Regional planning (i.e. a whole metro area collectively planning its future, instead of delegating it to balkanized cities, states, and counties) is hot these days. The Brookings Institution is all over it.
Eric at the Prosperity Blog says that we in the Puget Sound have got a good regional plan, we just need to make more people aware of it:
Rather than trying to bring everyone together to develop a new collaborative vision, lets use the vision that was already developed collaboratively and get everyone to buy-in. And Im not talking your standard outreach: a couple of powerpoint presentations, a luncheon, maybe an op-ed. Im talking a full frontal assault on the regions citizens and the state legislature. Billboards, radio and television ads, a Facebook page, Twitter, Linked-in, social media, viral video, newspapers, speeches, rallies.
That’s a good idea, as far as it goes. Certainly if the local bigwigs don’t even know about VISION 2040 (and Eric says that many don’t) it’s definitely worth telling them about it! But it seems to me that the problem is more fundamental: one of authority. Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) are necessarily weak, because they aren’t directly elected and don’t have a large funding base. No politician’s career rests directly on the successful implementation of a regional plan, and so it’s never going to be top-of-mind.
This isn’t a knock on the PSRC, it’s just how government works in the US: overlapping jurisdictions with everything ultimately punted to the local level in the least efficient manner possible. Solutions to this problem are almost invariably framed as “we should put the PSRC on steroids,” i.e., give it some skin in the game by making it directly elected and in control of a sizeable budget.
While that may be a good idea (if far-fetched), it’s important to remember that, as metro areas go, Seattle actually has fewer overlapping municipalities than most. Seattle and a good chunk of its suburbs are entirely contained within a single county, and all 4 counties that make up PSRC’s domain are within a single state.* There are plenty of metro areas (mostly back east, but even Portland, OR to a degree) that cross multiple state lines, and encompass 10 or more counties. Seattle regional planning should be a walk in the park by comparison.
* And even Kitsap County is sort of an outlier, no?
One of Bruce Katz’s main talking points when he was in town this week was that “metropolitan planning organizations need to have more power.” He called for a directly elected board that had statutory authority over some set amount of issues. Joni Earl, who was on a panel with him, talked about how Sound Transit – which she pointed out is the only regional entity actually implementing stuff – needs to work with 39 different jurisdictions to do their job, which seems like extra bureaucracy and wasted time. (Also creates a risk of a small jurisdiction holding the region’s mass transit system hostage for any number of reasons).
I tend to think that there’s a great stand-in for actual statutory authority in the world: money. The Gates Foundation isn’t a government, but they sure do get a lot of policy and program change done, and talk about having to work with multiple jurisdictions! If more transportation and land use funding flowed through MPOs instead of the state and the feds, I think you might be able to avoid creating a directly elected board or making cities formally cede pieces of their sovereignty to an umbrella government.
I think part of the basic problem here is that I’ve hardly heard of the PSRC, and I’m not so sure I want to hear more. I at least need to know who they are, what task they are assigned, and who assigned them that task, before I will consider giving them the time of day.
Naturally a good number of things are punted to the local level. Planning, for example, frequently takes effect through zoning, and what you indeed to do is require the agencies to include your planning criteria in implementing and enforcing zoning.
Putting the PSRC “on steroids” would simply create another layer of government, not inherently any better organized than any of the others, and arguably a lot less efficient in enforcing laws and regulations.
Why should Seattle regional planning be a walk in the park? There are absolutely flabbergasting amounts of money involved with major players looking 30 years into the future. Look at the Kemper Freeman fortune, which really took off with suburban development 50 years ago, and still seems to be even more interested than ever in pushing suburbanization. King County has been one of the toughest nuts in the nation for planners to crack, and I sincerely doubt it will get easier before gas hits $10/gallon.
Maybe at the bottom line regional planning depends on whether people see themselves as part of a region, and whether they trust the people doing the regional planning. On the one hand, this is hard because Americans move a lot, and on the other, this could make it easier to just tell newcomers they have to see this as a region that needs to be saved. If the basic public opinion is that saving Puget Sound is important, and here’s how we’re going to do that, a lot of people will see that as reasonable and take part.
If, in fact, 39 different jurisdictions are actually “extra bureaucracy”, the solution would appear to be merging them into fewer jurisdictions, not creating an additional bureaucracy.
Why would it be so amazing if ST had to deal with a number of jurisdictions? That’s the whole point of ST- to have an agency that deals with all those jurisdictions, instead of all of them having to deal with all of them. Of course ST needs to deal with them, because ST is a licensed common carrier.
This kind of discussion entirely misses the fact that almost all of those jurisdictions are parts of our form of representative government. I get pretty tired of seeing these hobgoblins cast on the wall like a Halloween party with flashlights, but if you actually looked, you would find these jurisdictions are towns and cities people have formed to govern themselves. I’m pretty sure these people are smart enough to figure out what needs to be done, if your arguments have any real merit.
Of course, the idea of giving a regional organization governing authority would not be to create an additional layer of government, but rather shift responsibilities from multiple jurisdictions to one overarching jurisdiction – creating more efficiency, not less. I have an incredible amount of respect for local governments and the people who run them, but their number one responsibility is to their own jurisdictions and this inevitably creates conflicts that disadvantage the greater good of the region. If you believe that regionalism has value, then you need institutions that facilitate it.
Well, some regional agencies, like ST, do shift multiple small responsibilities into one overall and considerably more efficient agency.
And it certainly seems possible that a close look at government would reveal dozens, possibly hundreds, of governmental bodies that really serve no purpose at all other than the egos of the people who sit on them. It’s always been the case in the past that you could find boards and commissions packed with cronies and contributing nothing but delay and cost.
Maybe the best illustration of what I’m saying is Forward Thrust. In the 50s Forward Thrust consolidated sewage treatment, the issue passed at the ballot box, and great results were obtained. In the late 60s Forward Thrust proposed a rail transit system.
But in the late 60s people were tired of giant agencies failing. The government plainly didn’t have a clue about Vietnam. Boeing, which had become a sort of super-agency in the Puget Sound area, was laying off 100,000 employees. The ballot measure failed, probably not on the merits, but because people had become distrustful of big agencies.
Obviously we need regional governance, but that governance has to emerge from something more substantial than a vague feeling that it would probably be “more efficient”.
I completely agree that re-allocation of money will significantly change things. What would have happened if part of WSDOT’s $860 million 2007-2009 biennial federal funds had been allocated to MPOs instead of the state in proportion with the population of our metro areas?
Some stimulus money did go through PSRC:
http://seattletransitblog.com/2009/03/12/psrc-allocates-stimulus-funds/
For more discussion of this subject, see Matt Yglesias, who also links to Mark Muro< 'a> in TNR.
Damn bifocal eyesight. Mark Muro.