With about 40 years of teaching and working in public policy and administration, Steve Harding’s latest effort has been starting his own personal blog, Practitioner-Scholar. CBJ interviewed Mr. Harding about his new efforts, lessons learned over the years and what his goals are for Practitioner-Scholar.
1. Tell us a little bit about your background and past work experience.
In roughly a 40-year span, I have served nearly 60 public, private, non-profit, and academic institutions. One would probably need a road map in order to follow my professional background. In one respect, it could be said that it has gone full circle. In 1975, I was an MPA student and a Graduate/Teaching Assistant in the brand new Center for Public Policy & Administration at Long Beach State. Now, I am an Adjunct Professor teaching some of the very same courses at Northwestern University.
So, what happened in between? With the exception of working for Colgate Palmolive and serving as Vice President of the $1 billion Larwin Development Company, I spent the first half of my career working directly for cities. My first city of 90,000 people promoted me five times in five years. By year six, I was a Deputy City Manager in another city of roughly 30,000. By year 10, I was reporting directly to a nine-member board of directors and the San Diego City Council as President of the City’s Southeast Economic Development Corporation (SEDC). By year 20, I was two years into being City Manager of the City of Murrieta.
Over the next 20 years, I [was] a Managing Principal, Vice President, or Director of Government Services with different municipal management, financial, and economic development consulting firms. I have also taught nearly 40 sections of graduate level courses at four universities.
2. When did you start your website Practitioner-Scholar and what was the inspiration behind it?
It started on May 15th, 2015. I am an amateur at this, so it took a couple of days to get it up and running. The format is bound to change over time but the content will probably be somewhat the same. Without any real formalized release, it did receive 993 hits in the first week.
My intent for even starting such a project is to provide local government practitioners, especially those early in their careers, a more centralized source of information not readily available through the usual cast of professional sources. My focus is on trends, regional systems, demographics, public service and public policy and not on the mechanics of management. I certainly will post my own work, but I do spend time researching various academic journals, think tanks and newswires for pertinent information. I have always asked both students and employees alike to go beyond just focusing on the “What We Do” and “How We Do It.” They need to continually ask “Why” we do it.
3. What are some of the key lessons you have learned over the past 37 years of working in public policy and administration?
For the most part, the daily lives of the public do not revolve around City Hall. Cities are different, regions are different, their political, socio-economics are different. Our professional experiences and understandings sometimes do not easily transfer from one community to the next. One set of administrative techniques, leadership silver bullets, or a recipe from the “Management Flavor of the Month Club” does not fit all. The issues facing a high unemployment rate agricultural community in the central valley, or an older multi-ethnic inner-city suburb with systemic crime and low educational attainment, differ from those in established homogenized affluent or newly minted suburbs. Some common professional applications are appropriate. Some are not. It helps to be of the people as well as for the people.
Mainly due to the daily demands and pressures of managing local government agencies, many professional public administrators have a tendency to forget they operate within a broad democratic system that is beyond the political needs of their respective elected bodies. Some treat the public as a burden rather than partners. As such, some efforts to communicate or to prove transparency may come across as nothing more than a series of perfunctory managerial techniques. In order to build trust, the dialog with the community has to be genuine, meaningful and continuous. Democracy sometimes is assumed to be a characteristic of politics rather than politics being a characteristic of democracy.
Many professionals in the public sector think they know all about the private sector. Concurrently, their counterparts in the private sector think they know all about the public sector. “Not really” on either count!
In my experience, full service cities are much more complicated to manage than contract cities. At times, it certainly has its place, but contracting is not always a panacea. Large, full-service local governments with full-time elected officials do not operate the same as the majority of agencies with part-time elected council and board members. The same can be said of many local agencies that operate on a District- or Ward-based level.
Since the passage of Proposition 13, economic development has mostly been about chasing sales tax rather than building wealth in the community. Out of necessity, many cities have really been practicing fiscal development not economic development. Of course, there are exceptions with some communities that have focused on small business creation, employment and education. I would like to think that most cities are finally starting to realize that economic development is more than marketing and the annual sojourn to [the International Council of Shopping Centers conference] in Las Vegas.
There are a lot of talented committed professionals in local government. The ones that I have found most admirable have been unassuming, trustworthy, and prioritize public service. They have the ability to focus on issues and not themselves. They are visionary, long-term strategists, tactical in their daily functions and have the ability to build coalitions, while being both people- and project-oriented.
The biggest challenge facing local governance today is not fiscal. It is changing the notion of self-centered entitlement regardless of position, tenure or venue.