THE FUTURE DEMANDS HIGH-PERFORMING LOCAL GOVERNMENT.

AuthorBinnings, Tom
PositionTHE ECONOMIST

In my early days of business and economic consulting, I tried to focus on encouraging clients to pursue excellence and high performance. Anyone who follows sports knows what that means. Some teams have come to live the passion of excellence and expect to be champions every year. Their fans have no regrets in dominating the competition.

Often it requires strong leaders determined to win, but to be truly sustainable over time, high performance in the pursuit of excellence demands a strong cultural orientation that surpasses leadership. The reality I found was most clients were so desperate to meet expenses or get the new contract that they could never focus on the long-term vision of sustainable success.

Recently, I attended a Malcolm Baldrige conference and was pleasantly surprised to see the city of Fort Collins as a presenter. They are pursuing the Baldrige Award, not for the award itself, but to get an external perspective of their standing as an organization so they can develop and reinforce a culture of continuous improvement--a prerequisite to excellence.

One of their early discoveries was the need to improve relationships with businesses. Mayor Michael Hancock pushed Denver in a similar direction when he created the Denver Peak Academy to coach all employees in improving the way government works. These efforts, and others that are being pursued in some local governments around the state, should be celebrated and copied.

Colorado and the Rocky Mountain West are unique when it comes to local governments. We have so many of them. El Paso County alone has 296 separate government entities providing public services. That's one governmental entity per 2,365 residents. If each government has five board members on average, that's one governor per 473 people.

This fragmented system of government stems from Colorado being a latecomer to urbanization. As municipal and county governments became more fiscally constrained in recent decades with more demands for public service and limited taxing potential, they backed away from infrastructure investment to support growth and began imposing more fees to have growth pay its own way. This results in the creation of metro districts, special improvements districts and fire districts, among others.

It's incumbent on us to train ourselves to be good governors. And for the most part we are good--at least to the point of covering expenses and not being corrupt. Those of us from other parts of the U.S. or...

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