Here in New Haven, even in my brief tenure, this was going on full speed ahead. Janitorial services in municipal buildings, debt collection, parking enforcement were all being subcontracted out and more will probably follow. In many instances the city appeared to received very little benefit from these arrangements. The reasons why they sailed through are 1) often the firms who ended up receiving contracts were donors to the mayor's campaigns and 2) a tacet, but absolutely unshakeable belief among the liberal Yale technocrats who advise the mayor in a Gore/Clinton "efficiency" driven model of government function.
So, what you do as a progressive in local government is (obviously) to expose and fight against these sorts of arrangements, while making note of their connection to the imposition of a larger corporate agenda. If you want a discussion of my effectiveness in this respect, I'll provide that on request. Short answer-it was slightly better than mixed... John Halle
----------
Not necessary, unless you feel like it. But I would like to concentrate for list benefit on the tactics to push issues and the way to combat this neoliberal common `wisdom', i.e reactionary capitalist pig hegemonic scum...
(I hate to keep referring to the past, but...)
Back when,... either the university or the city would resist implementation of a regulation or public services, the way that we essentially forced the issue was to match each of their quasi-professional presentations against a proposal, with a counter presentation. Or better, we tried to arrive in advance to make the case and let them try to counter it. In other words it is much more difficult to show why something shouldn't be done, than to show why something should be done. If you have a plan, you have an automatic advantage.
They would use administrative, business, and econ/pol.sci jack-off academic `management' types to put their plan together.
But we had our own group drawn from liberal-left sociology, city planning, law, political science, and public health.
They had statistics, which were usually anecdotal or impressionistic, ie. their shit was weak. But we could usually get much better data.
The reason was that one of the research academics in sociology involved in these battles had gotten the raw state dept public health, labor dept, and welfare data on disability along with the fed census under a federal research grant---he already had the data base. So he could put together almost any report we needed to convince public officials that x,y,z people need a,b,c services or changes in policies and regulations.
In addition we had two profs in the City Planning Dept who were intimately familiar with all these issues and were more than willing to help design a system for service delivery, because that was what they had studied. Back then community based development was the buzzword. So many of the designs, studies, and results were already documented. It was a matter of plugging in the stats, producing a narrative on local conditions and boom, there was the report.
So the real problem was finding these kind of people and bringing them into this process---having them available in the background when needed.
I have to confess I know absolutely nothing about San Francisco. The only person I know nowadays works in the State Architect's office---which is a very critical place. It oversees the entire spectrum of public and commercial scale private development and construction across the state.
But I know how to go about these battles. There will be people in the bowels of SFState, UCB, along with people in the Energy Dept federal labs at Lawrence Berkeley, and Livermore who know the real nuts and bolts of energy delivery systems. Most likely the data already exists to prove whatever case you want to make. There are probably years worth of studies on communities who put together their own public utilities. And there are probably already plenty of studies on what happened to communities who went the privatization route and crashed.
Anyway the main point is to involve leftish academics and leftish public professionals (there are some) who have interests in public affairs to counter the business, rightwing, and neoliberals in their endless rip-off schemes.
There is an amazing difference that has to be seen to be believed, between the slime-bag business types who think of themselves as professionals (and are not) doing their little fuck-you business plan, and the tweed-jacket guy who is used to doing presentations for lectures who can lay out the whole thing in stark and clear terms---for your side. I've only seen this sort of confrontation a few times, but it is a show stopper. Those public officials who decide for the business jerk, are clearly highlighted with dubious motivations. That embarrassment may not mean much on panel votes, but it makes great news. Their political ass can be put on the line---because you have presented compelling evidence to the contrary. This is exactly the point where the outside community base can count. They can rhetorically fry these jerks for you in the media (well, via your media contacts anyway). So the news story becomes, why did Mr. So-in-So vote for X?....
Which reminds me of another need. We had a couple of local newspaper reporters who liked us, were interested, and could be called for news conferences and city council presentations. They were another critical piece, like the committed academics and scattered sympathic bureaucrats in this local political mosaic.
After a few successful battles, the effect gets to be pretty awesome. The `impartial' academic community is with you, the `media' is with you, the `community' is with you.... So how come this shit hasn't happened yet? Answering that question, becomes more and more difficult, and eventually your political opposition gets voted down, or they become ineffective at stopping progress.
Anyway the point is to explain ways to go about local political advocacy within the system. I remember being impressed by how un-informed and careless the establishment people were, and this undercurrent of arrogant disregard could be used against them. They often didn't know their own administrative procedures, or what department was responsible for what projects, which led to occasional logistical victories.
Chuck Grimes