Catching up on our reading, the invaluable Governing has had even more worth posting on than usual this week, and except for the last item, today’s quick hits are a run down of their best of the week:
The latest Management Insights column, by former Indianapolis mayor Steve Goldsmith, looks at the move by San Diego’s strong new Mayor Jerry Sanders to cut and control the city’s public employee costs, which along with serious mismanagement have blown a $1.5 billion hole in the city’s budget. Goldsmith argues that by ending defined-benefit pension abuses and privatizing services, “it is still possible in large cities for the general taxpayer to win out over well organized special interests.”In the magazine, Governing’s cover story on the diminishing role of local newspapers in civic life sheds an interesting light on the Politico, the web-driven new political outlet debuting in January that I think represents the first mature attempt to create a large-scale news-gathering operation not intimately linked to the print distribution model. That the Politico is also endeavoring to create a news service that’s made up of all star reporters, no back-benchers, is interesting in its own right, though I’m not sure how, if at all, that relates to either the decline of the print paper or the rise of the web.Santa Monica’s real-time parking map is a graphic illustration of much bigger things to come. I’ll have a longer essay up tomorrow or Monday about real-time pricing and how it will change everything from toll rates to energy use.The only complaint that I have with Otis White’s Urban Notebook is that for whatever odd reason, there’s no way to link to individual items, but his last four posts are all worth reading. In order, he looks at Detroit’s crisis of confidence and of vision, the perils of over-planning, negative externalities and New York’s trans fats ban, and argues that Michael Bloomberg has become the most influential mayor in America (“good management is good politics”).
The last is a well-stated case, but over-the-top. Bloomberg, backed by an entirely uncritical New York Times editorial board and his capacious purse, has done an exceptionally good job selling the idea of his mayoralty—without the accomplishments to match. A good example of this gap between well-marketed reputation and actual achievements is the mayor's OpEd in today's Wall Street Journal continuing his hard sell of his thus-far very limited educational accomplishments, mostly a series of structural reforms that thus far have failed to result in improved student results.
Finally, the NYPD’s newest training tools—replicas of the 7/7 bombers’ apartment, the 1993 WTC van, and the dorm room of Oklahoma State University student and bomb-maker Joel Hinricks—are good example of the sort of imaginative training needed to identify threats going forward.
