Mustering the Little Platoons

One mayor's attempt to create active citizens.

John McClaughry from the December 2002 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Neighborhood residents needed larger incomes. Goldsmith launched an innovative Independence Initiative, organizing business sector groups to line up job openings and employing the for-profit firm America Works to train welfare recipients and put them into jobs. Entrepreneurs needed opportunity. Goldsmith recognized that every struggling business and grassroots organization in his city faced a maddening array of government regulations, most of them of no value to the public. "Between 1994 and 1999," Goldsmith reports, "the [Regulatory Study] Commission saved Indianapolis taxpayers $3.3 million by getting rid of 157,000 processes and regulations....As far as I know, no one misses any of them."

Neighborhoods needed facelifts and repairs. Goldsmith spent $1.3 billion repairing and cleaning up streets, bridges, sidewalks, sewers, parks, and buildings, and did it without raising tax rates (thanks to management efficiency, privatization, business partnerships, and refinancing). He put volunteer county jail inmates to work beautifying common areas and parks (139,000 man-hours over eight years).

Neighborhood organizations needed funding. Goldsmith created a Community Enhancement Fund that made over 400 competitive awards totaling nearly $1 million to grassroots organizations. With these modest grants, Goldsmith reports, "an east side mentoring initiative arranged for twenty high school students to serve as mentors and tutors for nearly one hundred elementary school students. Groups turned vacant lots into parks, ugly areas into neighborhood gardens, graffiti into murals, and much more."

Neighborhood residents lacked self-governance. Goldsmith launched a Neighborhood Empowerment Initiative, hoping to move toward a true municipal federalism. It was, alas, thwarted by the City-County Council, whose elected members saw themselves as the only legitimate manifestation of government in their townships (the boundaries of which bore little relationship to actual human communities within the city).

The mayor realized that residents related to their society through faith-based institutions, which had traditionally been excluded from public policy. Goldsmith created a Front Porch Alliance, enlisting leaders of grassroots value-shaping organizations as intermediaries between people and city government.

So did Goldsmith's faith in "Tocquevillian empowerment" prove a success? Not entirely. Real-world urban problems are so deeply seated and intractable that it is rare that any leader can claim an unqualified success in dealing with any of them. In many cities the measure of success has come down to, "Hey -- nobody rioted."

Still, Goldsmith can take credit for an effort that produced a lot of very positive results -- not by showering neighborhoods with taxpayer largesse but by emphasizing character and responsibility, devolving power, and rebuilding the institutions of local civil society. His efforts won encomia from people such as Steve Forbes ("one of the most effective, innovative mayors in American history"), Mayor Ed Rendell of Philadelphia ("one of America's most innovative mayors"), and Jack Kemp ("demonstrated that expanding private enterprise, not government, is the key to efficient, high quality services and, more importantly, to the empowerment of the city's residents").

In 1996 Goldsmith -- far from an ebullient campaigner -- ran for governor of the Hoosier State. He lost by a five-point margin to the popular lieutenant governor, Democrat Frank O'Bannon. More surprisingly, Goldsmith lost Marion County (Indianapolis).

Three years after that defeat, Goldsmith abruptly and inexplicably announced that he wouldn't be running for a certain third term as mayor. (After leaving office, he became a major architect of President Bush's Faith-Based and Community Initiatives program.) He had no heir apparent. The Republican nominee to succeed him was the Indiana secretary of state, with little experience in urban management or policy. The neighborhoods that had appreciatively voted for Goldsmith in 1995 reverted to their normal voting habits.

With Goldsmith gone, the city's neighborhood organizations -- only recently empowered -- were not sufficiently strong and cohesive to force his unwilling successor to continue his program. The new mayor, business Democrat Bart Peterson, promptly dismantled Goldsmith's alliances and initiatives, vetoed budget items for their support, and reinstalled traditional top-down managerial government. File the Goldsmith years under "Bright Shining Moments."

Goldsmith's book reveals his impressive philosophical depth as well as his practical experience. Unlike most mayors, he saw that social problem solving goes beyond the province of experts, planners, and managers and that most baneful of concepts, "delivering services." The key to success is the transformation of ordinary people into active citizens.

The recipe is easy to state but daunting to achieve: Empower people, enlarge their capacities, strengthen their local civic institutions, lower government-created barriers, increase information flow, create networks for expanding opportunity, demand responsibility and performance, and, above all, recreate a sense of efficacy among those who had viewed themselves as alienated and powerless.

Every aspiring urban leader should read Goldsmith's illuminating little book. Not everything he tried worked in Indianapolis. Not everything that worked in Indianapolis will work elsewhere. But the book's principles and policy ideas are perceptive and powerful. For any leader seeking to revive a lost civil society, they are also indispensable.