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Archive: Bill Dodge

Regional Governance: Thai Style

Bill Dodge / Dec 30 2011

For Release Friday, December 30, 2011
Citiwire.net

Bill DodgeThe Kingdom of Thailand practices governance with some unusual twists, some of which offer intriguing models for regional governance in America.

During my recent visit, Thailand was struggling with massive flooding. I monitored the interactions among national, provincial and local governments during the disaster. And I spent time with flood refugees in Pattaya, a city renown for sun and sex south of Bangkok.

Thailand is unique among its neighbors as having never been a European colony. It was ruled by an absolute monarchy until the 1930s and still has a strong royal presence in a constitutional monarchy. The national government structure has a prime minister, National Assembly with a House and Senate, and a complex judiciary — in all a blend of western laws and cultural practices that go back to the Khmer roots of the kingdom.

The Thai people have suffered through 16 constitutions, usually triggered by governance crises or military coups. Most of the constitutions make only small changes in the basic government structure. But each redistributes political and economic clout among the traditional powers — old families, the military, and the royal family — often with little consideration of citizen desires. Read More »

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Time for New Charters: The Regional Future of Local Government

Bill Dodge / Jun 19 2010

For Release Sunday, June 20, 2010
Citiwire.net

Bill DodgeLocal governments have strengthened their capacities multifold during my professional life. I recall vividly working with some that once keep financial records by hand, depended on snail mail for communications, and only responded to their neighbors under court order. Conversely, I have seen local governments earn the respect, and accompanying tax dollars, to provide state-of-the-art roads and sewers, public safety and recreation programs, and even bus service and affordable housing.

Yet in spite of this increased competency, individual local governments have been losing the ability to address many of their toughest challenges — the ones that cut across jurisdictional boundaries — at an increasing pace since the turn of the century. If there has ever been a time for innovation in local government, it is now.

Crosscutting challenges are not new. Some were predetermined by our natural environment. For example, local governments realized that taking drinking water out upstream and dumping waste water downstream only worked for the jurisdiction at the headwaters. Everyone else was going to drink someone else’s pollution. The same was discovered when the jurisdictions drawing on a common aquifer exceeded its ability to replenish itself and had to keep digging deeper wells. Neighboring local governments realized that they needed to negotiate watershed plans to assure adequate and potable drinking water. Ditto for airshed plans to breathe clean air.

Read More »

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Bridging the Urban-Rural Divide: Hope at Last?

Bill Dodge / Mar 05 2009

For Release Sunday, March 8, 2009
Citiwire.net

Bill DodgeThe bane of our polarized politics is nowhere more evident than in attempts to create effective partnerships among central cities (often politically blue), surrounding suburbs (variations of purple), and fringe rural areas (often red). Even when the logic of seizing common economic opportunities or thwarting common environmental threats is compelling, it’s difficult at best to reach agreements on how to deliver cost-effective services in such fields as roads, transit, sewer, water–indeed almost any critical service area. And when it comes to addressing such social challenges as fiscal inequities between rich and poor jurisdictions, the task borders on the impossible.

And that’s just in more urban regions. Pursuing partnerships between more urban regions (often blue) and more rural regions (often red) is usually deemed politically suicidal.

As President Obama strives to build bridges across the red-blue divide of our politics and society, a key pillar of that strategy needs to be regional cooperation. Read More »

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From Greenfields Frontier to a Renewable Frontier?

Bill Dodge / Dec 12 2008

For Release Sunday, December 14, 2008
Citiwire.net

Bill Dodge In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner bemoaned the closing of the western frontier. Until then, unfettered expansion onto free land had been the nation’s development dream, even though it required forcibly dislocating its Native Americans. By the 1890s Census, however, the unrelenting flow of humanity, along with setting aside Native American reservations, had brought settlement to points across the untamed wilderness of the West. The closing of the western frontier undermined America’s hopes for the future.

This year, 2008, may mark the closing of another frontier–the greenfields frontier. For over a half century, the nation has experienced unfettered expansion of human settlements, urban and rural, onto low cost greenfields.

A piece of earth and a car to drive has been central to the current development dream, resulting in explosive low density sprawl. New communities sprung up so quickly, and randomly, that they overwhelmed city annexation, even if it had been desired. But it wasn’t. Part of the dream was to flee the problems of the cities and set up new, more perfect, communities.

Instead, the new communities grew independently, often with little knowledge of their neighbors’ actions. Typically just in times of crises would they came together to deliver common services, such as sewer and water. Read More »

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