Ron Jensen is this Sun Belt city’s public works director, a not particularly exciting or imaginative job in most cities, though one pregnant with the political possibilities of patronage and pork.
But not in Phoenix, where painstaking efforts at municipal reform and innovation have earned this desert metropolis a growing international reputation as the 1990s City That Works.
Business and civic groups flood Jensen’s office with requests to hold meetings and even luncheons at the site of his newest pet project, a $13 million, architecturally heralded solid-waste processing and recycling plant in South Phoenix that will double as an ecological education center for schoolchildren.
His program to incorporate the work of local artists into the construction of new roads and other infrastructure projects has been hailed in the U.S. and abroad as a model of new thinking about public works and urban planning.
Jensen’s pioneering programs in competitive bidding for city services, pitting city departments against private contractors, are featured in author David Osborne’s book “Reinventing Government,” the new Bible of the government-reform movement of the same name spearheaded by Vice President Al Gore and the Clinton administration.
As a result, at a time when governments at all levels across the world are looking for new ways to do more with less, visitors from as far away as Russia and New Zealand, China and Chile, pour into town to look at Jensen’s advanced computerized cost-accounting systems and to get his advice on how to control their costs and improve their public services.
Jensen and other Phoenix officials receive so many requests for advice, in fact, that soon they may register another municipal first: hiring out as consultants to other cities and local governments seeking to revamp their delivery of public services.
“We’re paving the way for the Entrepreneurial City, where the city of Phoenix gets out and helps other people do things while we develop a new revenue stream,” Jensen said.
This Sun Belt capital is no urban paradise. Cursed by rapid, poorly planned growth and its accompanying big-city ills such as gangs, violent crime, traffic and sprawl, Phoenix often is dismissed by outsiders as a sterile cultural backwater spilling out over the desert cactus.
But the city nonetheless is in the forefront of a growing movement to reform and improve the way government works. Last month Phoenix was named the best-run city in the world by the German-based Bertelsmann Foundation, sharing the honor with Christchurch, New Zealand.
The selection by the giant European media foundation was based on excellence in the sort of buzzword concepts that are sweeping through the worlds of government and business: customer service, decentralized management, planning and financial controls, employee empowerment and administrative innovation.
The District of Columbia is a believer. It asked the City of Phoenix to submit a bid for consultant services, said Phoenix City Auditor Jim Flanigan, an adviser to Gore’s federal task force.
Phoenix has taken “customer service” as its credo, leaving “How Are We Doing?” pamphlets at every city office for citizens to fill out and return.
The concept extends to the city’s 11,000 employees, who increasingly are asked for direction in everything from identifying unnecessary regulations to providing suggestions about “things that work,” said Vice Mayor Skip Rimsza. City workers can receive bonuses of 10 percent of savings realized through their ideas, up to $2,500 per suggestion.
The results are appreciated by many residents. “I see a lot of interaction with the citizens,” said Wes Kar, 53, a Detroit native who moved here 15 years ago and owns his own insurance agency.
Competitive bidding for city contracts began for garbage pickup in 1978 and has been extended to landfill operations, custodial services, parking lot management, street sweeping, street repair, food and beverage concessions, printing and security.
At first the process saw the city lose out regularly to private companies. But after a few years city departments began to win contracts through more efficient use of their workers and equipment, saving the city at least $20 million in direct costs and untold more by lowering the overall level of bids, Flanigan said.
The city’s cost of garbage collection, for example, was $9 per household per month in 1978, but because of competitive bidding and the city’s resulting use of automatic-arm trucks requiring one worker to operate, the cost now is $4.
“There are still cities in this country picking up garbage by hand with two or three men to a truck,” said Rimsza. “Not in Phoenix.”
Louis Weischler, professor of public affairs at Arizona State University, notes that other cities are trying some of the same concepts. Madison, Wis., for example, is a national leader in total quality management. And Portland, Ore., and Minneapolis are renowned for their efficient government.
Still, Weischler said, under Mayor Paul Johnson and his predecessor, Terry Goddard, Phoenix has been unusually well-administered.
Not all the innovations here are applicable elsewhere. Unlike older urban areas such as Chicago or New York, Phoenix is a young city with a strong modern infrastructure. The city benefits from a non-partisan city manager system of government. The eight-member city council, though highly politicized, works closely with the city manager and the elected mayor.
The capital of a deeply conservative state known for its hostility to organized labor, this is a pro-business city with a balanced-budget requirement in its charter. Yet it has good relations with its five municipal unions.
Phoenix has a quality AA-plus bond rating, and through cooperation from its unions, was able to meet a projected deficit in its $1.4 billion annual budget without raising taxes by trimming 500 workers from the city payroll over the last two years, mostly through retirement and attrition.
The city’s population of 1,036,000 is largely homogenous, nearly 80 percent white, about 18 percent Hispanic and only 2 percent African-American, easing social tensions that wrack other cities.
Still, the city faces problems common to urban areas. Its booming economy of the 1980s, a time when office space doubled and the population grew nearly one-third, has stagnated the last few years. And the tax base continues to shrink as newcomers move to outlying areas in the Valley of the Sun.
Crime is a growing problem, and overwhelmingly the biggest concern of city residents. This summer saw a spate of especially grim drive-by shootings and other gang killings. The city has an estimated 10,000 gang members, and gang-related violence jumped 58 percent between 1990 and 1993.
The 2000-officer police department is one of the smaller big-city forces in the nation, at less than 2 officers per 1,000 residents, and the city ranks 21st among the nation’s 25 largest cities in violent crime. Voters this month approved a one-tenth of 1 percent sales tax to add 200 police officers and 70 firefighters.
As in many cities, police here are moving toward community-based policing, an approach that stresses crime prevention and greater interaction between officers and residents.
As part of this effort, Phoenix’s new curfew program requiring youths 15 and younger off the street by 10 p.m. and those 16 and 17 home by midnight is being watched across the nation. Many cities have curfews, but in Phoenix police enforce it.
They pick up youths and take them to designated parks across the city staffed by juvenile officers and park district employees, where the youngsters get tickets to appear in juvenile court, then play basketball or participate in other supervised activity until their parents pick them up.
Police like it because they no longer have to take youths to the station, where they must deal with cumbersome paperwork and “baby-sit the kid for three hours,” said Assistant Police Chief Irwin Bakin.
Despite protests from some civil rights groups, parents like the program, and police believe it has helped keep a bad gang problem from getting worse.
“I would rather they wake me up and have them tell me to come pick up your son for a curfew violation than have them wake me up to come and identify the body,” said Elizabeth Cruz, 47, the mother of six and a leader in the gang-riddled South Phoenix area of Mothers Against Gangs, an 18-month-old community group that credits police for their efforts to curb gang violence.
Cruz is involved in another new city police program, the Citizen Police Academy, which takes people from various walks of life through an intensive nine-week course at the police academy. The idea, Bakin said, is to foster better community relations and to prepare people to better help police.
All cities, to some extent, sponsor community watch programs, but it is a priority in Phoenix, where the city provides walkie-talkies and other equipment to residents. Police say the effort has helped stretch their thin force.
City Manager Frank Fairbanks estimates the city receives 600,000 worker-hours of volunteer work each year, valuable “sweat equity” that helps cut down costs.
In Phoenix, the fire department is a model of the cooperative labor-management relations that mark the city as a whole. The city’s 1,300 firefighters, like other city employees, are in the second year of a two-year collective bargaining pact that contained no pay increases in the first year and pay hikes the second year tied to increases in total city revenues.
The increase came to little more than 2 percent for the two-year period; unthinkable, perhaps, in cities such as Chicago. But then, in Chicago a visiting reporter’s interview with the fire chief and his deputy would not likely be set up to include the firefighters’ union president.
Within the department, Deputy Chief Dennis Compton and Capt. Pat Cantelme, the union leader, sit on a joint panel that decides manpower deployments. Each year they join other senior fire officials and union leaders on a three-day retreat to plan department policies together.
Union leaders trust the department and city officials to be straight with them about finances and other management problems, Cantelme said. And, in turn, the city tries to share the responsibility for running the department with the union.
“We’ve sort of broken loose and figured out that a good idea is a good idea,” said Fire Chief Alan Brunacini. “I can get up real early and stay up late, but it’s pretty hard for me or a small group to have all the good ideas.”
One of the good ideas that came from their annual retreat, Cantelme and Brunacini said, is the department’s Connector program, which places disabled firefighters in station houses to work as liaisons with social agencies for the myriad incoming 911 calls that turn out not to involve medical or fire emergencies.
In one case, a Connector firefighter received complaints routed by 911 dispatchers from a man whose children were being bitten by fleas from a garbage-strewn vacant lot next to his home.
Without waiting for approval, the firefighter called the local courthouse. Within days he arranged for a group of people convicted for drunk driving to clean it up as part of their community-service sentences.
“In that popular phrase these days,” said Chief Brunacini, “he was empowered.”
“There’s a willingness to try new ideas and there’s not as much bureaucracy as you’d find in other large cities,” said City Manager Frank Fairbanks. “We’re willing to try things and then, if they don’t work, to try something else.”
Nowhere is that more visible than in the city’s public works department, where Jensen speaks with passion about the need for new kinds of infrastructure that merge form and function with a notion of community.
Witness the new waste processing and recycling plant, a facility designed by artists as well as engineers. Schoolchildren go on field trips there, and city officials even used the site for a “dance at the dump” dinner party.
“Now is a chance for us to say that the new infrastructure has got to be a better investment of public dollars,” said Jensen. “New facilities like the waste plant shouldn’t be back in industrial areas, just doing their work, out of sight, out of mind. People should be using the thing.”
The idea, Jensen said, whether at the new plant or at the overpass of an unpopular new highway converted into a landmark with the incorporation into its structure of the work of local Native American artists, is to foster a sense of community and eradicate the prevalent power of NIMBY-Not In My Back Yard.
“I think you can turn things around,” said Jensen. “You could turn NIMBY into YIMBY-Yes In My Back Yard. The more we can turn negative into positive, the better off society will be.”
