolved into obstructionism and thoughtless box checking – having little to do with actual environmental protection or the protection of important minority, or even majority interests. ULURP and CEQR have taken on lives of their own, with huge enforcement bureaucracies focused on narrow requirements, losing sight of larger community values. Similarly, historic preservation (which admittedly has insufficiently large enforcement resources, creating a different set of problems) has lost its larger frame and fetishizes the old and engaged in inappropriate spot-zoning, often at odds with the city’s need for additional and affordable housing. A parallel regime of “public interest” litigation has also been weaponized as means for a small group of elite attorneys, using those regulatory schemes to exert un-democratic power over governmental decision making.

We know City government has the capacity both to provide quality services to New Yorkers and improve their lives. The City does an outstanding job providing high quality water to its residents. It reliably picks up garbage from residential buildings. The City’s robust and unique affordable housing programs were a key to New York’s renaissance beginning in the 1980’s. Entire neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx were transformed.

At the same time the City, for example, seems not to be able to maintain its public spaces. The Parks Department has been shown to find it difficult to execute capital projects on time or on budget. They City is widely recognized to be a terrible landlord at the New York City Housing Authority. While there has been some improvement in recent years, they City’s transportation policy remains insufficiently flexible and responsive to technological and social changes, like the need for bus rapid transit and light transportation alternative (like bikes and scooters, and the need for modern logistics and delivery systems). While some of the City’s schools remain among the best urban schools in the country, most students are underserved and segregated – and current policy nostrums threaten to disable even those excellent schools.

We want to use this forum to highlight the failures and successes in municipal service delivery, benefiting from the knowledge obtained both from working in the middle of the bureaucracy, as well in “partnership” with local government from the outside. Unfortunately, in our thinking about these issues over the last few years, we’ve identified more problems than solutions. We want to take advantage of the anonymity that this forum provides to be as forthright and clear as possible.

That said, many high-profile people in local government have struck us as being involved in public service to draw attention to themselves and to enjoy the exercise of power rather than to advance the public weal. Perhaps that statement seems naïve. Perhaps it appears overly cynical. We have also observed people in public policymaking who are truly dedicated to improving the lives of others. But, in writing here, we hope to criticize systems, ideas and ideologies – rather than individuals. Perhaps, occasionally, we will praise individuals who have taken risks and made change (where that can be done without an excess of self-revelation).

We recognize the dangers involved in setting ourselves up as the arbiter of the right and true, and the wrong and false. There is something inherently elitist and authoritarian about such an endeavor. But we will do our best to attempt to be fair, data-driven, discerning – and perhaps kind and generous as well in our writing. The systems constraining local government can and should be better.

J.J.

Tag: public administration

QUIS CUSTODES?

Translatio Erici Adams

OPUS SUGIT

SPATIO IMPERIUM

STULTI FUERUNT OMNES NOS IN DIEBUS NOSTRIS

FAS EST AB HOSTE DOCERI

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi

PUBLIUS REDUX

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