The new bureaucratic monster

My neighbor is a retired admiral, naval aviator, entrepreneur. He is as good and honest person as I’ve ever met. Think the Navy motto of producing an officer and a gentlemen, and he comes to mind. Think of Sen. John McCain’s “Straight Talk Express” bus tour during the 2000 Republican presidential primary: my neighbor could have been the former POW’s driver. “Straight Talk” could be his nickname.

That’s why city officials should listen when this guy complains. He recently had a serious complaint. His water had been arbitrarily turned off. Arbitrary because he had paid the bill in July and had the documentation to prove it.

When he called to see if I still had water, it was obvious there was a problem. I later saw the cute new truck from the Western Virginia Water Authority at his house and figured the water had been turned off. Of course, it was immediately turned back on and the next morning he read the riot act to one of the bureaucrats in the city’s water department.

The erroneous termination of my neighbor’s water service points to a much larger problem -- the creation of a large bureaucracy (the Western Virginia Water Authority) at precisely the time when the “gold standard” for efficient public management is a high-performance work culture in which employees are allowed to make decisions and solve problems.

The difference between bureaucratic and high-performance cultures: Workers in bureaucratic organizations are trained not to think and simply follow orders. Hhigh-performance government employees are paid to think, learn to avoid unnecessary problems, and understand that good customer service is a key political and management variable required for efficient government operations.

In 1940, Professor Robert Merton wrote what is still considered the classic work on the bureaucratic personality and its dysfunctions. Merton identified several related characteristics that are always evident with bureaucrats:

• Trained incapacity -- an occupational psychosis where one’s abilities function as inadequacies or blind spots
• Goal displacement -- adherence to the rules (that seldom serve a taxpayer's needs) is the bureaucrat's sole objective
• Depersonalization of public servant/client relationship -- the taxpayer is not treated as a human being but as an inanimate object.
  
  

The worker who turned off my neighbor’s water definitely displayed bureaucratic psychosis. My neighbor’s home is a new with landscaping that belongs in Better Homes and Gardens. Expensive cars sit in the round driveway. Yet, because of the inherent “blind spots” in trained incapacity, the immaculate grounds and furnishings never suggested to the worker to check with his or her supervisor and make sure the service was to be terminated at this address. Because the bureaucratic culture rewards non-thinking, the worker merely executed the order and didn't consider whether the termination should take place or how it would inconvenience the homeowner. After all, the bureaucrat reasons, I am just following orders.

That type of bureaucratic logic didn’t get Adolph Eichmann very far and will not play well with Roanoke citizens either.

While bureaucratic culture, attitude, and behavior have not changed since Merton’s article was written, one significant issue has been altered. Merton wrote that bureaucrat/client conflicts were minimized in the private sector because the client could register his protest by using another business in the competitive market system. However, because of the monopolistic nature of government organizations, there were no alternatives to using government services. In affluent, contemporary America, this is no longer true.

I’ve written previously (“White Flight, Black Indifference”) how wealthy Roanokers have withdrawn their children from the city's schools because of concerns over violence. Likewise, people like my neighbor have the wherewithal to move anywhere they desire in the Roanoke Valley or United States. Perceived inefficient and uncaring government, like perceived violence in the schools, can be the catalyst for such a move.

Consider these facts. My neighbor no longer has children in the public schools and rarely (if ever) uses police services. Because of a dwindling tax base, his real estate taxes increase significantly each year. When his home was destroyed by fire three years ago, many people in the neighborhood wondered whether he would rebuild in Roanoke city.

My neighbor is not a direct beneficiary of many of the public services (education, police protection, etc.) provided by the city of Roanoke. He subsidizes these services for other citizens through taxes levied against him. By any cost/benefit analysis, it would be cheaper for him to live in any other area of the Roanoke Valley. City leaders should be trying to attract, rather than alienate, more citizens like him.

Several years ago, researchers at UVa’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service wrote an article titled “Virginia’s Changing Workforce in the 21st Century.” The center had polled business owners and found their chief complaint was that young workers did not understand how businesses made profit or the value of customer service. The same is true for Roanoke city workers. Most of the books written on public management in the past 20 years have emphasized the importance of good customer service in obtaining new customers or upgrading services to existing customers. However, bureaucratic cultures and good customer service are oxymoronic.

Each year, the city of Roanoke sends its senior executives to summer management programs at elite institutions like UVa’s Cooper Center or the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. These executive management programs teach public administrators cutting-edge managerial strategies and thought. Importantly, they are not taught that bureaucratic management is the best way to run modern government institutions. The obvious disconnect? These strategies are hardly ever used to facilitate a transformation from inefficient bureaucracy to efficient high-performance management in Roanoke.

There is a lot of inefficiency in the management of Roanoke. My neighbor’s water turn-off is a micro example. Spending thousands of dollars annually to learn management strategies that never get implemented is a macro example. All of this is a drain on the weary taxpayer who pays, both financially and emotionally, for this inefficiency.

Children leaving the schools over school violence. Wealthy taxpayers considering leaving the city over inefficient government. Unless some of these management ideas learned in Charlottesville and Cambridge are actually utilized, the exodus of children and taxpayers from Roanoke is only beginning.