THE POWER OF SMALL COMMUNITIES

For many years, our work about cities focused largely on those that had large populations. It always felt like we were doing our jobs well when we were able to interview a mayor, a city manager or administrator of cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Jacksonville, Seattle, Denver, and so on.

But for a variety of reasons, over the last couple of years, we’ve been focusing more on smaller entities. In so doing, we’re writing about places that make up the bulk of the nation’s population. According to the most recent US Census data available, about 61% of Americans live in places with populations under 50,000. In recent years, we’ve interviewed busy city and town managers in entities that have under 10,000 in population, and many with under 100,000. We realize that what’s defined as “small” can vary wildly depending on region, attitude and context.

Smart politicians realize the importance of smaller cities when it comes to election time. Although there’s emphasis in the press about the way residents of larger cities are thinking about candidates, it’s not uncommon for smaller places to provide just enough of a margin to sway a race one way or another. This can be true of national races, but when it comes to statewide posts, legislative districts often group multiple small towns together and as a result, rural and semi-suburban municipal leaders have substantial influence on the outcomes.

As Chris Morrill, executive director of the Government Finance Officers Association, told us “Big cities get the headlines — but for millions of Americans, democracy lives on a quiet street where neighbors meet for a barbecue, in a town where you run into your government leaders at the grocery store, or the regional ball fields where parents cheer on their little league team.  Many GFOA members serve these smaller cities, towns, and counties.  The services they provide, the problems they solve, and futures they plan for, are as important as those faced by any large metro area”.  

As he points out, these communities have their own unique opportunities and challenges.  In fact, it doesn’t matter whether a community is large or small. Both need roads, tax collection capacity, schools, parks, a way to run their finances and more.

Since they tend to provide most of the services that larger ones do, smaller cities also need the same kinds of talent. But given their size, these positions often don’t exist at all, are part time, or are filled by individuals who carry the weight for a variety of jobs held by multiple individuals in larger places. In fact, towns and small cities often are required to operate with a town or city manager, combined department roles and a part-time finance director. As a result, just one vacancy can temporarily throw off the capacity of the community to provide essential services.

Since they are often reliant on narrow streams of revenues, you might think that they’d be perennially on the hunt for grants from the federal government. But grant writing is a technical, complex process, and many lack the internal capacity to seek this potential source of money successfully.

“Small communities need more dedicated staff to scan for grants constantly. Notices of funding opportunities (NOFOs) are lengthy, technical, and time-consuming to assess,” writes US Digital Response, a nonpartisan nonprofit that helps local state and tribal governments to obtain the kind of talent they need. “Free search tools like USDR’s Federal Grant Finder help, but small communities still need help to navigate the maze of federal grants.”

On the positive side, the people who run small governments are often committed to them as a life goal, not as a route to something that seems bigger and better. Ron Holifield, a former city manager who authors “Ron on the Road,” a monthly column on this website, reflected to us that “the very best city council I ever worked for was in a city of 3,500 where every member ran for office because they cared about the community. Motivating them to run, and every decision they made, centered on giving back to the community they loved.  Not one of them saw it as a steppingstone to higher office, or as a way of generating more business.  They saw it as a way of giving back.”

He went on to say that “Small towns I worked in epitomized the essence of servant leadership - it is not about me; it is not about now.  They considered the implications of each decision on their friends and neighbors.  They considered the implications of each decision on future generations.  My experience has been that small towns ultimately make better decisions because, above all, they love their community and want to do what is right for it, not what benefits them the most personally.”  

Finally, though larger cities may consider their smaller neighbors as lacking high-class restaurants and major museums, they often rely on them for many of the services that they provide. For example, large cities that consume huge amounts of water rely on networks of reservoirs located elsewhere. Similarly, many of the clean energy resources like wind and solar emanate from facilities that are in rural counties,

So, whether it’s big cities themselves, politicians, researchers or journalists, ignoring smaller places risks missing the real story.

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