Nevertheless, I grew up reading about historical figures like the Roman leader Cincinnatus who left his farm to serve in a leadership position, fulfilled his public responsibilities, and then returned as quickly as possible to his farm and his family.  George Washington was admired because he completed his two presidential terms, and then went back to his Virginia home.  Both of these leaders represented a set of values which placed public service above personal ambition.

My dad was a member of the International Typographers Union, which was noteworthy because it had term limits for union leaders.  I have also admired great companies like UPS because they have had implicit terms limits by enforcing early retirement rules for CEOs. I attempted to stay consistent with these values by retiring well before I could get drawn into believing that Pitney Bowes could not survive without me.

Public service has changed from a temporary service environment in which a very broad range of people are drawn upon for their expertise, their diverse perspectives, and their vision of the common good, to one in which a smaller, more ideologically rigid, less diverse, and more partisan group of people have established themselves as part of a relatively permanent government bureaucracy.  This is true of elected officials, appointed officials, government union leaders, and civil service managers.

Government at all levels has become like joining a fraternity in which there are vicious hazing rituals, exclusionary admission practices, and an isolation from people outside the fraternity once a member gets admitted.

This did not happen at once, but it’s time to take a brief look at where we are today.

Running for office or being considered for appointive office

A candidate for elective office opens himself or herself to every possible form of disparagement.  We need to be held accountable for our decisions, but the ability of opponents to disparage us or any member of our immediate and extended families without any accountability is outrageous.

This is an unintended consequence of a 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision Sullivan vs. The New York Times, in which a plaintiff lost a defamation case because the Supreme Court held that, in the pursuit of free speech, defamation claims by “public figures” were subject to a much higher standard than claims by ordinary citizens. This much higher standard of liability made it almost impossible for public figures to sue those who disparaged them falsely.

The ability to “terrorize” someone running for office or being appointed to an office is far greater than ever.  The First Amendment framers could not fathom capturing an individual’s random remark with a digital video camera, posting it globally and permanently within seconds, and building a disparagement campaign around it.  In fact, dirty tricksters follow candidates to provoke them into intemperate remarks to post them online.

We have also created such a complex set of disclosure, campaign finance, and election laws that we have increased the cost of running a campaign exponentially, or even the cost of being considered for an appointive office. Incomplete, false, or misleading disclosures, especially of financial data, have been criminalized. What is disclosed becomes the raw material for further disparagement.

Much character assassination that occurs at the national, state, and local levels relative to government officials is a kind of violence, or, if not a directly violent act, an invitation to violence by others.

Throughout history, democratic societies have been served by the collective wisdom of imperfect people in an imperfect, but effective, system of government.  I worry about the effectiveness of a person whose life is so devoid of imperfections that he or she could pass through every conceivable public screen.

Being an elected or appointed government official

Even if an individual survives the rigors of either a political campaign or a high-stakes appointment process, we have made many incremental decisions that have crippled the ability of government officials to have a significant impact on the entities they lead.  Our civil service system, combined with collective bargaining for a sizable percentage of the government workforces, has created a long-term set of stakeholders that will outlast any elected or appointed official.

I strongly support civil service. The most compelling logic for civil service reform was to insure that government had a system for selecting as many jobs as possible on the basis of merit, not political affiliation, and that there be knowledge and experience continuity in the middle and first-line management ranks during senior leadership transitions.

The key to making civil service systems effective is that the system be designed to retain people with good experience, knowledge, and judgment, not to protect incompetent or even immoral managers from being terminated.  It is virtually impossible to take effective disciplinary action in any reasonable period of time against a non-performing manager in most governments.

If an elected or appointive official is blessed with competent and motivated people to make decisions and carry them out, that leadership cadre has very difficult obstacles in getting anything done. Requirements for open meetings significantly reduce candor required for good decision making processes to take place.  We do not share publicly every half-formed thought we have, especially on important issue.  We have private conversations with people until we have a good sense of what we want to say publicly.  The notion that even preliminary discussions must be in public is an over-reaction to the Nixon White House crimes, not a rational way to run government.

When I was growing up, we used to hear about decisions being made in “smoke-filled back rooms.”  Today, the back rooms may no longer be “smoke-filled,” but they exist, and they take place outside the regulatory reach of a government meeting.   Even in government, there needs to be a zone of privacy in which leaders can have small conversations in which they can formulate their policies and actions.

The other craziness with government is the obsession with process for its own sake.  Back in 1991 through 1993, I chaired a public-private task force appointed by Governor Lowell Weicker to implement the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments for large Connecticut-based employers.  The task force was filled with the best-qualified people, and it functioned very efficiently and completed its work within a relatively short period of time.

The task forces in which I participated over the last three years were larger, more cumbersome, and much less efficient or effective.  There was a much higher level of distrust and many more stakeholders felt that they had to be represented.  The groups became larger and the meetings degenerated from problem-analysis and problem-solving sessions to a series of speeches made by each participant.  The participants no longer saw themselves focused on the best outcome for the public, but for the group they represented and on whose behalf they were selected.

The other set of issues that make public service challenging were those associated with getting changes made.  We have made so many more processes subject to elaborate reviews, comments, and litigation challenges that it is extremely difficult to get anything done.

For example, we cannot renovate a bridge or road or rebuild it, even when it desperately needs renovation, without spending years studying the problem.  There has been a broad consensus for at least two decades, that the Tappan Zee Bridge over the Hudson River desperately needs rebuilding, but the processes for getting the work done are hopelessly complex and time-consuming.

We also overcomplicate what should be simple processes.  When I chaired the Governor’s Commission for Reforming the Connecticut Department of Transportation, I discovered that the State had made the hiring of an administrative assistant so complicated that the hiring manager had to interview all 28 qualified candidates, rather than the top 3-5 candidates.

Getting rid of non-performers is equally cumbersome.  My Reform Commission members who ran government agencies told me that the average time to terminate a non-performing civil service employee was 18 months, if the agency did everything perfectly.  This is ridiculous.

How do we solve these problems?

• Recognizing the problem is a start.  When good people are discouraged from joining public service, something is wrong.
• We should relook at every law, regulation, process, and procedure to determine whether it serves its intended purpose, and, if so, whether there are excessive side effects.
• We probably need to relook at the First Amendment, as it relates to the way the Internet and modern digital media amplify the effects of false statements, or even true, but misleading, statements.
• We need to retain the civil service system, but assess whether there is a point beyond which the protection of employment and of existing processes does not serve the ultimate merit-based system goal.
• We need a nationwide effort led by the President to rebuild trust among Americans.  Many dysfunctional processes are built on distrust.
• We need to reexamine campaign finance, election, and lobbying laws to see if they violate the rights of Americans to exercise their First Amendment rights.  The Supreme Court case last year that struck down some campaign finance laws is a good start in provoking a national debate on the harmful effects of these laws.
• We need to reduce the criminally punishable financial disclosure and background questionnaire laws that discourage public service.

However, I also believe that we could reduce the stress on our transportation systems with three non-transportation initiatives, all of which are far less expensive to implement than building a lot of new transportation infrastructure.

Reduce work-related travel

Since I left Pitney Bowes two years ago, I have not commuted daily to an outside office.  As a result, I have not contributed to the clogging of our highways during peak commuting hours.  The reason is that the Internet and mobile technology available makes face-to-face meetings less necessary.  Partial telecommuting is an easy solution to creating more transportation capacity with what we have.

In my last few years at Pitney Bowes, we moved more call center workers back into their homes, which reduced our real estate footprint, improved morale, and increased productivity, since individuals were never late for work when they did not have to travel.  We never eliminated the commute to work completely, because we found that individuals who came to the office once every two weeks maintained a connection to their co-workers, but they did not have to be in the office every day.  Many more jobs can be restructured to reduce daily commuting, especially jobs that do not require retail contact with customers.

Increase deliveries in place of face-to-face pick-ups

I am pleased to see that, even in our suburban area, more restaurants are making delivery services available.  It used to be the case that only pizza stores delivered, but today Chinese, Japanese, and other restaurants deliver.  One delivery truck substitutes for 5-10 cars coming to the restaurant.

In our town, the dry cleaner services deliver.  The independent pharmacy delivers to senior citizens.  Many people get grocery deliveries because they work long hours.  The delivery of items to multiple people saves on trips during the busiest parts of the workday.

Ride matching for trips to fixed destinations

One of the underused sources of reduced driving is ride matching.  Ride-sharing and van pooling trips to work do not work as well as they used to because people work variable hours, have the need to leave the workplace during the day, and do not want to be dependent on others to get them to and from work.

However, I have often thought that going to and from airports is a great opportunity for ride matching.  I drive alone to New York airports if I have a short trip and am returning to the same airport from which I am departing.  However, I would be happy to drive someone else from my town going to the same airport if we were catching a flight at the same time.

The same thing is true with a trip to the train station for either a commute into New York, or an Amtrak trip to Washington or Boston.  I could easily save one or more individuals the need to drive their own cars to the train station.  They could share the parking fees with me.

Another opportunity is a ride matching system for sporting events like football and professional baseball games, films, plays, concerts, and other events where many people are going to the event at the same time and will be returning home at the same time.

Unfortunately, the state of Connecticut Department of Transportation has not provided enough incentives for ride matching agencies to do their job in getting people together for these fixed-destination, fixed time trips.  The limousine companies certainly will not tell anyone that someone else is going to the airport at the same time, because they lose revenue.

Surprisingly, large companies which have many people going to the airport at the same time also do not encourage ride matching because everyone going to the airport calls the limousine service separately.

Back in the 1980’s, I commuted between New York and Connecticut.  There was no shuttle service between the Stamford train station and the office in those days.  I would start walking, and people from the company would pick me up.  I made many friends from the company, and ended up with great learning in the process.

If we can have match.com or eharmony.com, we should be able to get people together who are going to the same place to share a ride.

One of the reasons ride matching systems have not worked is that they have been marketed as being good for the environment, not that they save wear and tear on cars, gas, tolls, and parking fees.  The other thing they save for trips to the airport is even larger bus or limousine service fees.  Frankly, I am surprised that firms like Travelocity.com have not found a way to match people from the same geography who are flying from a particular airport at the same time, and to collect a fee from each of them for saving them the higher individual commuting fees they would have paid.  In a place like New York City, they might very well be in the same building or next door to each other.

Summary comments

These ideas will not solve the transportation crisis, but they will reduce the strain on our system, and they will change commuting and travel patterns sufficiently that they may end up changing the planning for the network of the future.

Most people would agree that government has certain roles as a provider of security, a deliverer of basic services, a regulator, an enforcer of societal norms through criminal and civil laws and the court systems that enforce them, and a provider or a creator of certain “safety net” services, such as unemployment compensation and welfare.

There may be people on both political extremes who either believe the government has a broader role, such as redistributing wealth and equalizing income (the far left) or that government should have a much narrower role (the far right).  However, most people would conceptually agree on the various roles of government, and, therefore, would agree on what purposes should trigger the collection of taxes.

What has broken down in the last few decades and called our tax system into question is the fact that government has failed to fulfill its traditional missions well.  I believe there are three reasons for that, aside from the hyper-partisanship with which we are all familiar:

• Lawmakers have made a decision, which I believe to be mistake, to take traditional governmental functions and expand them to serve additional and unrelated goals.  For example, we have taken the government purchasing function, which was originally designed to acquire goods and services with the best value at the lowest cost, and stretched it beyond recognition to serve additional, unrelated, and arguably socially worthy goals like increasing employment diversity of government contractors, forcing government contractors to pay “prevailing wages,” or requiring certain contractors to unionize.  Whether these goals are truly valid and meritorious is not the issue, although some, including me, would argue with the way “prevailing wage” rules have been interpreted and enforced, and unionization has been imposed on people; enforcing them through the government’s purchasing power hides their implementation from public scrutiny.
• We have become so distrustful of government that we have gradually added more procedural steps to protect against “corruption,” or “arbitrariness,” “financial mismanagement,” or “secrecy.”  We have added steps to protect individuals, families, or organizations against government decisions, with the result that the cumulative effect of all these procedural steps is to render government slow and ineffective in delivering its core services.
• Lawmakers have made government a provider of “middle class” employment even if the jobs government creates for individuals would not merit a “middle class” paycheck in any other employment sector.  The problem has been compounded by collective bargaining agreements that prevent government officials from eliminating individual jobs or categories of jobs in a way in which individuals are involuntarily terminated. The “middle class” job commitment extends to employment benefits, some of which, like retiree benefits, when added to a “middle class” pay package, take the cost per job up to what Americans would normally consider “upper middle class.” For example, the 44-year-old Yonkers police officer who made $75,000 per year in his second last year of employment would be considered as holding a “middle class” job earning a “middle class” salary.  When he earned $148,000 , with the benefit of overtime pay, in his last year of employment, and triggered a $100,000 per year pension benefit for the rest of his life after age 45, the combination of his pension and retiree medical benefit turned his position and his pension and medical benefits into an “upper middle class” level of cost overnight.

In most cases, the decisions that make government ineffective and cause Americans to rebel against paying taxes to enable government to get bigger or even stay the same size are made one at a time, and their cumulative impact is not understood until it reaches a critical mass.  That is what happened over the last two years, and why the Obama Administration and the Democrats who supported the President were so soundly defeated in the 2010 elections.  We crossed a line beyond which Americans were saying: “Whatever has been done has gone too far.”  They are communicating that government has to shrink or, in the alternative, become far more effective in fulfilling its core missions. The message Americans are sending is quite simple: we are unwilling to pay more taxes when we are not getting anything sufficiently good for them.

The recent tax legislation reflects another failed premise of government today: governments do not stimulate long-term economic growth solely by lowering taxes broadly or selectively.  Lowering taxes can eliminate a financial obstacle to the creation or growth of businesses that would otherwise take root.  However, businesses get started or grow bigger because they offer goods and services the public wants to buy.  People get employed because they have skills the marketplace needs.  Simply making more money available will help businesses at the margins, but it cannot overcome an unemployment problem largely caused by the fact that many individuals have obsolete or inadequate skills.  The businesses will start and grow, but getting people who are unemployed back to work will require multiple steps and take a long time.  They will need new skills, and to be more flexible in their career paths, and to be passionate about lifelong learning.

Many elected officials do not have the political will to address fundamental structural economic and political issues.  We built an economy after World War II promising middle class wages for all Americans, but without the foundation of skills and educational capabilities to make such promises sustainable.  Public sector labor unions and unions in heavily politicized private sector industries like the automobile industry, successfully negotiated collective bargaining agreements allowing people with very low skills and educational attainment to secure middle class wages and benefits, and protections against downsizings, even as our economy has had to become more globally competitive.

Private sector companies with these less productive and over-staffed workforces are uncompetitive.  The public sector has become too expensive to support for the level of services we receive, as John Donahue of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government powerfully describes in his book The Warping of Government Work.  So why do we not address these structural problems?

Elected officials do not get re-elected by allowing large numbers of individuals to experience pain. Under-skilled people in private industry or the public sector would either be unemployed or employed at well below middle class wage levels if they freely competed in a globally competitive sector of the economy.

The long-term answer is better education and re-skilling of our population.  Unfortunately, labor unions control much of our education system, and most resist the kinds of education reforms, like aggressive teacher performance management, that would make our education system able to fulfill this mission.

Politicians and labor leaders cannot easily act to address these issues because the highly competent teacher and the teacher who should be downsized have the same voting power. In fact, the more a labor union is comprised of people overpaid relative to the marketplace, the more the union leader will be compelled to resist fundamental change.  Elected officials representing dying communities needing to make structural change have constituents least likely to want change.

So what’s the answer? First, acknowledge the problem openly. Second, recognize that even among labor unions or dying community populations, there are many change champions from whom support can be obtained. Third, craft solutions that minimize the number of losers. Fourth, recognize that not everyone in an overpaid, under-skilled population is motivated to retain their specific compensation and benefit packages.  People are diverse, and there needs to be an effort to take advantage of that diversity, rather than ignoring it.

I am less optimistic than many about the long-term recovery of our economy.  We have difficulty making clean, fast, directionally powerful decisions because we have created big centrally controlled systems with powerful interest groups able to prevent actions that would have adverse effects on them even in the slightest way.  That is why the Obama Administration has had to resort to a lot of ugly political horse-trading to pass a single health care reform bill in the Senate, and why the health care reform process is so ugly.

For the big structural issue I described, there will need to be three broad-based tactical approaches:

• Find ways to dramatize the pathology by personalizing it.  Think about the number of laws that have passed because of the dramatization of a particular victim of a pathology.  We have “Amber alerts” because a girl named Amber was kidnapped.  We have “Megan’s law” to address violent sexual abuse. The public face of government employees that receive excessive pay and benefits is usually a heroic police officer, firefighter, or teacher, not the Massachusetts toll collector who can retire at age 45 with full pension and retiree medical benefits after 23 years of service.  If the public realized how much those retirement benefits cost and how the public is supporting obsolete jobs that could be replaced by automatic toll collection technology that would eliminate toll plaza traffic jams, their attitudes about these benefits could be very different.
• Build grass-roots support through fact-based advocacy.  Our society has been very successful in changing public attitudes with grass roots campaigns on issues like smoking, driving while intoxicated, and seat belt usage.
• Use the power of entertainment.  I am involved with film and reality TV investments because I need to learn about how to use entertainment to change society.  Neil Baer, the executive producer of Law & Order SVU, is a physician who cares deeply about health care reform.  His show is a powerful platform to address many issues associated with sexually transmitted diseases and violence.

Over the next 12 months, I will be doing a fellowship at Harvard University to help myself learn and grow in a way that will enable me to contribute creative insights and to drive actions that will help lead the way in this much more difficult environment.

Periodically, my lifelong decision to be an independent voter, rather than a registered Democrat or Republican gets reinforced. My independence stems from a deep distrust of a concentration of power or financial reward anywhere in our governmental, business, or non-profit sectors.

Recently, I have seen evidence of what happens when there is the following lethal combination of circumstances we have today:

• highly-concentrated government or business power,
• inattentiveness of the majority of the population,
• exceptionally high rewards from the exercise of concentrated power, and
• more power concentrated in ideologically-driven people.

The vast majority of Americans are unhappy and insecure with respect to the political and business environment in which they find themselves. 

Fiscal Irresponsibility at all Levels of Government

Without most of us noticing it, state and local governments, which are required to balance their budgets every year, have engaged in a massive transfer of wealth from the vast majority of their citizens to a relatively small, but exceptionally militant and well-organized group of state and local government employees.  I am not angry at the demands made by these employees in their collective bargaining negotiations, but am disappointed that elected officials have not only supported and caved in to those demands, but have also hidden the true costs of these actions from voters.

In Connecticut, for example, the present value of retirement benefits for state employees, including elected members of the executive and legislative branches of state government, is $40 billion as of the end of the 2007 fiscal year, and it is probably higher today.  For roughly 80,000 full-time employees, that averages $500,000 per employee at the time of retirement.  Although this money is paid over time, it is part of the long-term indebtedness of the state that crowds out the ability of the state to invest in roads, bridges, public transit, education, public health, environmental sustainability, public safety, and rebuilding of our cities, among the much worthier uses to which the money could have been put.

Connecticut is not unique in this regard.  Virtually every state has some astronomical retirement benefit obligation, as amply demonstrated by a report of the U.S. Government Accounting Office, http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08317.pdf

How did this happen?  Our elected officials are generally well-intentioned individuals with a desire to serve the broad public interest.  However, when confronted with well-organized public employees’ unions who want increases in pay and benefits, it has been far easier to concede on long-term benefits than on short-term pay increases, since the long-term benefits are not required to be reflected in annual state government  income statements.  I do not blame the unions for demanding these benefits, or even the elected officials for agreeing to them, but I believe that the public has been relatively disengaged for too long in monitoring issues like this.

On Monday, July 20, both Houses of the Connecticut General Assembly voted on straight party lines to override Governor Rell’s veto of a well-intended, but flawed, health care bill called the SustiNet bill.  Although the bill had many great features and was supported by many great leaders, one of its fatal flaws was the creation of a health policy board specifically designed to exclude many critical stakeholders, including large employers, insurance companies, hospital leaders, and pharmaceutical companies, all of whom should have been part of the board. 

In effect, the General Assembly, through amendments to the original legislation, set out to create a highly unrepresentative policy board on one of the state’s most critical competitiveness issues.  Until after this bill passed both houses of the General Assembly the first time, few business leaders were even aware of its existence, much less its damaging terms and conditions.  I wrote an Op-Ed piece in the July 19, 2009, Hartford Courant expressing my opposition to this legislation as enacted, specifically, in part because of whom it excluded from the health policy board, and called some of our elected representatives.  While I obviously did not succeed, I did my best to make sure that elected legislators knew how I felt.

Too many business leaders believe that they can escape fiscal crises and problems in their headquarters states by leaving those states, but we are increasingly coming to realize that there is no place to which to escape.  The federal government will end up bailing out state and local governments, as it has done with significant chunks of the stimulus legislation, and all of us will pick up the tab.

The answer is not to replace the incumbents, whether they be Democrats or Republicans with other incumbents, nor is it to have term limits (which I support for other reasons.)  The answer is a more continuously engaged and active citizenry, particularly in the business community.  Too many major CEOs and other senior executives think of themselves as world citizens who have little connection to the communities in which their companies have major operations.  Too often they delegate management of government affairs to specialized legal and government affairs professionals.

If we are to constrain the absolute power of government officials and the special interests to which they cater, we need the check and balance of continuous engagement by a much larger part of our citizenry.  As travel writer Rick Steves stated in his book Travel as a Political Act,

“Whether you’re a mom, a schoolteacher, a celebrity, a realtor, or a travel writer, it’s wrong to stop paying attention and let others (generally with a vested interest in the situation) make political decisions for us.  Our founding fathers didn’t envision career politicians and professional talking heads doing our political thinking for us.”

Although I do not plan to go as far as folk singer Arlo Guthrie and become a member of either party, I agree with his comment in the interview entitled “Just Folk” in the Sunday, July 26, 2009, New York Times:

“I became a registered Republican about five or six years ago because, to have a successful democracy, you have to have at least two parties, and one of them was failing miserably…We needed a loyal opposition.”

To put it simply, if we are to avoid the corrupting effects of concentrated power, we must take back that power from those who have it.  I do not believe those with power today are bad people.  In fact, I have much in common with their goals, and believe them to be decent people who want to do the right thing.  However, without checks and balances, everyone, including me, is highly likely to make significant and bad decisions.  We cannot let that happen.

In Bloom’s column, the major point made is that Connecticut is the “national champion of governmental redundancy.”  We have 169 towns, with 169 separate governmental systems.  In Spiegel’s article, she talks about the fact that charities are “just starting to sort out how to deal with the as-yet uncalculated effects from potential cuts to state funds in the wake of Connecticut’s projected two-year $6 billion deficit, and the impact of the stock market’s vicissitudes on donors, corporate giving, and investment portfolios of foundations.”

I was pleased with the fact that Bloom was able to find an optimistic voice in the otherwise gloomy tone of both articles.  He presented comments from Robert N. DeCresenzo, the former mayor of East Hartford, who suggested that towns and cities need to figure out where they can pool resources.  He said that back-office functions like human resources, accounting, or tax collections could be shared, and that some direct support services like waste management and computer deployment in police cars, had already been shared in past collaborative efforts.

Non-profits, businesses, and governments need to look at today’s economic crisis as an opportunity to do things differently, not just to cut costs and services.  If all we do is lay off people and stop delivering necessary services, we will end up with a far worse economic crisis than we otherwise would have had.

I am chairing a start-up of a personal, patient-controlled, portable health record called Dossia.  In the last 10 months, we significantly stretched our scarce resources by making difficult decisions to work with partners who could help us with functions we did not need to do inside our organization.  We saved significant amounts of money.

All organizations need to think more like start-ups, rather than the big organizations they may have been. Last year, I chaired a reform commission at the request of Governor M. Jodi Rell on the Connecticut Department of Transportation.  I learned through that process that there are many ways to reduce traffic congestion that do not require government spending.

For example, as I testified before the Connecticut Transportation Strategy Board, greater mobility has typically been sought by spending significant capital to increase transportation system capacity.  However, there is a much more cost-efficient way to increase mobility: to work with private sector partners, as well as other government agencies, to implement strategies for partial or complete telecommuting to reduce peak-hour demands on the transportation system.  The private sector has many technology providers who would welcome the opportunity to help the State convene large employers and share best practices on alternative work arrangements.  In this context, the convening agency might be the state Department of Labor, not the Department of Transportation.

The DOT could focus its scarce resources on maintenance of our existing assets, rather than their construction or expansion.  It could also reduce unplanned delays by developing strategies to reduce the frequency and severity of motor vehicle accidents.  For example, a relatively low-cost deployment of traffic cameras and other devices to reduce highway speeds, as well as other moving violations, would significantly reduce accidents, which would reduce traffic congestion, improve air quality, and reduce state health care spending. To improve highway safety, the State could call upon a variety of private sector partners, such as automobile insurers, technology providers, and state and municipal police departments, to pool their resources to reduce the need for highway police patrols and rely more upon other safety-enhancement tools.

Non-profits should check the Internet for the huge number and variety of free or low-cost services available to them to increase their revenues and reduce their expenses.  They also need to define their core requirements more precisely.  For example, at Pitney Bowes, I realized over a decade ago that we had far more facilities space than we needed.  Over the last decade, we have shrunk facilities square footage far more rapidly than we have shrunk headcount, and we have gotten better usage from our space.  We realized that employees would give some excess space in their personal offices to get more conference room space, more capability in shared multi-functional printing devices, and more modern audio-visual technology.  Most non-profits I visit have great opportunity to shrink their footprint the way we have and spend less on overhead.

We can all look at the current situation with fear and anxiety, or we can see it as a great opportunity to figure out how to be creative and collaborative.  I know which alternative I prefer.

The main example that comes to mind is the way we characterize how government positions are filled.

When I was growing up, like most American history students, I read about the 1881 assassination of President James Garfield, who was killed by a “disappointed office seeker.” I learned that this tragedy gave rise to “civil service reform”, which, if I remember the history books, characterized the change as being one which replaced an appointment system based on “patronage” or “spoils” with one based on “merit”. Like most Americans, I came to believe that the civil service system was an unqualified positive development for American government, and the old system was corrupt, to the point of being “un-American.” In fact, on the radio this past week, I also heard a radio commentator refer to “patronage” appointments in a very disparaging way.

As a person who has interacted extensively with elected officials, as well as their appointed government agency leaders, I have come to a much more balanced understanding of the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two systems for filling positions. While many civil service employees are dedicated, hard-working, imbued with a sense of mission, and able to provide expertise that political appointees can never hope to match, there are many government leaders who would argue that we have become unbalanced in creating career positions insulated from accountability for results versus accountable appointed positions in many government organizations.

What elected and appointed officials have told me is that the voters have put them into office to accomplish specific goals, and that they believe that, above a certain level in a government agency, officials should be “accountable” to the elected officials who are “held responsible by voters” to achieve certain public policy goals to which they have committed themselves. They look at career “civil service” officials as individuals who effectively have lifetime employment and, therefore, have “no incentive to be responsive to citizens.” They look at these officials as individuals who often deliberately frustrate the will of the people. They see appointed officials as having a clear mandate to do what citizens have expressed as their desires through the voting process.

They also say that career civil service officials are often unable to be removed from their position, even if they are incompetent performers, bad managers, or inappropriately resistant to change. They also comment that these officials block more talented people below them from getting promoted, and bring down the morale of an entire agency.

I agree with those who say that most states and the federal government have made it far too difficult for appointed agency heads to remove non-performers or under-performers. In many places, we are out of balance in protecting procedural due process for the employee, and insufficiently protective of the rights of citizens served by these under-performers, fellow employees, or those who are ultimately responsible for agency performance. We also do a disservice to the majority of civil service employees who really do consistent and excellent work year after year.

Relative to being responsive to voters, those who created the civil service system understood the need to balance the perspective of those voted into office to achieve particular objectives during their tenure as elected officials, and those who, because of civil service protection, are able to take the longer view, and build needed expertise. We should always maintain a set of checks and balances on government power, and a properly-constructed civil service system does just that.

Nevertheless, my fundamental point is that the choice of language drives us to very different ways of looking at the problem, and to conclusions about how to strike the balance. As a high-school student, I believed that we needed a civil service system for as many jobs as possible. As a person who sees many flaws in how our governments function, and as a citizen, I want elected officials and their appointees to have the maximum ability to accomplish what the voters have demanded that they do. We should never let our choice of labels and language obscure what are often difficult and delicate decisions on how to balance worthy, but competing, objectives.

My fondest wish is that the media use more balanced language in describing how government functions, and be attentive to the evaluative implications of what, on the surface, sounds like morally-neutral language. The choice of words has consequences, and tilts seemingly “objective” reporting in a very biased direction.

Several things struck me as I reflected on the conference:

• After the Florida debacle in 2000, and the issues associated with the exceptionally tight Washington state gubernatorial race in 2004 that resulted in the election of Governor Christine Gregoire by about 100 votes out of 3 million cast, election officials and the federal government are more focused than ever on getting the election process right. They want accuracy, security, reliability, and, above all, they want every vote to count in the manner intended by the voter.

• Given the substantial increase in participation in voting as a result of the hotly-contested Democratic and Republican presidential primaries, they have a high degree of interest in securing long-term increases in voter participation. We will have a much healthier democracy if everyone participates not only in voting, but in other ways that result in greater civic engagement.

• There is more interest than ever in continuously upgrading election technology and process. Historically, elections officials would acquire technology and keep it for decades, with little or no improvement. I even heard of communities that had voting machines with levers that were still in operation in the last election that had been in use since 1898. Today, no election official who seriously wants to serve his or her citizens can afford to fall behind that badly. Federal funding through the Help America Vote Act, and supplementary state funding, as well as non-profit voter registration initiatives, and for-profit innovation are all designed to improve voter registration and voting processes continuously. This Law Librarian Blog post cites the first study on voting technology innovations prompted by the Help America Vote Act. Studies such as these should help speed up the adoption and usage of improved voting technology.

• Despite the excitement in the presidential campaign and the obviously greater participation we would expect to see in a 2008 presidential election year, elections officials still want to figure out how to increase voter participation in state and local elections, particularly when there is a referendum, as opposed to candidates, on the ballot. Even though young people have been energized to participate in the federal part of elections, they have yet to evidence a significant interest in elections that actually affect their lives in more profound ways, the state and local elections. This Rock the Vote blog reviews some myths and facts about the impact of the youth vote.

• Related to the participation issue with respect to state and local elections is the “undervote” issue, that is, the tendency of many voters who complete their ballot relative to federal election candidates, but fail to vote on state and local issues. We need to understand why undervoting occurs and to figure out a way to address it.

• Beyond participation, the next frontier is how to upgrade people’s knowledge about candidates and issues relative to more obscure elections. Many tools exist to educate voters relative to presidential and congressional candidates. State and local elections are still lagging behind, although the use of cable TV channels like C-Span and the analogous channels for state and local government have the potential to bring voters up to speed on issues closer to home. We also need to develop web and paper-based tools to help voters. This Freedom to Tinker blog post reviews how the Libertarian Party of Arizona has gone so far as to execute online voting for its primary election.

• I am particularly impressed with the League of Women Voters site Vote411.org as an informational and educational tool. It answers many basic questions for voters, such as polling place identification, who is on the ballot, and where candidates stand on issues. It is a wonderful tool, and more people should use it.

As a citizen, I came away from the meetings feeling very good about the dedication of our election officials, but also appreciating the complexity of their jobs and the thanklessness with which they perform those jobs. Election processes are like light-switches. No one marvels at the technology that enables them to work when they are functioning normally, but a huge amount of criticism gets directed at them when they fail to work. We need to appreciate what we have in America and continue to make it better.

Today, I believe strongly that we are best served as a society to the degree that all of our citizens participate in some way in helping government function better.

The first and most important way to help government function better is to vote. I believe strongly in making voting secure and having complete integrity and trust in the voting process, but, at the same time, we need to make it easier for eligible voters to register and vote. That’s why we have provided secure voting-by-mail solutions through our Relia-Vote system. That’s why I have believed that states should allow “no-excuses” voting by mail as an alternative, very much the way California offers voters the choice of either voting in person or registering to vote by mail. The states that have complete voting-by-mail systems, Washington and Oregon, have higher participation rates, on average, than other states. One could argue whether voting by mail is the cause of that or whether an already engaged citizenry in those states demands voting by mail, but I believe it has to help voter participation to add choices on how voters can exercise their right to vote.

I’ve discovered a California Institute of Technology blog that includes commentary about the effectiveness of voting by mail. A recent posting references a new study on this topic, that provides some material for debate.

The study randomly selected a group of voters that live in California’s precincts with fewer than 250 voters (and by California law, mandated to vote by mail) and compared their turnout with other California voters who had the option to vote absentee or at the polls. They found a slight decrease in turnout among those in the first group.

The authors do feel voting by mail can increase turnout (by up to 8%) in three types of elections: local, special elections, and ballot measures. They think that marginal voters being reminded of an election through the mail ballot could make a significant difference in turnout compared to these same voters in a higher profile race, with active mail, phones, TV campaigns and sophisticated “Get out the Vote” operations.

While I don’t know that I completely agree with the study’s methodology, it is credible and thoughtful.

But engagement should go beyond voting. I also answer surveys from elected officials and government agencies, because I believe that those who govern us are better served if they know what we think. I have volunteered to serve on public-private task forces for over two decades because I think business, the non-profit sector, and government, working together through engaged citizens produce better outcomes.

On Tuesday evening, October 9, I chaired a public hearing in Bridgeport, Connecticut, of the Connecticut Transportation Advisory Commission at which we heard testimony from Nancy Hadley, a former CT Deputy Commissioner. She described a program in the 1990’s in which different companies, including Pitney Bowes, adopted a government agency and helped it use best-in-class business practices to improve its operations. I thought that was an inspired idea from whoever came up with it.

I also believe that, as citizens, we should report issues to government or to private sector players performing a government-like function if we can help. I am very likely to report a traffic congestion problem to a local radio station if the station has not announced it, so that others can avoid a delay I have experienced. Back in the 1970’s, there was actually a broadly-based citizens band radio network in which motorists chatted about traffic problems with other motorists. It became a big fad at the time, even to the point that there was a number 1 hit record by a singer named C.W. McCall about CB radio users. The CB radio fad died, but the idea of sharing knowledge about traffic problems in real time is a good one.

In New Jersey, as I have commented in a previous blog, motorists can report on reckless drivers. In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg created a 311 telephone number to make it easy for citizens to report on everything from crime to potholes. In our Connecticut DOT Advisory Commission project, we have made it easy for citizens to give input on what we do relative to Connecticut DOT activities. We need to tap the wisdom of anyone who can help on any issue.

I also believe that we all benefit when we can understand public policy issues by participating in, or observing, the public business of government. Many people do not have the time or the ability to get to public hearings on issues, but with special TV channels today in many communities, they do not need to. Where I live in Southwestern Connecticut, Cablevision sets aside Channel 79 for broadcasting government hearings. At a national level, we have all benefited from having C-SPAN broadcast proceedings on many important issues.
At times, government hearings are extremely boring and tedious, but, whether we like it or not, what happens there matters a great deal to us. I recall a few years ago taking my son, who was at that time trying to get one of the citizenship merit badges for Boy Scouts, to a public hearing at our town hall. The subject of the hearing that night was the status of our high school construction project. Buried in the detail was an item about the challenges of getting the baseball field completed because of drainage issues. Later, we learned that the baseball field would not be ready when the school was completed, and that private funding would be needed to complete it. In retrospect, I wish I had gone to some of the other hearings, and had been able to tell my fellow baseball coaches a year earlier that we would need to develop a fund-raising campaign to get an adequate baseball field.

I have always lived my life with a handful of simple principles, one of which is that, if somebody is going to make a decision that profoundly affects my life or the lives of my loved ones, I not only want to know about it in advance, but I want to be at the table influencing the decision. To me, broader citizen engagement is something that everyone should find it in his or her self-interest to do, not to mention the good we do for others when we engage on public issues.

Marc Morial’s keynote speech eloquently and meticulously described an Opportunity Compact that the Urban League has committed to as a mission for the people it serves, and that it wants government officials and partners to support as well. This compact, which can be accessed on the NUL website, NUL.org, consists of four cornerstone values: (1) The Opportunity to Thrive; (2) The Opportunity to Earn; (3) The Opportunity to Own; and (4) The Opportunity to Prosper. These cornerstones are supported by policy priorities described in the Compact.

The Urban League has been offering social services for 97 years and has over 100 affiliates around the country. Historically, it has been most known for its workforce readiness programs, and for supporting educational initiatives. More recently, it has focused on increasing homeownership among African-Americans.

What Marc has brought to the NUL in his four-year tenure as CEO has been a substantially increased focus on entrepreneurship to increase the pool of available jobs, and an even more significant focus on driving civic engagement through voting for African-Americans, and in having the Urban League play a more pivotal educational role in public policy debates.

The conference inspired me because four Democratic candidates, Senators Clinton and Obama, former Senator Edwards, and Congressman Kucinic, thoughtfully and positively presented their agendas to the attendees, and Senators Clinton and Obama specifically endorsed the Opportunity Compact.

I was particularly pleased that, through ground-breaking research led by Drs. Silas Lee and Bernard Anderson, we were able to validate that, at a minimum, the Urban League service network has delivered over $2.5 billion of economic value to America over the last three years.

I also had one-on-one meetings with members of the Urban League movement. Bonnie Boswell, a Los Angeles-based newscaster and the niece of Whitney M. Young, the NUL CEO in the 1960’s and a civil rights leader whose contribution to civil rights has been underestimated because of the low-key way in which he influenced events, is raising money to do a documentary on Whitney Young’s life. His leadership skills are noteworthy because they go far beyond what he accomplished as a civil rights activist. He united white and black Americans, civil rights activists, corporate leaders and governments, and other diverse stakeholders in ways that enabled them to work together far beyond the specific tasks that initially brought them together. I will be helping Bonnie get this project completed because I believe strongly in it.

I also met with Melinda Emerson, a former NUL trustee and now a successful entrepreneur with her company, Open for Business with Melinda Emerson at www.melindaemerson.com. She is both passionate and extremely thoughtful about the key levers for success for any small business, not just female and minority-owned businesses. She is focused on the specific needs of “Mompreneurs,” businesses formed and operated by working mothers, particularly first-time working mothers, but her insights on how to succeed are more broadly applicable: the focus on targeting the right customers and getting to know their specific needs, networking, delegating effectively well before women have less time to spend on the business because of child-care needs, and finding ways to build continuous, long-term relationships with the best customers of a business.

Marc, Bonnie, and Melinda are just a few examples of the kind of people that keep me excited about the NUL. Their focuses on driving thoughtful policy positions and measurable success in implementing them, driving and educating people about effective leadership, and role-modeling excellence in entrepreneurial small business leadership respectively are just a few of the reasons I continue to support this great movement.