Innovations

							                                                 The Metropolitan Initiative
                                                      Innovations in
                                                 Metropolitan Cooperation

                                                         by Julia Parzen
                                                         March 11, 1997

                                                            First Draft



The purpose of this paper is to present the rich variety of U.S. experiments with metropolitan cooperation,
the attributes which seem to contribute to success, and what more would be possible with a new federal
initiative.

A Project of the Center for Neighborhood Technology The Metropolitan Initiative is an effort to
reinvent the relationship between the federal government and metropolitan areas. It focuses on the federal
role as regulator, as source of information, as funder, and as catalyst of technology transfer. The
Metropolitan Initiative is exploring new ways that these roles can work cooperatively with creative,
citizen-defined regional initiatives.



For more information contact Stephen A. Perkins, Ph.D., Center for Neighborhood Technology, 2125
West North Avenue, Chicago, IL 60647, (773) 278-4800, fax (773) 278-3840, e-mail steve@cnt.org

© 1997 The Center for Neighborhood Technology



                                                        Table of Contents

Executive Summary ....................................................... 3

     1.   Introduction ....................................................... 8
     2.   What Works ....................................................... 11
     3.   What are the Drivers ....................................................... 21
     4.   Who are the Champions ....................................................... 36
     5.   The Variety in Structure ....................................................... 40
     6.   Holistic Approaches to Metropolitan Cooperation ....................................................... 50
     7.   Single Issues that Draw People Together ....................................................... 53
     8.   The Federal Role ....................................................... 70



                                                 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

I. INTRODUCTION
Across the nation, individuals and communities are creating innovative metropolitan initiatives, coming
up with all kinds of ways to preserve the advantages of localism and specialization while also capturing
the benefits of regional cooperation. This paper tries to capture the breadth of innovations across the U.S.
in metropolitan planning for mutual gain. There is a great deal to be learned from these examples about
how to make metropolitan collaborations work well and produce benefits throughout regions. The
examples also suggest ways in which the federal government, both the executive and legislative branches,
could remove obstacles and facilitate the success of this natural momentum toward metropolitan
cooperation.

II. WHAT WORKS

Even while community collaboration is emerging as the tool of the times for solving difficult problems
and exploiting new opportunities, the number of failed collaborations is growing. Sometimes
collaborations are simply asked to overcome too much: distrust, fragmented dysfunctional institutions,
and short attention spans. It helps to already have strong civic organizations, cross-community coalitions,
and business networks, especially those which cross sectors. It helps if local organizations show an
interest in building process and facilitation skills within their own walls and structuring themselves to
support a place-based, cross-cutting focus. Leaders are needed convene people and keep them together
and focused. Leaders are also needed to provide the seed funding which allows convening processes to
mature. Separate from a conducive environment and committed champions, what successful experiments
seem to have in common is that they empower and “smarten up” citizens, entrepreneurially piece together
resources, and pursue solutions that fit local conditions and capture the imagination of local residents.
These attributes are described, along with examples, in the paper.

III. WHAT ARE THE DRIVERS

This is a time of intense experimentation with regional initiatives. There are many pressures and
inducements moving people and communities in this direction. There are new federal initiatives which are
providing incentives for cooperation. Struggles to compete in a global economy are leading people to
develop regional strategies. Changing views about the dynamics of growth and how to manage growth are
spurring regional dialog. New initiatives to grapple with fears about the loss of civil society are drawn to
local and regional solutions. Political frustration with how decisions are made that affect neighboring
communities is creating pressure to consider new decision-making mechanisms. More and more people
are struggling with what it means to live in a sustainable community, and are seeing how their future is
linked to their neighbors. Finally, there is a revolution in understanding of how people learn which is
providing new tools to facilitate regional collaboration. These reasons are described, along with examples,
in the paper.

IV. WHO ARE THE CHAMPIONS

The experience in the U.S. suggests that there can be no single gatekeepers or champions for innovative
metropolitan initiatives. Innovative examples of metropolitan collaboration have a diverse array of
champions, including government agencies, foundations, public interest coalitions, civic leaders, and
elected officials. Crucial leadership can come from anywhere in a community. This paper provides many
examples of different kinds of champions. They examples, however, do have something in common. In
all of these efforts, the champions reach out to other stakeholders who care about the issue, who can
allocate resources to implementing solutions, and who have a say in whether solutions are implemented.

V. THE VARIETY IN STRUCTURE
Collaboration among local governments is actually quite common. Sometimes collaborations are under
the auspices of regional authorities or consolidated governments, but often they are more informal.
Formal mechanisms include regional and/or consolidated government structure, metropolitan planning
councils, special service taxing districts and joint service agreements. Informal mechanisms include civic
organizations and citizen assemblies, area-wide coalitions and alternative planning organizations. There
are examples of all of these approaches in the paper.

Informal structures are gaining more adherents. Informal mechanisms may be less threatening to citizen’s
-- and elected representatives --desire for autonomy. They also take into account how difficult it is to
anticipate the challenges ahead or nail down the geographic scope of a region long enough to have it
governed by a single structure. Local governments may not want or need regional government, but,
increasingly, they need regional initiatives to enable the design of strategies that benefit themselves and
other communities.

It is a lesson in and of itself to see the great variety in the structure of experiments across the nation. It
seems clear that what will work in any particular place depends on local conditions. What communities
need is the opportunity to experiment with approaches that make sense to them, along with access to high
quality information about what has worked elsewhere and why.

VI. HOLISTIC APPROACHES TO METROPOLITAN COOPERATION

Learning theorists suggest that communities can become learning communities when they give up the
illusion that separate unrelated forces govern how their world operates. There are many metropolitan
initiatives which have taken something like a “systems view” of a region, including quality of life,
sustainability, image-changing/turn around, and knowledge creation initiatives. These sorts of
metropolitan collaborations tend to include data collection and visioning processes, indicators for
measuring progress, and processes for making continuous improvements. There are examples of these
sorts of initiatives throughout the report, including the Grand Rapids initiative in Michigan, Sustainable
Racine in Wisconsin, Sustainable Seattle, Chattanooga Vision 2000, and Eastward Ho! in Southern
Florida.

VII. SINGLE ISSUES THAT DRAW PEOPLE TOGETHER

Many metropolitan collaborations have formed around one specific issue. Examples are provided in this
paper which are spurred by concerns business development/job creation, transportation access, changing
land use and sprawl, improving environmental quality, protecting valuable ecological resources, reducing
education and fiscal disparities, welfare reform and poverty alleviation, fair housing, and addressing
spatial mismatch between people and jobs. What is remarkable to note is that, more often than not, these
single-issue projects evolve into broader initiatives.

VIII. BARRIERS TO PROGRESS

The breadth and variety of both the holistic and the issue-based metropolitan initiatives is impressive. A
few of these initiatives have made great progress in changing local conditions, and now serve as a
foundation for further metropolitan cooperation. However, many of the initiatives described in this report
are only a few years old. For them, progress generally can be judged, at best, by success in reinventing
planning processes, engaging citizens, and developing thoughtful strategies which have relatively broad
support.
All of the initiatives still face major obstacles, especially complex rules and regulations. All of the
initiatives need support and encouragement from their state and the federal government to overcome local
political structures and a complex web of local, state, and federal regulations which hamper them.

As important an obstacle is the difficulty of organizing local interest and action. Everyone is struggling
with how to create powerful community learning processes. How do we engage citizens? How do we
move from visioning to action, especially if major structural changes are needed? How do we create
institutions or networks to deal with cross-cutting policy issues? All of the initiatives need support and
encouragement from their state and the federal government to experiment with answers to these
questions, to share what they learn, and to continue to improve.

VIII. THE FEDERAL ROLE

Government -- with compartmentalized functions and policies -- has been a barrier to experimenting with
more collaborative practices, but it can become a source of encouragement for flexibility and innovation.
Both the executive and legislative branches of government have an important role to play in achieving the
vast potential for metropolitan collaboration.

The federal government can help regions to empower local citizens through a Smart Citizen
component. The Smart Citizen component includes (1) information: data collection and aggregation,
measurement tools, local scoreboards, and GIS systems. (2) transfer of ideas and technologies across
regions, (3) technology transfer to build regional infrastructure, and (4) support for training to build
capacity for regional collaboration, facilitation, and problem solving.

The federal government can help regions to more easily finance creative initiatives through a Smart
Money component. The Smart Money component includes (1) targeting funding from existing
authorities, (2) allowing for the flexible use of federal funding programs in exchange for innovative
projects, and (3) allowing for the creative use of capital assets, procurement, etc.

The federal government can help regions to cultivate locally appropriate solutions through a Smart
Rule-making component. It is very difficult for locally initiated solutions to problems to succeed given
the public policies they must navigate. The Smart Rule-making component includes (1) involving local
regions in key rule-making efforts, (2) providing waivers to allow for local innovation with the potential
to exceed current standards, (3) building flexibility into new rules so that places can decide the best way
to achieve standards, and (4) providing incentives for performance and accountability.

Metropolitan regions have taken the first step toward a new era of cooperation. The federal government
has also taken some first steps in recent housing, economic development, and environmental initiatives. It
is time to raise the bar. In a companion paper, The Federal Role in Metropolitan Cooperation, Clem
Dinsmore describes how the federal government could use existing authorities to take the next step.



                                           I. INTRODUCTION


By the year 2000, nearly half of the world’s people will live in metropolitan areas. Neil Peirce has
observed that the first thing one sees when approaching a metropolitan area from the air is the water, rail
and highway networks that link the region together, regardless of political boundaries. On the ground,
however, these political boundaries are an enormous obstacle to cooperation. It is not at all clear to most
people who live in different towns within a metropolitan area that their destinies are linked. In fact, most
people find the idea of regions off-putting and artificial. They simply don’t see themselves as being part
of a meaningful region.

Nevertheless, individuals and communities across the nation are finding that issues like economic
development, pollution, open space, housing, and transportation can benefit from regional strategies and
cooperation. And they are trying to invent new tools to respond to challenges at this scale, where they can
most effectively be resolved. So, many different kinds of initiatives are leading down the regional path,
from economic cluster strategies to work force development, sustainable development to civic
revitalization and citizen empowerment, and ecosystem management to quality of life initiatives.

Individuals and communities are also discovering that their success in work on one issue, for example,
economy, is contingent on success in the areas of ecology and community. As people explore the root
causes of problems, they are seeing the connections to other places and other problems. A strong
economy depends on both an available resource base and a strong community. It is impossible to preserve
the natural ecology without changing basic production patterns in the economy. And you can’t come to
consensus on ecological protection and economic restructuring if you don’t have a healthy social
infrastructure.

Sprawl, in particular, is emerging as a unifying issue. Urban decay is spurred by decentralization of jobs
and opportunity. Environmental degradation is exacerbated by the physical expansion of metropolitan
regions. A contributor to middle class disaffection is that people cannot truly escape urban ills. These very
clear connections are why, for example, social equity groups representing the poor living in older
communities and environmental groups wishing to protect land and water from development pressures are
beginning to coalesce around a regional agenda. It is why transportation reform encompasses a broad
agenda including housing, open space preservation, job access, livable communities, and economic
development. And it is why many brownfield efforts have become broader initiatives to promote urban
economic development and protect open space.

One “growth” area in which the desire to cross issues and jurisdictions comes together is sustainable
communities. Many people interested in sustainable development have independently concluded that
metropolitan regions are the smallest scale at which it is possible to capture most of the key flows and
meaningfully resolve problems in an integrated and holistic fashion. At the same time, the metropolitan
region may be the largest geographical unit that people can grasp and around which they can come
together and develop a sense of belonging.

The sense that there is something tangible and important which is a region is growing. People are
haltingly moving toward defining their “place” by exploring where the boundaries end, what are the
features they care most about, and who needs whom to preserve what matters.

So, in spite of the obstacles, individuals and communities have plunged ahead to create innovative
metropolitan initiatives. They are coming up with all kinds of ways to preserve the advantages of localism
and specialization while also facilitating collaboration across interests and explicit political tradeoffs
across geographical boundaries. A closer look at these initiatives shows that they are driven by clear and
strong self-interest to produce generous mutual gain.

Still, there is a lot to be learned about how to make metropolitan collaborations work well and produce
benefits throughout regions. Also, more could be done to break down barriers to metropolitan
cooperation. While the locus of action should be local, the federal government could play a powerful role
through Smart People, Smart Money, and Smart Rule-making. These roles are described later in the
report.

This report tries to capture the breadth of innovations across the U.S. in joint-stakes or mutual gain
metropolitan planning and action now underway and proposed. The examples emphasize efforts which
explicitly recognize the need for communities and interests to connect for mutual gain, build the sense of
place which enables people to work together and make sacrifices, include citizen participation and
accountability, and share tangible benefits. These are attributes that seem to contribute to success. In fact,
the first section of the report, What Works, is an attempt to synthesize and present some of the
characteristics of successful experiments in regional collaboration.

The sections which follow What Works try to present the diversity in terms of what is driving regional
initiatives, who is championing metropolitan collaboration, how initiatives are structured, what issues
they are tackling, and what barriers they face. One of the most important points we want to make is that
there is enormous diversity in approaches to metropolitan cooperation. This diversity needs to be
encouraged. What will work depends on the people and the place.

The final section explores ways in which the federal government, both the executive and legislative
branches, could remove the obstacles and facilitate the success of this natural momentum toward
metropolitan cooperation.

                                            II. WHAT WORKS

Even while community collaboration is emerging as the tool of the times for solving difficult problems
and exploiting new opportunities, the number of failed collaborations is growing. Sometimes
collaborations are simply asked to overcome too much: distrust, fragmented dysfunctional institutions,
and short attention spans.

Collaborations have a better chance in places where there are already networks of communication that
provide ways to talk across the community. It helps to already have strong civic organizations, cross-
community coalitions, and business networks, especially those which cross sectors. It helps to have
neighborhood-level organizations which can represent neighborhood interests at the town scale and town-
level organizations which can represent towns at the regional scale. This is the case in Portland where the
leadership for metropolitan cooperation is spread widely among business, government, civic, and
community leaders. This civic infrastructure helps regions perceive threats, recognize opportunities and
mobilize resources. Since crisis, outrage, and opportunity are the strongest motivators for change,
infrastructure which strengthens awareness of conditions in a region helps it to adapt and thrive.

Collaborative processes also have a better chance of succeeding in places where local organizations show
an interest in building process and facilitation skills within their own walls and structuring themselves to
support a place-based, cross-cutting focus. For example, many firms which have become leaders in
regional collaboration have already been through restructuring in their own organizations.

Of course, leaders are needed to convene people and keep them together and focused.

Leaders are also needed to provide the seed funding which allows convening processes to mature. In
many cities where collaboration has thrived, including Cleveland and Minneapolis, local foundations have
supported their efforts and even required groups to form alliances. For example, major foundations in
Cleveland agreed to help establish a community capital investment strategy in return for a commitment
from local governments to coordinate their efforts and fund half of the administration costs.
Separate from a conducive environment and committed champions, what successful experiments seem to
have in common is that they empower and “smarten up” citizens, entrepreneurially piece together
resources, and pursue solutions that fit local conditions and capture the imagination of local residents.

Empower and Smarten Up Citizens

Create Inclusive Processes

To change a system, you need to get the whole system in the room, including anyone who has an interest
or a role in the issue. Participants in regional processes each bring what they know about a part of the
system to the table. One of the benefits of coming together is seeing how the parts fit together. Those who
are affected by a problem bring important information about the effects and what will work to address
them. Those who have a say in whether changes can be made bring important information about which
responses are feasible. In a regional convening process, the main resource in the room, at least in the
beginning, is the knowledge, skills, and assets of participants.

Citizen participation is a key aspect of most of the successful examples of metropolitan collaboration. As
pointed out by Judith Espinosa, a former Secretary for the Environment for the State of New Mexico,
regional governance in various forms has existed for at least three decades. We continue to have so many
of the same problems because so much regional governance has been top-down. Regional governance
must empower people to identify goals for the places where they live and how to achieve them.

The importance of empowering people holds for the neighborhood level. The Dudley Street
Neighborhood Initiative has been helping residents of the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston to pursue
their vision of the community as “a safe, lively and close-knit urban village” since 1985. Because
residents have had control of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, they have assumed responsibility
for the neighborhood and tapped unrecognized resources and energy. A top-down project could not have
unleashed local leadership in this way.

Empowerment can also be a catalyst at the regional level. The East-West Gateway Coordinating Council
engaged in a broad public participation process for the development it the region’s long-range
transpiration plan. The goal of the process was to turn around the entire decision-making process,
bringing plans in closer sync with the goals and needs of the people, business, and communities they
serve. The planning process brought together a diverse steering committee including knowledgeable
people in transportation planning, economic development, environment, and social concerns. Three sub-
committees, representing 200 people advised the steering committee on land us and environmental
concerns, employment and community needs, and regional economic goals. Development, real estate,
business and financial interests, as well as low-income disadvantaged residents, were all included as
integral parts of the planning process. Focus groups were held to garner a wider response from the general
public. A public relations campaign kept citizens up-to-date through newsletters, public service messages,
and special publications. A readable guide, Talking the Talk, was designed to make the planning process
understandable to citizens. The plan has been approved, but the commitment to public involvement
continues in specific projects and mobility initiatives.

Include People Who Can Cut Across Issues and Help Others Do the Same

What is missing from most collaborative efforts is integration across various areas. While people may all
live in the same geographic community, they live in very different “communities of practice” and bring
very different kinds of mental models, language and values to collaborative problem-solving efforts.
Environmentalists who have a deep knowledge of the working of the natural ecology are often unfamiliar
with the dynamics of running a business in a competitive market. They don’t understand the languages of
product development, strategic planning, market positioning, quality management, and other domains of
expertise that business leaders live in and take for granted. On the other hand, business leaders often
know little about the actual dynamics of natural systems, and find the language of the ecologist confusing
and intimidating. A major challenge then, is to establish enough cross-disciplinary understanding and
common language to begin to talk and act together.

A cross-disciplinary group of community leaders who can model for the community the process of
understanding each others practice environments and identify projects that integrate across these
environments can have an enormous impact on the credibility of a collaborative process. The Grand
Rapids sustainable community project is making a special effort to build ways for participants from
different practice environments to understand each other and learn together.

Create a Shared Management and Decision-making Process

In the 1970’s, Dee Hock organized VISA, a product which nearly everyone in the U.S. and world
recognizes, along the principles he now preaches. Successful organizations, he said, must be highly
decentralized and highly collaborative, with authority, initiative, decision-making, and wealth distributed
as much as possible to the members. Competition must be encouraged, but mechanisms for cooperation
are also essential.

Effective collaborative initiatives which try to address fundamental problems need similar principles.
They must be open to all who are heavily involved in the purpose, offer advantages that gain voluntary
participation, allow no intrinsic advantage to any participant, decentralize power, and encourage diverse
participation.

Spend Time and Energy Early to Define Shared Vision and Build Project Ownership

Today there are hundreds of community visioning processes across the nation, building community
support for change. The Hudson River Advisory Board on Sustainable Development, for example,
includes a cross-section of Hudson River Valley people, developers, businessmen and women, mayors,
county officials, environmentalists, foundation leaders and academics, among others. In 1995, these
people spent six months creating a shared vision for the future of the Hudson River Valley. First, they
found a vision of what they hoped the Valley could be in fifty years. Then they worked backwards,
exploring what needs to change now to achieve the vision. These steps have guided the process as it
moves forward to broaden local support and identify strategies for change.

Gather and Widely Share the Best Information Available on Status of Their Community and Track
Progress Toward Their Goals

Information has a tremendous potential for increasing citizen awareness and ability to engage in decisions
affecting their lives. Key to this strategy is managing information better, expanding access to it,
measuring progress, and adopting accounting measures that allow people to stay on track.

To achieve a change in natural and human systems, there have to be ways to measure the impact of
current practices. Organized data substitutes for the impressionistic and anecdotal information we
otherwise would use to come to conclusions about how to act, and it can reveal opportunities we would
not otherwise notice.
The potency of information is why there are 150 community indicator projects across the U.S. The dialog
about indicators can be a very powerful learning tool for a community. On the flip side, if citizens don’t
have an opportunity to participate, they will not own the indicators and probably will not act in response
to them. It is important that people agree on desired directions and targets for each indicator,
benchmarking to other communities or ecosystems to decide what is a desirable target value for each
indicator.

In Seattle, several hundred citizens took five years to develop 40 indicators of “sustainability.” Their first
report was published in January of 1996. Sponsored by a volunteer organization called Sustainable
Seattle, the process involved 6 months of work just to define the word “sustainable.” The indicators cover
both human and natural systems, ranging from salmon populations to children in poverty and the cost of
health care. In their first report, eight of the forty indicators show improvement; 18 show no discernible
trend; and fourteen show declining sustainability.

Many of the examples of collaborative efforts include some kind of mapping of regional boundaries. The
mapping process helps people to share their information with each other and come to a common enough
“picture” of their region that they can agree on where to act. The mapping helps people to identify
interconnections and identify key systems. Even if people are working on a distinct problem in one of
these systems, a map of all of the systems can track how the problem is connected to each of them.
Usually, people find a dense set of connections, calling for action in multiple subs-systems
simultaneously.

Mapping also helps people to pursue solutions that are appropriate to local conditions.

For example, the MacArthur Foundation’s Sustainable Everglades Initiative is working with the
University of Florida to develop simulation models of water flow and land use in the Everglades using
fairly simple and inexpensive technology.

Build Capacity for Continuous Improvement

In complex systems, we cannot know ahead of time what the impact of a particular activity will be. We
have to try ideas in an experimental way and then notice how they works, modifying and building off of
outcomes. Rigid, heavy, resource-intensive strategic planning processes need to be replaced by relatively
small demonstration projects where much attention is given to what is working and then changes are
made to improve and expand the projects on a continual basis. Communities need to generate lots of
experimentation, not lots of consensus.

To understand and respond to problems, people need powerful learning environments. They need
community processes that help them to identify their concerns, immerse themselves in new information,
discover new patterns and opportunity, and change their own understanding of the world. For this to
happen, community collaborations require the following kinds of support:

-- Rich information that people can use in their exploration of new ideas

-- Help for the group in standing back to notice the patterns that are emerging from their knowledge

-- Help for the group in crafting questions worth asking that guide the creation of new knowledge

--Help for the group in making connections between people, ideas, and resources, forming new
relationships and new products
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation joined with 22 other philanthropies to launch the
Sustainable Everglades Initiative, an effort to coordinate responses to save the Everglades and Florida
Bay and capture what is learned along the way. The Conservation Fund is responsible for generating links
among grantees and grantors and “building whole system knowledge” about how the communities of
South Florida can interact with the Everglades in ways that preserve, restore, and sustain it. Sustainability,
under this initiative, is not an end result, but a process of continuous adaptation and adjustment. Other
grantees include national and grassroots conservation organizations, educational institutions, and
community groups.

Choose Achievable First Steps and Look for Quick Victories

These efforts have started with small, doable steps. Rapid iteration between small actions and large
visions provides for a vibrant learning environment. It also gives people a sense of pride in progress.

The Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative (LANI) was designed as a grassroots urban renewal effort
focused around major transportation corridors. Critical to the success of LANI was the decision to not
only plan for long-term visions, but to produce concrete results during the first year of the program.
Projects such as the installation of new bus stops and information kiosks helped to make commercial
streets more attractive and build cooperation within a neighborhood.

When Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative was started, Peter Medoff and the board launched several
campaigns that resulted in immediate success. One was to restore rail service to an abandoned commuter
train stop. Another was to improve safety conditions at a hazardous intersection. As pointed out by Jay
Walljasper, Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative kept the level of participation high through bigger,
tougher initiatives which progressed much more slowly because it set achievable goals early on.

Entrepreneurially Piece Together Resources

The core resources collaborative efforts have are the knowledge, skills and assets of their members. By
making these assets the beginning point of collaborative efforts to solve problems, these efforts avoided
the “dependency trap” that gives others power over their destiny and limits the scope of their imagination.
These efforts manage not to become focused on getting resources from others before they begin to do
something with what they have.

Still, many of these efforts could not have made progress without attracting creative, flexible money. Both
Cleveland Tomorrow and the Citizens League of Greater Cleveland, leaders in stimulating improvements
in the Cleveland metropolitan area, have had strong support from major foundations which have their
headquarters in Cleveland. Foundations have been a crucial source of funds to support regional analysis
and organization building activities. Both Cleveland and Philadelphia have also benefited from the
participation of a university-based center which has helped to identify regional opportunities and act as a
forum for incubating action programs.

Have the Flexibility to Pursue Locally Appropriate Solutions

One of the fascinating things we found through this survey of metropolitan collaborations was how many
different approaches, entry points, champions, and issues there were, all leading toward a similar goal.
What works depends upon local conditions and people. These differences must be respected and
supported.
When U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development staff asked civic leaders in 114 of the largest
metropolitan areas in 1996 what contributions the federal government could make to regional efforts,
most of the leaders mentioned support for education and workforce development, but each region had
different requirements depending on the skill needs of its industry clusters and the existing strengths and
weaknesses of the existing metropolitan educational system.

Through Build-Up Greater Cleveland, local governments agree to coordinate their infrastructure planning.
Local government, corporations and other institutions analyze, prioritize, and lobby for infrastructure
improvements. As a result of Build-up, local funds have been leveraged to secure more state and federal
funding. Federal infrastructure decisions need to be responsive to this kind of local planning.

The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative is lauded throughout the county for its efforts to revitalize the
Roxbury neighborhood. The Initiative was able to move forward because City government granted it the
power of eminent domain over local land. The Mayor of Boston agreed to deed tax delinquent land in
Roxbury to Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, but redevelopment of the land was still hindered by
pockets of private land owned by real estate speculators. So, to fit local conditions, the City went a step
further. Eminent domain is not the answer in most or many communities, but DSNI made a case for why
this solution fit local conditions and the Mayor supported DSNI.

Cities have historically tried to address neighborhood revitalization through bureaucratic policies that
don’t fit the unique needs of a particular neighborhood, but this is changing. For example, the Los
Angeles Neighborhood Initiative (LANI) was designed as a grassroots urban renewal effort focused
around major transportation corridors. LANI is trying to create thriving main streets and bring back a
sense of identity in eight neighborhoods through citizen-planned and managed transit-oriented
development projects. LANI has made quick progress by putting money behind the decisions of its citizen
planners.

Conclusion

Not every successful regional collaboration has all of the features described here. Most have some of
them. These attributes have a strong basis in theory and a growing presence in the real world. The
examples in the following sections point out some of the places where these features show up.

                                   III. WHAT ARE THE DRIVERS

This is a time of intense experimentation with regional initiatives. There are many pressures and
inducements moving people and communities in this direction. There are new federal initiatives which are
providing incentives for cooperation. Struggles to compete in a global economy are leading people to
develop regional strategies. Changing views about the dynamics of growth and how to manage growth are
spurring regional dialog. New initiatives to grapple with fears about the loss of civil society are drawn to
local and regional solutions. Political frustration with how decisions are made that affect neighboring
communities is creating pressure to consider new decision-making mechanisms. More and more people
are struggling with what it means to live in a sustainable community, and are seeing how their future is
linked to their neighbors. Finally, there is a revolution in understanding of how people learn which is
providing new tools to facilitate regional collaboration

Federal Initiatives
The federal government has a variety of innovative new programs which encourage parties with different
interests to adopt new patterns of behavior and work in a cooperative, collaborative manner. It is also
shifting responsibilities to states and local areas which are under pressure to invent new responses.

In some places, people have been energized by HUD’s empowerment zone process or the U.S. EPA
brownfields initiative to pursue cooperative place-based strategies. In 1993, the Empowerment Zones and
Enterprise Communities initiative funded six urban empowerment zones and 95 enterprise communities
with grants that can be spent at the zone’s discretion. Because top-down programs had failed in the past,
communities had to build a strategic plan with input from residents, local businesses, government
representatives, and community-based organizations. The plans had to have a vision for comprehensive,
community-driven solutions to economic, physical, environmental, community and human development
issues. More than 500 communities applied. Some communities which did not receive funding say that
they have benefited from the collaborative processes which emerged.

Recent reports on cities and regions from the Department of Housing and Urban Development reflect
HUD’s attempt to reinvent itself to facilitate metropolitan solutions. The National Urban Policy Report
emphasizes that the U.S. is a metropolitan nation with growing suburbs and huge disparities between
cities and suburbs. It presents the evidence available that these disparities, along with sprawl and
congestion, are a drag on economic productivity and growth. Regionalism: The New Geography of
Opportunity offers an even wider range of approaches to the same problem. As pointed out by Robert
Giloth, these reports don’t provide answers to the question of how to get city and suburban cooperative
action, but they do reinforce the strong connection between improvements in quality of life, particularly
for the poor, and long-term regional economic stability and growth for regions.

Now, based upon the findings of a new report, America’s New Economy And the Challenge of the Cities:
A HUD Report on Metropolitan Economic Strategy, HUD has announced that it will encourage
communities to form partnerships for metropolitan economic growth. Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer has
agreed to bring together the region’s government, business and civic leaders to form a partnership that can
serve as a national model. In addition, HUD’s Homeownership Partnerships are bringing cities and
suburbs together to expand homeownership across regions. HUD’s Bridges to Work program, which
combines job training and placement networks with transportation subsidies and supportive services, is
linking inner-city residents with regional jobs. HUD is also working on a second round of Empowerment
Zones that would include tax credits for employers located outside the zones who hire workers living in
the zone.

ISTEA, passed in 1991, recognized for the first time that transportation problems are different in different
places, and allowed people to use the approach that best meets their needs. The core principles that made
ISTEA a success were flexible funding so that different solutions are allowed in different places, a strong
local role, attention to environmental and community concerns, a long term focus, and greater
accountability to local residents. Communities all over the country have taken advantage of this
flexibility. In the first five years of ISTEA, more than $2.4 billion in what used to be highway money was
reprogrammed for public transportation. Every community hasn’t done it, but ISTEA’s flexibility has
allowed those areas with a local consensus around public transportation to do so.

Environmental policy is also shifting toward collaborative local solutions. One example is the federal
effort to reinvent regulation based on flexibility with accountability, where the regulated party is
responsible for achieving the final result rather than adhering to specific procedures. The U.S. EPA has
launched a demonstration program for the concept call Project XL. It allows businesses flexibility to
develop an alternative environmental management strategy for an entire facility which will replace
applicable requirements of current law. In exchange, the company must agree that the alternative strategy
will produce superior environmental performance and must have the support of the surrounding
community. The company must also agree to monitor and report results to citizens. The alternative must
be fully enforceable. The participants in the first phase of Project XL include six companies and two
government agencies. One of the agencies is the South Coast Air Quality Management District, so this is
a regional approach.

Action 21 on the Clinton Administration list of 25 High Priority Actions to reinvent government is for
EPA to support the development of community-driven strategies to integrate environmental quality and
economic development at the local level, including all of the different interests in the community and its
local, state and federal authorities. EPA’s Ecosystem Protection Workgroup in 1994 similarly recognized
what proponents of ecosystem management have been saying for years: environmental regulation requires
a place-driven approach using both national standards but also responsive to the needs of individual
ecosystems and human communities.

As part of its Brownfields National Partnership, the Interagency Working Group on Brownfields has
proposed that ten cities be chosen as brownfield showcase cities to demonstrate that through cooperation
and coordination, federal, state, local, and non-governmental efforts can be concentrated around
brownfields activities to produce environmental clean up, stimulate economic development, and revitalize
communities. The Interagency Working Group includes EPA, DOD, GSA, HUD, DOT, DOI, and many
other agencies.

The President’s Council on Sustainable Development met for three years to study ways in which America
can better achieve national environmental, economic , and social goals. Participants were drawn from
business, environmental, civil rights, labor, and Native American organizations, as well as from
government. Their report has been praised for its rare consensus on how to achieve a better future. Its
most strongly made point is that Americans can regain their sense that they are in control of their future
through collaborative decision processes which recognize that economic, environmental, and social goals
are integrally linked. The call is to no longer think narrowly about jobs, energy, transportation, housing or
ecosystems, as if they were not connected.

Finally, local governments are being forced to think about new ways to work together by changes in their
mandates and revenue base. Local government is expected to do more now than in the past, but it has less
financial means to do it. Financial responsibilities have shifted from the federal to local governments, and
the same is beginning to happen with state government. The rapid transfer of federal powers and
responsibilities to states and cities has put pressure on regions to identify and assert their own priorities.
Welfare reform has resulted in even greater use of state block grants. In a couple of states, governors are
simply going to create block grants for their counties. Block grants to counties could become a big
problem if there aren’t mechanisms for regional collaboration.

Declining federal funding for transportation infrastructure has also put pressure on regions to set
transportation priorities and consider the impact of decentralized, automobile-based growth on
infrastructure costs and the environment. The Federal Highway Administration has estimated that
“metropolitan expansion” over the next twenty years will require 353,183 new land miles of roads at a
total cost of $169.6 billion and an annualized cost of $8.5 billion. This is at a time where funds are short
to maintain existing roads. While it may be more expensive to maintain older city infrastructure as
compared to more recently constructed suburban infrastructure, from a societal standpoint it may still be
considerable cheaper to maintain or even expand existing infrastructure than to build new infrastructure in
the suburbs. In 1995, per capita spending of federal road money in urbanized areas was $54. In what the
Census Bureau calls “non-urbanized areas” mostly low density outer suburbs -- per capita spending was
$115.
Efforts to Compete in a Global Economy

Awareness is growing that only high-performance companies and communities -- those which according
to Bill Dodge, provide the highest quality products, services, jobs, educational systems, and business
climates -- will thrive. New people and new businesses seek out labor markets and economic regions,
rarely specific government jurisdictions. Many of the newer companies in Oregon -- Hewlett Packard,
Intel, and Hyundai -- say they moved to the Portland area because there is open space close by a
contained urban area. They felt this kind of region could attract skilled workers who care about quality of
life. This is why economic regions need to pool resources and expertise.

Economic development agencies realize that it is a waste for cities within the same labor market to
engage in bidding wars for businesses that have already chosen to locate in the region, using up scarce
public money and allowing businesses to reduce their responsibility to the city and region. Nevertheless,
most feel unable to eliminate the wars and feel compelled to enter the fray. Some are now taking steps to
reduce competition between cities and suburbs. For example, metropolitan Portland’s business,
government, and civic leaders have concluded that they must pursue a coordinated development strategy
by cooperating in efforts to retain existing businesses and recruit new businesses for the entire
metropolitan region.

Champions of urban revitalization have been drawn to regional collaboration for quite different reasons,
i.e., because their efforts to stem urban decline have been stymied by government subsidies which draw
development away from the urban core.

Older suburbs, in particular, are seeing that their economic futures are linked to their neighbors. Some of
the prosperous suburbs a few years ago which benefited from the forces of new development at the fringe
have become today’s communities in decline. This has happened in Kansas City, where the first ring of
new suburban communities is now losing economic vitality.

Even some suburbanites from high-income communities have become convinced by studies which show
that the most economically integrated metro areas have the highest incomes. For example, according to a
study by George Mason University professor Stephen Fuller, a modest revival of the District of
Columbia’s economy would spill over into the suburbs, producing more than $2 billion in additional
income in Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland over the next six years. There is one visible sign of
the economic cost of metropolitan fragmentation, which is the congestion resulting from long commutes
to dispersed job centers throughout regions. There is also the difficulty of finding low-wage worker in
high-income suburbs. Finally, there is the reality that deteriorating cities create an incentive for more city
residents and businesses to move to the suburbs. This influx can have substantial consequences for
suburban communities, in terms of roads, schools, and sewer systems, but also congestion and
preferences for higher levels of public services.

Regional economists seem to agree that metropolitan areas have “interwoven destinies.” Even though
technology has tempered the influence, local clusters of firms and their relationships still are very
important to regional economic success. Regions still can develop competitive advantage by fostering
relationships and networks among firms, building collaborations to improve training, expanding the flow
of information between job seekers and employers seeking new workers, and nurturing infant industries.

A recent study by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found that economic growth
in America’s metropolitan regions is being generated by 18 dynamic industry clusters, such as health
services, electronics and communication, and transportation equipment. The study concluded that these
clusters of related industries depend on each other for growth, and that they are strengthened by public
and private investments in regional transportation and infrastructure, research and technology, and
education and work force development. These clusters cross city and suburban boundaries. For example,
in the Nashville metropolitan region, businesses of the transportation equipment industry cluster are
distributed all around the region. Because clusters transcend jurisdictional boundaries, some metropolitan
regions are recognizing the need to increase collaboration among public and private leaders across regions
to build regional competitiveness. Miami and Minneapolis-St.Paul both have partnerships which have
identified and are trying to aid strategic industry clusters.

Some of the specific tools for mutual gain in metropolitan economies are regional technology centers for
incremental innovations; regional training institutions to provide, maintain and adapt labor skills; industry
service centers which allow firms to access technology and marketing information they cannot afford to
provide for themselves; and regional development funds. Political coalitions are needed to allow these
kinds of institutions to emerge. Because metropolitan economies usually cross jurisdictional lines, this
means towns and cities must find ways to work together.

Emerging Views on the Dynamics of Growth

Citizens across the nation are questioning patterns of growth and taking a closer look at the impacts of
development. They are voting down conventional growth projects like a new Outer Beltway in Kansas
City and voting for more control over land sales and zoning waivers in Tucson. People are asking how
can our community benefit from growth without losing what we care about? For example, in their 1995
study, “Beyond Sprawl,” the Bank of America, California Resources Agency, Greenbelt Alliance, and
Low Income Housing Fund, warned that that unchecked sprawl threatens to inhibit growth and degrade
the quality of life in California.

In 1993, a New York state-wide survey of builders, officials, environmentalists, and citizens was taken by
McKinsey and Company, a top firm of international business consultants. The survey showed
overwhelming dissatisfaction with the way New York is growing -- by a margin of 3 to 1. The McKinsey
consultants commented that had this been a market survey of a gadget, not a growth policy, they would
have recommended discontinuing the item.

Some of the lessons which people have started to learn about the costs of unmanaged growth are captured
in a study of eight areas in Florida. The study found that the community with the best revenue to cost ratio
was characterized as contiguous in form with substantial amounts of industrial land use, while the worst
ratios were for predominately residential communities with lower densities (satellite, linear or scattered).
Jim MacKenzie and Roger Dower of the World Resources Institute and Don Chen of STPP estimate that
the total market, external and motor vehicle accident costs of car traffic not borne by users could be as
high as $355.7 billion per year.

The lessons from studies of cities around the nation are that development can have negative impacts on
economic development, environmental quality, and social welfare in a community and its surrounding
region. People are waking up to the fact that low density, auto dependent sprawl has profound
consequences on quality of life. Seattle has followed Oregon’s lead in its 1994 urban growth plan and by
voting for a $4 billion mass transit system and strict laws to end sprawl. San Jose and four smaller Bay
area communities all voted to keep new subdivisions and community development within a contained
area. Denver and Salt Lake City are studying urban growth boundaries. Even Las Vegas, the fastest
growing city in the nation is hearing the first calls for growth control in the face of severe traffic
congestion, overcrowded schools, and a looming water shortage.
Bolder, Colorado, and other communities have found they can’t manage growth alone. Bolder fended off
its own sprawl, but Denver spread out all the way to Bolder. To protect the aspects of their community
they care about, people are struggling to find a common ground for dealing with growth intelligently on a
regional basis. The newspapers are full of editorials which have been stirred by the concern for smarter
growth management at the level of neighborhoods, communities, and regions. The strategies people are
pursing include infill development, brownfields redevelopment, and New Urbanism development, which
includes a return to pedestrian scale, greater efficiency of public infrastructure, multiple-use development
and vital town centers.

Fears about Social Decline/ Declining Civil Society

Many pundits have agreed that this is a time of declining confidence in government, weakening of
community institutions, falling voter turnout, and a feeling by many Americans that the quality of moral
life has dropped.

Social problems in the cities seem intractable, and such problems once associated with inner-city
communities have spread to a wider range of established suburbs. In both the New York and Boston
metropolitan areas, crime rates in the suburbs grew at a much faster rate than in the central cities between
the early 1980’s and early 1990s.

In the midst of all of these problems, a handful of retired public leaders believe there is the potential for a
new era in community problem solving. William J. Bennett has teamed up with Sam Nunn to head the
National Commission on Civic Renewal. Lamar Alexander has agreed to chair the newly created national
Commission on Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, and Bill Bradley has joined the National Commission
on Society, Culture, and Community. Patricia Schroeder will head a large project at the Institute for Civil
Society, a Boston think-tank. These efforts share a common commitment to supporting local initiatives,
looking for common ground among divergent philosophical camps and encouraging a heightened sense
of civic participation in a search for solutions.

Political Frustration

People are frustrated with the lack of political mechanisms for resolving conflicts about where to place
low-income housing and locally undesirable land uses. They are angry that towns upstream are allowed to
develop in ways that lead to flooding or have other adverse effects on downstream communities. People
around the country are expressing increasing dissatisfaction with the opportunities for them to participate
in creating and implementing legislation, laws and policy that have direct impacts on their communities.

A very small number of people are also frightened that the physical and economic separation occurring in
metropolitan regions is resulting in political polarization. Residents no longer speak a common language
nor can they cooperate to solve common problems.

At the same time, public agencies are slowly opening up to the idea of local problem solving
collaborations because of the benefits in the form of public ownership of decisions, alternatives to
adversarial processes, the chance to help shape new shared norms of behavior, and the opportunity to
build new relationships that could be useful beyond specific negotiation processes.

Also, people in urban areas and poorer suburbs are becoming more frustrated with the degree to which
residents of wealthier suburbs feel disconnected from social problems and efforts to alleviate them. Due
in large part to research conducted by Myron Orfield, a state representative from Minnesota, it has
become clear that suburban communities are not a monolith with common experiences and political
needs. Many older and inner ring suburbs and more middle income outer suburbs have more in common
with central cities than with wealthy suburbs, and may be convinced to support a regional reform agenda.
This pattern creates the potential for a majority political coalition between the central cities and the inner
and middle-class suburbs. Probably this is true in a number of metropolitan regions.

The Revolution in Our Understanding of Human Learning

The last three decades have produced revolutionary new insights into how human beings learn and how
we can best design learning experiences and environments that accelerate our natural capacity for
learning. This new understanding of the process of learning has led to some rethinking of how to design
schools, workplaces, communities and other social learning systems.

The traditional view of learning could be called the “machine’ view of learning. It is largely based on
behaviorist models of the mind. In it, teaching is the simple process of feeding small pieces of
information from teacher to the learner. It is assumed the learner will be able to transfer her knowledge to
new situations.

The emerging view treats learning as an organic, natural process -- open, self-organized, full of messy,
nonlinear connections, constantly changing and adapting, and frequently using cooperation as the most
powerful learning tool. Learners struggle with a rich variety of information and have to actively work
with it to create patterns that they can understand. Learners are encourage to cooperate and draw upon the
diversity of a whole group.

Much of the turmoil in the business community today is a reflection of urgent efforts to radically redesign
work organizations that are more conducive to the support of human learning and knowledge creation that
is essential to economic survival in today’s information-driven markets. The old hierarchical, bureaucratic
and authority-driven institutions seem incapable of adapting to rapid change. To greater or lesser degrees,
similar revolutions are creating crises in many educational and governmental institutions.

These parallel efforts to reinvent institutions are creating opportunities for collaboration. The focus these
efforts have on using teams to creatively tackle problems is building credibility for collaborative solutions
in general.

These ideas about learning underpin the collaboration which is emerging in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Grand Rapids has a rich variety of initiatives to increase sustainability and health in various sectors of the
community. Many of the community leaders involved in these initiatives have concluded that it is time to
construct a framework which would encourage integration and cross-fertilization among efforts and build
the community’s capacity for thinking and planning together. Grand Rapids plans a process based upon a
set of shared principles, including working together toward a shared, inclusion vision of a healthy
community, use of state-of-the-art learning theory to share work, an open and inclusive process, work
driven by the needs of the participants, and voluntary and rotating leadership. Leaders in this process
include local heads of a foundation, chamber of commerce, and environmental organizations, a Grand
Rapids city commissioner, and others.

Struggles to Envision Sustainable Communities

Community-based experiments to improve quality of life or create sustainable communities are emerging
in all parts of the country, from small rural towns such as Red Lodge, Montana, to inner city
neighborhoods in Atlanta. According to Redefining Progress, an organization which promotes alternatives
to the Gross National Product for measuring progress, there are now 150 community indicator projects
across the nation.

Residents of communities around the country are beginning to question where they are headed. They
don’t want a future of community disintegration, economic decline, and environmental degradation. They
want to strengthen their ability to plan, protect the features that they care about in their communities, and
take advantage of new opportunities.

These experiments are complemented by a growing number of clearinghouses, intermediaries, technical
assistance providers, and policy advocates.

The entire field reflects the growing acknowledgment that solutions to many of the nation’s pressing
problems, such as poverty and environmental degradation, will be devised and implemented at the
community level. Redefining Progress, itself, is considering focusing less on one national number and
more on indicators which are useful to communities and emerge from community processes.

In many community sustainability initiatives an effort is made to map the boundaries of systems. It is rare
that these patterns of natural and human activity closely map political jurisdictions. This means that
almost all actions on sustainability end up being cross-jurisdictional in nature.

Conclusion

For all of these reasons, people and organizations across the nation are experimenting with ways to
capture the potential benefits from greater metropolitan cooperation in stronger economies and economic
opportunity, cleaner environments and more healthy ecosystems, more livable communities which cost
less to maintain, more efficient use of federal and state funding and regional infrastructure assets, greater
civic engagement, more effective dispute resolution across communities, and a sustainable future.

                                   IV. WHO ARE THE CHAMPIONS

The experience in the U.S. suggests that there can be no single gatekeepers or champions for innovative
metropolitan initiatives. Innovative examples of metropolitan collaboration have a diverse array of
champions, including government agencies, foundations, public interest coalitions, civic leaders, and
elected officials. Crucial leadership can come from anywhere in a community.

Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) designated by the federal government clearly have an
important role to play in metropolitan cooperation. The East-West Gateway Coordinating Council, the
MPO for the Missouri and Illinois bi-state region, is the convener and development intermediary for the
St. Louis Regional Jobs Initiative.

The St. Louis Regional Jobs Initiative is trying to move the major job-related sectors of the region toward
a linked system that ensures that the labor market meets the needs of urban core workers and regional
employers. The major job-related sectors in the eight-county area comprised of the City of St. Louis, four
counties in Missouri, and three counties in Illinois , are seen to be economic development, business,
education, transportation, human services, community development, and local and state agencies. One of
the premises of the initiative is that it will not succeed in its mission if the diverse voices of employers,
workers, and other stakeholders in the regional labor market are not included in planning, decision
making and outcome evaluation. The same MPO has been working to implement a new 20-year plan that
provides a framework for linking transportation investment more closely with economic, environmental,
and community benefits. This initiative is described later in the report.
Councils of Governments also stand out as leaders of metropolitan initiatives. The East-West Gateway
Coordinating Council is not only the MPO, but also the Council of Governments for the St. Louis region.
Facing some of the worst air quality problems in the country, the Denver Regional Council of
Governments has worked with local public interest groups including the Sustainable Transportation
Project to generate an unprecedented amount of support for their new light rail system. With public
approval at an all time high, critical extensions to the system have been given the go ahead. Energized
citizens and transportation reform advocates are now pressing for the implementation of an urban growth
boundary in the upcoming Long Range Plan.

Transit, ferry and planning agencies, including the Puget Sound Regional Council, are implementing
an innovative regional fare system that will enable central Puget Sound commuters and other transit riders
to use one convenient fare payment system on all public transportation services in the region. A smart
card fare collection system will be designed to facilitate fare coordination, and a regional fare revenue
reconciliation clearinghouse will help the region’s many operators implement the new system. Smart card
technology will make it easier to use public transportation, cheaper to collect fares, and create new
opportunities for improving mobility in the region.

County agencies, such as Cuyahoga County Planning Commission have also been champions for
collaborative processes. Cuyahoga County Planning Commission convened a symposium in October
1992 to discuss brownfield redevelopment strategies as part of an effort to counteract sprawl in the
metropolitan region. A multi-stakeholder Brownfields Working Group analyzed the problem of
brownfields and produced recommendations. Progress since then includes a voluntary clean up law for
Ohio and funding to Cleveland from the U.S. EPA for two demonstration projects. Today, in the
Cleveland metropolitan region, there is a coalition of businesses, community development corporations,
Cuyahoga county officials, neighborhood groups and other citizens working to develop brownfields sites
in the city and find ways to remedy the financial and regulatory barriers they encounter.

Cities can reach out to surrounding communities to start the ball rolling. Mayor Archer’s administration
in the City of Detroit has attempted to reverse the past city-suburban conflict by organizing regional
collaborations with suburban businesses and governments. General Motors’ commitment to stay in the
City of Detroit was encouraged by Mayor Archer’s efforts to reach out to suburban constituencies,
including county and state government.

Local nonprofit organizations have been prominent proponents of regional initiatives. The Metropolitan
Energy Center (MEC) is a non-profit agency working to achieve the sustainable, efficient,
environmentally sound and economic use of energy in the Kansas City metropolitan region. Their work
focuses on connecting energy efficiency, environmental stewardship, and economic improvement through
community partnerships for the benefit of all citizens in the region. MEC and a planning team consisting
of the local transit agency, the city, local architects, and six Americorps volunteers have partnered with
two neighborhoods to work on a community planning effort called the Community Empowerment
Project. The goal of the project is to educate the community members about sustainability and create a
plan that will not only make their communities more sustainable, but that will also maintain diverse,
livable communities within Kansas City.

Chambers of Commerce also have an important role to play. The Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce
is developing a long-term strategic plan to support target growth industry clusters such as medical
products, trade and transportation, and tourism and entertainment. The Chamber is using a collaborative
process between business, government and education leaders to identify ways to support and encourage
these growth industries throughout the region.
Churches have led creative initiatives. The Louisiana Coastal Wetlands Interfaith Stewardship Plan was
formed in 1986 to help congregations across Louisiana understand the impact of rapid erosion on natural
ecosystems in hundreds of communities located on the delta where Mississippi River meets the Gulf of
Mexico. Churches and synagogues sponsored forums for 2000 people interested in learning why and how
to protect coastal wetlands. These efforts built stronger grassroots support for coastal protection and
spurred the allocation of state and federal wetlands restoration funds.

Individuals have also been effective champions for collaborative efforts. Steve Hulbert helped empower
his whole community to turn his idea for saving Olympia, Washington’s watersheds into a full-scale
program that educates the community about forest ecosystems, the connections between watersheds and
the forest, and the effect people can have on both. He joined with Global Rivers Environmental Education
Network (GREE) and community members to develop a program that involves youth, businesses,
educators, resource professionals, nonprofit organizations, neighborhoods and government in monitoring
the condition of the area’s watersheds. Public partners include the State DNR, Puget Sound Water Quality
Authority, the Washington Sate Department of Ecology, the Interagency Committee for Outdoor
Recreation, and the Olympia DNR and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service who supply the resources and
financial support while community organizations, businesses and parents provide the volunteers.

The catalyst for Sustainable Racine has been Samuel C. Johnson, Chairman of SC Johnson Wax who
asked community representatives to join him in laying the foundation for Sustainable Racine. The five
elements of the Racine initiative are community visioning, asset inventory, goal-setting and measurement,
alliances to share ideas and talents, and communications that ensure the initiative is open to and welcomes
every member of the community.

In the examples described above, leadership came from many different places. At the same time, in all of
these efforts, the champion reached out to all the various stakeholders who care about the issue, who can
allocate resources to implementing solutions, and who have a say in whether solutions are implemented.

                                 V. THE VARIETY IN STRUCTURE

Collaboration among local governments is actually quite common. Sometimes collaborations are under
the auspices of regional authorities or consolidated governments, but often they are more informal. The
examples below capture the great variety in the structure of experiments across the nation. What will
work in any particular place depends on local conditions. What communities need is the opportunity to
experiment with approaches that make sense to them, along with access to high quality information about
what has worked elsewhere and why.

Formal

Formal mechanisms include regional and/or consolidated government structure, metropolitan planning
councils, special service taxing districts and joint service agreements.

Regional Government

Portland Metro is the nation’s only directly elected regional government. It is the metropolitan planning
agency and regional planning body for the three-county Portland metropolitan region, and the focal point
for many collaborative efforts in the Portland area. It is responsible for both growth management
performance and regional transportation planning. Metro, which controls development in the three-county
Portland area, this year adopted an even stricter plan for the area, including limits on parking spaces at
new stores and other measures to reduce automobile traffic.
Montgomery County, Maryland, which includes a large number of communities, has achieved rare social
and economic integration because it has a unified county school system and the Maryland-National
Capital Park and Planning Commission which has exclusive planning and zoning control for the county.
This allows many innovative ideas to take root, such as the Moderately Priced Dwelling Unit (MPDV)
Ordinance where builders of more than 50 unit project must set aside 15 percent of units for low and
moderate income housing in exchange for a density bonus of up to 22 percent. The assumption behind
why Montgomery County has worked is that businesses seek out labor markets and economic regions
rather than specific government jurisdictions. The county approach gives the region a shared metro-wide
voice to business.

Chattanooga and Knoxville city schools also dissolved and merged into a county-wide system.

Consolidated Government

In the 1960s and 1970s, Nashville-Davidson County, Jacksonville-Duval County, Indianapolis-Marion
County, Lexington-Fayette County, and Anchorage-Anchorage Borough were created through
consolidations of cities with the counties of which they were a part. All are touted because of their fiscally
sound, unified governments with strong credit ratings and competitive rates of economic growth.
Government unity seems to have fostered integration and equity.

Voters approved the consolidation of the City of Jacksonville and Duval County in 1967. Supporters of
consolidation pointed to the complexity and cost of multiple, overlapping governments, the efficiencies of
consolidation, and the marketing potential of claiming a larger population and a more diverse economy.
Because of the consolidation, many civic organizations, trade associations, public service organizations,
and charitable organizations operate, for the most part cooperatively, through the Jacksonville area. Inter-
local agreements are also maintained between the city and the beach communities of Atlantic Beach,
Neptune Beach, and Jacksonville Beach.

Through annexation Charlotte has grown from 30 square miles to 204 square miles, tripled its population,
and maintained average city incomes 22 percent above suburban levels. In the 1980s, the gap between
African American and white family incomes narrowed in the Charlotte area while increasing nationally.
Charlotte ranks third in housing integration among all major U.S. metropolitan areas with a large African-
American population. Annexation has paved the way for unification of the City and the County.

An early component of Nashville’s economic strategy also was to consolidate the governments of the City
of Nashville and Davidson County. This move improved intergovernmental cooperation, strengthened
regional planning, and eased the ability of businesses to deal with local government. As a result of the
consolidation, the Greater Nashville Regional Council (GNRC) is the primary planning organization in
the region.

In the last three years, there have been several more formal consolidations in the South. Athens
consolidated with Clark County, Georgia. Augusta consolidated with Richmond County, Georgia.
However, city-county consolidations are rare. Over 100 proposals have been voted down since World
War II, while only twenty have been approved.

Over the last four decades, central cities have annexed over 12,000 square miles and more than doubled in
area. Columbus, Ohio annexed extensively. Annexation has been San Antonio’s strategy for sustaining
growth. Phoenix did too, managing growth by annexing neighborhood suburbs. The result was the city
grew 10 fold in physical size and population in 50 years. Annexation can improve access to opportunity
for more residents of a region, but it also has its costs. Phoenix officials now say the annexation caused
publicly financed sprawl of the worst kind and resulted in poor air quality, traffic gridlock and spatial
disorder.

In any case, except for cities in the South and Southwest, such as Jacksonville and Houston, most big
cities are unable to change their boundaries, annexing neighboring communities as population moves
further out. In many mid-western cities and in New England and the Mid-Atlantic States annexations are
all but impossible because of rigid political maps.

Metropolitan Planning Councils

Regional planning councils in the 1960s and 1970s received a strong push from federal policy decisions.
By the end of the 1970s, there were nearly 48 federal programs which required a regional plan or
planning organization as a condition of funding or gave preference to regional councils. In fact, many
regional councils failed when the federal government sharply curtailed funding in the early 1980’s, at
which time it shifted the locus of regionalism to the state. By 1991, only 13 of the 48 federal programs
promoting sub-state regionalism were still funded. The only new federally sponsored legislation which
still promotes a strong role for metropolitan planning councils is ISTEA. Nevertheless, many regional
planning councils have evolved into strong forces for regional collaboration.

The Metropolitan Council of the Twin Cities has historically been charged with wastewater permitting
and planning and review of large-scale projects of regional impact. Under new legislation, it is also
responsible for regional transit, transportation, and wastewater services. These functions increase the
capacity of the Met to coordinate regional development. Although there have been attempts to establish
direct election of council commissioners and expand Met responsibilities to include fair housing
allocation, these efforts have not yet succeeded.

SCAG is the designated Metropolitan Planning Organization for six counties in Southern California.
SCAG helped develop the Alameda Corridor initiative and established the Alameda Corridor
Transportation Agency, composed of representatives from the surrounding cities and development
agencies, to build and manage the project. The Alameda Corridor consolidates 90 miles of rail operations
into a single 20-mile, high capacity facility that will provide rail access to the ports of Los Angeles and
Long Beach. SCAG recently funded a collaborative economic strategy planning effort by 28 cities in
Southeast Los Angeles County to help identify opportunities for leveraging the multi-billion dollar
investment in the Alameda Corridor. These 28 cities have now formed a Gateway Cities Partnership to
carry out a cooperative strategy.

The East-West Gateway Coordinating Council in St. Louis, whose activities were described above, is
another example of an MPO which is also a COG.

Special service taxing districts and joint service agreements

Regional efforts, not in the form of metro government, but in function-sharing and tax- sharing, are
common. There are currently more than 33,000 special districts in the Untied States. More than 90
percent perform a single function, and most of these have never broadened out to other functions. Thirty-
six percent provide water and sewer services. Sixteen percent are fire districts. Six percent provide post-
secondary technical and vocational education and library services, and 4 percent perform transportation-
related functions.

For example, some sort of inter-local transit district exists in all major metro areas. Palm Beach, Broward
and Dade Counties have cooperated to establish a commuter train service running from West Palm Beach
to Miami called Tri-Rail. The city and county for St. Louis voted on an increase of the sales tax to fund
expanded Metrolink transit service in the region. The measure passed with 61% of the vote in the county
and 65% of the vote in the city.

Sometimes voluntary intergovernmental cooperation for joint purchasing and services such as parks and
recreation, waste water, and solid waste disposal is an early first step that allows for more collaborative
problem solving in the future. It is interesting to note that flexible manufacturing networks succeeded
most early around joint purchasing, but the most beneficial networks in the world have evolved to include
all kinds of collaborations to solve problems and exploit opportunities. There may be ways to help
voluntary efforts at metropolitan cooperation to evolve as well. Looking back at the history of regional
councils, many were created as single-purpose organizations and later emerged into a broader
coordinating entity. The Metropolitan Council of the Twin Cities, for example, was established in 1967 to
address a water pollution crisis and Seattle Metro was created because of pollution in Lake Washington.

General regional taxes for a bundle of services are less common. Miami, Louisville, and Minneapolis all
have such arrangements with their suburbs. The oldest tax base sharing is in the Minneapolis-St. Paul
metro area where 40% of each local government’s increase in commercial and industrial tax base since
1971 has gone into an area-wide pool and is then shared. More recently, Louisville-Jefferson County in
Kentucky created an income tax-sharing compact. Rochester-Monroe County in New York has
implemented a sales tax sharing plan.

Following a financial crisis for civic facilities in 1982, Denver created the first regional asset district. In
1988, voters in metropolitan Denver’s six counties approved a referendum to create a special district that
would levy a one-tenth of 1 percent sales tax to support these facilities. The tax currently produces $14
million a year and funds are distributed by a formula which was hammered out by institutions and local
government bodies. The special district was so successful that the model was used again recently to set up
a regional tax.

In 1991, Montgomery County, Ohio, and the City of Dayton set up a voluntary revenue-sharing program
called the Economic Development Equity Fund (EDGE) to assist communities to improve their economic
health. The Fund comes from a share of increased property and tax revenues generated by economic
development among participating communities. The fund targets cooperative economic development
efforts among communities. At the time the fund was established, it was expected to generate $5 million
annually.

In 1994, a tax base sharing structure known as Joint Economic Development Districts was established
which enabled the city of Akron to receive two percent of suburban taxes on business profits and wages in
exchange for extending city sewer and water services. The city is now trying to expand this tax base
sharing framework to other suburbs.

Also in 1994, based on the success of Denver’s regional asset district, a governmental structure was
launched in Allegheny County designed to fund the regional assets which benefit all of southwestern
Pennsylvania and to institute a long-overdue tax restructuring for the local governments within Allegheny
County, including the City of Pittsburgh. The legislation which created the Allegheny Regional Asset
District was promoted by government officials from the City of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County
combined with private-sector leaders from the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, and
the Greater Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce.

The Allegheny Regional Asset District has the authority to disburse 50 percent of the proceeds of a
countywide 1 percent local option sales tax to the 128 municipalities in the region. The seven-member
board excludes appointed officials and public employees. The two principal beneficiaries of the District
are the libraries and parks which cross communities, but money can also be used for sports facilities and
more than two dozen cultural institutions. Allocation of the “other” 50 percent of the sales tax proceeds
have led to reductions in property taxes, elimination of nuisance taxes, and tax relief for senior citizens.
Poorer communities get more revenue than wealthier communities do. The Allegheny Regional Asset
District is a concrete product of recognition by residents that the region’s attractiveness depended upon
preserving regional assets which the City of Pittsburgh could no longer afford to maintain alone.

Informal/Virtual

Flexible choices are rising to the top among regional collaborations. They are less threatening to citizen’s
-- and elected representatives --desire for autonomy. They also take into account how difficult it is to
anticipate the challenges ahead or nail down the geographic scope of a region long enough to have it
governed by a single structure. Even communities which have annexed land or consolidated city and
county government continue to be confronted with irrepressible sprawl leapfrogging across their borders.

Regions may not want or need regional government, but they do need regional governance, where
“governance,” according to Bill Dodge, “encompasses the roles and relationships of all community
leaders and citizens guiding and empowering the design of strategies to address common concerns and the
delivery of services to provide for the common good.”

Regionalism today often operates through a network of regional decision-making mechanisms as opposed
to formal structures. Process is more important than structure. Organizations in a network at any one time
reflect the specific task being undertaken, and change with the task. Such informal mechanisms include
civic organizations and citizen assemblies, area-wide coalitions and alternative planning organizations.
Most of the examples sprinkled throughout this report have an informal structure, but a few additional
examples are provided here.

Citizen Assemblies, Areawide Coalitions and Alternative Planning Organizations

The Chicagoland Transportation and Air Quality Commission includes 29 citizen members as well as the
participation of hundreds of citizen volunteers throughout the Chicago region. The Commission created
the Citizen Transportation Plan for Northeastern Illinois which lays out a policy and planning framework
for transportation decisions for the next 25 years. The Commission included over 200 organizations in its
planning, ranging from Access Living to the Openlands Project and from the Jewish Council on Urban
Affairs to the American Lung Association. The Commission is helping individuals and organizations
throughout the region to become engaged in the development of the region’s long-term transportation
plan. The Commission will work to have the Citizen Plan adopted by the Chicago area metropolitan
planning organization, CATS.

The Duwamish Coalition, named after the river that flows through Seattle, includes participants from the
cities of Seattle, Tukwila, Renton and Muckleshoot Indian Nation as well as representatives from
business, labor, environmental agencies and key federal, state, and local agencies. The Coalition’s
purpose is to clean up, reclaim and promote the 5-mile long Duwamish industrial corridor in King
County, WA, and preserve 75,000 jobs with a $2.5 billion annual payroll. While the Coalition has taken
many small practical steps to restore the river and habitat for salmon and other wildlife, it views the most
important step as fostering cooperative relationships between government, industry, community,
environmentalists, and labor.
Cambridge Civic Forums has held a series of community forums directed at community, civic and
business organizations, as well as churches and universities. The Forum’s stated purpose is "to consider
the future of the region as a model of racial diversity and economic vitality." Six topics emerged early
which have been themes throughout the process, education and training, health and well being, business
and employment, land use and transportation, environment and resource use, and social justice and
quality of life (including arts and religion)). Although this is a city effort, organizers recognize that it is
important to draw in neighboring communities and this is underway.

The Central Indiana Regional Citizens League (CIRCL), formed in late 1996, is modeled on citizens’
leagues in other cities such as Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, Kansas City, and Jacksonville, Florida. It is a
non-profit, non-partisan public interest organization which will attract citizens to help fashion an agenda
for the nine-county central Indiana region in the 21st century and tackle the area’s problems with a
regional focus. CIRCL is an outgrowth of an ongoing study of central Indiana by urban affairs expert Neil
Peirce, who advocates sharing of resources among communities to solve problems that cross local
boundaries. CIRCL plans to host discussion groups, monthly “connection forums” to debate issues, and
convene study committees.

Specific Implementation Mechanisms

Specific implementation mechanisms include public private partnerships for job creation and training,
welfare to work experiments, public private partnerships for real estate investments in open space, historic
preservation, open space and community development.

For example, business attraction and retention efforts in the Portland metropolitan area are coordinated by
the Portland Development Commission, through agreements with the Multnomah, Clackamas, and
Washington County. The Portland Development Commission operates a Regional Workforce Quality
Committee to organize metropolitan-wide job training and placement.

              VI. HOLISTIC APPROACHES TO METROPOLITAN COOPERATION

Peter Senge, Director of the Systems Thinking and Organizational Learning Program at MIT’s Sloan
School of Management, has for many years encouraged leading firms to give up the illusion that separate
unrelated forces govern how their world operates. Once freed of this notion, Senge says organizations can
become “learning organizations.” Communities can also become learning communities, and this seems to
be the direction metropolitan collaborations are taking.

The sorts of initiatives which start with something like a systems view of a region include quality of life,
sustainability, image-changing/turn around, and knowledge creation initiatives. They include data
collection and visioning processes, strategies for measuring progress, and processes for making
improvements. Some examples have already been described elsewhere in this report including the Grand
Rapids initiative in Michigan and Sustainable Racine in Wisconsin. A few additional examples --
Sustainable Seattle, Chattanooga Vision 2000, Eastward Ho! in Southern Florida, and a series of
interwoven Northwest Indiana initiatives are described below.

Sustainable Seattle

The Sustainable Seattle process began when the Washington, D.C.-based Global Tomorrow Coalition
brought together a diverse group of people-- representing business, government, environmental groups,
students, the media, community organizations and religious leaders for a one-day forum in 1990. A group
of participants decided to continue the work begun and created the Sustainable Seattle Network and Civic
Forum, a volunteer network and civic forum committed to the Seattle region’s long-term cultural,
economic, and environment health and vitality. Volunteers began work on a variety of projects, with a
special focus on developing a set of sustainability indicators for the region.. Sustainable Seattle continues
to explore and promotes sustainable practices in all areas of civic life in Seattle as well as in surrounding
areas in King County. It has produced-- with broad community input-- a survey of key long-term trends
affecting the area’s sustainability. It plans to update and publish its survey periodically. It is now trying to
evolve from a volunteer group into a permanent organization.

Chattanooga Vision

Chattanooga Vision 2000 was invented because of the experience in other cities that turn-arounds result
from creating a new coalition involving diverse segments of the population. Rather than lobbying for a
plan, Chattanooga leaders allowed ideas to emerge from a community-wide process. Chattanooga leaders
involved 1700 people in 39 meetings over 4 months to set specific goals for the following decade for
places, work, government, people, and play.

Volunteers formed task forces to carry out the goals, many of which have now been achieved. The self-
image of the city is much better. Class, race, and geographic barriers are perceived to be lower. The
downtown is noticeably better (including new shuttle buses, a new performance hall and aquarium, and
major renovations to historical buildings.) A nonprofit called RiverCity Company has developed and built
support for a master plan for redeveloping 20 miles of river front. There are also new public
transportation services, bikeways, and pedestrian services. There is a new Neighborhood Network
Organization which is helping to form and connect neighborhood associations across the city and county.
A new Business Development Center is credited with improving business attractiveness. Public
awareness of the vital role of public education has improved through Partners for Academic Excellence.
The Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise has developed or rehabilitated housing for many low-to-
moderate-income families, toward a goal of upgrading 100 percent of substandard housing in 10 years.

Chattanooga is also developing eco-industrial parks and has an array of programs to reduce air and water
pollution. And Chattanooga Vision continues to reinvent itself, adopt new goals, and implement new
strategies.

Eastward Ho!

The Eastward Ho! Initiative is a joint state-local effort to revitalize an 85-mile long urban corridor
stretching from West Palm Beach to Miami to attract new residents and economic development and
prevent continued urbanization of the Everglades watershed. This initiative is a good example of how
honest efforts discover the links among issues. The Governor’s Commission for a Sustainable South
Florida has helped catalyze a historic groundbreaking for Everglades restoration this year, at least in part
because of the collaboration of federal, state, and local natural resource agencies. However, the project
has continued to evolve.

The Governor’s Commission concluded that Florida could not achieve a sustainable Everglades
ecosystem without also creating a more sustainable urban system in South Florida. So, the Eastward Ho!
Initiative was created to revitalize older urban areas. However, the Initiative does not stop with urban
revitalization. The ultimate goal of Eastward Ho! is to create sustainable communities in Southeast
Florida that use resources to meet current needs while ensuring that adequate resources are available for
future generations. It is concerned with accommodating new residents, maintaining unique local
character, revitalizing the urban core, protecting the water supply, ecosystems, and quality of life, and
making increasing cultural diversity a strength.
Northwest Indiana

In Northwest Indiana, there are a series of overlapping projects which together are trying to address the
key issues for improving the attractiveness of Northwest Indiana. These efforts include the Northwest
Indiana Brownfields Project, the Grand Calumet River Visioning Process, the Quality of Life Initiative of
the Northwest Indiana Development Forum, and the Sustainable Development Roundtables for Northwest
Indiana. This set of initiatives is building capacity for the communities within Northwest Indiana to work
together. It is also building relationships among business people, community representatives,
environmental organizations, and government officials, many of whom are active in all of the initiatives.

Northwest Indiana Sustainable Development Roundtable, for example, includes 38 community leaders in
business, government, labor, and environment who are trying to develop a blueprint for economic,
environmental, and community development in the three northern counties of Indiana, funded by U.S.
EPA through the Northwest Indiana Regional Planning Commission and cosponsored by Indiana
University Northwest.

The small successes of each of these projects is helping to build a sense of regional identity in Northwest
Indiana and a base for future successes.

                     VII. SINGLE ISSUES THAT DRAW PEOPLE TOGETHER

Many metropolitan collaborations have formed around one specific issue, such as workforce preparation
or open space preservation. What is remarkable to note is that, more often than not, these single-issue
projects evolve into broader initiatives.

Although single issue collaborations often broaden out, many different issues have driven these efforts at
metropolitan collaboration, including business development/job creation, transportation access, changing
land use and sprawl, improving environmental quality, protecting valuable ecological resources, reducing
education and fiscal disparities,

welfare reform and poverty alleviation, fair housing, and addressing spatial mismatch between people and
jobs. Some examples of each are provided below.

Economic Development

Regional clusters of industries continue to be a significant and, according to Michael Storper and Allen
Scott, much underrated, element of the world economy, even given steadily globalizing economic
relations. Regional economies usually don’t achieve their full potential without institutions which
promote collaboration to enhance their functioning. Storper and Scott suggest that to get full value from
these clusters requires (1) trust among firms built through effective sharing of information, (2) political
coalitions -- such as regional economic councils -- which identify priorities, build political support, and,
through their broad design, help regions continually redefine their niche, (3) regional labor syndicates to
negotiate labor training and targets for working conditions, and (4) inter-regional coordination to set
ground rules for what regions may and may not do to compete with each other.

The collaborations we found that have formed around regional economic development generally are
focusing on two of these four capacities, trust among firms and regional organizations to set priorities and
marshal resources.
The Seattle Jobs Initiative is encouraging local economic development councils in Seattle and King
County to come together to better serve the workforce needs of employers, in collaboration with the
community colleges. A new model has been proposed which includes a regional strategy targeting high
wage sectors, a federated organization structure which ties together various actors and manages the
system for results, and a manufacturing and industrial council to advocated for the retention and
expansion of the city’s industrial base. The Seattle Jobs Initiative received funding from the Annie Casey
Foundation to develop its Strategic Investment Plan and implementation. Funds must be used to stress the
relationship between inner cities and the larger regional economies.

The Seattle Jobs Initiative is led by the Officer of Economic Development of the City of Seattle, but the
Initiative has its own board and working groups.

A Southern Californian electric vehicle consortium named CALSTART was a successful bidder among
private -public consortia for funds made available under federal legislation. It raised additional funds
from a variety of local public agencies and established a network of Southern Californian component
manufacturers to collaboratively produce a prototype electric car. This may lead to the beginnings of a
new industry in California.

The Greater Indianapolis Progress Committee is a broad based, bi-partisan, nonprofit advisory group
whose activities and task forces help forge community consensus and are a catalyst for change. Through
careful planning and strategic use of partnerships, Indianapolis set a new course as the amateur sports
capital of the nation.

Building our Future: Regional Strategies for Economic Opportunities is a collaborative, multi-year
initiative to create job and homeownership opportunities as the Twin Cities area competes as a single
region in the global economy. The strategies include work force development, expanding jobs which pay
household-supporting wages, and bringing Minneapolis, St. Paul, and suburban communities together as
interdependent partners in a single regional economy.

The Northwest Indiana Forum is working together with local businesses in Lake, Porter, LaPorte,
Newton, Jasper, Pulaski and Starke Counties, using its $1.7 million budget to improve the business
climate and attract new business and jobs to Northwest Indiana and to change the perception of Northwest
Indiana in Chicago, in Indianapolis, and among people who live in Northwest Indiana. It is recruiting new
businesses to Northwest Indiana and pursuing rule changes such as proposing to repeal the business
inventory tax in Indiana. It is trying to improve quality of life, image, and morale in the region by
bringing together 41 chambers of commerce as a planning group for how to become one of the top
communities in the U.S. Chambers will reach out to schools, churches, service clubs, civic and
government organizations to come up with 1997 projects which improve quality of life in Northwest
Indiana. The Forum is trying to improve educational opportunity and become known for educational
reform (25%) by achieving 100 teachers with national certification and then get more and a broad school-
to-work initiative, acting as coordinating agency for local universities and job trainers for grants. It is also
working with partners to improve the environment in Northwest Indiana.

Cleveland Tomorrow, founded in 1982, is a non-profit organization whose members include 50 of the
region’s largest corporations. CT is concerned with the region’s business climate and specific strategic
projects, like a new stadium. CT partners with other regional organizations which focus on other issues.
The Cleveland Roundtable addresses inter-racial and ethnic tension. Build-up Greater Cleveland engages
in infrastructure planning and prioritization.
Also a membership organizations for businesses, Greater Philadelphia First has a broader purview and
a large number of affiliates, including the Greater Philadelphia Economic Coalition, the Greater
Philadelphia International Network, PhilaPride and the Committee to Support the Philadelphia Public
Schools.

Transportation access

The number of strong transportation examples of metropolitan cooperation has proliferated in recent years
because of the passage six years ago of ISTEA. ISTEA, by design, strengthens local decision-making and
public participation. Because transportation plans are prepared by metropolitan planning organizations,
these planning efforts often do include many different communities within a region.

Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the MPO for the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area
which includes over 100 towns and cities, has successfully implemented ISTEA’s flexible funding
provisions through the Bay Area Partnership. Working with local and state partners, MTC allocated
almost $500 million in flexible ISTEA funds to 500 projects. It has made substantial progress in blending
concerns for cost-effectiveness with the consideration of transportation’s impacts on land use and the
environment. The key to success was developing consensus and keeping the project selection process
open to input and improvements from the public and local agency partners. The Bay Area plans were
developed through a process involving public officials, business and environmental groups.

The Columbus, Georgia Alternative Transportation Plan is a two-state effort to provide a vital bicycle
and pedestrian network for a small city. It is an example of the efforts to integrate transportation systems,
linking freeways to transit, bikeways to local roads etc., integrating transportation facilities into the
community context, allowing for multiple uses of transportation facilities, enabling transportation and
resource agencies within a region to work together, and improving system efficiency rather than mode
efficiency.

Concerned parties from government, business, and public interest groups are collaborating on a plan for
the Route 1 corridor in Middlesex County, New Jersey, that would balance economic development
concerns, congestion management, access via alternative modes and environmental protection. The
project is in its second year and has been nationally recognized for its emphasis on mutual agreement.

The North Central Texas Council of Governments, the MPO for the Dallas-Ft.Worth area, has led a
regional planning effort focused on the Trinity River Corridor which is a focal point not only for Dallas,
but also for nine cities and three counties, The Trinity River Corridor Citizens Committee developed a
consensus plan to integrate the multiple needs within the Dallas portion of the corridor. The
comprehensive plan offers alternative transportation modes and well planned facilities and growth
balanced with environmental protection.

Changing Land Use/Sprawl

San Jose established an Urban Service Boundary in 1970 that capped sprawl by limiting the area that
received city services. With extensive community involvement, the city reaffirmed this urban growth
boundary (UGB) in early 1996 and completed the San Jose 2020 General Plan which strengthens the
efforts against sprawl. San Jose will emphasize higher-density, mixed-use infill development in existing
urban areas near public transit. The General Plan also outlines other strategies aimed at improving energy
and water efficiency, reducing automobile dependency, preserving natural habitats, and improving air and
water quality.
The Metro Council, the regional government in the Portland, Oregon area, approved a Region 2040 plan
which calls for future development to be clustered around the region’s growing rail transit system within
neighborhood, town, and regional centers. This plan looks four decades into the future to project
metropolitan Portland’s development patterns. Metro, the elected regional planning body, is responsible
for coordinating implementation of Region 2040. Metro has established common regional performance
standards and model ordinances for communities to follow in developing their own local land-use plans.

The City of Los Angeles and the L.A. Metropolitan Transit Authority are working on a joint strategy
to encourage high-density development around transit stations. The first major implementation step has
been the Alameda District Plan for the area near Los Angeles’s historic Union Station. The Plan has
generally been welcomed by the city’s political and business communities as a means to retain employers
by coordinating land use with public transit.

In Long Island, a locally based regional coalition has agreed on a plan for growth in the 100,000-acre
Pine Barrens that can avoid contaminating the aquifer almost every Long Islander drinks from.

Improving environmental quality

Polluted rivers, lakes and groundwater seldom are contained within one political jurisdictions, nor are air
quality problems. Also, sprawling land use is contributing to rising pollution. A San Jose, California,
study showed that without a greenbelt, 13,000 ex-urban homes would be developed that, compared to an
equivalent number of units downtown and along the transit corridor, would require at least an additional
200,000 miles of auto commuting, an extra 3 million gallons of water, and 40 percent more energy for
heating and cooling every day.

In the face of these problems, there is mounting evidence that collaborative approaches to environmental
protection are not only feasible, but also able to create successful and enduring agreements about the hard
choices of managing economic growth, ensuring environmental quality and building healthy
communities.

The Grand Calumet Task Force in Northwest Indiana is coordinating The Grand Calumet
River/Indiana Harbor Ship Canal Corridor Vision Project, a 2-year research, visioning, and action process
to describe what property is there, how it is used, problems, and solutions which achieve a balance of
community and economic development, recreation, preservation, water quality, cultural, historic and other
uses and benefits. The Grand Calumet River originates in the east end of Gary, Indiana and flows 13
miles through the heavily industrialized cities of Gary, East Chicago, and Hammond and drains into Lake
Michigan via the Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal. Industry has agreed to partially fund the project, as has
state and city government. Grand Calumet Task Force’s role is community outreach. Some see this
project as a first step in a broader sustainable community planning and visioning effort for Northwest
Indiana.

Facing large investments to reduce emissions, Unocal of Southern California came up with the
alternative idea to buy pre-1971 cars for $700 per car in conjunction with the California Air Resource
Board and destroy them. First Interstate Bank created a special car loan program with favorable terms.
Ford offered participants special rebates on new cars. Those who sold their cars generally purchased a
newer, cleaner one. This program resulted in greater and more cost-effective regional emissions
reductions.
Wildlife Habitat Council, Inc. is convening industry representatives, environmentalists, and landowners
along the St.Clair River, which divides the Canadian Province of Ontario and Michigan, to help them
develop ways to work together to improve environmental conditions in the St.Clair River watershed area.

Brownsville, Texas, and the adjoining city of Matamoros, Mexico are exploring how an oil refinery, a
stone company, and asphalt producer, and farms might work together to reduce waste and curb local
environmental problems.

Partly because it is one of few metropolitan regions in the U.S. with a consolidated city and county
government, Jacksonville has a long history of region-wide collaboration. With backing from across the
metropolitan region, the Jacksonville, Florida Chamber of Commerce led an initiative to address its
environmental problems. The city adopted strong odor abatement regulations which motivated businesses
to invest in new pollution control technologies. Private and public sector leaders articulated a vision for
riverfront development to attract tourists and improve quality of life for residents. By the early 1990s,
these efforts were producing results. Both sides of the river were transformed into an attraction for
visitors and residents alike.

Protecting valuable ecological resources:

The few remaining intact ecological systems are at risk as regions expand to new areas.

Adversarial processes are common in challenges over the use of these resources, dividing communities
and neighbors. To avoid the costs in dollars and relationships of these adversarial approaches,
communities are experimenting with collaborative mechanisms that enable many stakeholders to come
together to identify common goals and areas of interest and resolve conflicts. These processes also help
people to feel connected to a place and take responsibility for protecting it.

Some characteristics of successful collaborative approaches to protect ecological resources is that they
use a framework based on a natural system such as a watershed or bioregion, voluntary multistakeholder
discussion, a process open to the public, and the best available science. The ecosystem focus is
particularly important because a shift is beginning from managing single species or resources to managing
ecosystems for a variety of resources. The large landscapes at issue often cross ownership boundaries.
Although they are new and experimental, there are dozens of cooperative efforts to use ecosystem
approaches across the U.S.

The Chicago Regional Biodiversity Council is a new consortium of organizations known publicly as
Chicago Wilderness. The Council was formed to achieve broad based understanding of the global
significance of the Chicago region’s biodiversity and support for its long-term protection, restoration, and
stewardship. The objective of the Chicago Regional Biodiversity Council is to enrich the quality of life of
the citizens of the region, foster a sustainable relationship with the natural world, and promote the
protection of the natural heritage of this area through specific joint projects (there are already 32 existing
projects). The Council is a unique collaboration of more than 35 organizations including the Chicago Park
District, the Chicago Department of Environment, the metropolitan county forest preserves, state and
federal agencies, conservation groups, arboretums, aquaria, botanical gardens, zoos, biologically-oriented
museums, and other land owners.

The Council has a steering committee, communications group, and five teams. A Policy and Strategy
Team is developing a regional Biodiversity Recovery Plan. The plan would identify boundaries of the
region, set forth an adaptive management plan, develop a process for setting priorities for acquisitions and
establish an acquisitions plan. An Education and Outreach Team is trying to increase and diversify public
participation in and understandings of the region’s biodiversity by developing collaborative education
programs and events. The Science and Land Management Teams are meeting jointly to communicate and
agree on priorities and identify information needed on the region’s existing biodiversity. The Marketing
Team is planning media events, brochures, and a campaign to highlight projects of Chicago Wilderness.
The Post Kick Off Activities team is assembling activities on a region wide basis that will focus and
reinforce Chicago Wilderness. It is focusing on developing mechanisms for volunteer involvement in
Chicago Wilderness.

Also in Chicago, the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, Openlands Project, Forest Preserve
Districts of Cook, Will, DuPage County, Kane County, Lake and McHenry counties, as well as many
other local and state organizations produced the Northeastern Illinois Regional Greenways Plan, a
vision for an interconnected region-wide network of linear open spaces to provide benefits to rural, urban,
and suburban parts of the region. The Northeastern Illinois Regional Greenways Plan identified a number
of greenways and linkages to existing greenways which should be regarded as top priorities. Regional
priorities were selected and all of the organizations involved are helping to implement the plan.

The Illinois & Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor extends over 78 miles, and it is hoped will
one day stretch from Chicago’s Navy Pier to LaSalle/Peru, Illinois, allowing residents and visitors a
chance to experience the region’s diverse natural, recreational, and cultural resources while stimulating
tourism and other economic development. The Corridor is the result of cooperation among companies,
local governments throughout the Chicago metropolitan area, and many private citizens who volunteer as
caretakers of the Canal.

Education and fiscal disparities

Fiscal capacity refers to a municipality’s ability to collect tax revenues, control the cost of its services,
and maintain outside funding from the state and federal sources. At this point in urban America, the fiscal
capacity of most cities is waning, with more investment and wealth concentrating in outlying areas. As
municipal services decline and urban poverty and crime set in, middle- to upper-income households tend
to move out of the city, abandoning areas which continue in their downward spiral. Many inner-ring
suburbs are experiencing declining fiscal capacity as well.

Fiscal disparities are growing between cities and suburbs nationally, and, some argue, are undermining
the economic competitiveness of entire regions. A variety of authors have produced papers which show
that suburbs of cities with higher fiscal disparities compare unfavorably to the suburbs of the cities with
lower disparities in per-capita income, unemployment rates, education levels, poverty rates and other
factors.

As long as basic local services are dependent on local property wealth, property tax-base sharing is a
critical component of metropolitan stability. Property tax-base sharing creates equity in the provision of
public services, levels the quality of education, breaks the intensifying sub-regional mismatch between
social needs and tax resources, undermines local fiscal incentives which drive sprawl, and ends inter-
metropolitan competition for tax base.

Since 1971, jurisdictions in the Metropolitan Council, a long-range planning body representing 100
cities and 2.3 million people in the Twin Cities region of Minnesota, have been pooling 45 percent of
the tax revenues raised through commercial and industrial development. The funds generated are then
redistributed to cities, counties, townships, and schools with the region. Myron Orfield, a Minnesota state
legislator, more recently forged a coalition of the central cities, older suburbs, low-tax base suburbs, and
churches in the richer suburbs to propose greater tax base sharing, strong land use planning, fair housing,
and a combination of urban reinvestment, job creation and welfare reform. The coalition won in the
Minnesota legislature, but the governor vetoed the legislation. The coalition has won funds to reinvest in
the city for environmental cleanup and redevelopment.

Welfare reform and poverty alleviation

As a result of the move to blockgrants for welfare payments, many metropolitan regions are pulling
together task forces of businesses, government, and community groups to figure out how to use federal
resources well and how to augment them to improve opportunity for people leaving welfare.

The Office of Port Jobs in Seattle is a collaboration among community-based organizations, employers,
unions, the Port Commission, City of Seattle, and King County to develop projects that link
disadvantaged people to training and employment opportunities providing adequate wages and to broker
contraction agreements among employers, community-based groups, labor unions, and governments. Ten
model projects have been development to date, ranging from hotel and restaurant work to apprenticeships
for port construction jobs to on-site degree-granting education course.

The purpose of the Seattle Jobs Initiative (SJI) is to link disadvantaged adults to livable wage jobs in the
Puget Sound regional economy and to improve Seattle’s workforce development system so that its focus
and resources help residents attain and retain livable wage jobs, receive training proposed by involved
employers who seem themselves as customers of the system, and where the training is integrated with
human services. The new organizing structures are the Community Network and the Broker System. The
Community Network brings together all of the employment, training and human service agencies in the
region to recruit and refer residents, package support services and training dollars, share a common
information network about jobs and skill requirements, provide social service supports and measure long-
term success. The Broker System is a one-stop-shop for employers which will identify qualified workers,
develop training programs for employers, etc. Many groups and individuals have been involved in SJI,
and the goal is a coming together of all involved sectors and implementation in a manner that is broadly
understood and shared by the Seattle community.

Fair housing

In the United States, more than 11 million families are competing for 4.5 million low-income housing
units. Metro-wide housing assistance and affordable housing requirements is one of the ways to diminish
racial and economic segregation and fill the housing gap. Each jurisdiction must provide its fair share of
affordable housing in order for a region to function effectively. In addition to zoning for affordable
housing, appropriate financing vehicles must be developed for adequate volumes of multifamily housing
to be produced. This strategy includes vigilant enforcement of anti-discrimination in housing, scatter-site
public housing, zoning requirements that encourage mixed-income developments, and promotion of
metro-wide economic development.

There aren’t many places which have implemented these kinds of policies. In fact, suburban policies
restricting (or at least not supporting) the construction of affordable housing are aggravating geographic
division by class and race and undermining the legal requirements for equal access to jobs and housing
opportunities across the nation.

The efforts to eliminate the housing gap and deal with these issues is not up to the task, but there are
many valiant efforts. There seems to be pretty universal agreement that the best affordable housing being
created today involves partnerships between community organizations, local governments, corporate and
lending institutions, and the philanthropic and religious communities.
The Metropolitan Boston Housing Partnership is a full-service regional nonprofit corporation that
develops and preserves affordable housing, administers a rental assistance program throughout the greater
Boston area, and sponsors initiatives that encourage resident participation and control in housing,
neighborhoods, social services, and economic opportunities. The partnership’s board includes the CEOs
of the areas largest financial institutions, neighborhood leaders, government officials, and prominent
academics. Working together, this group has been able to solve problems that no one of the parties in the
partnership could solve alone.

The DuPage Homeownership Center is a nonprofit organization in Wheaton, Illinois, that unites all
sectors of the housing industry to finance comprehensive home-buyer outreach and education. The center
is funded by its members, including 48 home mortgage lenders, the DuPage Association of Realtors,
metropolitan area corporations, private foundations, and social service agencies. The center has a full-
time staff who conduct needs assessments, affirmative outreach efforts, home-buyer seminars, credit
education seminars, and individual counseling. The center serves as a bridge between potential home-
buyers and housing service providers, helping families overcome impediments and utilize available
services to achieve homeownership.

The Portland, Oregon area’s Metropolitan Housing Rule, under the Statewide Planning Program, has
stimulated affordable housing and friendly land-use and zoning requirements in more than two dozen
jurisdictions surrounding the City of Portland. The Rule has expanded the availability of lower-cost
housing by requiring the area’s 27 jurisdictions to decrease lot-size requirements. Towns and counties are
mandated to plan and allocate growth areas for meeting their fair share of the region’s affordable housing
needs. One community, for example, had planned for only 371 additional multifamily housing dwellings
in its comprehensive plan, which was adopted in 1978. Between 1985 and 1989, having revised its plan to
meet the Metropolitan Housing Rule requirements, the jurisdiction witnessed development of 1981
multifamily units.

Spatial mismatch between people and jobs

As jobs have moved to the suburbs in cities, such as Kansas City, without commensurate movement of
low-income families, disadvantaged workers in the older areas of the central city find it increasingly
difficult to get to where the jobs are. Likewise, suburban employers have trouble finding workers for low-
skilled jobs. This mismatch between jobs and housing has been exacerbated by suburban polices
restricting (or at least not supporting) the construction of affordable housing.

Without housing options close to jobs, urban workers must depend on poor and unreliable public
transportation. Most cannot afford their own cars. Access to a car is least prevalent among the lower
income classes. Nearly 40 percent of workers with annual income below $10,000 don’t commute by car,
compared to around 20% in even the relatively modest $25,000 to $35,000 income range.

Many of the housing efforts described above are a direct response to this spatial mismatch, but there have
also been innovative efforts to make it easier for urban workers to get to jobs and training. Residents in
the Albuquerque South Valley of New Mexico worked with several public interest organizations
including the Alliance for Transportation Research and the City and County governments to extend local
bus service to the Albuquerque’s Technical Vocational Institute’s new South Valley Branch.

In Chicago, 60 percent of the manufacturing jobs have left since 1970, while industrial sectors in the
suburbs have rapidly grown. Suburban Job-Link in Chicago is collaborating with the City of Chicago
Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training, the Pace Suburban Bus Company, churches, community
organizations, and social service groups to combine carpooling with community organizing and job
placement to help residents of urban communities find work in the suburbs. The program provides
reliable transportation and plugs inner-city residents into job networks.

The Shuttle Bug Reverse Commute Project is a public-private partnership between the Transportation
management Association of Lake-Cook, the Villages of Northbrook and Deerfield and their respective
Chambers of Commerce, and 14 businesses with over 11,000 employees. The Project provides shuttle
service from a suburban commuter rail station to nearby companies, allowing urban workers to get to jobs
in suburbs 25 miles northwest of downtown Chicago.

Disinvestment from older communities in favor of newer ones

Brownfields redevelopment has emerged as a core issue for mayors of older cities throughout the U.S.
There are demonstration projects sprinkled around the nation, many of which have multiple goals, from
job creation to ex-urban open space preservation, from restoration of ecological diversity within urban
areas to real estate development.

Northwest Indiana Brownfield Redevelopment Project (NWIBRP) is trying to bring good-paying jobs
to Hammond, Gary and East Chicago while cleaning up the environment by solving the brownfield
problem. The Project grew out of an empowerment zone application to become a model plan for public
participation in redevelopment of brownfield sites. The Project received state and EPA grants to
implement the model process. NWIBRP involves community groups, labor, residents, environmental
organizations, business people, and local and state public officials. The community is guaranteed at least
50% representation on the board, include Calumet Project and Grand Calumet Task Force. Communities
were able to vote on which brownfield sites to clean up first.

Chicago Interdepartmental Brownfields Workgroup was formed to facilitate redevelopment of
Chicago brownfields sites. In November 1993, the departments of Environment, Planning and
Development, Law, Buildings, and the Mayor’s Office formed an interdepartmental workgroup on
brownfields. The working group launched three initiatives to identify and overcome barriers to the reuse
of abandoned industrial property.

First, a Brownfields Forum was formed to devise practical reforms to environmental and economic
development policies to improve clean up and redevelopment of contaminated properties. This diverse
group of about 100 people, came up with 63 recommendations for overcoming barriers to brownfields
reuse which will be carried out by nine project teams headed by public, private, and nonprofit entities. At
about the same time, the Brownfields Pilot Program was devised to clean up and redevelop demonstration
sites in distressed neighborhoods using $2 million in general obligation bonds. The Department of
Environment’s Brownfield Coordinator is also compiling a database on brownfield sites.

Conclusion

The breadth and variety of both the holistic and the issue-based initiatives described in this section is
impressive. A few of these initiatives have made great progress, and now serve as a foundation for further
metropolitan cooperation. However, many of the initiatives described in this report are only a few years
old. They are clustered at an early stage, i.e. opportunity identification, and have not yet mobilized
substantial resources. For them, progress generally can be judged, at best, by success in reinventing
planning processes, engaging citizens, and developing thoughtful strategies which have relatively broad
support.
Most initiatives have not had much impact yet on cross-cutting issues like sprawl and rising inequality
between cities and wealthy suburbs. They have not led to basic changes in how towns within a region
make regional decisions, except in a few cases where states or counties have played a leadership role in
requiring local municipalities to cooperate (Oregon), accept a fair share of affordable housing
(Connecticut, Massachusetts, Tallahassee and Tampa, Florida), adopt inclusionary zoning policies
(Montgomery County, Maryland), equalize school funding, adopt planning for growth (New Jersey), or
share revenue (Minnesota). Clearly, states have an important role to play, a role which is becoming even
more prominent because of the devolution of federal programs to the states.

All of these initiatives still face major obstacles, especially complex rules and regulations. The Hudson
River Advisory Board on Sustainable Development was sobered by the regulatory morass which, by
default, is leading to degradation of what matters to people who live in the region. The only solution the
Advisory Board could see was less government and more collaboration. Of course, this cannot occur
without the support of states and the federal government. All of the initiatives need support and
encouragement from their state and the federal government to overcome local political structures and a
complex web of local, state, and federal regulations which hamper them.

Not all of the issues, however, are due to rules and regulations. Many have to do with how to increase
awareness of critical issues, spur action and act effectively. In other words, they have to do with how to
create powerful community learning processes. Proponents of regional collaboration have some common
questions they are striving to answer:

Increasing Public Awareness and Understanding: How do we engage citizens? How do we spur desire
for action by showing either that there is a crisis or a big opportunity in regional action? What
mechanisms can be used to put key policy questions to the citizens?

Increasing Ability to Act: How do we move from visioning to action, especially if major structural
changes are needed? How do we create institutions or networks to deal with cross-cutting policy issues?
How do we get representation and accountability at the regional level? How do we get alignment between
issues, representation, and taxing jurisdictions?

All of the initiatives need support and encouragement from their state and the federal government to
experiment with answers to these questions, to share what they learn, and to continue to improve. At the
same time, the communities where there is still little or no experimentation with regional collaboration
need incentives to take the first step.



                                      VIII. THE FEDERAL ROLE

While the federal government should not mandate regional policies, it can respond to the public’s demand
for more efficient public investments and more efficient government.

Government -- with compartmentalized functions and policies -- has been a barrier to experimenting with
more collaborative practices, but it can become a source of encouragement for flexibility and innovation.
This has been true of both the executive and legislative branches of government, and both have an
important role to play in achieving the vast potential for metropolitan collaboration.

The Federal government can help to empower citizens, provide critical pieces of the financial resources
they need to advance their strategies, and offer regulatory flexibility needed for them to pursue locally
appropriate solutions. It can also convene and facilitate, shifting gradually from prescribing behavior to
supporting responsibility by setting goals, creating incentives, monitoring performance, and providing
information.

The federal government can help regions to empower local citizens through a Smart Citizen
component. The Smart Citizen component includes (1) information: data collection and aggregation,
measurement tools, local scoreboards, and GIS systems. (2) transfer of ideas and technologies across
regions, (3) use of technology transfer to build regional infrastructure and (3) support for training to build
capacity for regional collaboration, facilitation, and problem solving.

The federal government can help regions to more easily finance creative initiatives through a Smart
Money component. The Smart Money component includes (1) targeting funding from existing
authorities, (2) allowing for the flexible use of federal funding programs in exchange for innovative
projects, and (3) allowing for the creative use of capital assets, procurement, etc.

The federal government can help regions to cultivate locally appropriate solutions through a Smart
Rule-making component. It is very difficult for locally initiated solutions to problems to succeed given
the public policies they must navigate. From environmental regulations that unintentionally inhibit urban
redevelopment, a federal tax structure that favors low density single family dwellings, and an
infrastructure investment bias that allows motorists to evade the full costs of their driving. The Smart
Rule-making component includes (1) involving local regions in key rule-making efforts, (2) providing
waivers to allow for local innovation with the potential to exceed current standards, (3) building
flexibility into new rules so that places can decide the best way to achieve standards, and (4) providing
incentives for performance and accountability.

Smart People

The federal government could help a lot by providing from its data sets detailed information about local
economic, physical, and social conditions and of the dimensions of alternative strategies. Today, many
different local, state, and federal agencies are compiling computerized geographical information systems,
but no one is making sure they are all compatible or can accept the same data.

Some of the measures which regions are exploring include measures of physical capacity, health and
condition (land, infrastructure, and ecosystems), financial measures of cost, revenue, assets, liabilities,
and net worth of a community’s capital assets (public and private), measures of population, behavior and
usage that define demand and consumption, and measures of community’s preferences, priorities, and
choices, both today and how they have changed over time. The federal government could help make these
data bases “knowledge bases” such that content or meaning is built into the flow of information.

For example, the Cowlitz-Wahkiakum Council of Governments has been awarded a grant form the
National Spatial Data Infrastructure program to create a Geographic Data Clearinghouse Node on the
Internet for the Southwest Washington region and promote the use of federal data standards. The purpose
of NSDI is to make current and accurate geospatial data sets easy to find and use for local, regional, and
national efforts to improve economic, environmental, and social welfare.

The federal government could play a leadership role in innovation in metropolitan collaboration by
facilitating place-based dialogs to bring diverse people together. For example, in the environmental arena,
forums could focus on the management of conflicts of particular regions and how to give more
opportunity, power, and responsibility to communities to address natural resource questions that affect
them directly and primarily.
The Federal government could establish goals for regional initiatives and support their local
implementation.

The federal government can improve local decision-making by providing information on best practices in
other regions around the country. It can monitor, evaluate, and publicize local programs, so we can all
learn together. It can offer technical and logistic help.

It can help develop methodologies to measure benefits of collaborations, and tools to compare the costs
and benefits of local investment decisions.

Smart Money

Metropolitan strategies almost always involve some federal resources, such as transportation, education,
training, economic development, or trade assistance. Delivery of these resources needs to be coordinated
with regional planning that sets economic, environmental, and social goals. The goal should be to flexibly
direct the federal government’s substantial investment resources to locally-determined needs and optimize
public investment through a regional approach.

For example, public and private organizations in the Miami, Florida metropolitan region have reached
agreement about physical infrastructure plans to support the region’s trade and transportation and tourism
clusters. They also see as a high priority cleaning up the Everglades and other ecosystems. Miami leaders
need national infrastructure and redevelopment investment decisions to support their local strategies for
economic competitiveness, environmental quality, and social equity.

In New York State, several Hudson Valley towns which set up joint tourism planning ventures were
rewarded for this by higher grants from both the State DOT and DED. To the degree that statutes allow it,
funding programs should be reworked so that towns that are cooperating with each other get quicker
responses and higher funding than towns that are going it alone.

Because there are still only a small number of innovative broad-based collaborations -- and even these
struggle with small resources -- the federal government could provide grant money for exemplary
collaborative processes to address crucial regional problems. It could share best practices across the
nation. It could also fund technology development that addresses cross-cutting problems through
collaborations with multiple local initiatives.

Another opportunity to help is through purchasing and procurement policies that favor practices promoted
by local collaborations.

Another is to begin to use funding for single issue programs to encourage communities to explore
linkages. For example, federal investments in inner-cities and urban businesses ought to be linked to
regional opportunities, not isolated by gridlock, quarantined by exclusionary zoning, and drained by
suburban growth. Also, federal investments in open space could reinforce regional habitat reserves,
greenbelts, and urban limit lines.

Federal investments in transit should be supported by land use patterns which put riders and jobs within
an easy walk of stations and by a coherent regional plan which strategically clusters development.
Investments in highways should not unwittingly support sprawl, inner-city disinvestment, or random job
decentralization. Federal investments in affordable housing should place families in economically diverse
neighborhoods where services, decent schooling and transit are available.
As responsibility is devolved from the federal to local levels, it will be important to explore how
programs and policies can be fundamentally changed so they serve to strengthen communities’ abilities to
manage their resources effectively rather than merely shift public power from one level of government to
another.

Smart Rule-Making

Problems aren’t better solved at a local level if local governments have no interest in solving them. The
combination of local fiscal responsibility and national mobility could set off a perverse competition that
drags the whole U.S. down to the lowest local standards. In a land with free mobility, no place can
maintain social or environmental conditions better than its neighbors. The way to prevent sinking to the
lowest possible denominator is to set high common denominators, strict and impartial, and federally
enforced. Therefore, the most important step the federal government can take is to reward the good local
programs with more federal support, not punish them with bigger loads.

Once these high standards are in place, the role of the federal government should be to reward
collaborative efforts and provide incentives for them. For example, the federal government could amend
rules that are barriers to local multistakeholder processes and promote them. It could waive state matches
for transportation planning funds where there are especially strong collaborations. Or, for projects that
exceed performance requirements, it could provide more favorable federal and state tax treatment for site
clean ups. In any case, it should coordinate and consolidate various state and federal site standards and
pollution cleanup requirements.

There is a great deal federal agencies can do under existing authorities to support collaboration. In a pilot
project, the Forest Service found that 70 percent of its regulatory barriers to taking an ecosystem approach
were self-imposed rather than required by legislation. Legislation usually inhibits inter-organizational
cooperation rather than prohibiting it. At the staff level, many federal employees are experimenting with
ways to overcome structural barriers. They need help and rewards.

Already, in 1994, Vice President Gore and the heads of nine federal agencies -- the Office of
Management and Budget, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Health
and Human Services, the Departments of Education, Labor, Justice, Commerce, Agriculture, and the
Office of Drug control Policy -- signed the "Oregon Option," a Memorandum of Understanding with the
State of Oregon, the City of Portland, Multnomah county, the Oregon League of Cities, and the Oregon
Association of Counties, to encourage federal interagency cooperation and regulatory flexibility in
working with the state and local governments to support implementation of locally-developed
performance-based benchmarks. This kind of initiative needs to be taken more broadly.

A good example of the way the federal government can facilitate metropolitan collaboration is through
vigorously implementing the intent of ISTEA. ISTEA brought an end to the era where transportation
policy was set almost entirely in Washington. U.S. DOT should have a new role in assuring that all voices
are heard when decisions are made, in making sure long term consequences are considered, and in
evaluating the effectiveness both of the projects selected and the agencies undertaking them. There needs
to be federal certification of MPOs to assure that ISTEA’s requirements are begin faithfully carried out.
Also revise rules for MPOs are needed to assure that the membership on an MPO board represents the
population it serves.

U.S. DOT also has an important role to play in supporting the role of communities in transportation
projects. One result of ISTEA’s greater focus on the impacts of transportation facilities on communities
and neighborhoods is the many smaller projects which are often conceived by community groups. Under
current federal rules these organizations are not allowed to take a formal role in administering the
implementation of the projects they have conceived even if the department of transportation in their state
wishes to turn over administration of the project to them. This needs to change.

Conclusion

The federal government could play a key role in spurring innovation in metropolitan cooperation. It has
already taken some of the first steps in recent housing, economic development, and environmental
initiatives. It is time to raise the bar. In a companion paper, The Federal Role in Metropolitan
Cooperation, Clem Dinsmore describes how the federal government could do use existing authorities to
take the next step.