Budgets are tight. Problems are tough. State and local governments have increased responsibilities, with out more money. Problems cut across jurisdictional lines and traditional departments. Like businesses, governments must change to cope with new realities. Old models cannot dealing with new problems.
Some Wisconsin local governments and state agencies are “breaking out of the box” to come up with new ways to deal with tough problems and tight budgets. The examples described here all pertain to water pollution and are all playing themselves out in northeastern Wisconsin. Each example provides a peek into the future. Together, they represent new models for governing ourselves. None of the models is perfect; none is entirely in place. They provide lessons about the characteristics that must be part of the new models that will emerge in government.
The Green Bay Metropolitan Sewerage District saved $55 million on a $125 million plant by thinking outside the box. The District decided that prevention is cheaper than treatment, so — working through the Brown County Solid Waste Department — it helped create a year-round, household hazardous-waste treatment facility that essentially paid for itself the first week it was open. Residents dropped off enough mercury to comprise the Dis trict’s total allowable discharge for the next 150 years, along with dioxin-laden materials, and a large quantity of DDT.
The District is committed to working with others to help learn and implement the most cost-effective means for cleaning the waters of the Fox and Wolf Rivers and the Bay of Green Bay. It created and provided initial funding for Fox-Wolf Basin 2000 (FWB 2000), a cooperative organization. A board of directors governs it; members are drawn from across the Fox-Wolf River watershed — including representatives of local government, environmentalists, industry, agriculture, citizens, and state elected officials. It is working to ensure a watershed approach, build scientific understanding to guide resource management strategies, and devise sensible policies. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) is undergoing a fundamental reorganization and reorientation so that it can address problems more effectively than ever before, and do it within a tight budget. The DNR is working hard to become more collaborative, friendlier, and effective by reinventing itself. From now on, if all goes as planned, the DNR will take a multidisciplinary approach with a focus on solving problems in subregions, grouped mainly around watersheds. It is a bottoms-up systems approach that is truly on the frontier of public organization. The Fox River Coalition (FRC), the fourth example, is a voluntary partnership of the Wisconsin DNR, industry, and local governments working to clean up river sediments poisoned with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) years ago. The Coalition is trying to learn how to clean the contaminated sediments without causing great harm to the local economy. The problem is that no one knows what to do, how to do it, or whether the attempt to clean the sediments will cause more harm than good.
The old models are characterized by various combinations of bureaucratic bludgeoning, one-size-fits-all thinking, extremely expensive technological fixes, activity as a substitute for action, and top-down thinking. In water-pollution control, those models have given us very clean effluent from treatment plants, but rivers filled with dirty water. Municipalities with modem treatment facilities face extraordinarily high marginal costs and almost no marginal payoffs, yet regulators continue to ratchet up the requirements while almost ignoring nonpoint pollution. In the Fox-Wolf basin, three-fourths of the phosphorous and 90% of the suspended solids reaching the lower section of the Bay of Green Bay come from rural sources. If every point-source discharger in the basin were closed down tight tomorrow, the state’s water-quality goals for the Bay could not be attained. The old models have taken us as far as they can. They are out of steam. The problem has changed right before their eyes. They are doing as much harm as good.
The new models will feature·cooperation and collaboration among governments at the same and different levels and between government and the private sector. Giantism is nearing an end. “Rafting up” among partners sharing similar visions will save money and time, and it will shift the focus to solving problems, instead of generat ing activity without much accomplishment. Cooperation and collaboration characterize the new models. They cut across boundaries. They are problem-focused and systems-oriented. Ideas flow from the bottom up and top down and sideways across disciplines and boundaries. The new paradigms are cost-conscious and concerned with effectiveness. They are, above all, pragmatic and action-oriented.
