Should the Census count inmates as residents of the prisons where they’re held — often hundreds of miles from home? Or should they be tallied as citizens of the cities or counties they came from?

An agreement just reached between the U.S. Census Bureau and Rep. William Clay Jr. (Mo.), the chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees census issues, may signal an historic shift in how the bureau reports prisoners to state and local governments. The accord creates at least a chance for prisoners’ overwhelmingly urban home areas to get a better break on legislative representation.

Counting prisoners where they’re incarcerated didn’t matter a lot when America had modest numbers of inmates, usually held in institutions near their homes.

But all that’s changed in the last three decades as America’s prisoner counts have soared from about 500,000 in 1980 to 2.3 million today. The combination of tough “law-and-order” politics and development of a vast “prison industrial complex” has led to confinement of predominantly city-based convicts in hundreds of new prisons in small town areas.

Since the 1970s, with their economies and populations declining, rural areas have campaigned hard for prisons as a source of jobs for local residents. State legislators representing those areas back up the towns’ efforts and are likely to support indiscriminate “lock-em-up” strategies. Increasingly powerful prison guard unions take the same side and back pro-incarceration legislators in campaigns.

But far-from-home incarceration is bad penology. Inmates who are held at outstate (sometimes even out-of-state) locations receive far fewer family visits. More isolated, they’re destined to have a harder time readjusting on release. The practice feeds a negative spiral leading to more recidivism and demands for still more prisons.

But there’s another impact: because the Census historically counts inmates where they’re imprisoned, their numbers actually swell population counts — and legislative representation — for rural areas. The losers in political clout are then the very urban areas most of the prisoners come from.

The Prison Policy Initiative, an advocacy group that documents the impacts of mass incarceration, found 21 counties across the nation where at least 20 percent of the population were prisoners from another county. The reformers’ “case celebre” is Jones County in eastern Iowa, where a backhoe operator was elected to the Anamosa City Council with just two write-in votes, one his wife’s. Why? Because 95 percent of his ward’s population consists of 1,300 inmates in Iowa’s largest penitentiary– and none of them can vote.

Seven state senate districts in upstate New York, the Policy Initiative has calculated, would not have met minimum population requirements in the last decade if they’d not had significant prison populations. California, Texas, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin and Maryland are among other states in which the census count of inmates held in lightly populated small town areas can impact the political balance.

The distortion makes it less likely that a whole range of smart penal reform measures — electronic monitoring in place of imprisonment, community-based reentry programs and halfway houses, basic education and post-release employment programs — will receive adequate state support and funding.

The agreement Rep. Clay has negotiated with the Census Bureau doesn’t reach the full solution reformers would like — to count all inmates as residents of their home cities and counties, not their prison addresses.

But the bureau has agreed to make an early release, in 2011, of its counts of “group quarters” such as prisons. States will then have time to decide how, for purposes of the legislative reapportionment they’ll be starting next year, their prisoners should be counted: where the prisons or where the prisoners last resided before incarceration. Or they can choose not to count them for reapportionment purposes at all.

How the issue plays out over the long run won’t just influence state politics but big decisions in federal grants policies too. The Census Bureau itself last year identified some $436 billion worth of federal grant and direct assistance money that’s “allocated based on Census Bureau data,” with the largest items being Medicaid ($203 billion), unemployment insurance ($36 billion), highway funding ($34 billion). Nutrition, school and college aid, school lunches and Head Start are also impacted.

The reality is that prisons aren’t the only issue shortchanging urban areas. As the National Research Council confirmed in a 2009 study, there’s a long history of “differential net undercount” of blacks and Hispanics that “has led to their receiving less than their share of federal funds and political representation.”

Correcting the imbalance, compounded by many low-income residents’ fears of government and/or immigration laws, is no easy task for Census takers. But there should be no easier place to start than counting prisoners at their home addresses, not their prison cells.

WASHINGTON — Why in the world should Congress be considering a “Green Taxis Act”?

It’s because New York — plus Seattle, Boston, San Francisco and several other cities — want to switch their taxi fleets over to all-hybrid vehicles. But they’ve run into a big legal snag, and Congress may have to come to their rescue.

Switching cabs to hybrids promises some potentially stunning gains.

Take carbon emissions. In New York City, taxis alone account for 1 percent of total carbon emissions; switching them to hybrids would be the equivalent of taking 35,000 cars off the road.

Second, there’s gas consumption. A standard taxicab such as V-8 powered Ford Crown Victoria gets about 14 miles to a gallon of gas. But some hybrids, running on a combination of gasoline and electricity, get as much as 36. The hybrid advantage is especially high among taxis because they so often find themselves idling or creeping along in traffic, generating pollutants all the time. Hybrids just don’t need internal combustion energy in that situation.

In New York City, where the typical cab is driven 80,000 miles a year, the Crown Victoria consumes 5,700 gallons a year, the leading hybrids 2,200 gallons. If we want to curb American oil consumption, what better starting point?

Finally — and arguably most significantly — there is the health issue. Most vehicles are worrisome smog generators. Their tailpipes emit not just carbon dioxide but also nitrogen oxides, benzene and particulates. The public pays the price in heightened levels of asthma, other respiratory diseases, and increased susceptibility to cardiac incidents — triggering sometimes deep personal tragedies and drains on public health budgets.

So what’s the hang-up slowing down hybrid conversions across the country?

Taxi fleet owners, who lease out their cabs to individual drivers, flinch at the original hybrid purchase price (often several thousands dollars higher). The hybrids’ big savings end up not in the pockets of the fleet owners but the drivers, who buy their own fuel.

So in 2008, when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg set fuel standards designed to convert all of the city’s 13,237 taxis (its legendary “yellow cabs”) to hybrids by 2012, he was immediately challenged.

The city’s Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, which represents the fleet owners, went to court arguing that only the federal government has the power to regulate emissions and fuel efficiency. The Federal Clean Air Act and a companion environmental law of the 1970s, they argued, preempted states or local governments from regulating in the field.

A federal judge in New York ruled in favor of the fleet owners. Bloomberg was not pleased, declaring:
“The decision is not a ruling against hybrid cars, rather a ruling that archaic Washington regulations are applicable and therefore New York City and other cities are prevented from choosing to create cleaner air or a healthier place to live.”

Then the city passed an incentive program to encourage yellow taxi owners to convert to hybrids, and was again slapped down by the court.

Now the case is before the U.S. Court of Appeals and there’s a new player — the Obama administration. It’s entered the fray with a “friend of the court” brief vigorously defending the right of New York — and Boston in a parallel case — to set rules for its own taxicab fleets. The move is significant because it’s rare that the federal Justice Department would make a major point of defending states’ and localities’ rights.
And there’s another new player: Congress. The Green Taxis Act, permitting cities to move forward without preemption roadblocks, has been introduced by two New Yorkers — Sen. Kirstin Gillibrand and Rep. Jerrold Nadler.

The legislation, Nadler argues, would “finally empower New York City and other cities to make their fleets greener and more accessible.”

Gillibrand adds: “As a mother of an asthmatic child, I believe this bill is a win-win for our children and our efforts to combat climate change.”

There’s even a “Buy in USA” angle — the still-dominant Crown Victory is manufactured in Canada, but the leading hybrid alternative — the Ford Escape — is produced in the Kansas City area.

The big question, of course, is whether the Green Taxis Act will attract enough attention to achieve passage in a busy and distracted Congress.

Narrow parochialism might stymie it. Rohit Aggarwala, Bloomberg’s Director of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, says word has filtered back from some Capitol Hill circles that “it’s a joke because no one outside of New York thinks taxis are important.”

That would be sad: Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C. all have all expressed definite interest in the clean taxi program. Big fleets await clean-up in Houston, Miami, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Denver, Phoenix and St. Louis as well. Cumulatively, smaller cities’ fleets add up to big numbers.

If we Americans can’t give our cities a green light on this straightforward reform, then our health and climate futures are indeed dim.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.

WASHINGTON — Nicknaming a federal grant-in-aid program TIGER may seem an anomaly: federal disbursements, normally loaded with rules, regulations and complexity, rarely get called bold or ferocious.

But the government’s historic knee-jerk preference for roads gets a nip–maybe a deep bite–in the Transportation Department’s just-announced $1.5 billion in grants to states and cities under the “Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery” program–or TIGER.

As Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood explained to me last week: “TIGER is our opportunity to say to folks that we know you’re trying to do innovative and creative transportation things that never really fit our official formulas or program silos. This program is your opportunity to show you’re the innovators around the country.”

Each state and local government applicant, in short, had to show how many of the program’s goals it could reach– “shovel-ready” job production that fights recession and rebuilds the economy, safer streets and communities, environmental sustainability (such as reduced carbon emissions), and greater community livability.

There also seems to have been an unwritten factor: to be catalytic, providing the gap financing to move commendable but stalled local projects forward.

The contrast to money channeled routinely to roads justified if at all on reducing congestion–couldn’t have been more dramatic.

A TIGER-supported replacement for a deteriorated interstate bridge over the Arkansas River in Tulsa, for example, won’t just carry cars and trucks but include lanes for bikes and pedestrians, long-distance freight and passenger rail service, and also space for a commuter rail system that might otherwise have to wait a generation to be completed.

Beleaguered Detroit receives $25 million to help the city assemble funds for its first significant transit line in decades –a 3.4-mile light rail line up the central Woodward Avenue spine, seen as a major downtown economic stimulant and way for low-income Detroiters to access the center city.

Whitefish, Mont., is awarded $3.5 million to return its main street, now a high-speed truck route, to walkability and a retail-friendly small town character with curb-to-curb reconstruction, modern traffic controls and angled parking.

Then there’s New York City, where Transportation Department officials allocated $83 million in TIGER funds to improvements for Penn Station, now congested with more millions of passengers than it can reasonably handle. They hope the money will be a magic key to break the local political stalemate that has delayed developing a world-class station in the historic Farley Office Building across Eighth Avenue.

Where TIGER funds highways, it’s generally for missing links and interchanges. The bigger news is freight. A 2,500-mile “Crescent Corridor Freight Rail” network from the Gulf Coast to the Mid-Atlantic and involving eight states, receives funding. Plus, TIGER invests $100 million in the long-congested Chicago rail hub, a key to efficient delivery of goods nationwide.

It’s true TIGER is covering only 51 projects out of the 1,400 applications (total value $57 billion) it received. But if its “modal split” is a harbinger, future government transportation outlays may differ radically from the past. Just 23 percent of the TIGER projects are roads, compared to 26 percent for transit projects, 19 percent for rail, 7 percent for ports and 25 percent for multimodal facilities.

The tightly competitive TIGER grants process “is a smartly conservative, competitive, outcome-oriented way” to assure federal transportation dollars actually serve regions’ own planning goals, and support communities’ livability as well as mobility. That’s the judgment of Scott Polikov, a Texas town planner and transportation expert and board member of the Congress for the New Urbanism.

Polikov worked with a successful Dallas-area TIGER application to fund a new streetcar line that connects major employment centers, workforce housing, parks and walkable mixed-use neighborhoods as well as existing light and commuter rail lines. Regional cohesion helped win the day, he says, with the North Texas Council of Governments–which serves as the designated Metropolitan Planning Council (MPO) for its area–using the TIGER grant lure to pull together local jurisdictions that rarely work well together.

With Congress hard-pressed to find sufficient money for traditional large-scale highway projects, Polikov says the country’s leading MPOs would do well to coalesce for a competitive, less costly federal transportation program modeled on TIGER.

Potentially, state transportation departments, which have “ruled the roost” on dispensing both their own and federal formula-based transportation dollars, might resist that idea. But TIGER lets the cat out of the bag: Why shouldn’t state departments compete, too–especially in big projects with neighboring states, and not just roads but waterways and rail, with goals mixed from mobility to livability to carbon reduction?

The time’s clearly at hand to spend our transportation dollars a lot more smartly. TIGER’s roar: let competition come first.

Note to readers: Research by Rob Puente of Brookings’ Metropolitan Program also indicates the TIGER grants give metro areas a much bigger break than normal transportation allocations. Check this Brookings link for details.

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WASHINGTON — The tea party crowd has it dead wrong. We don’t need smaller government, we need smarter government that can look ahead, saving us crises and billions of dollars in the process.

A prime example: this winter’s record-breaking snow storms that left the Nation’s Capital region, due to insufficient snow-clearing equipment, immobilized days on end, at humongous cost to citizens, governments and private businesses.

Appalled at the inefficiency, Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein came up with an intriguing idea: Why not require everyone in the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia metro region to sign up for “snow insurance”?

Sure, it would cost something. Homeowners might have to pay $25 a year, businesses an average of $2,500. With the cash, local governments would guarantee no disruption of work or school after snowfall up to one foot, perhaps 36 hours maximum for a bigger storm.

Even if monster storms hit just every few years, the math works. The recent storm surge cost the federal government at least $400 million–$100 million a day–in lost productivity. Private businesses and jobs were hit hard–the overall loss to the region was likely close to $5 billion.

Yet with a “snow insurance”-funded extra $75 million a year, deployed to finance added manpower and technologically advanced snow removal equipment, the blow would have been dramatically less. Businesses would have stayed running, schools open. Government would have saved dramatically. Hourly workers would have been spared the bitter reversal of losing pay when they couldn’t reach work.

But just push snow insurance seriously, Pearlstein noted, and Republicans would castigate it as “the biggest tax increase in history.”

Yet the fact is–snow removal’s just one of thousands of potential smart, money-saving government moves. Environmental markets specialist Albert Appleton produced a slew of think-smartly-ahead ideas for thinking ahead at a recent New York conference on sustainable city finance, cosponsored by the Urban Age Institute and New York Academy of Sciences.

As New York’s environmental protection commissioner in the early ’90s, Appleton recalled, there was real danger that agricultural runoff in the Catskill Mountains would imperil the city’s legendarily clear waters, supplied from Catskill reservoirs.

There was an obvious “high tech” solution: build enormous water filtration plants. But they would have cost about $6 billion, triggering rocketing water and sewage rates for New York taxpayers. So Appleton chose another strategy–to make the Catskill farmers stewards of the watershed. Predictably, the upstate farmers bristled at the big city’s suggestions to limit pathogen and nutrient runoff from their operations. City demands would destroy their way of life, they claimed. So the solution: the city agreed to address the farmers’ concerns and paid for cleanup and safeguarding measures also designed to economically strengthen Catskill farming.

Not only has the Catskill environment improved, says Appleton, but “we have protected the champagne of drinking water for the future.”

And after that incident, he adds, whenever he saw audiences’ “eyes glaze over” when he made a pitch for environmental protections, “all I had to say (was) it’s like the watershed program–it’s cost-saving pollution prevention.”

Now, he insists, it’s time to scratch the 20th century one-issue-at-a-time, regulatory approach to environmental concerns. And to fix perverse incentives. A utility’s emissions, for example, easily cause asthma and other illnesses. But what’s the benefit to the company’s bottom line if it installs superior scrubbers or substitutes cleaner fuels?

Alternatively, Appleton proposes government should design market rewards for pollution-reducing measures–switching increasingly to “green” power and energy conservation. The goal should be an overall cleaner environment, through multiple steps, by diverse players, across entire watersheds.

Government spending choices need careful scrutiny, too he suggests: “Green energy is supported today mostly by subsidies. But that’s economically inefficient when we also continue to subsidize coal, oil and natural gas.” Costs for wind, solar and the like are now “within striking range” of fossil-based fuels, he adds. He sees fair economics as the route to greener power.

Plus, Appleton stresses, taxes should reflect true costs. To replace property taxes now facing widespread public revolt, he’d institute a “land services use tax” –the actual proportionate costs the public has to pay to support a piece of property, from roads to water lines to sewers to lighting to police protection. Compact, in-town and physically closeby developments would be the economic winners–not scattered home and office sites which actually cost far more to reach and service.

(A parallel innovation–the Henry George-era idea of putting local property taxes on the value of land, not buildings–has been tried sporadically over the years, with positive results in such cities as Pittsburgh. Proponents say its an incentive to clean up abandoned, vacant or rundown properties, benefiting cities, stimulating economic development in the process. The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy recently published a report detailing experiences of nations and cities that have tried the land value tax.)

So what does a “snow tax” have to do with funding for water supplies, pollution prevention, green energy and a fairer way to impose land-based taxes? Each of the steps could lead to higher productivity, a better environment, smarter and more nimble cities and regions, and ultimately more, not less, disposable cash for citizens.

Of course some experiments might founder. The political hurdles are huge. But aren’t we smart enough to at least try?

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WASHINGTON — For America’s cities and regions, this seems the worst of times. But take a look at their partnership with the federal government. It’s a rapid turn for the better.

Check virtually any local budget and the dark side slams you in the face. Tax receipts are taking a deep dive while cities’ needs, from sheltering the homeless to employees’ health coverage to storm recovery costs, are on the upswing. With slow recovery in jobs and property values, mayors and county officials will have a torturously tough job well into this decade.

But check the Obama fiscal 2011 budget, together with companion moves the White House is making to coordinate federal assistance to cities and metro regions. There’s a silver lining to these “worst” times.

One example: the budget asks Congress to approve $1 billion for the new National Housing Trust Fund–a key way for communities to fill the yawning shortage of affordable housing for their lowest income residents.

Plus, the administration is asking an extra $85 million to finance 10,000 added housing vouchers. In a break from many recent years, it’s requested 100 percent of the actual operating costs for public housing. A consolidated $350 million rental housing initiative would, it’s claimed, preserve 300,000 otherwise threatened assisted housing units. Community Development Block Grants would be funded at close to $4 billion. And the administration is asking Congress to make permanent its Build America bonds program, designed to cut cities’ costs for infrastructure projects.

Compared to the “cities-come-last” budget decisions of the Bush years, the contrast is vivid.

But there are two added, potentially decisive innovations in the Obama urban approach.

First, there’s the Obama crew’s steps to work around the “silos” of separate federal departments to make revenue streams for communities work in mutually reinforcing ways.

The radical idea of closely collaborating agencies emerged last June with an unprecedented agreement of the Departments of Housing and Urban Development and Transportation, plus the Environmental Protection Agency. Their “Partnership for Sustainable Communities” aims to embrace better quality and energy-efficient housing, access to adequate public transit, good jobs, quality schools, safe streets and environmental protections–regardless of which department’s technically responsible. The goal’s to have the federal government “speak with one voice” in its field operations.

The partner agencies are now moving forward on that agenda. HUD, for example, has a new Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, guided by Deputy Secretary Ron Sims, who learned the ropes of metro-area coordination as King County (Wash.) executive, and directed by Shelley Poticha, former president of the policy group “Reconnecting America.”

Add in Obama’s pitch for $1.8 billion worth of speeded-up federally-supported “New Starts” for local transit lines, plus over $10 billion for high-speed rail that would invigorate many metro areas’ economies, plus the Transportation Department’s $1.5 billion in “TIGER” grants for innovative local projects, and one sees a belated but critical 21st century city- and neighborhood building policy coming into focus.

It even reaches the Agriculture and Health and Human Services Departments–Obama seeks $400 million to fight the twin scourges of obesity and joblessness in poor communities through a Healthy Food Financing Initiative. Fresh, more nutritious foods would be delivered to inner-city “food deserts” by helping new farmers markets take root and constructing new supermarkets.

This administration seems to truly believe that investing smartly in troubled neighborhoods can dramatically increase life prospects–especially for poor children.

Case in point: the new budget designates $250 million for a “Choice Neighborhoods” program to link housing to school reform and supportive social services. And perhaps most exciting of all, a “Promise Neighborhoods” initiative ($210 million). Its goal: to bring the innovative, proven multi-pronged “cradle to college” strategies of the Harlem Children’s Zone into communities nationwide, breaking barriers by working with parents and their children starting right after birth, and providing kids with smartly-conceived, ongoing, personalized support.

The Promise Neighborhoods idea is complex: it requires collaboration of city halls, corporations, community foundations, neighborhood centers, schools, health clinics, religious bodies and human service agencies. But it’s possibly the best formula yet invented to break the bitter cycle of inter-generational poverty that so easily ruins personal lives, so often fills prison cells, and cumulatively acts as a dead weight on our entire society.

Mayors seem to appreciate the administration’s outreach, underscored by officials’ frequent field tours. They see serious intent to strengthen communities, to help them develop sustainable strategies to make us a more equitable and healthy society. It’s serious stuff, and could eventually equal the post-World War II GI Bill in expanding our middle class and building our collective national strengths.

But might it all wither in recriminations over taxes, deficits or a “teaparty”-style political backlash? Will today’s glittering silver lining tarnish and disappear? That’s the profound danger.

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Are we ready to retire the old bugaboo that any American mayor better think twice before visiting a foreign city — that the press back home will pillory him or her for “junketeering”?

Just possibly. “Gotcha” stories about foreign travels are still feared by mayors. But they’re dangerous anachronisms. Our cities’ economies and wellbeing actually require inventive foreign connections. Trade opportunities and enriching local economies still top the list. But new considerations are flooding in — for example the well-advertised global competition for the footloose young professionals, looking for “live” local scenes and cultural diversity.

The hands-down American regional leader on learning from abroad has been Seattle with its array of highly export-oriented firms. For 17 years Seattle has sent sizable delegations (70 or more) of business, political and civic leaders to see first-hand how a major foreign city and region really “clicks.” I’ve personally accompanied three of those visits — to Sydney, Hong Kong and Berlin — and discovered they’re significant eye-openers. Recently Seattle delegations have visited such cities as Fukuoka and Abu Dhabi — hardly our grandparents’ world city list.

In contrast to yesteryear’s idea that we Americans “know it all” and don’t need foreign input, there’s growing awareness — appreciated by boardrooms and city halls, growing more slowly in popular awareness, that today’s global standard for successful leadership is “go look.”

Last year my colleague Tim Campbell, board chair of the Urban Age Institute, conducted a survey of 16 high-income world cities. Every one of them had sent out high-level delegations to metropolises in other countries. All the cities were engaged in at least nine visits a year, with some making as many as 30.

A top example — Chicago. In a special blue ribbon report, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs ranked global engagement, along with continued infrastructure improvement and building human capital, as keys to securing and keeping position among the top ranks of competitive towns worldwide.

The report touted Chicago’s success in global business services, corporate headquarters, worldwide transportation links, attracting the “creative class,” and strong public-private partnerships. But it said the city and region had to keep hustling on such problem areas as public schools, traffic congestion, and the region’s fragmented governance (at least 1,200 separate units with taxing power). Reform moves were urged in all those areas — plus the emerging issue of climate change, in which outside experts rate Chicago’s programs among the best in the world.

The panel also looked forward by calling for a Mayor’s Office of International Affairs to receive visiting delegations and to set priorities for overseas travel by the mayor and other officials. It also urged a distinct budget focused precisely on foreign travel by the mayor and other city officials.
Atlanta is another city gung-ho for international connections — a tradition begun by Andrew Young when he was mayor (1981-89). Returning last year from a trip to Chile for the Americas Competitiveness Forum — an event hosted frequently by Atlanta itself — Mayor Shirley Franklin boasted of her city’s international outreach efforts:

“We’ve established a perfect example of partnership that other cities, even other countries, want to emulate.” Franklin asserted that Atlanta has become “an important gateway for the America’s, and provides a perfect entry point for companies from Europe and Asia to enter the United States.”

But again, success means facing up to serious challenges– among them, in Franklin’s words, “foreign language instruction, improving multi-cultural awareness and diversity, and increasing our focus on math and science.”

An unsurprising set of most globally connected cities — among them New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Singapore and Chicago — emerged in a “Global Cities Index” developed by the journal Foreign Affairs, the consulting firm A.T. Kearney and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

But you don’t need to be “mega” in size to benefit substantially from foreign contacts, Campbell notes in a new report for the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. He cites Barcelona, Charlotte, Portland and Turin as examples of cities that have used foreign travels to gather learning and ideas to help them register major gains over the past generation.

Campbell notes Barcelona’s post-Franco flowering including the 1992 Summer Olympics, Portland’s urban growth boundary and building a street-friendly, transit-oriented setting, Charlotte’s banking advances, and Turin’s strategic planning exercises and economic advances. That doesn’t mean anything’s guaranteed: witness Charlotte’s current crisis of banking shrinkage including the disappearance of Wachovia, one of its top anchors.

But a city that’s “learned to learn” in this global age is far better positioned to recoup, to adapt and move forward. The media and the general public need to take note: face-to-face learning by a city’s leaders isn’t some luxury; rather it’s a competitive imperative.

Note to readers — an excellent companion commentary, by Bill Barnes of the National League of Cities, may be found at the NLC website. The article has a mega-view of U.S. competitiveness in these times, and also pays appropriate credit to our Citistates Group colleague, Bill Stafford, for his years of foresight articulating the need for American urban regions to position themselves for the challenges of the new global economy.

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Swimming in red ink, deficits rolling in as far as the eye can see, what are America’s state governments to do?

The “realists,” notes government reform expert Ted Kolderie, “tell us the only options are to cut and to tax.” Their clear message, he suggests: “With more we can do more; with less we have to do less. We don’t do ‘different.’”

But they’re bitter consequences, especially in a recession. Budget cuts reduce vital services. Increased taxes just take money out of peoples’ pockets, perversely making economic recovery all the tougher.

Raymond Scheppach, executive director of the National Governors Association, hears lots about the monstrous budget dilemmas the 50 state governors face. The time’s at hand, he believes to “to look at new and different governance models for the delivery of services.”

I asked him for examples and he didn’t hesitate.

A top idea: Curb our states’ “endless incarceration” practices — failed logic in a nation that already imprisons more people than any other on the planet. At a January meeting, Scheppach relates, one governor proclaimed: “I’m not going to build any more prisons from now on. We have to find a different way.”

Ask criminal justice specialists, and big majorities cite reasonable solutions running from residential programs to electronic monitoring, drug decriminalization to community service.
Next on Scheppach’s list: higher education. “States have to stop putting money into new buildings and campuses. We need to move to a high degree of undergraduate education online.”

A top example: Western Governors University, an online institution created by 11 Western governors 13 years ago and administered from Salt Lake City. It now has 17,000 students from 50 states and is the nation’s largest supplier of urban math and science teachers.

Says David Osborne, coauthor of “Reinventing Government” and “The Price of Government in an Age of Permanent Fiscal Crisis”: “We should quit paying for higher education except for research, and give the money to the students, letting them choose the universities that meet their needs.”

As for public schools, Osborne would transform local school boards into “chartering boards” that would contract with independent groups, like charter schools, to run schools, regularly renewing or discontinuing contracts based on their performance in educating children. Teacher unions are adamantly opposed. But cities such as Washington, D.C., Milwaukee and Houston, aiming for better student achievement for public dollars invested, are moving toward the new model.

But the biggest fiscal savings, says Osborne, can be won on health care. Medical bills are already 35 to 40 percent of states’ budgets and rising rapidly. Yet studies by experts at Dartmouth College show the more doctors and hospital beds per capita in a region, the higher the cost and, amazingly, often lower average health outcomes.

So what should states do? Decree a shift, says Osborne, from fee-per-service to a competitively determined total flat fees for a given procedure — a knee replacement for example. Typical expense-compounding billing for each separate step, from diagnosis to X-ray to anaesthesia to recovery care, would be ruled out. Likewise, primary care physicians would get flat fees for caring for a person of any given age for a year — again discouraging unnecessary procedures. There would be coordinated statewide electronic record keeping and a new system of health courts set up to contain malpractice costs.

Longer-term, Osborne adds, states need to save health dollars by curbing the obesity epidemic — “Americans eating themselves to death.” Fiscal sanity demands curbing highly expensive long-term care for diabetes and heart conditions. How? Tax junk food. Champion exercise and sound diets. And then, with increasingly older populations consuming some 25 percent of health care dollars in their last year of life, institute more end-of-life care — avoiding, for example, heart bypasses for weakened 89-year-olds.
So what about the hundreds of billions of dollars that state governments owe in unfunded pension obligations and retiree health care? Scheppach has one answer: the so-called “defined benefits” system, with its lifetime guarantees, “just has to go.” State workers — at least new ones — would have to manage their own 401-k or comparable plans.

Perhaps, says Scheppach, states should “hire private sector people willing to come into government for three to five years.” They’d be paid competitive salaries, bring in fresh blood and ideas, and provide a clear alternative to the prevalent pattern of retaining state workers for 25 years or more and then owing them high lifetime defined benefits.

Put another way, state workers would be job-mobile (like most of us), and not receive retirement benefits superior to the taxpayers who support them.

Are all these ideas practicable? Maybe not all. Each would trigger political battles. But if we can’t pass imaginative reforms in today’s fiscal storm, then when? Inaction means prolonged fiscal misery, deep deficits, and a less competitive United States.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.

“This may be the most calamitous fiscal year states have known in decades,” reports Rob Gurwitt in Governing magazine, the 23-year old bible on coverage of state and local governance across the continent.

And the coming fiscal year, experts are predicting, may be almost as grim as the states run out of budget gimmicks, rainy day funds and the infusion of federal stimulus money that helped them, finally, to balance their current budgets. The states’ cumulative 2010 and 2011 budget shortfalls may be about $350 billion–a third of a trillion dollars–estimates the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Why such grim news? Sales and personal tax receipts, which soared in the last decade because of the hot, credit-driven consumer economy, cratered with the recession. The pre-recession revenue levels, Governing reports, “will either take an unusually long time to recover, or never do so.” Indicators of prolonged fiscal migraines run from the ravages of industrial decline in the Great Lakes states to the mortgage crises that have tripped the Sunbelt’s perpetual growth machines.

All states face increasing health care costs for their needy. And then there’s the long-term debt that states have incurred–in bonds they’ve sold, in pensions and post-retirement health benefits, in replacement or maintenance of physical infrastructure that can’t be permanently ignored. Governing columnist John E. Petersen comes up with a startling $2.4 trillion of “aggregated indebtedness” the states carry. And they’re unlike the federal government, which with an accumulated debt of some $12 trillion, can at least print money and borrow (up to a point) at will.

Ironically, if crisis has hit the states, it’s also hit Governing magazine itself. Its former parent corporation, the St. Petersburg Times, late last year insisted on unloading it for cash. And there’s fear the magazine itself may never again be what it was in its heyday under founder Peter Harkness. The top bidder and buyer, e.Republic, does publish credible trade magazines such as Government Technology. But, as the New York Times reported, the fact that its top managers are members of the Church of Scientology has caused some uneasiness.

E.Republic’s first move was to slash Governing’s staff including more than half the magazine’s top brain trust of such editor/writers as Alan Ehrenhalt, Christopher Swope, Penny Lemov, Ellen Perlman and Alan Greenblatt, plus deputy publisher Elder Witt–almost anyone earning a high salary.

I recall hoping through the ’70s and ’80s that someone would start up a quality magazine focused on states and cities. Then Governing, a class act, appeared. Now there’s just hope–and little more–that the junior writers and free-lancers the new management relies on will be able to keep up the quality.

And hope, to be candid, may be all we can harbor for the states too. “The realization has started to dawn,” Gurwitt reports, “that fundamental assumptions about how state government operates needs rewiring.” Or in the words of Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, “that we’re facing a near-permanent reduction in state revenues that will require us to reduce the size and scope of our state governments.”

California, with its monstrous deficits, its emblematic issuance of IOU’s instead of real money, its furloughs of state workers, has received the most national attention. But Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm warns that her state budget may need another 20 percent cut, after last year’s 10 percent gouge. Granholm suggests shrinking the state government from 18 departments to eight. Florida’s budget is down 28 percent from its peak in 2006. Illinois faces a yawning $12 billion hole in a $26 billion budget. Check New Jersey, New York, Arizona, Georgia, Oklahoma–indeed all but a few resource-rich states like Wyoming–and you find more of the same fiscal agony.

And money’s not the only problem. Fierce partisanship and prolonged legislative standoffs–reminiscent of today’s Congress–have impacted states nationwide (as Alan Greenblatt describes in another Governing article). The legal progeny of California’s infamous Proposition 13 of 1978–requirements of super-majorities to pass tax increases, either state or local–make accords in tough times incredibly hard to forge.

“I’d like to see see states think a lot more strategically–where they can and should be in ten years,” says Scott Pattison, executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers. But too little is happening, he acknowledges. States don’t yet have the political will to extend sales taxes to services–the growth area of their economies. America is dramatically “overincarcerated” by world standards, but legislators fear political kickback if they release even low-level offenders. The new talk is of cutting seriously into school and university budgets, where there are clearly inefficiencies–but also the danger of a society failing to seed its future.

Bottom line: state governance in America is in for an incredibly rough ride. And all of us with it.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.

WASHINGTON — Most everyone agrees that efficient roads, rails and air service are vital for our economy and our quality of life. Most of us see that without them, America will have a hard time competing against rising powers worldwide.

So why is Congress stalling? Representatives and senators know well that the federal transportation program expired last September. They keep passing temporary extensions without facing up to core issues–for example the federal gas tax stuck at 18.4 cents a gallon, unchanged for 17 years, despite escalating asphalt and concrete prices.

And why do we keep on paving over more and more of our landscape instead of embracing a “fix it first” strategy? Can’t we make our roads and transit investments match our housing choices in a “post-sprawl” era? Why aren’t regions being told that they had better link roads, rail and available air service for a smarter “intermodal” future?

The easy answer is always that Congress is too busy with the health bill and other crowded agendas. Bridges aren’t collapsing very often. Road congestion is bothersome, but we have little faith in expanded roadways either. Plus, people are more excited by the Obama administration’s embrace of a national “high-speed” rail system than more miles of asphalt.

So there was scarcely a ripple when Felix Rohatyn, respected and veteran civic leader, warned that “America’s roads and bridges–the country’s entire infrastructure–is rapidly and dangerously deteriorating.”

Steve Heminger, director of the Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission, is quoted as bemoaning: “Is anyone listening out there?” Transportation expert Kenneth Orski even warns that the second jobs stimulus measure the Obama administration is likely to recommend could be a “death warrant” for full-scale transportation reform because it will likely include some quick road repair funds.

Most transportation experts think the gas tax is not only on its last legs, but should be replaced by some kind of electronically monitored system measuring how many miles a car is actually driven. But the idea likely needs lots of testing and the White House, in a recession economy, is opposed.

So what do we get? A series of short-term program extensions, forcing Congress to make up for declining gas tax proceeds with general revenue funds–i.e, deficit spending. In the process most dollars are left flowing through traditional transportation “stovepipes” that are tilted heavily to roads over transit, traffic “throughput” over community livability.

Where we ought to be heading, says John Robert Smith, president and CEO of the reform group Reconnecting America, is an “intermodal” future in which road, rail and air service are all tightly connected rather than disjointed and competing.

And Smith, a Republican who built a high quality multimodal downtown terminal as mayor of Meridian, Miss., then served as chairman of the Amtrak board of directors, has high hopes that transportation reauthorization can avoid the bitter partisanship that now infects Congress:

“For Republicans, this is a national security issue, freedom from foreign oil and more Chinese debt. It’s brick and mortar and steel that will bring a return on investment, promoting business opportunities. On the Democratic side, it’s about equity, connecting people, broadening transportation choices.”

Transportation hasn’t typically been a partisan issue, notes Emil Frankel, former Transportation Department official and currently transportation policy director of the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center. But Frankel cautions that this time party differences might surface if climate and energy issues start to play a significant role.

“An even bigger obstacle to reform,” he says, “could be opposition of existing stakeholders–from construction firms and unions to transit operators–all trying to protect and expand funding they receive under current programs.”

Add up the potential pitfalls and it’s indeed hard to see Congress acting early, despite a comprehensive reauthorization bill introduced last year by Rep. James Oberstar (D-Minn.). What’s more, members may flinch at daring to pass a multi-billion dollar authorization measure just before the midterm elections.

Alas! Rohatyn and others are right–our infrastructure is crumbling. We do need a system that values performance over special interest protection. We need state transportation departments to place a priority on maintenance and cater to fewer politically-motivated bridges–or roads–to nowhere.

And for the future, in this overwhelmingly metropolitan nation, we need explicit, clear transportation choices made in and for our city regions. The existing MPO (metropolitan planning organization) model for transportation choices needs a serious shakeup–starting with fair apportionment and demanding only one MPO in each metro region, not the splintered structures some regions now exhibit.

It’s only at the metro level, notes Smart Growth Leadership Institute chairman Parris Glendening, that there can be truly effective links of transportation with housing, economic competitiveness, carbon reduction, reducing vehicle miles traveled and promoting national security by reducing energy consumption.

It’s a massive challenge. The consequence if we miss it: a less livable, less prosperous America.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.

NEW YORK — Why can’t humans–intelligence officials, for example–communicate better? And what’s a possible cure?

The close call on an airliner Christmas Day has resurrected and underscored a problem already targeted in the 9/11 investigations: highly trained officers failing to share critical intelligence clues across agency lines.

Why are we repeating the same errors? How do we “fix” the system?

A week after the near-disaster of the Detroit-bound jet, an intriguing remedy–at least a possible answer–cropped up. And not in official Washington, but rather in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s third-term inaugural address in New York City.

Bloomberg recalled a successful effort he’d introduced in private business–temporarily reassigning senior managers to new areas, “an eye-opening exercise that improved teamwork, generated new ideas, and launched the company to greater heights.”

So, said the mayor, within a few days he’d start reassigning every one of New York’s first deputy commissioners to become a deputy for three weeks at another agency– “one they regularly work with,” working directly with that agency’s commissioner– “side by side, 24/7.”

Bloomberg didn’t mention our national intelligence breakdowns, but he did identify a highly relevant goal– “to break down the bureaucratic barriers that too often impede innovation, compromise customer service, and cost taxpayers money.”

One has to wonder–Wouldn’t we (and national security) benefit if State, CIA, NSA, FBI–the whole alphabet of federal intelligence-based agencies–broke down their barriers in similar fashion?

Each of his deputy commissioners, Bloomberg said, will be obliged to “report directly back to me with recommendations for ways their own agencies–and the agencies they’ve been assigned to–can work more closely together to improve their performance.”

Bloomberg continued: “This is not a game of musical chairs. This is a management challenge, and a unique opportunity for collaboration and innovation.” And, he added: “As I tell everyone I hire, don’t screw it up.”

The nation would do well to keep its eyes on Bloomberg’s experiment–and not just in the interest of a formula that might get intelligence departments communicating quickly and effectively, in our pressing national interest.

The serious issue of failing to talk early and share information, often and creatively across the “silos” of department and agency lines isn’t new. It’s deeply ingrained. And you can find it at any level of government–federal, state or local–wasting enormous public wealth and benefit in the process..

I’d argue it starts at the neighborhood, city and regional level. Ask what makes an area successful? Is it adequate police or fire protection, social services, schools, libraries, or quality maintenance of our shared space on streets and public places? Or “unseen” services ranging from clean water to sanitation services? The answer, clearly, is “all of the above.”

Yet in fact, there are many local agencies that fail to talk with one another in more that a perfunctory way–especially across municipal lines. Each exists in its separate “silo.” There are few bureaucratic (or political) rewards for coordination or risk-taking partnerships. So money is wasted and the quality of life is lower than smart, coordinated teamwork might deliver.

Tick up to the state level and the silos are just as pronounced. Human services, transportation, environmental protection, law enforcement–each normally operates in its own orbit, fairly oblivious of the others.

The federal government? It’s become, the Brookings Institution’s Bruce Katz said last year, “an ossified network of specialized and balkanized agencies at a time when most challenges require integrated solutions that ‘join up’ related areas of domestic policy.”

The Obama administration is at least trying to implement some coherence by getting its housing, transportation, energy and environmental protection agencies to coordinate field operations.

Several states–among them Virginia, Iowa and Utah–are emulating corporate ideas of an “enterprise-wide perspective” including common training of executives, shared procurement and information technology services that can drive down costs. Two Massachusetts governors–Michael Dukakis and Mitt Romney–both made classic efforts to set clear state growth policies and then get their relevant departments working in unison to achieve coordinated results. Many far-sighted mayors try the same.

But it’s always tough sledding because department heads and entrenched bureaucrats alike typically think (even unconsciously)– “This is my turf. Knowledge, ultimate authority, is in my head. Asking me to share is either a threat or an insult.” Perhaps it goes back to America’s cultural norms: “It’s about me, the rugged individual.”

But there may be hope. Martin O’Malley, with his “CitiStat” operation as Baltimore’s mayor and now “StateStat” as governor of Maryland, has pushed tough, data-driven accountability of department heads and other key officials “facing the music” together in joint sessions. Several other cities have emulated the model.

And now we have Bloomberg’s experiment of cabinet officials not only observing, but critiquing and reporting back to him on the performance of each others’ departments. A dose of parallel discipline in intelligence circles might make us all safer.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.