Comment:

Geoffrey C. Stokes

Maximum Feasible Participation Confronts New Management Finding a new ailment afflicting the cities may strike many people as a pointless and sadistic procedure. Yet there's a quiet and curable set of municipal troubles that will get worse in the near future. It stems from two increasingly contradictory demands made on local governments by the federal government and big foundations. On one hand, the feds and the Fords insist that local administration conform to the practices of the New Management, highly sophisticated techniques to centralize and rationalize the whole business of making decisions. On the other hand, federal and foundation dollars are continuing to pressure local government to let citizens have a major, even a controlling, voice in the planning process. For instance, a metropolitan school board, having received a large foundation grant to undertake cost-benefit studies of various educational options, has determined on fairly good evidence that massive expenditures to reduce class size will make little difference in pupils' skills. At the same time, one of its school districts has received a decentralization grant from the same foundation; the district wants to use a major portion of its budget to lower the pupil-teacher ratio. The central school board refuses to allow the budget change, citing its studies as a rationale. The local board, feeling at once betrayed and patronized, stages a protest, which culminates in a sit-in at the central board's meeting, where both sides appeal to a surprised and angry mayor to support them. This is an imaginary case, but it is typical of the kind of confrontation 4

that will occur more and more unless we move to avoid it. The federal government has endorsed efforts toward community participation in a number of ways, the most important being the "maximum feasible participation" language of the Economic Opportunity Act. Regardless of the original intent of that language, or even of the current mood in Washington, the federal commitment to community participation has been extended in the legislation both for Model Cities and the Community Mental HealthCenter Program. Even where no federal pressure exists, few wise administrators are now prepared to take any action, whatever its apparent benefits, without extensive community consultation. The continued inability of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller to begin construction on a state office building in central Harlem is an example of the consequences that occur when a community feels left out of an important decision-no matter what its apparent benefits. Even groups totally dependent on government servicewelfare recipients, for example-are demanding and receiving the right to participate in decisions affecting them. The trend is clear, and the momentum of the movement toward decentralization and direct citizen participation can no longer be reversed, whatever second thoughts the Nixon administration may have. Yet the same combination of governmental and foundation forces that fostered these developments is driving just as strongly, although less visibly, toward centralized decision making.

Given increasing demands for government services and a tightening of domestic budget constraints, the use of cost-benefit analyses to increase efficiency would no doubt have begun to spread without a great deal of prompting. Nevertheless, the decision of President Lyndon B. Johnson, in August of 1965, that all federal agencies were to adopt such techniques in s e t t i n g up Planning-ProgrammingBudgeting Systems (PPBS) clearly accelerated the trend. PPBS involves an agency's setting its goals in terms of outputs, clustering the outputs rationally, measuring both the costs and probable benefits of various programs and finally choosing among alternatives. It is a complex process, and from the agencies that contract extensively with local governments, there has naturally been continuing pressure to force localities to submit grant applications and fiscal information in a form that fits the federal agency's PPBS structure. Take the Federal Highway Safety Act of 1966. To meet the requirements of that act, each state must develop a highway safety plan that meets certain federal standards. Since the standards apply, among other things, to auto registration, vehicle inspection, road markings and driver testing procedures, a number of state and local agencies have to be involved in the program. This complexity, coupled with the requirements for a two-year cost analysis and ten-year cost projections, demands centralized administration. The act orders-under threat of suspension of federal fundseach state to create a highway safety planning and management office to coordinate the statewide program. In effect, these requirements demand that the state establish a PPBS structure for highway safety. Administrative regulations in other federal programs press equally hard for centralized decision making. The Model Cities program, which calls for a certain level of community participation, grants only to localities that demonstrate "sound planning and programming" in their grant applications, thus demanding evidence of the capacity to establish New Management systems even before the processes of community control can begin. TRANS-ACTION

The message is clear, and more and more states and cities are getting it. A survey of state and locality use of PPBS showed more than half the states at least beginning steps; some 60 cities and counties were also establishing systems, while more than three times that number were actively considering doing so. At the same time, then, that there is a strong, perhaps irreversible, movement toward local community participation in governmental decision making, more and more decisions are going to be made in the middle levels of bureaucracies on the basis of highly technical cost-benefit studies. The potential for conflict is clearly high, for most community-based groups are simply not sophisticated at this kind of analysis. Beyond this, whatever the administrative advantages of PPBS may be, good cost-benefit analysis makes political compromise difficult, for it spells out alternatives clearly and makes trade-offs explicit. For instance, despite both an enormous squeeze on library funds and the existence of e x t e n s i v e research showing that middle-class white communities make much greater use of public libraries than do poor black neighborhoods, a "rational" decision to maintain branch hours in heavy-use (white) neighborhoods by cutting services in underutilized (black) branches would have severe political consequences. Under current conditions, the aggrieved community could only react to the fact of such a decision, not to the analysis behind it. However, there may be ways to harmonize community participation with the New Management. The underlying rationale behind the New Management techniques is that all public investment (men, money, machines and the like) should be made in ways that maximize benefits relative to costs. In a typical PPB system, there are a series of steps to be taken in pursuit of this goal: [] The government sets its goals and establishes its priorities. [] The government defines alternative ways of reaching the goals and calculates the cost of each of the alternatives. [] The alternatives are ranked in order 6

of preference according to the costbenefit ratio and the analysts' assessment of nonquantifiable costs and benefits. Although this summary is highly simplified, it frames the array of statistical and mathematical techniques that characterize the New Management. The problem is to determine the phase of this arcane process at which the community can most usefully participate. In the broadest sense, community participation-through the ballotalready influences the setting of goals and priorities. A mayor who is elected on a "law and order" campaign has already had certain implicit priorities approved by the voters. Budgets, which in most jurisdictions must be legislatively ratified and are subject to public hearings, represent another means by which community participation, however imperfectly, is included in the setting of priorities and goals. The community is, however, much less involved in the second step in the management process: insuring that all relevant alternatives are fairly considered. It is here that those who best know their communities can most fruitfully work w i t h - o r against-the central planners. There are two major obstacles to such involvement: first is the mystique of planning as objective and scientific, and second is the lack of community skill in analyzing alternatives in ways that satisfy federal funding sources. The first reflects the city planning tradition that the planner is a neutral figure, planning for the good of the total community, considering all relevant alternatives and choosing rationally among them. Despite the recent development of a school of committed or advocacy planning, the tradition holds strong. In addition, the New Management analysts bring elaborate mathematical models, systems analyses and irresistibly hardheaded Pentagon phrases like "more bang for the buck." The air of detached rationality and mysterious lore is hard to penetrate. The reality is rather different. Analysts assume certain values, most frequently those of their employer. (This is not to say that planners are hypocritical, but rather that they tend to seek employment in agencies whose

values are harmonious with their own.) Thus the planners for New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) plan mass transit that will meet the MTA's goals by moving large numbers of people as quickly, cheaply and efficiently as possible. These unexceptionable goals, however, recently led the MTA to advocate a direct subway route to Wall Street, bypassing Manhattan's impoverished Lower East Side rather than including stops in the ghetto community. The chance to bring a poor neighborhood into the mainstream of the city was simply not among the goals considered by the MTA, even though the incremental costs of extending the subway would have been more than offset by the economic improvement in the community. What is important in this example is not the ultimate outcome, a compromise unsatisfactory to all parties, but the way in which we can see the diligent, thorough MTA planners as rendered incapable of "rational" planning by their adherence to a limited value system. It makes more than simple political sense, therefore, to incorporate community participation in the planning process. And fortunately, analytical skills are for sale. Although such skills are scarce, any community group with sufficient funds could even now hire an analyst planner who shares its values to criticize and evaluate the work of government analysts. In such a case, not only would the community insure that its viewpoint would be adequately represented but the public interest would be served as well; alternatives that are developed and defended out of commitment are liable to enlarge a government's range of choice far more than alternatives advanced mechanically by central planners as they go about their daily tasks. All too often, central planners' alternatives are merely straw men whose demolition justifies an administrator's predetermined favorite. How would all this work? In the case of proceedings where public hearings are already required, the answer is clear. But local governmental decisions on such sensitive issues as how many sanitation men to put in a neighborhood, or whether police should patrol in pairs or singly, are made without TRANS-ACTION

hearings, and for such cases new procedures will have to be devised. Many useful changes may well come about as governments shift more completely to PPBS structures, organizing budgets by neighborhood as well as by agency. The shape of these future budget documents will inevitably make

budget hearings, more open to community participation than they are now, but a more important immediate step would require the periodic publication of agency analyses so that advocate analysts chosen by the communities could respond to them. This public debate would serve to

Conference On Problems, Programs And Prospects Of The American Working Class In The 1970"s Continuing Education Center Douglass Campus

Rutgers University New Brunswick, New Jersey October 1-2, 1971 This conference is a preliminary attempt to develop a systematic review of the actual conditions that prevail in the American working class. It seeks to find answers to such questions as the relationship of class to racial and ethnic attitudes; the disparity in life style and aspirations between organized and unorganized workers; the impact of Third World ideologies on working class attitudes; new dimensions to problems of working class "authorita$ianism"; working class health and welfare delivery systems; changing blue collar orientations to education and culture; working class ideologies in the light of the Cold War thaw; political participation and mobilization of the working class in political elections; differential demands of women in the work force. This conference is sponsored jointly by Rutgers University and transaction Magazine, and is supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. All lecture sessions are open to the interested public without charge; but due to limited facilities, those desiring to attend (other than the invited participants) must contact the secretary of the Department of Sociology of Rutgers University at Livingston College, who will, in turn, assist in matters of accomodation and transportation. Among those participating and presenting papers are the following: Irving Louis Horowitz (Director), Henry Berger, Robert Blauner, Lewis Carliner, William H. Form, J. David Greenstone, Herbert Hill, Julius Jacobson, Richard Kolm, John Laslett, John C. Leggett, Elliott Liebow, S. M. Miller, Ward Morehouse, Martin Oppenheimer, Frank Reissman, Brendan Sexton, Patricia Sexton, Jon M. Shepard, Arthur Shostak, Peter Stearns, George Sternlieb, Adolph Sturmthal and Stanley Weir. The actual theme of each paper and time of scheduled presentation will be decided at a later date. The exact title and theme of each paper is subject to the final decision by each participant. There will be three sessions: one Friday evening, October 1, 1971; and the next t w o on the morning and afternoon of October 2, 1971.

minimize the current likelihood of central analysts' making decisions that ought properly to be made through political processes, for community analysts would clearly have as one of their functions dramatizing the nonquantifiable costs and benefits of various alternatives. But the publication of the initial government analyses together with various alternative responses could do more than make decision making truly open to communities; it could also substantially raise the level of political debate, which all too often is dominated by demonstrations that dramatize only the fact that there are more tenants than landlords, or more students than teachers. As to who should pay for this process, I would argue that since we will all benefit, we should all pay. The assignment of public funds to a nonprofit analysis corporation, which would, like lawyers of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), respond to all qualified clients within a given jurisdiction, is one possibility. Another is the method of the OEO experiments in community-involved physical planning: grants given directly to communities who choose and hire their own analysts. A third possibility is the establishment of university programs for training community analysts, using real planning issues as laboratory material. Although its outcome was disappointing, the initial antiballistic missile debate in Congress is an instance of the application of analytical techniques in a political framework. The ultimate Senate vote was of course based on political more than analytical criteria, but the senators and voters were informed on the issue by a staggering variety of government and nongovernment analyses, and the level o f debate was remarkably high throughout. The prospect of having a similar depth of information available to us as we make basic decisions about the policies that affect our cities daily is indeed exciting; it is also very much in reach. Geoffrey C. Stokes is assistant administrator at tbe Environmental Protection Administration in N e w York City.

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