A call for a more decentralized city government

The snatching of citizen voting rights by SJ City Council has some people wondering if our deeply centralized, bureaucratic model of city governance has gone too far. Irene Smith, former candidate for D3 (and critic of the council appointment process, see here), laid out a new way of looking at municipal governance that focused on a more bottoms-up, "deconcentrated" approach, excerpted below.

D3 has more than 1800 unhoused residents, according to the city’s 2019 Census. That’s a whopping 300% more than District 6, at 568 and D1 has 141. This highlights the fact that D3 has unique urban problems that the rest of the city doesn’t have, yet we govern D3 the same way we do the semi-rural neighborhoods of Almaden Valley. We apply the same restrictions, the same policies, the same funding mechanisms, the same management model to urban downtown as we do for horse farms and 4-acre mansions.

It’s not a successful approach. D3 needs to be able to have greater say identifying, designing, and funding our unique solutions.

The question of how to balance the efficiencies of scale with responsiveness to unique local needs is a longstanding debate in city planning and governance circles. On one hand, we have San Jose’s — and most big American city’s model — which aims to realize cost-effectiveness via a centralized bureaucracy. On the other hand, we have the model championed by Jane Jacobs, in the Death And Life of Great American Cities, which focuses instead on providing hyper-local planning (or unplanning), more on a block by block basis.

I will acknowledge up front that I am more inclined toward Jacobs’ vision for D3 — and assert that San Jose’s hypercentralized model does not meet our needs, and in fact does not even realize efficiencies.

Let me give you an example:

Citywide, there is no budget for towing RVs. D3 is overrun by RVs and abandoned vehicles — it’s a critical quality of life issue for residents and small businesses. But D10-and other districts — do not have a RV towing problem, so when it comes to voting for an RV towing budget, it is dismissed.

The same phenomenon — the city choosing a one-size-fits-all approach that doesn’t work for urban D3 — applies to: the siting policy, vehicle abatement, police foot patrols, encampment abatements, sidewalk management, and a whole long laundry list of other issues.

I believe we need to start the process of exploring the concept of “deconcentration” for District 3.

The World Bank explains the meaning of the term:

Deconcentration — which is often considered to be the weakest form of decentralization and is used most frequently in unitary states — redistributes decision making authority and financial and management responsibilities among different levels of the central government. It can merely shift responsibilities from central government officials in the capital city to those working in regions, provinces, or districts, or it can create strong field administration or local administrative capacity under the supervision of central government ministries.

This article originally appeared in Medium. Read the whole thing here.

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