DEALING WITH GOVERNMENT MESS

“Open your eyes. This horrible mess is your life. There is no sense in waiting for it to get better. Stop putting it off and live it,” wrote Robin Hopp in “The Mad Ship”, a book that was published in late 2003.

Though the wording is kind of extreme, we think that a somewhat similar sentiment applies to city, county and state government. As good ideas wend their way to fruition, they’re going to encounter the unexpected, like it or not. If leaders expect a neat predictable unaltered path that leads to a worthwhile goal, without encountering the mess that is part of government life, they’re going to be deeply disappointed and maybe not even embark on an interesting initiative at all.

Over the years, when we’ve talked with many government leaders about some of the best things they’ve accomplished, they’ll generally concede that the road from a captivating idea to a positive result is laden with detours, potholes and garbage- laden paths.  

This phenomenon is often hidden from the general public. When elected officials make a pronouncement of an accomplishment, rarely do they ever bring up all the unexpected craziness that cropped up in the months or years before they got in front of a microphone.

Consider the effort to provide smoother ground access to Los Angeles Airport. Right now, people are forced into a single congested multi-level roadway shared by personal vehicles rideshares, rental cars and public city buses. That’s a recipe for frustrated travelers who wind up in the middle of this muddle.

Sometime in the next few months, we’d like to predict that there’s going to be a great deal of hoopla when the Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA) completes a driverless electric train system intended to carry 30 million passengers a year, in plenty of time for the 2028 Olympics.

Once completed this totally sensible piece of infrastructure can soon leave forgotten all the mess along the way, including difficult civil engineering challenges encountered after construction began in 2019. The biggest hurdle of all was a massive contract battle between the union and LAWA in 2023. That postponed the original plan to open. Ultimately, in order to break the deadlock a $550 million settlement was reached to compensate the union for the costs associated with the delays.

Talk about a mess.

Perhaps the only thing that’s worse than the messes that new projects, programs and initiatives encounter, is the fear of messiness. That can easily lead public officials to avoid taking risks. And risk-taking is essential for any kind of real progress to be made.

We quoted Don Kettl, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland , a few months ago on his topic, and here’s what he had to say: “With inescapable demands and an enormously turbulent environment, state and local officials need to learn how to take risks—to experiment with new strategies for solving problems, to explore how best to connect with citizens, and to learn—fast—about how to adapt to unpredictable changes. It’s a hugely exciting time but one full of enormous challenges, and it’s a time where business-as-usual leaders are doomed to fail.”

Actually, we’d argue that when public projects are forced to follow the initial game plan, without a bit of complexity along the way, a lot of new knowledge can be lost. And so, when the messiness enters the scene, and people learn enough to change their own minds, that’s inclined to lead to a superior, more iterative process that is more likely to wind up with some semblance of success.

Ultimately one of the sources of mess is the simple notion that collaboration, which is necessary for progress, is inevitably chaotic. But unless dissent is suppressed (and that’s decidedly not a good thing) there are going to be pushbacks from residents as well as government staffers and elected officials. Barriers, while painful to advocates, can help to create consensus out of dissonance.

Finally, as governments increasingly rely on data to make decisions (and we’ve long thought that was a good idea), the often-contradictory metrics can easily create a situation in which there’s no assuredly right data to lead to the best conclusions.

We carefully follow performance audits from states and localities, and one of the biggest issues that they bring up is the lack of consistency in the data upon which leaders rely. That inconsistency leads to differing opinions along the way, from people whose opinions are “data-based”. The search for absolute truth is a quixotic venture, and in the meantime, as opinions are filtered through the lens of differing data sets, the process is bound to be – shall we say it again? – messy.

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