Mayor Norman Rice's Remarks from 2006 Regional Assembly

Mayor Norman Rice's Remarks

Keynote speaker at 10th Annual Regional Assembly on June 2, 2006

Thank you for that generous welcome. It is indeed a pleasure to be here before the Mid-America Regional Council. And I’ll tell you, that is the last time I’m going to say Mid-America Regional Council! That’s a mouthful and I was told by David and Georgia that I could call it “MARC.” That sounds more friendly, just like the generous hospitality I’ve received since I arrived in Kansas City.

It is great to be here. I am very familiar with organizations such as MARC. I worked for the Puget Sound Council of Governments – our local COG – early on in my career. Later on as a city council member and mayor, I collaborated with the council on many issues, including transportation, growth management and housing. So if you were looking for a speaker who knows about the challenges of inter-governmental cooperation, you got one! I know how tough it is and I appreciate the work you all do.

I extend my congratulations to your Regional Leadership Award winners. I’m honored to share the stage with them today and celebrate their achievements with all of you.

The Kansas City Area Life Science Institute, Janice Kreamer, Ronald Norris, and Ted Stolfus would be the first to say that they share their awards with the many citizens who supported their efforts.

But they were honored because they are catalysts for civic engagement. They are people who embrace the values of citizenship, compassion and community….and share those values with others.

These are the same values that I hold dearly. A strong sense of citizenship and a concern for the greater good. A compassion for all people, regardless of race, income or ability. And a spirit of community, the belief that anything is possible if we work together in partnership.

It’s these values that drive my work at the University of Washington. Today I am a Distinguished Visiting Practitioner for Civic Engagement – and I thought MARC was a mouthful. In this role, I’m blessed with the opportunity to reflect on my own career in public service and study the work and writings of others. These efforts are aimed at educating and energizing leaders about civic participation…..showcasing models that really work…..and inspiring people to get involved and make a difference.

Last month I came across a thoughtful editorial on this topic in The Boston Globe. Titled “Time to Rebuild Civic Responsibility,” Bridgewater State College professor Michael Kryzanek noted that it was “town meeting season” in Massachusetts.

And he predicted that people would again be talking about why voter turnout for town meetings and local elections was so poor……why there was an epidemic of apathy…why Americans had a profound unwillingness to pay any attention to matters of public policy.

He said there was no quick fix to what he aptly described as “the failure to appreciate the privilege of living in a state and country where people have a say in how they are governed.”

He also noted the irony that while we live in place where election turnouts are an embarrassment, more than 17 million Americans had voted that week for their favorite singer on American Idol. And in the big Idol finale just last week, there were a staggering 63 million votes cast.

It’s shocking and, more so, it’s sad.

I truly believe that people’s failure to appreciate the privilege of having a say in how they are governed threatens to destroy our democracy and democratic values.

And that is what makes the work MARC is undertaking through the OneKCVoice alliance is so very critical not just to Kansas City, but to the country.

An alliance for citizen engagement is an innovative construct. It has the potential to really get people energized and involved. It is a bold experiment and I truly commend each and every one of you for supporting the OneKCVoice effort.

I am a big fan of “experiments” in civic engagement. As mayor, my administration executed some innovative strategies to generate citizen participation.

Some of our ideas were winners. Others were not. But overall, we accomplished our goal of getting people to feel a stronger sense of community ownership.

I’d like to share a few of those strategies with you today and some of the lessons I learned along the way.

The first involves education, the issue that prompted me to run for mayor in the first place.

It started with a ballot referendum to end busing. The debate around it was shrill and divisive.

But as is often the case, the problem wasn’t really busing. It was ensuring that high quality education was available to every child, in every school, in every neighborhood in Seattle.

Busing was what political analysts call a wedge issue – one designed to divide people, prevent meaningful debate and, oh yes, win elections.

While people were arguing over busing, Seattle’s school system was struggling. Everything was declining – enrollments, test scores, budgets, and even the school buildings themselves. The district lacked strong leadership and public support.

And while Seattle was really hitting its stride with the tech boom, Microsoft and the rest, the quality of our schools threatened to tarnish our reputation as the “in place.” And more importantly, it threatened the future of our kids and our neighborhoods.

I don’t need to tell you that education is not traditionally a city government issue. But I decided to make it one and I jumped into the race for mayor. I wanted to move away from the harsh public debate and engage people in a positive effort to improve our schools. I’d be in the best position to do just that as mayor.

Following the election, I called for an education summit. I originally thought this summit would include 60 or so community and education leaders. But that idea proved dead wrong. Those people were so vested in their own viewpoints that a summit with them would have been nothing more than a waste of time.

That’s when I decided to make our summit an inclusive, city-wide event. The goal: to define quality education. It would be the first step in a comprehensive effort to strengthen our school system.

So on one bright and shiny day in May, we hosted citizen meetings in 36 different locations. Each site had its own trained volunteer facilitator. People were asked to share their ideas on what makes for a quality education. Is it neighborhood schools? Better teacher pay? Smaller class sizes? More after-school programs? We had a chance to hear, directly from parents, about what matters the most in the education of their kids.

We had more than 2000 citizens participate across the city. Their input was fed into a computer system and tallied. And then the very next day, we reconvened the summit and told everyone the results. This immediate follow-up allowed us to quickly validate our findings and build momentum around the next steps.

We then created task forces around the top issues – neighborhood schools, diversity, school safety and the like. The summit had energized people and we found strong leadership and participation.
In short, people felt they could have a say in what happens in their schools and wanted to do their part to make them better.

The school system went to work developing strategies around the summit findings. The city government began to assume a bigger role in education. I truly believe that the city has a responsibility to support the broader school environment, to ensure that kids are safe, healthy and ready to learn.

To that end, we introduced the Families and Schools levy. Voters have approved this levy three times now, funding more than $7 million dollars a year in school support for things like health clinics, family counselors, and investments in day care and school safety. With the levy dollars covering those needs, the school district could better concentrate on what it does best: teaching kids.

With so much positive momentum around education in the city, we attracted a bright and charismatic new superintendent. And, in 1998 the city passed a $150 million dollar bond measure to fix or rebuild our aging schools. It was later renewed for another $178 million dollars.

Another case study in successful civic engagement is found in Seattle’s neighborhood planning program, which has a lot of relevance to you in MARC. That’s the term we used when we developed our growth management strategy. It’s just a friendlier term and sounds less bureaucratic.

Back in the early 1990s, our state passed a “growth management” act that mandated a bottom-up approach to planning. Each city and county was to submit a plan that would feed into the state’s overall approach.

We seized this opportunity to do something really dynamic. We set up eight focus groups in communities across the city. And instead of talking about “growth management,” we talked about values.

We asked questions such as: What do you like about your neighborhood? Why do you live here? What makes your neighborhood special? What are you afraid of?

We got tremendous input about issues such as transportation, parks, jobs, diversity, public safety, schools, and, oh yes, parking. People always want to talk to the mayor about parking!

In short, these focus groups provided us with a strong sense of the personal values of Seattle’s residents, what people really care about. Those values were captured in the terms: social equity, economic opportunity and environmental stewardship.

These insights about values allowed us to turn the growth management discussion into a meaningful dialogue about what the city wants, rather than what we have to choose.

We took all this information back to our city planners and started anew. We established 16 neighborhood planning councils, each tasked with developing its own plan and submitting it to the city for approval.

Each council had its own planner – a city employee - that answered to the community. And everyone agreed that all proposals had to reflect the city’s values of social equity, economic opportunity and environmental stewardship.

These neighborhood councils are still in place today, an integral part of our ongoing planning activities.

Our approach did so much more that simply satisfy a state mandate and protect the urban growth boundary. It gave people ownership in their communities. It inspired them. And it resulted in solutions that a room full of city planners could never have devised on their own!

And finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t share my biggest failure in civic engagement! Our best lessons always come from our failures. And this one involves a Clinton Administration initiative commonly called “Weed and Seed.”

Seattle had the chance to get a $1.5 million dollar grant to help low-income neighborhoods. The idea was to “weed” out the criminals and “seed” the neighborhood with programs for youth, public safety, etcetra.

We all thought, great! The only problem was that we had just one month to apply for the grant. But that didn’t deter us. After all, who could be against an opportunity like this!?

Well as it turned out, a lot of people. To some, “Weed and Seed” was a synonym for getting rid of minorities and creating a police state. Clear out the undesirables ………and then regentrify the community. That wasn’t at all what we had in mind, but that didn’t matter.

The grant process required we convene a citizen meeting to present our proposal. Easy enough, we thought.

Well, our hastily assembled proposal was DOA. Residents called for my impeachment and the resignation of the police chief. We were maligned on the editorial pages. It was a disaster. And in the end, it took us a year and half to overcome this bad start and work with the community to submit our grant application.

The education summit, neighborhood planning program and even Weed and Seed are all, in their own ways, highlights of my public service career.

In each instance, we made something happen that made our community a better place to work and live. And, we made better citizens, people who appreciated the chance to have a say in how they are governed.

So what are the big “lessons learned,” from these experiences? Well there are many, but I’d boil them all down to five over-riding thoughts.

First, center the debates around policy rather than politics. And that means frame the questions around values first, issues second. I believe the way we addressed growth management and built the discussion around community values is a great example of how to do this effectively. It allows you to build common ground and ease the divisiveness so prevalent today.

It’s also how we can combat the use of “wedge issues.” This political strategy is designed to divide people and dummy-down public policy. And as community leaders, it’s critical that we fight this tactic with everything we’ve got.

Second, have meaningful civic engagement or no engagement at all. Give citizens the opportunity to shape the questions and shape the answers. Ask, listen, clarify, modify and then do it all again.

Don’t take anything for granted, as I did with Weed and Seed. Go back and validate what you learned, as we did with the education summit.

I’ll add that compassion is an essential part of civic engagement. Be a genuine, compassionate listener and you’re already half way there. People want to talk – even if to complain rather than solve a problem – and it’s your job as community leaders to listen with compassion.

And in the end, remember that trusting the process is more important than controlling the process. Don’t presume you are going to end up with the results you are expecting.
And know that once you start down the path of civic engagement, you cannot turn back. To do so will damage your credibility and feed the distrust and cynicism so many Americans feel.

Third, you can never communicate enough. I’ve never seen a public endeavor fail because of over communication. And today our communications toolbox is bigger than ever before – the Internet, email, local cable channels and more.

While electronic communications can’t replace face-to-face, they go along way in getting people started along the continuum from informed….. to interested….. to involved.

Fourth, civic engagement requires political will. Genuine civic participation doesn’t happen over night. It’s often a drawn out, laborious process, the results of which we don’t see right away. And outcomes often don’t become apparent until after a politician’s term of office is over.

Communities need to identify and support leaders with the political will to invest in civic engagement, even when these investments put their own re-election chances at risk.

And finally, look beyond governance. If you find yourself talking about governance all the time, you’re missing the point. Leaders must learn to leave boundaries and biases aside and get to the meat of the issues.

Today’s challenges require high-action, high-octane strategies at the regional level. We’ll never get there if we remain weighed down with territorial disputes, turf battles and finger-pointing.

I saw a bumper sticker that really got me thinking the other day. It said “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”

I don’t bring that up as a slam on today’s politicians or policies. That’s not my point. It’s just that there is so much in America to be outraged about, no matter if you are conservative or liberal, rural or suburban, black or white. But we don’t hear that outrage or feel the indignation.

Why not? Because by and large, America is not paying attention. And America isn’t paying attention because politicians have so successfully simplified politics into narrow, divisive issues. They’ve made public policy all about winning and losing, not solving real problems.

We talk about red and blue in politics like we were teaching colors to preschoolers. Too many leaders are all about making voters angry, rather than hopeful……enraged, rather than engaged.

And what is happening is that people have tuned out and, in doing so, lost their appreciation of living in a country where they have a say in how they are governed.

I truly believe the single largest challenge facing society today is the need to ignite civic responsibility and we must start today.

I commend MARC and each and every one of you for your commitment to civic participation. It is through your efforts that people will pay attention – and again become informed, interested and involved citizens.

Thank you.

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