Competitive Instinct

Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith is serious about cutting back city hall.

William D. Eggers from the August/September 1993 issue

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standing not more than five feet away, I'm greeted with a torrent of complaints. They're "much more stressed," "always afraid" of losing

their jobs, and their "sense of security has disappeared." One crew member sums up the feelings of the group: "The mayor has rocked our boat."

Goldsmith worries about the morale problem. "Without successful buy-in from the employees of our efforts, we can't succeed," he

says. To bring employees into the fold, he has set up an array of programs, including once-a-month department brown-bag lunches with the mayor, so the employees can "get the vision," and an electronic mailbag system in which employees can send him messages directly. "I have 4,000 new pen pals," says Goldsmith.

Some employees have indeed caught the entrepreneurial fever. The crack-sealing crew, for all their griping about increased stress and tougher conditions, say their major complaint is that it takes them a week to get supplies. The delay slows us down and decreases our productivity." In fact, the crew is talking about taking their unit private. "I'm ready to do it right now," says David Walderop, the alternate crew leader, "There's money to be made out there and we all know it."

Downsizing, quantifying performance, measuring productivity, competing services, and eliminating waste are only half the revolution Goldsmith is trying to bring about in the way big cities are run. The other half is decentralizing government and empowering neighborhoods. The mayor believes governments at all levels have over-centralized decision making and superseded more important non-governmental organizations such as churches, families, and neighborhoods.

"You cannot ignore the populations in neighborhoods, do things for them, to them, and then think you're going to solve their problems in the long run," says the mayor. "You need to have a theory that empowers the people in those communities."

He has publicly embraced the outlines of a radical proposal developed at the Indiana University School of Public Affairs called "municipal federalism." It would allow for the voluntary establishment of neighborhood councils to make decisions now made in city hall.

Neighborhoods would have the right to contract with the city to maintain their own parks and sweep their own side streets and sidewalks. The people in the neighborhoods, not city bureaucrats, would determine which vacant lots are fixed up with housing rehabilitation money. Implementing this Tocquevilleian vision of getting people to seize control of public services and decision making at the neighborhood level has been Goldsmith's greatest challenge so far.

Upon becoming mayor he had hoped to duplicate in other areas of the city a successful neighborhood effort to revitalize a local park. Holiday Park, located in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, had degenerated to the point where drug dealers and male prostitutes had set up permanent shop there. Community residents were afraid to go anywhere near the park. Neighbors, fed up with the situation, received permission to take over the park and proceeded to raise $300,000 in private donations for new equipment, a security guard, and better upkeep. The former drug-infested park is now filled with picnicking families on weekends.

But SELTIC Parks Commissioner Tom Reilly hasn't found it easy to duplicate that success. The straight- shooting chairman of Reilly Industries, a multi-million-dollar, international chemical company, Reilly says most community groups just aren't interested in adopting "orphan" parks. "We haven't been particularly successful," he says, shaking his head. "It's been a very frustrating process."

Reilly points to a troubled park where there were recently two shootings. Within 200 yards of the park are six churches. If they worked together, he says, they could turn that park around. But "there's a great deal of envy between the various groups," he explains. "If you talk about turning over a park to one group, the other ones go crazy. Sometimes they'd rather the park be in bad shape than see it turned over to someone else."

And many neighborhood groups aren't very organized. They can't take on some of the repetitive functions involved in managing parks, such as weekly grass cutting, youth programs, and maintenance. But Reilly, who is known to sometimes bulldoze his way through hurdles in the