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 8 Sharing the Buck Communities Rethink Public Finances and Public Responsibilities Judging by the opinion polls, you would never guess that the residents of Lakewood, Colorado, are questioning the role of government in the modern world. Surveys show that they are overwhelmingly enthusiastic about their elected representatives and city employees. Lakewood residents have a strong sense of public safety, they value the public services they receive, and they are excited about the new downtown rising up in their midst (see Chapter 3). Going by the survey results, you might think that Lakewood is some kind of first-tier suburban utopia.1 The public finances of Lakewood, however, have reached a crisis point, partly because city residents have voted down sales tax increases on every occasion since 1971. These ballot measures were not proposed for major new expenditures; they were intended only to offset the declining tax revenues from a sagging retail market, and to support the current level of government services and operations. Without the ability to maintain revenue , the city has endured years of cutbacks, laying off key personnel and terminating popular programs. Lakewood now has the lowest level of tax revenues per capita in the Denver region, despite the fact that it rates higher in citizen satisfaction than almost all of the neighboring communities. In 2005, as the city council prepared to put yet another sales tax increase on the ballot, Lakewood seemed to be the utopia no one wanted to pay for. Lakewood’s predicament is actually quite typical. Many other cities have experienced a similar disparity, with residents who speak highly of local government performance and yet are unwilling to reward and maintain that performance with their tax contributions. Officials are left with few options: if they make cuts in municipal services, citizens ask why the streets weren’t plowed or the trash picked up. Officials may also try temporary fixes like deferred capital maintenance, freezes on hiring and salaries, or shuffling money between funds or departments.2 Eventually, however,  The Next Form of Democracy the gap between revenues and expenses grows so large that it cannot be concealed or ignored. These financial crises in local government are often blamed on the state of the economy, wasteful public officials, or declining aid from state and federal governments. But while those factors cannot be discounted, they also obscure a more significant trend: our sense of who is responsible, and who pays, for the public welfare is now in question. Since the Progressive Era a century ago, we have assumed that the role of government is to provide services, and the role of citizens is to pay taxes for those services. That way of thinking may no longer apply in most places.3 No wonder that even our best city managers are hard-pressed to keep their administrations afloat. Public management schools still train them to believe that the main criteria for good government are openness and efficiency , and yet it is increasingly apparent that those Progressive Era values will not ensure citizen support. Lakewood’s government is open and efficient , but that isn’t enough; people just aren’t sure what they want out of government anymore. Faced with budget shortfalls, public demand for services, and pressing issues like crime prevention, housing, and roads, city managers and other local officials are trying many new approaches—most of which blur the lines between citizens and government. Like the community organizers described in Chapter 6 and the educators of Chapter 7, local officials are trying to build structures for shared governance that will allow citizens and practitioners to work together productively. Like the residents of Lakewood, they are rethinking the connection between public finance and public responsibilities. They are three main ways in which city managers and other local officials are approaching this work: 1. Participatory budgeting. Some public officials are inviting residents to take a stronger role in the budgeting process, engaging them in public meetings that help people assess the financial picture and decide for themselves how tax revenues should be spent. “To successfully market a budget, a local government must move from monologue to dialogue,” says Frank Benest, a former city manager. “That means including the public in the budget process before the actual document is formally adopted.”4 Sometimes the focus is on one particular project, proposed initiative, or section of the budget, and the question to the public is whether this expenditure is necessary , and if so, how it should be managed. In a...

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