At a time when government at all levels often
seems paralyzed by partisanship and hidebound thinking, it’s refreshing to hear
an elected leader seek advice from those with a track record for
customer-friendly and cost-cutting innovations. The residents of Macomb County
should pat the chairman of their Board of Commissioners on the back for doing
just that.
In a major public address on March 18, board
Chairman William Crouchman asked the business community to help streamline
county government operations. He is forming a task force of experienced managers
in private enterprise to assess county practices against those proven effective
in the private sector. Hallelujah!
To those who might assume that Crouchman must
be a Republican, he is not. He is a Democrat from St. Clair Shores. In local
government, good policy is generally a lot less partisan than it is at the state
and federal levels. Regardless of party, the folks in the levels of government
closest to the people are usually more interested in getting the job done than
sniping at the other guys. This illustrates the wisdom of "the principle of
subsidiarity," a pillar of our federal system: If it’s a government function, no
government should do it if it can be done better at a more immediate and local
level.
Successful, private businesspeople have much
to offer that springs from having to please customers or go out of business. But
even they can learn a thing or two from a book on occasion. One I would highly
recommend to the members of Commissioner Crouchman’s task force is "Governing
by Network: The New Shape of the Public Sector," by Stephen Goldsmith and
William D. Eggers. Goldsmith is a former mayor of Indianapolis and Eggers is an
experienced local government expert with backgrounds in both the public and
private sectors. Goldsmith and Eggers challenge the
reader to think of government less as the actual provider of certain
goods and services and more as the facilitator of them. The book is
chockfull of examples of leaner, better government.
As Crouchman noted
in his address, these are lean times in Michigan and they are likely to get
leaner before they get fatter. County government can be smarter than state
government, which last fall slapped our shrinking private economy with a $1.4
billion tax hike. I congratulate the commissioner on taking a smart step in the
direction of getting county government’s work done better and less expensively.
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Lawrence W. Reed is
president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research and educational
institute headquartered in Midland, Mich. Permission to reprint in whole or in
part is hereby granted, provided that the author and the Center are properly
cited.
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