President of the International City Management Association and City Manager at Moreno Valley in California, Norman King told delegates that Australia and the USA share many common issues. “Like you, we have been scaling back and things have been tougher,” he said.
“We first called this ‘downsizing’ but then changed to ‘rightsizing’. We have done so much now, it could be said we are capsizing!” He said that we must be careful not to become too focused on what we can provide for our citizens but how to harness the skills of both our workers and citizens.
Norman King said that in an era of Governments running out of money, of huge deficits mortgaging future generations, we must find ways for consumers of resources and products to pay, particularly where they inflict costs on others.
“We must look at incentives to make people change their ways,” he said. “We must move from a supply management mode, where we identify problems and treat them, to demand management, that is, reducing the problem rather than just throwing more money at it.”
He used the situation of encouraging people to recycle and reuse rather than keeping on building bigger and bigger landfills. “The rules of the game must shift from simply providing the services, to making people more responsible for their own actions, otherwise they will keep demanding more and more,” Norman King said.
“Councils are not just there to service citizens. People also have a responsibility to become actively involved in ensuring the success and well being of their community.”
He said in the USA there has been a shift back to the ‘barnraising’ approach. Based on the practice that if a barn was destroyed by fire, neighbours came over to rebuild it, people must get back to accepting responsibility for putting something back into their community. Various community watch programs and volunteerism are some examples working well. He said that people are rediscovering the importance of localism, of doing things for the good of the community.
“In the USA, it has been said the essential services Cities provide are police and fire. This is true but the real essential service is to help democracy work, nurturing the capacity for local self government to build better communities,”Norman King said.
