This month’s Connie’s Corner describes a service of love for the city of New Orleans by members of the PSG reinvention network.
Prior to Katrina occurring, our company had planned to hold its nationwide network meeting in New Orleans in 2006. When Katrina hit, we debated – for an instant - about moving the conference elsewhere. We decided instead that we needed to hold our conference there more than ever.
Like other organizations, we felt a deep need to reach out and assist our fellow citizens. We wanted to add value where we were most capable of doing so. We decided to combine our meeting with a service project.
Rick Heydinger, PSG Partner Emeritus, orchestrated a working conference where we could contribute our hearts and minds – as well as our hands – in support of New Orleans’ rebuilding. I want you to hear the summation of our work directly from Rick. Here are excerpts from his executive summary-
The City of New Orleans is facing a challenge, the dimensions of which only a few cities in history have faced. The scale of the human tragedy and loss is impossible to comprehend until you experience today’s New Orleans firsthand.Between April 29 and May 2, PSG and its member network came to New Orleans. We toured the devastation; we cleaned-up debris; we learned about the culture and history of this national treasure; we experienced JazzFest and we visited with firemen who were “on the ground” throughout the devastation.
With this as a backdrop, we divided ourselves into “design teams” and focused on specific problems facing New Orleans City government. Mayor Nagin came in the midst of his reelection campaign to support our effort and officials from Lieutenant Governor’s Landrieu staff also participated.
In an intense working period of twenty-four hours, we rolled up our sleeves and tried to put our best ideas on the table in six areas. In defense of our designers, we remind readers that these teams worked under considerable constraints. They produced these designs in twenty-four hours with limited data on the current situation. Nevertheless, PSG feels these designs contain powerful ideas that, if implemented, could have a dramatic impact on the recovery and future of New Orleans:
Design Summaries
- Accountability to Citizens – Building faith and trust in the future of New Orleans requires a strategy for regularly reporting on the “results” that the City government is delivering to its residents.
This strategy establishes a system for tracking the performance of City government that is trustworthy, transparent, and inclusive. It creates a series of neighborhood scorecards that are regularly reviewed and widely publicized. Setting neighborhood priorities and reviewing progress are occasions for building community esprit.
- Budgeting for City Services – One of the most fundamental problems facing the City government is to determine an effective financing and budgeting strategy. This must be done in the face of uncertain revenue collections coupled with an unprecedented need for City services and fewer than half of the pre-Katrina city workforce.
This strategy establishes a Mayor’s office focused exclusively on the delivery of results that matter to citizens (e.g., debris removed, streets repaired, houses rebuilt). The Mayor’s office is no longer responsible for running the “enterprises” that deliver City services, as they are today. Instead, pay-for-performance contracts are written with public or private enterprises; these contracts specify the results that must be delivered.
Mayor Nagin and his leadership team would not operate these services and thus they are not concerned with all the related challenges of operating a business such as hiring and firing, scheduling, maintaining equipment, etc. This strategy separates “steering from rowing.” The first step in implementing this strategy is to address the question how much can we spend today? The answer to this question dictates the type and level of services that can be delivered to each neighborhood. Neighborhoods are empowered to select the “the basket of services” that will be delivered within the budget available. Performance is reviewed regularly and publicly. Services can grow as the City budget permits.
- Procuring City Goods and Services – To support its recovery and rebuilding, New Orleans must procure an usually large quantity of good and services. Moreover, government procurement systems across the country are often seen as a stumbling block to reform and responsive governance.
Consistent with the budgeting strategy, this design establishes a professional, independent procurement enterprise that purchases results, not activities. The enterprise markets it services to the greater New Orleans region as well. It has specific objectives focused on Disadvantaged Business Enterprises (DBE). It utilizes the power of purchasing expertise and competition along with an operating principle of total transparency. It writes performance contracts, offers performance incentives to vendors, and develops share-in-savings agreements.
- Housing and Community Development – Fundamental to the rebuilding of the City is a credible, clear housing and neighborhood redevelopment plan. This must be done so that families and businesses can make their individual reinvestment decisions with confidence.
This design launches a community development bank and takes immediate steps to address difficulties with the insurance market. The design stimulates the supply of housing by hosting a NOLA house competition, with citizens voting on their favorite house plans and being given an opportunity to invest in the house of their choice. The design engages people in their neighborhoods, consistent with many of the suggestions in the designs for Accountability and Budgeting.
- Addressing The Diaspora – The dislocation of the residents of New Orleans and their culture presents a challenge of historic proportions; author Tom Piazza describes it as “biblical.”
To attract dislocated residents as well as retain those in New Orleans, this design first returns New Orleans to the ranks of a livable city. It does this by developing a package of affordable, basic services that include security, utilities, trash removal, governance, housing and schools. It then enhances the basics by focusing on the importance of neighborhood and proposing ways for people to “put a stake in the ground” while reconnecting through the use of technology and community centers. For those “sitting on the fence” about their decision to reside in New Orleans, information that measures rebuilding progress is made readily available, one-stop centers for all questions and permits are established, and “bureaucracy busters” who are empowered to assist residents cut through red tape are appointed. Stories about neighborhood rebuilding such as those about the Broadmoor neighborhood featured in the Memorial Day edition of the Times-Picayune will demonstrate to others that NOLA can come back.
- Establishing the Common Good – The recovery of New Orleans will require the capacity to work across and between different sectors of society: the government, the business sector, not-for-profit organizations, education institutions, community and neighborhood groups, and spiritual communities. A key to rebuilding NOLA will be to develop an approach that energizes these groups while getting them to move in a complementary way.
Common Good has been formed to take up this challenge. The participants in this meeting had the honor of assisting the founder of Common Good, Michael Cowan, think through the strategic issues facing the organization. Advice was offered which includes: build on the assets, act now, build a civil society and choose the role that best suits this diverse, essential coalition for the long run.
We offer these strategies to newly reelected Mayor Nagin as well as all other parties who have a stake in the rebuilding of New Orleans. It is PSG’s contribution to the recovery of the vitality of the Crescent City, a recovery that is vital to the United States.
Pretty impressive for 24 hours of work! If you’d like to see the longer designs for any one of these topics, please let me know. I’d be happy to send them to you.
Connie’s postscript: I had never been to New Orleans before this meeting. Of course I had watched filmage of the destruction. I had listened to the analysis of whether to rebuild. But, until I saw the devastation without a TV screen filtering the images, until I heard the personal stories of firefighters who thought and think our government has abandoned them, until I understood the personal and national reasons to rebuild New Orleans, until I read Tom Piazza’s love poem to his city in the book – Why New Orleans Matters, I had been truly ignorant.
I hadn’t realized how beloved and vital New Orleans is. This minute – in December 2006 - in New Orleans, individual and businesses are still deciding whether to stay, go, return, or stay gone. For all our sakes, New Orleans has to rebuild that which we cannot afford to lose.
At such moments, you realize that you and the other are, in fact, one. It’s a big realization. Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.
Joseph Campbell
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