Local government services and contracts: Best practices and key issues to watch‏

Municipalities in dire straits are found all over the United States — from Detroit in the north toStockton, Calif., out west, and Central Falls, R.I., in the east, to name just three. While each city’s case is different, the root causes have much in common. They can include the still-lingering impacts of the Great Recession, ongoing deindustrialization, tax limitations, and demographic changes that increase the costs of pensions and health care. Sometimes the causes are spectacular: Jefferson County, Alabama, was hit with debt from an expensive infrastructure upgrade, a corruption scandal, and a drop in revenue. At other times they’re near-silent, including “zombie subdivisions” laid out during the real-estate boom that drain resources and resist solutions.

Even for cities in good financial shape, the current economic climate has increased pressure to trim expenses, keep costs under control and manage complex assets efficiently — expensive projects might once have been limited to roads and sewers, but now can include a 411 system, state-of-the-art hospitals or laptops for public schools.

New ways of funding infrastructure upgrades have been developed, including tax-increment financing, but the benefits are often matched with substantial risks. Public-private partnerships have potential for service delivery, but serious problems can arise if they’re not properly structured and monitored. For example, in 2008 Chicago signed a 75-year lease of its parking meters to a private company for $1.15 billion. The agreement gave the city some much-needed cash, but also could have cost them as much as $1 billion in future revenue, according to the city’s inspector general. The entire deal has been mired in controversy since it was signed.

Covering these issues can be especially challenging for journalists. If your city proposes or announces a new public-private partnership, what’s the best way to judge if the right questions have been asked? If public assets are being sold to a third party or managed by them, is that decision really in the public’s interest? And what happens to issues of equity when all budgeting seems like a zero-sum game?

A 2013 study published in State and Local Government Review, “Collaborative Service Delivery: What Every Local Government Manager Should Know,” seeks to provide some of these answers. The authors — Cheryl Hilvert of the nonprofit Center for Management Strategies and David Swindell of Arizona State University’s Center for Urban Innovation — examine a wide range of literature in the field and also analyze the results of a survey of city managers conducted since 1982 by the International City/County Management Association (ICMA).

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