Innovations in
Metropolitan Cooperation

The purpose of this paper is to present the rich variety of U.S. experiments with metropolitan cooperation, the attributes which seem to contribute to success, and what more would be possible with a new federal initiative.

A Project of the Center for Neighborhood Technology The Metropolitan Initiative is an effort to reinvent the relationship between the federal government and metropolitan areas. It focuses on the federal role as regulator, as source of information, as funder, and as catalyst of technology transfer. The Metropolitan Initiative is exploring new ways that these roles can work cooperatively with creative, citizen-defined regional initiatives.

For more information contact Stephen A. Perkins, Ph.D., Center for Neighborhood Technology, 2125 West North Avenue, Chicago, IL 60647, (773) 278-4800, fax (773) 278-3840, e-mail steve@cnt.org

© 1997 The Center for Neighborhood Technology

Executive Summary ....................................................... 3

1. Introduction ....................................................... 8
2. What Works ....................................................... 11
3. What are the Drivers ....................................................... 21
4. Who are the Champions ....................................................... 36
5. The Variety in Structure ....................................................... 40
6. Holistic Approaches to Metropolitan Cooperation ....................................................... 50
7. Single Issues that Draw People Together ....................................................... 53
8. The Federal Role ....................................................... 70

I. INTRODUCTION

Across the nation, individuals and communities are creating innovative metropolitan initiatives, coming up with all kinds of ways to preserve the advantages of localism and specialization while also capturing the benefits of regional cooperation. This paper tries to capture the breadth of innovations across the U.S. in metropolitan planning for mutual gain. There is a great deal to be learned from these examples about how to make metropolitan collaborations work well and produce benefits throughout regions. The examples also suggest ways in which the federal government, both the executive and legislative branches, could remove obstacles and facilitate the success of this natural momentum toward metropolitan cooperation.

II. WHAT WORKS

Even while community collaboration is emerging as the tool of the times for solving difficult problems and exploiting new opportunities, the number of failed collaborations is growing. Sometimes collaborations are simply asked to overcome too much: distrust, fragmented dysfunctional institutions, and short attention spans. It helps to already have strong civic organizations, cross-community coalitions, and business networks, especially those which cross sectors. It helps if local organizations show an interest in building process and facilitation skills within their own walls and structuring themselves to support a place-based, cross-cutting focus. Leaders are needed convene people and keep them together and focused. Leaders are also needed to provide the seed funding which allows convening processes to mature. Separate from a conducive environment and committed champions, what successful experiments seem to have in common is that they empower and ìsmarten upî citizens, entrepreneurially piece together resources, and pursue solutions that fit local conditions and capture the imagination of local residents. These attributes are described, along with examples, in the paper.

III. WHAT ARE THE DRIVERS

This is a time of intense experimentation with regional initiatives. There are many pressures and inducements moving people and communities in this direction. There are new federal initiatives which are providing incentives for cooperation. Struggles to compete in a global economy are leading people to develop regional strategies. Changing views about the dynamics of growth and how to manage growth are spurring regional dialog. New initiatives to grapple with fears about the loss of civil society are drawn to local and regional solutions. Political frustration with how decisions are made that affect neighboring communities is creating pressure to consider new decision-making mechanisms. More and more people are struggling with what it means to live in a sustainable community, and are seeing how their future is linked to their neighbors. Finally, there is a revolution in understanding of how people learn which is providing new tools to facilitate regional collaboration. These reasons are described, along with examples, in the paper.

IV. WHO ARE THE CHAMPIONS

The experience in the U.S. suggests that there can be no single gatekeepers or champions for innovative metropolitan initiatives. Innovative examples of metropolitan collaboration have a diverse array of champions, including government agencies, foundations, public interest coalitions, civic leaders, and elected officials. Crucial leadership can come from anywhere in a community. This paper provides many examples of different kinds of champions. They examples, however, do have something in common. In all of these efforts, the champions reach out to other stakeholders who care about the issue, who can allocate resources to implementing solutions, and who have a say in whether solutions are implemented.

V. THE VARIETY IN STRUCTURE

Collaboration among local governments is actually quite common. Sometimes collaborations are under the auspices of regional authorities or consolidated governments, but often they are more informal. Formal mechanisms include regional and/or consolidated government structure, metropolitan planning councils, special service taxing districts and joint service agreements. Informal mechanisms include civic organizations and citizen assemblies, area-wide coalitions and alternative planning organizations. There are examples of all of these approaches in the paper.

Informal structures are gaining more adherents. Informal mechanisms may be less threatening to citizenís -- and elected representatives --desire for autonomy. They also take into account how difficult it is to anticipate the challenges ahead or nail down the geographic scope of a region long enough to have it governed by a single structure. Local governments may not want or need regional government, but, increasingly, they need regional initiatives to enable the design of strategies that benefit themselves and other communities.

It is a lesson in and of itself to see the great variety in the structure of experiments across the nation. It seems clear that what will work in any particular place depends on local conditions. What communities need is the opportunity to experiment with approaches that make sense to them, along with access to high quality information about what has worked elsewhere and why.

VI. HOLISTIC APPROACHES TO METROPOLITAN COOPERATION

Learning theorists suggest that communities can become learning communities when they give up the illusion that separate unrelated forces govern how their world operates. There are many metropolitan initiatives which have taken something like a ìsystems viewî of a region, including quality of life, sustainability, image-changing/turn around, and knowledge creation initiatives. These sorts of metropolitan collaborations tend to include data collection and visioning processes, indicators for measuring progress, and processes for making continuous improvements. There are examples of these sorts of initiatives throughout the report, including the Grand Rapids initiative in Michigan, Sustainable Racine in Wisconsin, Sustainable Seattle, Chattanooga Vision 2000, and Eastward Ho! in Southern Florida.

VII. SINGLE ISSUES THAT DRAW PEOPLE TOGETHER

Many metropolitan collaborations have formed around one specific issue. Examples are provided in this paper which are spurred by concerns business development/job creation, transportation access, changing land use and sprawl, improving environmental quality, protecting valuable ecological resources, reducing education and fiscal disparities, welfare reform and poverty alleviation, fair housing, and addressing spatial mismatch between people and jobs. What is remarkable to note is that, more often than not, these single-issue projects evolve into broader initiatives.

VIII. BARRIERS TO PROGRESS

The breadth and variety of both the holistic and the issue-based metropolitan initiatives is impressive. A few of these initiatives have made great progress in changing local conditions, and now serve as a foundation for further metropolitan cooperation. However, many of the initiatives described in this report are only a few years old. For them, progress generally can be judged, at best, by success in reinventing planning processes, engaging citizens, and developing thoughtful strategies which have relatively broad support.

All of the initiatives still face major obstacles, especially complex rules and regulations. All of the initiatives need support and encouragement from their state and the federal government to overcome local political structures and a complex web of local, state, and federal regulations which hamper them.

As important an obstacle is the difficulty of organizing local interest and action. Everyone is struggling with how to create powerful community learning processes. How do we engage citizens? How do we move from visioning to action, especially if major structural changes are needed? How do we create institutions or networks to deal with cross-cutting policy issues? All of the initiatives need support and encouragement from their state and the federal government to experiment with answers to these questions, to share what they learn, and to continue to improve.

VIII. THE FEDERAL ROLE

Government -- with compartmentalized functions and policies -- has been a barrier to experimenting with more collaborative practices, but it can become a source of encouragement for flexibility and innovation. Both the executive and legislative branches of government have an important role to play in achieving the vast potential for metropolitan collaboration.

The federal government can help regions to empower local citizens through a Smart Citizen component. The Smart Citizen component includes (1) information: data collection and aggregation, measurement tools, local scoreboards, and GIS systems. (2) transfer of ideas and technologies across regions, (3) technology transfer to build regional infrastructure, and (4) support for training to build capacity for regional collaboration, facilitation, and problem solving.

The federal government can help regions to more easily finance creative initiatives through a Smart Money component. The Smart Money component includes (1) targeting funding from existing authorities, (2) allowing for the flexible use of federal funding programs in exchange for innovative projects, and (3) allowing for the creative use of capital assets, procurement, etc.

The federal government can help regions to cultivate locally appropriate solutions through a Smart Rule-making component. It is very difficult for locally initiated solutions to problems to succeed given the public policies they must navigate. The Smart Rule-making component includes (1) involving local regions in key rule-making efforts, (2) providing waivers to allow for local innovation with the potential to exceed current standards, (3) building flexibility into new rules so that places can decide the best way to achieve standards, and (4) providing incentives for performance and accountability.

Metropolitan regions have taken the first step toward a new era of cooperation. The federal government has also taken some first steps in recent housing, economic development, and environmental initiatives. It is time to raise the bar. In a companion paper, The Federal Role in Metropolitan Cooperation, Clem Dinsmore describes how the federal government could use existing authorities to take the next step.

By the year 2000, nearly half of the worldís people will live in metropolitan areas. Neil Peirce has observed that the first thing one sees when approaching a metropolitan area from the air is the water, rail and highway networks that link the region together, regardless of political boundaries. On the ground, however, these political boundaries are an enormous obstacle to cooperation. It is not at all clear to most people who live in different towns within a metropolitan area that their destinies are linked. In fact, most people find the idea of regions off-putting and artificial. They simply donít see themselves as being part of a meaningful region.

Nevertheless, individuals and communities across the nation are finding that issues like economic development, pollution, open space, housing, and transportation can benefit from regional strategies and cooperation. And they are trying to invent new tools to respond to challenges at this scale, where they can most effectively be resolved. So, many different kinds of initiatives are leading down the regional path, from economic cluster strategies to work force development, sustainable development to civic revitalization and citizen empowerment, and ecosystem management to quality of life initiatives.

Individuals and communities are also discovering that their success in work on one issue, for example, economy, is contingent on success in the areas of ecology and community. As people explore the root causes of problems, they are seeing the connections to other places and other problems. A strong economy depends on both an available resource base and a strong community. It is impossible to preserve the natural ecology without changing basic production patterns in the economy. And you canít come to consensus on ecological protection and economic restructuring if you donít have a healthy social infrastructure.

Sprawl, in particular, is emerging as a unifying issue. Urban decay is spurred by decentralization of jobs and opportunity. Environmental degradation is exacerbated by the physical expansion of metropolitan regions. A contributor to middle class disaffection is that people cannot truly escape urban ills. These very clear connections are why, for example, social equity groups representing the poor living in older communities and environmental groups wishing to protect land and water from development pressures are beginning to coalesce around a regional agenda. It is why transportation reform encompasses a broad agenda including housing, open space preservation, job access, livable communities, and economic development. And it is why many brownfield efforts have become broader initiatives to promote urban economic development and protect open space.

One ìgrowthî area in which the desire to cross issues and jurisdictions comes together is sustainable communities. Many people interested in sustainable development have independently concluded that metropolitan regions are the smallest scale at which it is possible to capture most of the key flows and meaningfully resolve problems in an integrated and holistic fashion. At the same time, the metropolitan region may be the largest geographical unit that people can grasp and around which they can come together and develop a sense of belonging.

The sense that there is something tangible and important which is a region is growing. People are haltingly moving toward defining their ìplaceî by exploring where the boundaries end, what are the features they care most about, and who needs whom to preserve what matters.

So, in spite of the obstacles, individuals and communities have plunged ahead to create innovative metropolitan initiatives. They are coming up with all kinds of ways to preserve the advantages of localism and specialization while also facilitating collaboration across interests and explicit political tradeoffs across geographical boundaries. A closer look at these initiatives shows that they are driven by clear and strong self-interest to produce generous mutual gain.

Still, there is a lot to be learned about how to make metropolitan collaborations work well and produce benefits throughout regions. Also, more could be done to break down barriers to metropolitan cooperation. While the locus of action should be local, the federal government could play a powerful role through Smart People, Smart Money, and Smart Rule-making. These roles are described later in the report.

This report tries to capture the breadth of innovations across the U.S. in joint-stakes or mutual gain metropolitan planning and action now underway and proposed. The examples emphasize efforts which explicitly recognize the need for communities and interests to connect for mutual gain, build the sense of place which enables people to work together and make sacrifices, include citizen participation and accountability, and share tangible benefits. These are attributes that seem to contribute to success. In fact, the first section of the report, What Works, is an attempt to synthesize and present some of the characteristics of successful experiments in regional collaboration.

The sections which follow What Works try to present the diversity in terms of what is driving regional initiatives, who is championing metropolitan collaboration, how initiatives are structured, what issues they are tackling, and what barriers they face. One of the most important points we want to make is that there is enormous diversity in approaches to metropolitan cooperation. This diversity needs to be encouraged. What will work depends on the people and the place.

The final section explores ways in which the federal government, both the executive and legislative branches, could remove the obstacles and facilitate the success of this natural momentum toward metropolitan cooperation.

Even while community collaboration is emerging as the tool of the times for solving difficult problems and exploiting new opportunities, the number of failed collaborations is growing. Sometimes collaborations are simply asked to overcome too much: distrust, fragmented dysfunctional institutions, and short attention spans.

Collaborations have a better chance in places where there are already networks of communication that provide ways to talk across the community. It helps to already have strong civic organizations, cross-community coalitions, and business networks, especially those which cross sectors. It helps to have neighborhood-level organizations which can represent neighborhood interests at the town scale and town-level organizations which can represent towns at the regional scale. This is the case in Portland where the leadership for metropolitan cooperation is spread widely among business, government, civic, and community leaders. This civic infrastructure helps regions perceive threats, recognize opportunities and mobilize resources. Since crisis, outrage, and opportunity are the strongest motivators for change, infrastructure which strengthens awareness of conditions in a region helps it to adapt and thrive.

Collaborative processes also have a better chance of succeeding in places where local organizations show an interest in building process and facilitation skills within their own walls and structuring themselves to support a place-based, cross-cutting focus. For example, many firms which have become leaders in regional collaboration have already been through restructuring in their own organizations.

Of course, leaders are needed to convene people and keep them together and focused.

Leaders are also needed to provide the seed funding which allows convening processes to mature. In many cities where collaboration has thrived, including Cleveland and Minneapolis, local foundations have supported their efforts and even required groups to form alliances. For example, major foundations in Cleveland agreed to help establish a community capital investment strategy in return for a commitment from local governments to coordinate their efforts and fund half of the administration costs.

Separate from a conducive environment and committed champions, what successful experiments seem to have in common is that they empower and ìsmarten upî citizens, entrepreneurially piece together resources, and pursue solutions that fit local conditions and capture the imagination of local residents.

Empower and Smarten Up Citizens

Create Inclusive Processes

To change a system, you need to get the whole system in the room, including anyone who has an interest or a role in the issue. Participants in regional processes each bring what they know about a part of the system to the table. One of the benefits of coming together is seeing how the parts fit together. Those who are affected by a problem bring important information about the effects and what will work to address them. Those who have a say in whether changes can be made bring important information about which responses are feasible. In a regional convening process, the main resource in the room, at least in the beginning, is the knowledge, skills, and assets of participants.

Citizen participation is a key aspect of most of the successful examples of metropolitan collaboration. As pointed out by Judith Espinosa, a former Secretary for the Environment for the State of New Mexico, regional governance in various forms has existed for at least three decades. We continue to have so many of the same problems because so much regional governance has been top-down. Regional governance must empower people to identify goals for the places where they live and how to achieve them.

The importance of empowering people holds for the neighborhood level. The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative has been helping residents of the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston to pursue their vision of the community as ìa safe, lively and close-knit urban villageî since 1985. Because residents have had control of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, they have assumed responsibility for the neighborhood and tapped unrecognized resources and energy. A top-down project could not have unleashed local leadership in this way.

Empowerment can also be a catalyst at the regional level. The East-West Gateway Coordinating Council engaged in a broad public participation process for the development it the regionís long-range transpiration plan. The goal of the process was to turn around the entire decision-making process, bringing plans in closer sync with the goals and needs of the people, business, and communities they serve. The planning process brought together a diverse steering committee including knowledgeable people in transportation planning, economic development, environment, and social concerns. Three sub-committees, representing 200 people advised the steering committee on land us and environmental concerns, employment and community needs, and regional economic goals. Development, real estate, business and financial interests, as well as low-income disadvantaged residents, were all included as integral parts of the planning process. Focus groups were held to garner a wider response from the general public. A public relations campaign kept citizens up-to-date through newsletters, public service messages, and special publications. A readable guide, Talking the Talk, was designed to make the planning process understandable to citizens. The plan has been approved, but the commitment to public involvement continues in specific projects and mobility initiatives.

Include People Who Can Cut Across Issues and Help Others Do the Same

What is missing from most collaborative efforts is integration across various areas. While people may all live in the same geographic community, they live in very different ìcommunities of practiceî and bring very different kinds of mental models, language and values to collaborative problem-solving efforts. Environmentalists who have a deep knowledge of the working of the natural ecology are often unfamiliar with the dynamics of running a business in a competitive market. They donít understand the languages of product development, strategic planning, market positioning, quality management, and other domains of expertise that business leaders live in and take for granted. On the other hand, business leaders often know little about the actual dynamics of natural systems, and find the language of the ecologist confusing and intimidating. A major challenge then, is to establish enough cross-disciplinary understanding and common language to begin to talk and act together.

A cross-disciplinary group of community leaders who can model for the community the process of understanding each others practice environments and identify projects that integrate across these environments can have an enormous impact on the credibility of a collaborative process. The Grand Rapids sustainable community project is making a special effort to build ways for participants from different practice environments to understand each other and learn together.

Create a Shared Management and Decision-making Process

In the 1970ís, Dee Hock organized VISA, a product which nearly everyone in the U.S. and world recognizes, along the principles he now preaches. Successful organizations, he said, must be highly decentralized and highly collaborative, with authority, initiative, decision-making, and wealth distributed as much as possible to the members. Competition must be encouraged, but mechanisms for cooperation are also essential.

Effective collaborative initiatives which try to address fundamental problems need similar principles. They must be open to all who are heavily involved in the purpose, offer advantages that gain voluntary participation, allow no intrinsic advantage to any participant, decentralize power, and encourage diverse participation.

Spend Time and Energy Early to Define Shared Vision and Build Project Ownership

Today there are hundreds of community visioning processes across the nation, building community support for change. The Hudson River Advisory Board on Sustainable Development, for example, includes a cross-section of Hudson River Valley people, developers, businessmen and women, mayors, county officials, environmentalists, foundation leaders and academics, among others. In 1995, these people spent six months creating a shared vision for the future of the Hudson River Valley. First, they found a vision of what they hoped the Valley could be in fifty years. Then they worked backwards, exploring what needs to change now to achieve the vision. These steps have guided the process as it moves forward to broaden local support and identify strategies for change.

Gather and Widely Share the Best Information Available on Status of Their Community and Track Progress Toward Their Goals

Information has a tremendous potential for increasing citizen awareness and ability to engage in decisions affecting their lives. Key to this strategy is managing information better, expanding access to it, measuring progress, and adopting accounting measures that allow people to stay on track.

To achieve a change in natural and human systems, there have to be ways to measure the impact of current practices. Organized data substitutes for the impressionistic and anecdotal information we otherwise would use to come to conclusions about how to act, and it can reveal opportunities we would not otherwise notice.

The potency of information is why there are 150 community indicator projects across the U.S. The dialog about indicators can be a very powerful learning tool for a community. On the flip side, if citizens donít have an opportunity to participate, they will not own the indicators and probably will not act in response to them. It is important that people agree on desired directions and targets for each indicator, benchmarking to other communities or ecosystems to decide what is a desirable target value for each indicator.

In Seattle, several hundred citizens took five years to develop 40 indicators of sustainability.î Their first report was published in January of 1996. Sponsored by a volunteer organization called Sustainable Seattle, the process involved 6 months of work just to define the word ìsustainable.î The indicators cover both human and natural systems, ranging from salmon populations to children in poverty and the cost of health care. In their first report, eight of the forty indicators show improvement; 18 show no discernible trend; and fourteen show declining sustainability.

Many of the examples of collaborative efforts include some kind of mapping of regional boundaries. The mapping process helps people to share their information with each other and come to a common enough ìpicture ì of their region that they can agree on where to act. The mapping helps people to identify interconnections and identify key systems. Even if people are working on a distinct problem in one of these systems, a map of all of the systems can track how the problem is connected to each of them. Usually, people find a dense set of connections, calling for action in multiple subs-systems simultaneously.

Mapping also helps people to pursue solutions that are appropriate to local conditions.

For example, the MacArthur Foundationís Sustainable Everglades Initiative is working with the University of Florida to develop simulation models of water flow and land use in the Everglades using fairly simple and inexpensive technology.

Build Capacity for Continuous Improvement

In complex systems, we cannot know ahead of time what the impact of a particular activity will be. We have to try ideas in an experimental way and then notice how they works, modifying and building off of outcomes. Rigid, heavy, resource-intensive strategic planning processes need to be replaced by relatively small demonstration projects where much attention is given to what is working and then changes are made to improve and expand the projects on a continual basis. Communities need to generate lots of experimentation, not lots of consensus.

To understand and respond to problems, people need powerful learning environments. They need community processes that help them to identify their concerns, immerse themselves in new information, discover new patterns and opportunity, and change their own understanding of the world. For this to happen, community collaborations require the following kinds of support:

-- Rich information that people can use in their exploration of new ideas

-- Help for the group in standing back to notice the patterns that are emerging from their knowledge

-- Help for the group in crafting questions worth asking that guide the creation of new knowledge

--Help for the group in making connections between people, ideas, and resources, forming new relationships and new products

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation joined with 22 other philanthropies to launch the Sustainable Everglades Initiative, an effort to coordinate responses to save the Everglades and Florida Bay and capture what is learned along the way. The Conservation Fund is responsible for generating links among grantees and grantors and ìbuilding whole system knowledgeî about how the communities of South Florida can interact with the Everglades in ways that preserve, restore, and sustain it. Sustainability, under this initiative, is not an end result, but a process of continuous adaptation and adjustment. Other grantees include national and grassroots conservation organizations, educational institutions, and community groups.

Choose Achievable First Steps and Look for Quick Victories

These efforts have started with small, doable steps. Rapid iteration between small actions and large visions provides for a vibrant learning environment. It also gives people a sense of pride in progress.

The Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative (LANI) was designed as a grassroots urban renewal effort focused around major transportation corridors. Critical to the success of LANI was the decision to not only plan for long-term visions, but to produce concrete results during the first year of the program. Projects such as the installation of new bus stops and information kiosks helped to make commercial streets more attractive and build cooperation within a neighborhood.

When Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative was started, Peter Medoff and the board launched several campaigns that resulted in immediate success. One was to restore rail service to an abandoned commuter train stop. Another was to improve safety conditions at a hazardous intersection. As pointed out by Jay Walljasper, Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative kept the level of participation high through bigger, tougher initiatives which progressed much more slowly because it set achievable goals early on.

Entrepreneurially Piece Together Resources

The core resources collaborative efforts have are the knowledge, skills and assets of their members. By making these assets the beginning point of collaborative efforts to solve problems, these efforts avoided the ì dependency trapî that gives others power over their destiny and limits the scope of their imagination. These efforts manage not to become focused on getting resources from others before they begin to do something with what they have.

Still, many of these efforts could not have made progress without attracting creative, flexible money. Both Cleveland Tomorrow and the Citizens League of Greater Cleveland, leaders in stimulating improvements in the Cleveland metropolitan area, have had strong support from major foundations which have their headquarters in Cleveland. Foundations have been a crucial source of funds to support regional analysis and organization building activities. Both Cleveland and Philadelphia have also benefited from the participation of a university-based center which has helped to identify regional opportunities and act as a forum for incubating action programs.

Have the Flexibility to Pursue Locally Appropriate Solutions

One of the fascinating things we found through this survey of metropolitan collaborations was how many different approaches, entry points, champions, and issues there were, all leading toward a similar goal. What works depends upon local conditions and people. These differences must be respected and supported.

When U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development staff asked civic leaders in 114 of the largest metropolitan areas in 1996 what contributions the federal government could make to regional efforts, most of the leaders mentioned support for education and workforce development, but each region had different requirements depending on the skill needs of its industry clusters and the existing strengths and weaknesses of the existing metropolitan educational system.

Through Build-Up Greater Cleveland, local governments agree to coordinate their infrastructure planning. Local government, corporations and other institutions analyze, prioritize, and lobby for infrastructure improvements. As a result of Build-up, local funds have been leveraged to secure more state and federal funding. Federal infrastructure decisions need to be responsive to this kind of local planning.

The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative is lauded throughout the county for its efforts to revitalize the Roxbury neighborhood. The Initiative was able to move forward because City government granted it the power of eminent domain over local land. The Mayor of Boston agreed to deed tax delinquent land in Roxbury to Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, but redevelopment of the land was still hindered by pockets of private land owned by real estate speculators. So, to fit local conditions, the City went a step further. Eminent domain is not the answer in most or many communities, but DSNI made a case for why this solution fit local conditions and the Mayor supported DSNI.

Cities have historically tried to address neighborhood revitalization through bureaucratic policies that donít fit the unique needs of a particular neighborhood, but this is changing. For example, the Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative (LANI) was designed as a grassroots urban renewal effort focused around major transportation corridors. LANI is trying to create thriving main streets and bring back a sense of identity in eight neighborhoods through citizen-planned and managed transit-oriented development projects. LANI has made quick progress by putting money behind the decisions of its citizen planners.

Conclusion

Not every successful regional collaboration has all of the features described here. Most have some of them. These attributes have a strong basis in theory and a growing presence in the real world. The examples in the following sections point out some of the places where these features show up.

This is a time of intense experimentation with regional initiatives. There are many pressures and inducements moving people and communities in this direction. There are new federal initiatives which are providing incentives for cooperation. Struggles to compete in a global economy are leading people to develop regional strategies. Changing views about the dynamics of growth and how to manage growth are spurring regional dialog. New initiatives to grapple with fears about the loss of civil society are drawn to local and regional solutions. Political frustration with how decisions are made that affect neighboring communities is creating pressure to consider new decision-making mechanisms. More and more people are struggling with what it means to live in a sustainable community, and are seeing how their future is linked to their neighbors. Finally, there is a revolution in understanding of how people learn which is providing new tools to facilitate regional collaboration

Federal Initiatives

The federal government has a variety of innovative new programs which encourage parties with different interests to adopt new patterns of behavior and work in a cooperative, collaborative manner. It is also shifting responsibilities to states and local areas which are under pressure to invent new responses.

In some places, people have been energized by HUDís empowerment zone process or the U.S. EPA brownfields initiative to pursue cooperative place-based strategies. In 1993, the Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities initiative funded six urban empowerment zones and 95 enterprise communities with grants that can be spent at the zoneís discretion. Because top-down programs had failed in the past, communities had to build a strategic plan with input from residents, local businesses, government representatives, and community-based organizations. The plans had to have a vision for comprehensive, community-driven solutions to economic, physical, environmental, community and human development issues. More than 500 communities applied. Some communities which did not receive funding say that they have benefited from the collaborative processes which emerged.

Recent reports on cities and regions from the Department of Housing and Urban Development reflect HUDís attempt to reinvent itself to facilitate metropolitan solutions. The National Urban Policy Report emphasizes that the U.S. is a metropolitan nation with growing suburbs and huge disparities between cities and suburbs. It presents the evidence available that these disparities, along with sprawl and congestion, are a drag on economic productivity and growth. Regionalism: The New Geography of Opportunity offers an even wider range of approaches to the same problem. As pointed out by Robert Giloth, these reports donít provide answers to the question of how to get city and suburban cooperative action, but they do reinforce the strong connection between improvements in quality of life, particularly for the poor, and long-term regional economic stability and growth for regions.

Now, based upon the findings of a new report, Americaís New Economy And the Challenge of the Cities: A HUD Report on Metropolitan Economic Strategy, HUD has announced that it will encourage communities to form partnerships for metropolitan economic growth. Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer has agreed to bring together the regionís government, business and civic leaders to form a partnership that can serve as a national model. In addition, HUDís Homeownership Partnerships are bringing cities and suburbs together to expand homeownership across regions. HUDís Bridges to Work program, which combines job training and placement networks with transportation subsidies and supportive services, is linking inner-city residents with regional jobs. HUD is also working on a second round of Empowerment Zones that would include tax credits for employers located outside the zones who hire workers living in the zone.

ISTEA, passed in 1991, recognized for the first time that transportation problems are different in different places, and allowed people to use the approach that best meets their needs. The core principles that made ISTEA a success were flexible funding so that different solutions are allowed in different places, a strong local role, attention to environmental and community concerns, a long term focus, and greater accountability to local residents. Communities all over the country have taken advantage of this flexibility. In the first five years of ISTEA, more than $2.4 billion in what used to be highway money was reprogrammed for public transportation. Every community hasnít done it, but ISTEAís flexibility has allowed those areas with a local consensus around public transportation to do so.

Environmental policy is also shifting toward collaborative local solutions. One example is the federal effort to reinvent regulation based on flexibility with accountability, where the regulated party is responsible for achieving the final result rather than adhering to specific procedures. The U.S. EPA has launched a demonstration program for the concept call Project XL. It allows businesses flexibility to develop an alternative environmental management strategy for an entire facility which will replace applicable requirements of current law. In exchange, the company must agree that the alternative strategy will produce superior environmental performance and must have the support of the surrounding community. The company must also agree to monitor and report results to citizens. The alternative must be fully enforceable. The participants in the first phase of Project XL include six companies and two government agencies. One of the agencies is the South Coast Air Quality Management District, so this is a regional approach.

Action 21 on the Clinton Administration list of 25 High Priority Actions to reinvent government is for EPA to support the development of community-driven strategies to integrate environmental quality and economic development at the local level, including all of the different interests in the community and its local, state and federal authorities. EPAís Ecosystem Protection Workgroup in 1994 similarly recognized what proponents of ecosystem management have been saying for years: environmental regulation requires a place-driven approach using both national standards but also responsive to the needs of individual ecosystems and human communities.

As part of its Brownfields National Partnership, the Interagency Working Group on Brownfields has proposed that ten cities be chosen as brownfield showcase cities to demonstrate that through cooperation and coordination, federal, state, local, and non-governmental efforts can be concentrated around brownfields activities to produce environmental clean up, stimulate economic development, and revitalize communities. The Interagency Working Group includes EPA, DOD, GSA, HUD, DOT, DOI, and many other agencies.

The Presidentís Council on Sustainable Development met for three years to study ways in which America can better achieve national environmental, economic , and social goals. Participants were drawn from business, environmental, civil rights, labor, and Native American organizations, as well as from government. Their report has been praised for its rare consensus on how to achieve a better future. Its most strongly made point is that Americans can regain their sense that they are in control of their future through collaborative decision processes which recognize that economic, environmental, and social goals are integrally linked. The call is to no longer think narrowly about jobs, energy, transportation, housing or ecosystems, as if they were not connected.

Finally, local governments are being forced to think about new ways to work together by changes in their mandates and revenue base. Local government is expected to do more now than in the past, but it has less financial means to do it. Financial responsibilities have shifted from the federal to local governments, and the same is beginning to happen with state government. The rapid transfer of federal powers and responsibilities to states and cities has put pressure on regions to identify and assert their own priorities. Welfare reform has resulted in even greater use of state block grants. In a couple of states, governors are simply going to create block grants for their counties. Block grants to counties could become a big problem if there arenít mechanisms for regional collaboration.

Declining federal funding for transportation infrastructure has also put pressure on regions to set transportation priorities and consider the impact of decentralized, automobile-based growth on infrastructure costs and the environment. The Federal Highway Administration has estimated that ìmetropolitan expansionî over the next twenty years will require 353,183 new land miles of roads at a total cost of $169.6 billion and an annualized cost of $8.5 billion. This is at a time where funds are short to maintain existing roads. While it may be more expensive to maintain older city infrastructure as compared to more recently constructed suburban infrastructure, from a societal standpoint it may still be considerable cheaper to maintain or even expand existing infrastructure than to build new infrastructure in the suburbs. In 1995, per capita spending of federal road money in urbanized areas was $54. In what the Census Bureau calls ìnon-urbanized areasî mostly low density outer suburbs -- per capita spending was $115.

Efforts to Compete in a Global Economy

Awareness is growing that only high-performance companies and communities -- those which according to Bill Dodge, provide the highest quality products, services, jobs, educational systems, and business climates -- will thrive. New people and new businesses seek out labor markets and economic regions, rarely specific government jurisdictions. Many of the newer companies in Oregon -- Hewlett Packard, Intel, and Hyundai -- say they moved to the Portland area because there is open space close by a contained urban area. They felt this kind of region could attract skilled workers who care about quality of life. This is why economic regions need to pool resources and expertise.

Economic development agencies realize that it is a waste for cities within the same labor market to engage in bidding wars for businesses that have already chosen to locate in the region, using up scarce public money and allowing businesses to reduce their responsibility to the city and region. Nevertheless, most feel unable to eliminate the wars and feel compelled to enter the fray. Some are now taking steps to reduce competition between cities and suburbs. For example, metropolitan Portlandís business, government, and civic leaders have concluded that they must pursue a coordinated development strategy by cooperating in efforts to retain existing businesses and recruit new businesses for the entire metropolitan region.

Champions of urban revitalization have been drawn to regional collaboration for quite different reasons, i.e., because their efforts to stem urban decline have been stymied by government subsidies which draw development away from the urban core.

Older suburbs, in particular, are seeing that their economic futures are linked to their neighbors. Some of the prosperous suburbs a few years ago which benefited from the forces of new development at the fringe have become todayís communities in decline. This has happened in Kansas City, where the first ring of new suburban communities is now losing economic vitality.

Even some suburbanites from high-income communities have become convinced by studies which show that the most economically integrated metro areas have the highest incomes. For example, according to a study by George Mason University professor Stephen Fuller, a modest revival of the District of Columbiaís economy would spill over into the suburbs, producing more than $2 billion in additional income in Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland over the next six years. There is one visible sign of the economic cost of metropolitan fragmentation, which is the congestion resulting from long commutes to dispersed job centers throughout regions. There is also the difficulty of finding low-wage worker in high-income suburbs. Finally, there is the reality that deteriorating cities create an incentive for more city residents and businesses to move to the suburbs. This influx can have substantial consequences for suburban communities, in terms of roads, schools, and sewer systems, but also congestion and preferences for higher levels of public services.

Regional economists seem to agree that metropolitan areas have ìinterwoven destiniesî. Even though technology has tempered the influence, local clusters of firms and their relationships still are very important to regional economic success. Regions still can develop competitive advantage by fostering relationships and networks among firms, building collaborations to improve training, expanding the flow of information between job seekers and employers seeking new workers, and nurturing infant industries.

A recent study by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found that economic growth in Americaís metropolitan regions is being generated by 18 dynamic industry clusters, such as health services, electronics and communication, and transportation equipment. The study concluded that these clusters of related industries depend on each other for growth, and that they are strengthened by public and private investments in regional transportation and infrastructure, research and technology, and education and work force development. These clusters cross city and suburban boundaries. For example, in the Nashville metropolitan region, businesses of the transportation equipment industry cluster are distributed all around the region. Because clusters transcend jurisdictional boundaries, some metropolitan regions are recognizing the need to increase collaboration among public and private leaders across regions to build regional competitiveness.Miami and Minneapolis-St.Paul both have partnerships which have identified and are trying to aid strategic industry clusters.

Some of the specific tools for mutual gain in metropolitan economies are regional technology centers for incremental innovations; regional training institutions to provide, maintain and adapt labor skills; industry service centers which allow firms to access technology and marketing information they cannot afford to provide for themselves; and regional development funds. Political coalitions are needed to allow these kinds of institutions to emerge. Because metropolitan economies usually cross jurisdictional lines, this means towns and cities must find ways to work together.

Emerging Views on the Dynamics of Growth

Citizens across the nation are questioning patterns of growth and taking a closer look at the impacts of development. They are voting down conventional growth projects like a new Outer Beltway in Kansas City and voting for more control over land sales and zoning waivers in Tucson. People are asking how can our community benefit from growth without losing what we care about? For example, in their 1995 study, ìBeyond Sprawl,î the Bank of America, California Resources Agency, Greenbelt Alliance, and Low Income Housing Fund, warned that that unchecked sprawl threatens to inhibit growth and degrade the quality of life in California.

In 1993, a New York state-wide survey of builders, officials, environmentalists, and citizens was taken by McKinsey and Company, a top firm of international business consultants. The survey showed overwhelming dissatisfaction with the way New York is growing -- by a margin of 3 to 1. The McKinsey consultants commented that had this been a market survey of a gadget, not a growth policy, they would have recommended discontinuing the item.

Some of the lessons which people have started to learn about the costs of unmanaged growth are captured in a study of eight areas in Florida. The study found that the community with the best revenue to cost ratio was characterized as contiguous in form with substantial amounts of industrial land use, while the worst ratios were for predominately residential communities with lower densities (satellite, linear or scattered). Jim MacKenzie and Roger Dower of the World Resources Institute and Don Chen of STPP estimate that the total market, external and motor vehicle accident costs of car traffic not borne by users could be as high as $355.7 billion per year.

The lessons from studies of cities around the nation are that development can have negative impacts on economic development, environmental quality, and social welfare in a community and its surrounding region. People are waking up to the fact that low density, auto dependent sprawl has profound consequences on quality of life. Seattle has followed Oregonís lead in its 1994 urban growth plan and by voting for a $4 billion mass transit system and strict laws to end sprawl. San Jose and four smaller Bay area communities all voted to keep new subdivisions and community development within a contained area. Denver and Salt Lake City are studying urban growth boundaries. Even Las Vegas, the fastest growing city in the nation is hearing the first calls for growth control in the face of severe traffic congestion, overcrowded schools, and a looming water shortage.

Bolder, Colorado, and other communities have found they canít manage growth alone. Bolder fended off its own sprawl, but Denver spread out all the way to Bolder. To protect the aspects of their community they care about, people are struggling to find a common ground for dealing with growth intelligently on a regional basis. The newspapers are full of editorials which have been stirred by the concern for smarter growth management at the level of neighborhoods, communities, and regions. The strategies people are pursing include infill development, brownfields redevelopment, and New Urbanism development, which includes a return to pedestrian scale, greater efficiency of public infrastructure, multiple-use development and vital town centers.

Fears about Social Decline/ Declining Civil Society

Many pundits have agreed that this is a time of declining confidence in government, weakening of community institutions, falling voter turnout, and a feeling by many Americans that the quality of moral life has dropped.

Social problems in the cities seem intractable, and such problems once associated with inner-city communities have spread to a wider range of established suburbs. In both the New York and Boston metropolitan areas, crime rates in the suburbs grew at a much faster rate than in the central cities between the early 1980ís and early 1990s.

In the midst of all of these problems, a handful of retired public leaders believe there is the potential for a new era in community problem solving. William J. Bennet has teamed up with Sam Nunn to head the National Commission on Civic Renewal. Lamar Alexander has agreed to chair the newly created national Commission on Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, and Bill Bradley has joined the National Commission on Society, Culture, and Community. Patricia Schroeder will head a large project at the Institute for Civil Society, a Boston think-tank. These efforts share a common commitment to supporting local initiatives, looking for common ground among divergent philosophical camps and encouraging a heightened sense of civic participation in a search for solutions.

Political Frustration

People are frustrated with the lack of political mechanisms for resolving conflicts about where to place low-income housing and locally undesirable land uses. They are angry that towns upstream are allowed to develop in ways that lead to flooding or have other adverse effects on downstream communities. People around the country are expressing increasing dissatisfaction with the opportunities for them to participate in creating and implementing legislation, laws and policy that have direct impacts on their communities.

A very small number of people are also frightened that the physical and economic separation occurring in metropolitan regions is resulting in political polarization. Residents no longer speak a common language nor can they cooperate to solve common problems.

At the same time, public agencies are slowly opening up to the idea of local problem solving collaborations because of the benefits in the form of public ownership of decisions, alternatives to adversarial processes, the chance to help shape new shared norms of behavior, and the opportunity to build new relationships that could be useful beyond specific negotiation processes.

Also, people in urban areas and poorer suburbs are becoming more frustrated with the degree to which residents of wealthier suburbs feel disconnected from social problems and efforts to alleviate them. Due in large part to research conducted by Myron Orfield, a state representative from Minnesota, it has become clear that suburban communities are not a monolith with common experiences and political needs. Many older and inner ring suburbs and more middle income outer suburbs have more in common with central cities than with wealthy suburbs, and may be convinced to support a regional reform agenda. This pattern creates the potential for a majority political coalition between the central cities and the inner and middle-class suburbs. Probably this is true in a number of metropolitan regions.

The Revolution in Our Understanding of Human Learning

The last three decades have produced revolutionary new insights into how human beings learn and how we can best design learning experiences and environments that accelerate our natural capacity for learning. This new understanding of the process of learning has led to some rethinking of how to design schools, workplaces, communities and other social learning systems.

The traditional view of learning could be called the ìmachineî view of learning. It is largely based on behaviorist models of the mind. In it, teaching is the simple process of feeding small pieces of information from teacher to the learner. It is assumed the learner will be able to transfer her knowledge to new situations.

The emerging view treats learning as an organic, natural process -- open, self-organized, full of messy, nonlinear connections, constantly changing and adapting, and frequently using cooperation as the most powerful learning tool. Learners struggle with a rich variety of information and have to actively work with it to create patterns that they can understand. Learners are encourage to cooperate and draw upon the diversity of a whole group.

Much of the turmoil in the business community today is a reflection of urgent efforts to radically redesign work organizations that are more conducive to the support of human learning and knowledge creation that is essential to economic survival in todayís information-driven markets. The old hierarchical, bureaucratic and authority-driven institutions seem incapable of adapting to rapid change. To greater or lesser degrees, similar revolutions are creating crises in many educational and governmental institutions.

These parallel efforts to reinvent institutions are creating opportunities for collaboration. The focus these efforts have on using teams to creatively tackle problems is building credibility for collaborative solutions in general.

These ideas about learning underpin the collaboration which is emerging in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Grand Rapids has a rich variety of initiatives to increase sustainability and health in various sectors of the community. Many of the community leaders involved in these initiatives have concluded that it is time to construct a framework which would encourage integration and cross-fertilization among efforts and build the communityís capacity for thinking and planning together. Grand Rapids plans a process based upon a set of shared principles, including working together toward a shared, inclusion vision of a healthy community, use of state-of-the-art learning theory to share work, an open and inclusive process, work driven by the needs of the participants, and voluntary and rotating leadership. Leaders in this process include local heads of a foundation, chamber of commerce, and environmental organizations, a Grand Rapids city commissioner, and others.

Struggles to Envision Sustainable Communities

Community-based experiments to improve quality of life or create sustainable communities are emerging in all parts of the country, from small rural towns such as Red Lodge, Montana, to inner city neighborhoods in Atlanta. According to Redefining Progress, an organization which promotes alternatives to the Gross National Product for measuring progress, there are now 150 community indicator projects across the nation.

Residents of communities around the country are beginning to question where they are headed. They donít want a future of community disintegration, economic decline, and environmental degradation. They want to strengthen their ability to plan, protect the features that they care about in their communities, and take advantage of new opportunities.

These experiments are complemented by a growing number of clearinghouses, intermediaries, technical assistance providers, and policy advocates.

The entire field reflects the growing acknowledgment that solutions to many of the nationís pressing problems, such as poverty and environmental degradation, will be devised and implemented at the community level. Redefining Progress, itself, is considering focusing less on one national number and more on indicators which are useful to communities and emerge from community processes.

In many community sustainability initiatives an effort is made to map the boundaries of systems. It is rare that these patterns of natural and human activity closely map political jurisdictions. This means that almost all actions on sustainability end up being cross-jurisdictional in nature.

Conclusion

For all of these reasons, people and organizations across the nation are experimenting with ways to capture the potential benefits from greater metropolitan cooperation in stronger economies and economic opportunity, cleaner environments and more healthy ecosystems, more livable communities which cost less to maintain, more efficient use of federal and state funding and regional infrastructure assets, greater civic engagement, more effective dispute resolution across communities, and a sustainable future.

The experience in the U.S. suggests that there can be no single gatekeepers or champions for innovative metropolitan initiatives. Innovative examples of metropolitan collaboration have a diverse array of champions, including government agencies, foundations, public interest coalitions, civic leaders, and elected officials. Crucial leadership can come from anywhere in a community.

Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) designated by the federal government clearly have an important role to play in metropolitan cooperation. The East-West Gateway Coordinating Council, the MPO for the Missouri and Illinois bi-state region, is the convener and development intermediary for the St. Louis Regional Jobs Initiative.

The St. Louis Regional Jobs Initiative is trying to move the major job-related sectors of the region toward a linked system that ensures that the labor market meets the needs of urban core workers and regional employers. The major job-related sectors in the eight-county area comprised of the City of St. Louis, four counties in Missouri, and three counties in Illinois , are seen to be economic development, business, education, transportation, human services, community development, and local and state agencies. One of the premises of the initiative is that it will not succeed in its mission if the diverse voices of employers, workers, and other stakeholders in the regional labor market are not included in planning, decision making and outcome evaluation. The same MPO has been working to implement a new 20-year plan that provides a framework for linking transportation investment more closely with economic, environmental, and community benefits. This initiative is described later in the report.

Councils of Governments also stand out as leaders of metropolitan initiatives. The East-West Gateway Coordinating Council is not only the MPO, but also the Council of Governments for the St. Louis region. Facing some of the worst air quality problems in the country, the Denver Regional Council of Governments has worked with local public interest groups including the Sustainable Transportation Project to generate an unprecedented amount of support for their new light rail system. With public approval at an all time high, critical extensions to the system have been given the go ahead. Energized citizens and transportation reform advocates are now pressing for the implementation of an urban growth boundary in the upcoming Long Range Plan.

Transit, ferry and planning agencies, including the Puget Sound Regional Council, are implementing an innovative regional fare system that will enable central Puget Sound commuters and other transit riders to use one convenient fare payment system on all public transportation services in the region. A smart card fare collection system will be designed to facilitate fare coordination, and a regional fare revenue reconciliation clearinghouse will help the regionís many operators implement the new system. Smart card technology will make it easier to use public transportation, cheaper to collect fares, and create new opportunities for improving mobility in the region.

County agencies, such as Cuyahoga County Planning Commission have also been champions for collaborative processes. Cuyahoga County Planning Commission convened a symposium in October 1992 to discuss brownfield redevelopment strategies as part of an effort to counteract sprawl in the metropolitan region. A multi-stakeholder Brownfields Working Group analyzed the problem of brownfields and produced recommendations. Progress since then includes a voluntary clean up law for Ohio and funding to Cleveland from the U.S. EPA for two demonstration projects. Today, in the Cleveland metropolitan region, there is a coalition of businesses, community development corporations, Cuyahoga county officials, neighborhood groups and other citizens working to develop brownfields sites in the city and find ways to remedy the financial and regulatory barriers they encounter.

Cities can reach out to surrounding communities to start the ball rolling. Mayor Archerís administration in the City of Detroit has attempted to reverse the past city-suburban conflict by organizing regional collaborations with suburban businesses and governments. General Motorsí commitment to stay in the City of Detroit was encouraged by Mayor Archerís efforts to reach out to suburban constituencies, including county and state government.

Local nonprofit organizations have been prominent proponents of regional initiatives. The Metropolitan Energy Center (MEC) is a non-profit agency working to achieve the sustainable, efficient, environmentally sound and economic use of energy in the Kansas City metropolitan region. Their work focuses on connecting energy efficiency, environmental stewardship, and economic improvement through community partnerships for the benefit of all citizens in the region. MEC and a planning team consisting of the local transit agency, the city, local architects, and six Americorps volunteers have partnered with two neighborhoods to work on a community planning effort called the Community Empowerment Project. The goal of the project is to educate the community members about sustainability and create a plan that will not only make their communities more sustainable, but that will also maintain diverse, livable communities within Kansas City.

Chambers of Commerce also have an important role to play. The Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce is developing a long-term strategic plan to support target growth industry clusters such as medical products, trade and transportation, and tourism and entertainment. The Chamber is using a collaborative process between business, government and education leaders to identify ways to support and encourage these growth industries throughout the region.

Churches have led creative initiatives. The Louisiana Coastal Wetlands Interfaith Stewardship Plan was formed in 1986 to help congregations across Louisiana understand the impact of rapid erosion on natural ecosystems in hundreds of communities located on the delta where Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico. Churches and synagogues sponsored forums for 2000 people interested in learning why and how to protect coastal wetlands. These efforts built stronger grassroots support for coastal protection and spurred the allocation of state and federal wetlands restoration funds.

Individuals have also been effective champions for collaborative efforts. Steve Hulbert helped empower his whole community to turn his idea for saving Olympia, Washingtonís watersheds into a full-scale program that educates the community about forest ecosystems, the connections between watersheds and the forest, and the effect people can have on both. He joined with Global Rivers Environmental Education Network (GREE) and community members to develop a program that involves youth, businesses, educators, resource professionals, nonprofit organizations, neighborhoods and government in monitoring the condition of the areaís watersheds. Public partners include the State DNR, Puget Sound Water Quality Authority, the Washington Sate Department of Ecology, the Interagency Committee for Outdoor Recreation, and the Olympia DNR and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service who supply the resources and financial support while community organizations, businesses and parents provide the volunteers.

The catalyst for Sustainable Racine has been Samuel C. Johnson, Chairman of SC Johnson Wax who asked community representatives to join him in laying the foundation for Sustainable Racine. The five elements of the Racine initiative are community visioning, asset inventory, goal-setting and measurement, alliances to share ideas and talents, and communications that ensure the initiative is open to and welcomes every member of the community.

In the examples described above, leadership came from many different places. At the same time, in all of these efforts, the champion reached out to all the various stakeholders who care about the issue, who can allocate resources to implementing solutions, and who have a say in whether solutions are implemented.

Collaboration among local governments is actually quite common. Sometimes collaborations are under the auspices of regional authorities or consolidated governments, but often they are more informal. The examples below capture the great variety in the structure of experiments across the nation. What will work in any particular place depends on local conditions. What communities need is the opportunity to experiment with approaches that make sense to them, along with access to high quality information about what has worked elsewhere and why.

Formal

Formal mechanisms include regional and/or consolidated government structure, metropolitan planning councils, special service taxing districts and joint service agreements.

Regional Government

Portland Metro is the nationís only directly elected regional government. It is the metropolitan planning agency and regional planning body for the three-county Portland metropolitan region, and the focal point for many collaborative efforts in the Portland area. It is responsible for both growth management performance and regional transportation planning. Metro, which controls development in the three-county Portland area, this year adopted an even stricter plan for the area, including limits on parking spaces at new stores and other measures to reduce automobile traffic.

Montgomery County, Maryland, which includes a large number of communities, has achieved rare social and economic integration because it has a unified county school system and the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission which has exclusive planning and zoning control for the county. This allows many innovative ideas to take root, such as the Moderately Priced Dwelling Unit (MPDV) Ordinance where builders of more than 50 unit project must set aside 15 percent of units for low and moderate income housing in exchange for a density bonus of up to 22 percent. The assumption behind why Montgomery County has worked is that businesses seek out labor markets and economic regions rather than specific government jurisdictions. The county approach gives the region a shared metro-wide voice to business.

Chattanooga and Knoxville city schools also dissolved and merged into a county-wide system.

Consolidated Government

In the 1960s and 1970s, Nashville-Davidson County, Jacksonville-Duval County, Indianapolis-Marion County, Lexington-Fayette County, and Anchorage-Anchorage Borough were created through consolidations of cities with the counties of which they were a part. All are touted because of their fiscally sound, unified governments with strong credit ratings and competitive rates of economic growth. Government unity seems to have fostered integration and equity.

Voters approved the consolidation of the City of Jacksonville and Duval County in 1967. Supporters of consolidation pointed to the complexity and cost of multiple, overlapping governments, the efficiencies of consolidation, and the marketing potential of claiming a larger population and a more diverse economy. Because of the consolidation, many civic organizations, trade associations, public service organizations, and charitable organizations operate, for the most part cooperatively, through the Jacksonville area. Inter-local agreements are also maintained between the city and the beach communities of Atlantic Beach, Neptune Beach, and Jacksonville Beach.

Through annexation Charlotte has grown from 30 square miles to 204 square miles, tripled its population, and maintained average city incomes 22 percent above suburban levels. In the 1980s, the gap between African American and white family incomes narrowed in the Charlotte area while increasing nationally. Charlotte ranks third in housing integration among all major U.S. metropolitan areas with a large African-American population. Annexation has paved the way for unification of the City and the County.

An early component of Nashvilleís economic strategy also was to consolidate the governments of the City of Nashville and Davidson County. This move improved intergovernmental cooperation, strengthened regional planning, and eased the ability of businesses to deal with local government. As a result of the consolidation, the Greater Nashville Regional Council (GNRC) is the primary planning organization in the region.

In the last three years, there have been several more formal consolidations in the South. Athens consolidated with Clark County, Georgia. Augusta consolidated with Richmond County, Georgia. However, city-county consolidations are rare. Over 100 proposals have been voted down since World War II, while only twenty have been approved.

Over the last four decades, central cities have annexed over 12,000 square miles and more than doubled in area. Columbus, Ohio annexed extensively. Annexation has been San Antonioís strategy for sustaining growth. Phoenix did too, managing growth by annexing neighborhood suburbs. The result was the city grew 10 fold in physical size and population in 50 years. Annexation can improve access to opportunity for more residents of a region, but it also has its costs. Phoenix officials now say the annexation caused publicly financed sprawl of the worst kind and resulted in poor air quality, traffic gridlock and spatial disorder.

In any case, except for cities in the South and Southwest, such as Jacksonville and Houston, most big cities are unable to change their boundaries, annexing neighboring communities as population moves further out. In many mid-western cities and in New England and the Mid-Atlantic States annexations are all but impossible because of rigid political maps.

Metropolitan Planning Councils

Regional planning councils in the 1960s and 1970s received a strong push from federal policy decisions. By the end of the 1970s, there were nearly 48 federal programs which required a regional plan or planning organization as a condition of funding or gave preference to regional councils. In fact, many regional councils failed when the federal government sharply curtailed funding in the early 1980ís, at which time it shifted the locus of regionalism to the state. By 1991, only 13 of the 48 federal programs promoting sub-state regionalism were still funded. The only new federally sponsored legislation which still promotes a strong role for metropolitan planning councils is ISTEA. Nevertheless, many regional planning councils have evolved into strong forces for regional collaboration.

The Metropolitan Council of the Twin Cities has historically been charged with wastewater permitting and planning and review of large-scale projects of regional impact. Under new legislation, it is also responsible for regional transit, transportation, and wastewater services. These functions increase the capacity of the Met to coordinate regional development. Although there have been attempts to establish direct election of council commissioners and expand Met responsibilities to include fair housing allocation, these efforts have not yet succeeded.

SCAG is the designated Metropolitan Planning Organization for six counties in Southern California. SCAG helped develop the Alameda Corridor initiative and established the Alameda Corridor Transportation Agency, composed of representatives from the surrounding cities and development agencies, to build and manage the project. The Alameda Corridor consolidates 90 miles of rail operations into a single 20-mile, high capacity facility that will provide rail access to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. SCAG recently funded a collaborative economic strategy planning effort by 28 cities in Southeast Los Angeles County to help identify opportunities for leveraging the multi-billion dollar investment in the Alameda Corridor. These 28 cities have now formed a Gateway Cities Partnership to carry out a cooperative strategy.

The East-West Gateway Coordinating Council in St. Louis, whose activities were described above, is another example of an MPO which is also a COG.

Special service taxing districts and joint service agreements

Regional efforts, not in the form of metro government, but in function-sharing and tax- sharing, are common. There are currently more than 33,000 special districts in the Untied States. More than 90 percent perform a single function, and most of these have never broadened out to other functions. Thirty-six percent provide water and sewer services. Sixteen percent are fire districts. Six percent provide post-secondary technical and vocational education and library services, and 4 percent perform transportation-related functions.

For example, some sort of inter-local transit district exists in all major metro areas. Palm Beach, Broward and Dade Counties have cooperated to establish a commuter train service running from West Palm Beach to Miami called Tri-Rail. The city and county for St. Louis voted on an increase of the sales tax to fund expanded Metrolink transit service in the region. The measure passed with 61% of the vote in the county and 65% of the vote in the city.

Sometimes voluntary intergovernmental cooperation for joint purchasing and services such as parks and recreation, waste water, and solid waste disposal is an early first step that allows for more collaborative problem solving in the future. It is interesting to note that flexible manufacturing networks succeeded most early around joint purchasing, but the most beneficial networks in the world have evolved to include all kinds of collaborations to solve problems and exploit opportunities. There may be ways to help voluntary efforts at metropolitan cooperation to evolve as well. Looking back at the history of regional councils, many were created as single-purpose organizations and later emerged into a broader coordinating entity. The Metropolitan Council of the Twin Cities, for example, was established in 1967 to address a water pollution crisis and Seattle Metro was created because of pollution in Lake Washington.

General regional taxes for a bundle of services are less common. Miami, Louisville, and Minneapolis all have such arrangements with their suburbs. The oldest tax base sharing is in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area where 40% of each local governmentís increase in commercial and industrial tax base since 1971 has gone into an area-wide pool and is then shared. More recently, Louisville-Jefferson County in Kentucky created an income tax-sharing compact. Rochester-Monroe County in New York has implemented a sales tax sharing plan.

Following a financial crisis for civic facilities in 1982, Denver created the first regional asset district. In 1988, voters in metropolitan Denverís six counties approved a referendum to create a special district that would levy a one-tenth of 1 percent sales tax to support these facilities. The tax currently produces $14 million a year and funds are distributed by a formula which was hammered out by institutions and local government bodies. The special district was so successful that the model was used again recently to set up a regional tax.

In 1991, Montgomery County, Ohio, and the City of Dayton set up a voluntary revenue-sharing program called the Economic Development Equity Fund (EDGE) to assist communities to improve their economic health. The Fund comes from a share of increased property and tax revenues generated by economic development among participating communities. The fund targets cooperative economic development efforts among communities. At the time the fund was established, it was expected to generate $5 million annually.

In 1994, a tax base sharing structure known as Joint Economic Development Districts was established which enabled the city of Akron to receive two percent of suburban taxes on business profits and wages in exchange for extending city sewer and water services. The city is now trying to expand this tax base sharing framework to other suburbs.

Also in 1994, based on the success of Denverís regional asset district, a governmental structure was launched in Allegheny County designed to fund the regional assets which benefit all of southwestern Pennsylvania and to institute a long-overdue tax restructuring for the local governments within Allegheny County, including the City of Pittsburgh. The legislation which created the Allegheny Regional Asset District was promoted by government officials from the City of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County combined with private-sector leaders from the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, and the Greater Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce.

The Allegheny Regional Asset District has the authority to disburse 50 percent of the proceeds of a countywide 1 percent local option sales tax to the 128 municipalities in the region. The seven-member board excludes appointed officials and public employees. The two principal beneficiaries of the District are the libraries and parks which cross communities, but money can also be used for sports facilities and more than two dozen cultural institutions. Allocation of the ìotherî 50 percent of the sales tax proceeds have led to reductions in property taxes, elimination of nuisance taxes, and tax relief for senior citizens. Poorer communities get more revenue than wealthier communities do. The Allegheny Regional Asset District is a concrete product of recognition by residents that the regionís attractiveness depended upon preserving regional assets which the City of Pittsburgh could no longer afford to maintain alone.

Informal/Virtual

Flexible choices are rising to the top among regional collaborations. They are less threatening to citizenís -- and elected representatives --desire for autonomy. They also take into account how difficult it is to anticipate the challenges ahead or nail down the geographic scope of a region long enough to have it governed by a single structure. Even communities which have annexed land or consolidated city and county government continue to be confronted with irrepressible sprawl leapfrogging across their borders.

Regions may not want or need regional government, but they do need regional governance, where ìgovernance,î according to Bill Dodge, ìencompasses the roles and relationships of all community leaders and citizens guiding and empowering the design of strategies to address common concerns and the delivery of services to provide for the common good.î

Regionalism today often operates through a network of regional decision-making mechanisms as opposed to formal structures. Process is more important than structure. Organizations in a network at any one time reflect the specific task being undertaken, and change with the task. Such informal mechanisms include civic organizations and citizen assemblies, area-wide coalitions and alternative planning organizations. Most of the examples sprinkled throughout this report have an informal structure, but a few additional examples are provided here.

Citizen Assemblies, Areawide Coalitions and Alternative Planning Organizations

The Chicagoland Transportation and Air Quality Commission includes 29 citizen members as well as the participation of hundreds of citizen volunteers throughout the Chicago region. The Commission created the Citizen Transportation Plan for Northeastern Illinois which lays out a policy and planning framework for transportation decisions for the next 25 years. The Commission included over 200 organizations in its planning, ranging from Access Living to the Openlands Project and from the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs to the American Lung Association. The Commission is helping individuals and organizations throughout the region to become engaged in the development of the regionís long-term transportation plan. The Commission will work to have the Citizen Plan adopted by the Chicago area metropolitan planning organization, CATS.

The Duwamish Coalition, named after the river that flows through Seattle, includes participants from the cities of Seattle, Tukwila, Renton and Muckleshoot Indian Nation as well as representatives from business, labor, environmental agencies and key federal, state, and local agencies. The Coalitionís purpose is to clean up, reclaim and promote the 5-mile long Duwamish industrial corridor in King County, WA, and preserve 75,000 jobs with a $2.5 billion annual payroll. While the Coalition has taken many small practical steps to restore the river and habitat for salmon and other wildlife, it views the most important step as fostering cooperative relationships between government, industry, community, environmentalists, and labor.

Cambridge Civic Forums has held a series of community forums directed at community, civic and business organizations, as well as churches and universities. The Forumís stated purpose is "to consider the future of the region as a model of racial diversity and economic vitality." Six topics emerged early which have been themes throughout the process, education and training, health and well being, business and employment, land use and transportation, environment and resource use, and social justice and quality of life (including arts and religion)). Although this is a city effort, organizers recognize that it is important to draw in neighboring communities and this is underway.

The Central Indiana Regional Citizens League (CIRCL), formed in late 1996, is modeled on citizensí leagues in other cities such as Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, Kansas City, and Jacksonville, Florida. It is a non-profit, non-partisan public interest organization which will attract citizens to help fashion an agenda for the nine-county central Indiana region in the 21st century and tackle the areaís problems with a regional focus. CIRCL is an outgrowth of an ongoing study of central Indiana by urban affairs expert Neil Peirce, who advocates sharing of resources among communities to solve problems that cross local boundaries. CIRCL plans to host discussion groups, monthly ìconnection forumsî to debate issues, and convene study committees.

Specific Implementation Mechanisms

Specific implementation mechanisms include public private partnerships for job creation and training, welfare to work experiments, public private partnerships for real estate investments in open space, historic preservation, open space and community development.

For example, business attraction and retention efforts in the Portland metropolitan area are coordinated by the Portland Development Commission, through agreements with the Multnomah, Clackamas, and Washington County. The Portland Development Commission operates a Regional Workforce Quality Committee to organize metropolitan-wide job training and placement.

Peter Senge, Director of the Systems Thinking and Organizational Learning Program at MITís Sloan School of Management, has for many years encouraged leading firms to give up the illusion that separate unrelated forces govern how their world operates. Once freed of this notion, Senge says organizations can become ìlearning organizations.î Communities can also become learning communities, and this seems to be the direction metropolitan collaborations are taking.

The sorts of initiatives which start with something like a systems view of a region include quality of life, sustainability, image-changing/turn around, and knowledge creation initiatives. They include data collection and visioning processes, strategies for measuring progress, and processes for making improvements. Some examples have already been described elsewhere in this report including the Grand Rapids initiative in Michigan and Sustainable Racine in Wisconsin. A few additional examples -- Sustainable Seattle, Chattanooga Vision 2000, Eastward Ho! in Southern Florida, and a series of interwoven Northwest Indiana initiatives are described below.

Sustainable Seattle

The Sustainable Seattle process began when the Washington, D.C.-based Global Tomorrow Coalition brought together a diverse group of people-- representing business, government, environmental groups, students, the media, community organizations and religious leaders for a one-day forum in 1990. A group of participants decided to continue the work begun and created the Sustainable Seattle Network and Civic Forum, a volunteer network and civic forum committed to the Seattle regionís long-term cultural, economic, and environment health and vitality. Volunteers began work on a variety of projects, with a special focus on developing a set of sustainability indicators for the region.. Sustainable Seattle continues to explore and promotes sustainable practices in all areas of civic life in Seattle as well as in surrounding areas in King County. It has produced-- with broad community input-- a survey of key long-term trends affecting the areaís sustainability. It plans to update and publish its survey periodically. It is now trying to evolve from a volunteer group into a permanent organization.

Chattanooga Vision

Chattanooga Vision 2000 was invented because of the experience in other cities that turn-arounds result from creating a new coalition involving diverse segments of the population. Rather than lobbying for a plan, Chattanooga leaders allowed ideas to emerge from a community-wide process. Chattanooga leaders involved 1700 people in 39 meetings over 4 months to set specific goals for the following decade for places, work, government, people, and play.

Volunteers formed task forces to carry out the goals, many of which have now been achieved. The self-image of the city is much better. Class, race, and geographic barriers are perceived to be lower. The downtown is noticeably better (including new shuttle buses, a new performance hall and aquarium, and major renovations to historical buildings.) A nonprofit called RiverCity Company has developed and built support for a master plan for redeveloping 20 miles of river front. There are also new public transportation services, bikeways, and pedestrian services. There is a new Neighborhood Network Organization which is helping to form and connect neighborhood associations across the city and county. A new Business Development Center is credited with improving business attractiveness. Public awareness of the vital role of public education has improved through Partners for Academic Excellence. The Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise has developed or rehabilitated housing for many low-to-moderate-income families, toward a goal of upgrading 100 percent of substandard housing in 10 years.

Chattanooga is also developing eco-industrial parks and has an array of programs to reduce air and water pollution. And Chattanooga Vision continues to reinvent itself, adopt new goals, and implement new strategies.

Eastward Ho!

The Eastward Ho! Initiative is a joint state-local effort to revitalize an 85-mile long urban corridor stretching from West Palm Beach to Miami to attract new residents and economic development and prevent continued urbanization of the Everglades watershed. This initiative is a good example of how honest efforts discover the links among issues. The Governorís Commission for a Sustainable South Florida has helped catalyze a historic groundbreaking for Everglades restoration this year, at least in part because of the collaboration of federal, state, and local natural resource agencies. However, the project has continued to evolve.

The Governorís Commission concluded that Florida could not achieve a sustainable Everglades ecosystem without also creating a more sustainable urban system in South Florida. So, the Eastward Ho! Initiative was created to revitalize older urban areas. However, the Initiative does not stop with urban revitalization. The ultimate goal of Eastward Ho! is to create sustainable communities in Southeast Florida that use resources to meet current needs while ensuring that adequate resources are available for future generations. It is concerned with accommodating new residents, maintaining unique local character, revitalizing the urban core, protecting the water supply, ecosystems, and quality of life, and making increasing cultural diversity a strength.

Northwest Indiana

In Northwest Indiana, there are a series of overlapping projects which together are trying to address the key issues for improving the attractiveness of Northwest Indiana. These efforts include the Northwest Indiana Brownfields Project, the Grand Calumet River Visioning Process, the Quality of Life Initiative of the Northwest Indiana Development Forum, and the Sustainable Development Roundtables for Northwest Indiana. This set of initiatives is building capacity for the communities within Northwest Indiana to work together. It is also building relationships among business people, community representatives, environmental organizations, and government officials, many of whom are active in all of the initiatives.

Northwest Indiana Sustainable Development Roundtable, for example, includes 38 community leaders in business, government, labor, and environment who are trying to develop a blueprint for economic, environmental, and community development in the three northern counties of Indiana, funded by U.S. EPA through the Northwest Indiana Regional Planning Commission and cosponsored by Indiana University Northwest.

The small successes of each of these projects is helping to build a sense of regional identity in Northwest Indiana and a base for future successes.

Many metropolitan collaborations have formed around one specific issue, such as workforce preparation or open space preservation. What is remarkable to note is that, more often than not, these single-issue projects evolve into broader initiatives.

Although single issue collaborations often broaden out, many different issues have driven these efforts at metropolitan collaboration, including business development/job creation, transportation access, changing land use and sprawl, improving environmental quality, protecting valuable ecological resources, reducing education and fiscal disparities,

welfare reform and poverty alleviation, fair housing, and addressing spatial mismatch between people and jobs. Some examples of each are provided below.

Economic Development

Regional clusters of industries continue to be a significant and, according to Michael Storper and Allen Scott, much underrated, element of the world economy, even given steadily globalizing economic relations. Regional economies usually donít achieve their full potential without institutions which promote collaboration to enhance their functioning. Storper and Scott suggest that to get full value from these clusters requires (1) trust among firms built through effective sharing of information, (2) political coalitions -- such as regional economic councils -- which identify priorities, build political support, and, through their broad design, help regions continually redefine their niche, (3) regional labor syndicates to negotiate labor training and targets for working conditions, and (4) inter-regional coordination to set ground rules for what regions may and may not do to compete with each other.

The collaborations we found that have formed around regional economic development generally are focusing on two of these four capacities, trust among firms and regional organizations to set priorities and marshal resources.

The Seattle Jobs Initiative is encouraging local economic development councils in Seattle and King County to come together to better serve the workforce needs of employers, in collaboration with the community colleges. A new model has been proposed which includes a regional strategy targeting high wage sectors, a federated organization structure which ties together various actors and manages the system for results, and a manufacturing and industrial council to advocated for the retention and expansion of the cityís industrial base. The Seattle Jobs Initiative received funding from the Annie Casey Foundation to develop its Strategic Investment Plan and implementation. Funds must be used to stress the relationship between inner cities and the larger regional economies.

The Seattle Jobs Initiative is led by the Officer of Economic Development of the City of Seattle, but the Initiative has its own board and working groups.

A Southern Californian electric vehicle consortium named CALSTART was a successful bidder among private -public consortia for funds made available under federal legislation. It raised additional funds from a variety of local public agencies and established a network of Southern Californian component manufacturers to collaboratively produce a prototype electric car. This may lead to the beginnings of a new industry in California.

The Greater Indianapolis Progress Committee is a broad based, bi-partisan, nonprofit advisory group whose activities and task forces help forge community consensus and are a catalyst for change. Through careful planning and strategic use of partnerships, Indianapolis set a new course as the amateur sports capital of the nation.

Building our Future: Regional Strategies for Economic Opportunities is a collaborative, multi-year initiative to create job and homeownership opportunities as the Twin Cities area competes as a single region in the global economy. The strategies include work force development, expanding jobs which pay household-supporting wages, and bringing Minneapolis, St. Paul, and suburban communities together as interdependent partners in a single regional economy.

The Northwest Indiana Forum is working together with local businesses in Lake, Porter, LaPorte, Newton, Jasper, Pulaski and Starke Counties, using its $1.7 million budget to improve the business climate and attract new business and jobs to Northwest Indiana and to change the perception of Northwest Indiana in Chicago, in Indianapolis, and among people who live in Northwest Indiana. It is recruiting new businesses to Northwest Indiana and pursuing rule changes such as proposing to repeal the business inventory tax in Indiana. It is trying to improve quality of life, image, and morale in the region by bringing together 41 chambers of commerce as a planning group for how to become one of the top communities in the U.S. Chambers will reach out to schools, churches, service clubs, civic and government organizations to come up with 1997 projects which improve quality of life in Northwest Indiana. The Forum is trying to improve educational opportunity and become known for educational reform (25%) by achieving 100 teachers with national certification and then get more and a broad school-to-work initiative, acting as coordinating agency for local universities and job trainers for grants. It is also working with partners to improve the environment in Northwest Indiana.

Cleveland Tomorrow, founded in 1982, is a non-profit organization whose members include 50 of the regionís largest corporations. CT is concerned with the regionís business climate and specific strategic projects, like a new stadium. CT partners with other regional organizations which focus on other issues. The Cleveland Roundtable addresses inter-racial and ethnic tension. Build-up Greater Cleveland engages in infrastructure planning and prioritization.

Also a membership organizations for businesses, Greater Philadelphia First has a broader purview and a large number of affiliates, including the Greater Philadelphia Economic Coalition, the Greater Philadelphia International Network, PhilaPride and the Committee to Support the Philadelphia Public Schools.

Transportation access

The number of strong transportation examples of metropolitan cooperation has proliferated in recent years because of the passage six years ago of ISTEA. ISTEA, by design, strengthens local decision-making and public participation. Because transportation plans are prepared by metropolitan planning organizations, these planning efforts often do include many different communities within a region.

Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the MPO for the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area which includes over 100 towns and cities, has successfully implemented ISTEAís flexible funding provisions through the Bay Area Partnership. Working with local and state partners, MTC allocated almost $500 million in flexible ISTEA funds to 500 projects. It has made substantial progress in blending concerns for cost-effectiveness with the consideration of transportationís impacts on land use and the environment. The key to success was developing consensus and keeping the project selection process open to input and improvements from the public and local agency partners. The Bay Area plans were developed through a process involving public officials, business and environmental groups.

The Columbus, Georgia Alternative Transportation Plan is a two-state effort to provide a vital bicycle and pedestrian network for a small city. It is an example of the efforts to integrate transportation systems, linking freeways to transit, bikeways to local roads etc., integrating transportation facilities into the community context, allowing for multiple uses of transportation facilities, enabling transportation and resource agencies within a region to work together, and improving system efficiency rather than mode efficiency.

Concerned parties from government, business, and public interest groups are collaborating on a plan for the Route 1 corridor in Middlesex County, New Jersey, that would balance economic development concerns, congestion management, access via alternative modes and environmental protection. The project is in its second year and has been nationally recognized for its emphasis on mutual agreement.

The North Central Texas Council of Governments, the MPO for the Dallas-Ft.Worth area, has led a regional planning effort focused on the Trinity River Corridor which is a focal point not only for Dallas, but also for nine cities and three counties, The Trinity River Corridor Citizens Committee developed a consensus plan to integrate the multiple needs within the Dallas portion of the corridor. The comprehensive plan offers alternative transportation modes and well planned facilities and growth balanced with environmental protection.

Changing Land Use/Sprawl

San Jose established an Urban Service Boundary in 1970 that capped sprawl by limiting the area that received city services. With extensive community involvement, the city reaffirmed this urban growth boundary (UGB) in early 1996 and completed the San Jose 2020 General Plan which strengthens the efforts against sprawl. San Jose will emphasize higher-density, mixed-use infill development in existing urban areas near public transit. The General Plan also outlines other strategies aimed at improving energy and water efficiency, reducing automobile dependency, preserving natural habitats, and improving air and water quality.

The Metro Council, the regional government in the Portland, Oregon area, approved a Region 2040 plan which calls for future development to be clustered around the regionís growing rail transit system within neighborhood, town, and regional centers. This plan looks four decades into the future to project metropolitan Portlandís development patterns. Metro, the elected regional planning body, is responsible for coordinating implementation of Region 2040. Metro has established common regional performance standards and model ordinances for communities to follow in developing their own local land-use plans.

The City of Los Angeles and the L.A. Metropolitan Transit Authority are working on a joint strategy to encourage high-density development around transit stations. The first major implementation step has been the Alameda District Plan for the area near Los Angelesís historic Union Station. The Plan has generally been welcomed by the cityís political and business communities as a means to retain employers by coordinating land use with public transit.

In Long Island, a locally based regional coalition has agreed on a plan for growth in the 100,000-acre Pine Barrens that can avoid contaminating the aquifer almost every Long Islander drinks from.

Improving environmental quality

Polluted rivers, lakes and groundwater seldom are contained within one political jurisdictions, nor are air quality problems. Also, sprawling land use is contributing to rising pollution. A San Jose, California, study showed that without a greenbelt, 13,000 ex-urban homes would be developed that, compared to an equivalent number of units downtown and along the transit corridor, would require at least an additional 200,000 miles of auto commuting, an extra 3 million gallons of water, and 40 percent more energy for heating and cooling every day.

In the face of these problems, there is mounting evidence that collaborative approaches to environmental protection are not only feasible, but also able to create successful and enduring agreements about the hard choices of managing economic growth, ensuring environmental quality and building healthy communities.

The Grand Calumet Task Force in Northwest Indiana is coordinating The Grand Calumet River/Indiana Harbor Ship Canal Corridor Vision Project, a 2-year research, visioning, and action process to describe what property is there, how it is used, problems, and solutions which achieve a balance of community and economic development, recreation, preservation, water quality, cultural, historic and other uses and benefits. The Grand Calumet River originates in the east end of Gary, Indiana and flows 13 miles through the heavily industrialized cities of Gary, East Chicago, and Hammond and drains into Lake Michigan via the Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal. Industry has agreed to partially fund the project, as has state and city government. Grand Calumet Task Forceís role is community outreach. Some see this project as a first step in a broader sustainable community planning and visioning effort for Northwest Indiana.

Facing large investments to reduce emissions, Unocal of Southern California came up with the alternative idea to buy pre-1971 cars for $700 per car in conjunction with the California Air Resource Board and destroy them. First Interstate Bank created a special car loan program with favorable terms. Ford offered participants special rebates on new cars. Those who sold their cars generally purchased a newer, cleaner one. This program resulted in greater and more cost-effective regional emissions reductions.

Wildlife Habitat Council, Inc. is convening industry representatives, environmentalists, and landowners along the St.Clair River, which divides the Canadian Province of Ontario and Michigan, to help them develop ways to work together to improve environmental conditions in the St.Clair River watershed area.

Brownsville, Texas, and the adjoining city of Matamoros, Mexico are exploring how an oil refinery, a stone company, and asphalt producer, and farms might work together to reduce waste and curb local environmental problems.

Partly because it is one of few metropolitan regions in the U.S. with a consolidated city and county government, Jacksonville has a long history of region-wide collaboration. With backing from across the metropolitan region, the Jacksonville, Florida Chamber of Commerce led an initiative to address its environmental problems. The city adopted strong odor abatement regulations which motivated businesses to invest in new pollution control technologies. Private and public sector leaders articulated a vision for riverfront development to attract tourists and improve quality of life for residents. By the early 1990s, these efforts were producing results. Both sides of the river were transformed into an attraction for visitors and residents alike.

Protecting valuable ecological resources:

The few remaining intact ecological systems are at risk as regions expand to new areas.

Adversarial processes are common in challenges over the use of these resources, dividing communities and neighbors. To avoid the costs in dollars and relationships of these adversarial approaches, communities are experimenting with collaborative mechanisms that enable many stakeholders to come together to identify common goals and areas of interest and resolve conflicts. These processes also help people to feel connected to a place and take responsibility for protecting it.

Some characteristics of successful collaborative approaches to protect ecological resources is that they use a framework based on a natural system such as a watershed or bioregion, voluntary multistakeholder discussion, a process open to the public, and the best available science. The ecosystem focus is particularly important because a shift is beginning from managing single species or resources to managing ecosystems for a variety of resources. The large landscapes at issue often cross ownership boundaries. Although they are new and experimental, there are dozens of cooperative efforts to use ecosystem approaches across the U.S.

The Chicago Regional Biodiversity Council is a new consortium of organizations known publicly as Chicago Wilderness. The Council was formed to achieve broad based understanding of the global significance of the Chicago regionís biodiversity and support for its long-term protection, restoration, and stewardship. The objective of the Chicago Regional Biodiversity Council is to enrich the quality of life of the citizens of the region, foster a sustainable relationship with the natural world, and promote the protection of the natural heritage of this area through specific joint projects (there are already 32 existing projects). The Council is a unique collaboration of more than 35 organizations including the Chicago Park District, the Chicago Department of Environment, the metropolitan county forest preserves, state and federal agencies, conservation groups, arboretums, aquaria, botanical gardens, zoos, biologically-oriented museums, and other land owners.

The Council has a steering committee, communications group, and five teams. A Policy and Strategy Team is developing a regional Biodiversity Recovery Plan. The plan would identify boundaries of the region, set forth an adaptive management plan, develop a process for setting priorities for acquisitions and establish an acquisitions plan. An Education and Outreach Team is trying to increase and diversify public participation in and understandings of the regionís biodiversity by developing collaborative education programs and events. The Science and Land Management Teams are meeting jointly to communicate and agree on priorities and identify information needed on the regionís existing biodiversity. The Marketing Team is planning media events, brochures, and a campaign to highlight projects of Chicago Wilderness. The Post Kick Off Activities team is assembling activities on a region wide basis that will focus and reinforce Chicago Wilderness. It is focusing on developing mechanisms for volunteer involvement in Chicago Wilderness.

Also in Chicago, the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, Openlands Project, Forest Preserve Districts of Cook, Will, DuPage County, Kane County, Lake and McHenry counties, as well as many other local and state organizations produced the Northeastern Illinois Regional Greenways Plan, a vision for an interconnected region-wide network of linear open spaces to provide benefits to rural, urban, and suburban parts of the region. The Northeastern Illinois Regional Greenways Plan identified a number of greenways and linkages to existing greenways which should be regarded as top priorities. Regional priorities were selected and all of the organizations involved are helping to implement the plan.

The Illinois & Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor extends over 78 miles, and it is hoped will one day stretch from Chicagoís Navy Pier to LaSalle/Peru, Illinois, allowing residents and visitors a chance to experience the regionís diverse natural, recreational, and cultural resources while stimulating tourism and other economic development. The Corridor is the result of cooperation among companies, local governments throughout the Chicago metropolitan area, and many private citizens who volunteer as caretakers of the Canal.

Education and fiscal disparities

Fiscal capacity refers to a municipalityís ability to collect tax revenues, control the cost of its services, and maintain outside funding from the state and federal sources. At this point in urban America, the fiscal capacity of most cities is waning, with more investment and wealth concentrating in outlying areas. As municipal services decline and urban poverty and crime set in, middle- to upper-income households tend to move out of the city, abandoning areas which continue in their downward spiral. Many inner-ring suburbs are experiencing declining fiscal capacity as well.

Fiscal disparities are growing between cities and suburbs nationally, and, some argue, are undermining the economic competitiveness of entire regions. A variety of authors have produced papers which show that suburbs of cities with higher fiscal disparities compare unfavorably to the suburbs of the cities with lower disparities in per-capita income, unemployment rates, education levels, poverty rates and other factors.

As long as basic local services are dependent on local property wealth, property tax-base sharing is a critical component of metropolitan stability. Property tax-base sharing creates equity in the provision of public services, levels the quality of education, breaks the intensifying sub-regional mismatch between social needs and tax resources, undermines local fiscal incentives which drive sprawl, and ends inter-metropolitan competition for tax base.

Since 1971, jurisdictions in the Metropolitan Council, a long-range planning body representing 100 cities and 2.3 million people in the Twin Cities region of Minnesota, have been pooling 45 percent of the tax revenues raised through commercial and industrial development. The funds generated are then redistributed to cities, counties, townships, and schools with the region. Myron Orfield, a Minnesota state legislator, more recently forged a coalition of the central cities, older suburbs, low-tax base suburbs, and churches in the richer suburbs to propose greater tax base sharing, strong land use planning, fair housing, and a combination of urban reinvestment, job creation and welfare reform. The coalition won in the Minnesota legislature, but the governor vetoed the legislation. The coalition has won funds to reinvest in the city for environmental cleanup and redevelopment.

Welfare reform and poverty alleviation

As a result of the move to blockgrants for welfare payments, many metropolitan regions are pulling together task forces of businesses, government, and community groups to figure out how to use federal resources well and how to augment them to improve opportunity for people leaving welfare.

The Office of Port Jobs in Seattle is a collaboration among community-based organizations, employers, unions, the Port Commission, City of Seattle, and King County to develop projects that link disadvantaged people to training and employment opportunities providing adequate wages and to broker contraction agreements among employers, community-based groups, labor unions, and governments. Ten model projects have been development to date, ranging from hotel and restaurant work to apprenticeships for port construction jobs to on-site degree-granting education course.

The purpose of the Seattle Jobs Initiative (SJI) is to link disadvantaged adults to livable wage jobs in the Puget Sound regional economy and to improve Seattleís workforce development system so that its focus and resources help residents attain and retain livable wage jobs, receive training proposed by involved employers who seem themselves as customers of the system, and where the training is integrated with human services. The new organizing structures are the Community Network and the Broker System. The Community Network brings together all of the employment, training and human service agencies in the region to recruit and refer residents, package support services and training dollars, share a common information network about jobs and skill requirements, provide social service supports and measure long-term success. The Broker System is a one-stop-shop for employers which will identify qualified workers, develop training programs for employers, etc. Many groups and individuals have been involved in SJI, and the goal is a coming together of all involved sectors and implementation in a manner that is broadly understood and shared by the Seattle community.

Fair housing

In the United States, more than 11 million families are competing for 4.5 million low-income housing units. Metro-wide housing assistance and affordable housing requirements is one of the ways to diminish racial and economic segregation and fill the housing gap. Each jurisdiction must provide its fair share of affordable housing in order for a region to function effectively. In addition to zoning for affordable housing, appropriate financing vehicles must be developed for adequate volumes of multifamily housing to be produced. This strategy includes vigilant enforcement of anti-discrimination in housing, scatter-site public housing, zoning requirements that encourage mixed-income developments, and promotion of metro-wide economic development.

There arenít many places which have implemented these kinds of policies. In fact, suburban policies restricting (or at least not supporting) the construction of affordable housing are aggravating geographic division by class and race and undermining the legal requirements for equal access to jobs and housing opportunities across the nation.

The efforts to eliminate the housing gap and deal with these issues is not up to the task, but there are many valiant efforts. There seems to be pretty universal agreement that the best affordable housing being created today involves partnerships between community organizations, local governments, corporate and lending institutions, and the philanthropic and religious communities.

The Metropolitan Boston Housing Partnership is a full-service regional nonprofit corporation that develops and preserves affordable housing, administers a rental assistance program throughout the greater Boston area, and sponsors initiatives that encourage resident participation and control in housing, neighborhoods, social services, and economic opportunities. The partnershipís board includes the CEOs of the areas largest financial institutions, neighborhood leaders, government officials, and prominent academics. Working together, this group has been able to solve problems that no one of the parties in the partnership could solve alone.

The DuPage Homeownership Center is a nonprofit organization in Wheaton, Illinois, that unites all sectors of the housing industry to finance comprehensive home-buyer outreach and education. The center is funded by its members, including 48 home mortgage lenders, the DuPage Association of Realtors, metropolitan area corporations, private foundations, and social service agencies. The center has a full-time staff who conduct needs assessments, affirmative outreach efforts, home-buyer seminars, credit education seminars, and individual counseling. The center serves as a bridge between potential home-buyers and housing service providers, helping families overcome impediments and utilize available services to achieve homeownership.

The Portland, Oregon areaís Metropolitan Housing Rule, under the Statewide Planning Program, has stimulated affordable housing and friendly land-use and zoning requirements in more than two dozen jurisdictions surrounding the City of Portland. The Rule has expanded the availability of lower-cost housing by requiring the areaís 27 jurisdictions to decrease lot-size requirements. Towns and counties are mandated to plan and allocate growth areas for meeting their fair share of the regionís affordable housing needs. One community, for example, had planned for only 371 additional multifamily housing dwellings in its comprehensive plan, which was adopted in 1978. Between 1985 and 1989, having revised its plan to meet the Metropolitan Housing Rule requirements, the jurisdiction witnessed development of 1981 multifamily units.

Spatial mismatch between people and jobs

As jobs have moved to the suburbs in cities, such as Kansas City, without commensurate movement of low-income families, disadvantaged workers in the older areas of the central city find it increasingly difficult to get to where the jobs are. Likewise, suburban employers have trouble finding workers for low-skilled jobs. This mismatch between jobs and housing has been exacerbated by suburban polices restricting (or at least not supporting) the construction of affordable housing.

Without housing options close to jobs, urban workers must depend on poor and unreliable public transportation. Most cannot afford their own cars. Access to a car is least prevalent among the lower income classes. Nearly 40 percent of workers with annual income below $10,000 donít commute by car, compared to around 20% in even the relatively modest $25,000 to $35,000 income range.

Many of the housing efforts described above are a direct response to this spatial mismatch, but there have also been innovative efforts to make it easier for urban workers to get to jobs and training. Residents in the Albuquerque South Valley of New Mexico worked with several public interest organizations including the Alliance for Transportation Research and the City and County governments to extend local bus service to the Albuquerqueís Technical Vocational Instituteís new South Valley Branch.

In Chicago, 60 percent of the manufacturing jobs have left since 1970, while industrial sectors in the suburbs have rapidly grown. Suburban Job-Link in Chicago is collaborating with the City of Chicago Mayorís Office of Employment and Training, the Pace Suburban Bus Company, churches, community organizations, and social service groups to combine carpooling with community organizing and job placement to help residents of urban communities find work in the suburbs. The program provides reliable transportation and plugs inner-city residents into job networks.

The Shuttle Bug Reverse Commute Project is a public-private partnership between the Transportation management Association of Lake-Cook, the Villages of Northbrook and Deerfield and their respective Chambers of Commerce, and 14 businesses with over 11,000 employees. The Project provides shuttle service from a suburban commuter rail station to nearby companies, allowing urban workers to get to jobs in suburbs 25 miles northwest of downtown Chicago.

Disinvestment from older communities in favor of newer ones

Brownfields redevelopment has emerged as a core issue for mayors of older cities throughout the U.S. There are demonstration projects sprinkled around the nation, many of which have multiple goals, from job creation to ex-urban open space preservation, from restoration of ecological diversity within urban areas to real estate development.

Northwest Indiana Brownfield Redevelopment Project (NWIBRP) is trying to bring good-paying jobs to Hammond, Gary and East Chicago while cleaning up the environment by solving the brownfield problem. The Project grew out of an empowerment zone application to become a model plan for public participation in redevelopment of brownfield sites. The Project received state and EPA grants to implement the model process. NWIBRP involves community groups, labor, residents, environmental organizations, business people, and local and state public officials. The community is guaranteed at least 50% representation on the board, include Calumet Project and Grand Calumet Task Force. Communities were able to vote on which brownfield sites to clean up first.

Chicago Interdepartmental Brownfields Workgroup was formed to facilitate redevelopment of Chicago brownfields sites. In November 1993, the departments of Environment, Planning and Development, Law, Buildings, and the Mayorís Office formed an interdepartmental workgroup on brownfields. The working group launched three initiatives to identify and overcome barriers to the reuse of abandoned industrial property.

First, a Brownfields Forum was formed to devise practical reforms to environmental and economic development policies to improve clean up and redevelopment of contaminated properties. This diverse group of about 100 people, came up with 63 recommendations for overcoming barriers to brownfields reuse which will be carried out by nine project teams headed by public, private, and nonprofit entities. At about the same time, the Brownfields Pilot Program was devised to clean up and redevelop demonstration sites in distressed neighborhoods using $2 million in general obligation bonds. The Department of Environmentís Brownfield Coordinator is also compiling a database on brownfield sites.

Conclusion

The breadth and variety of both the holistic and the issue-based initiatives described in this section is impressive. A few of these initiatives have made great progress, and now serve as a foundation for further metropolitan cooperation. However, many of the initiatives described in this report are only a few years old. They are clustered at an early stage, i.e. opportunity identification, and have not yet mobilized substantial resources. For them, progress generally can be judged, at best, by success in reinventing planning processes, engaging citizens, and developing thoughtful strategies which have relatively broad support.

Most initiatives have not had much impact yet on cross-cutting issues like sprawl and rising inequality between cities and wealthy suburbs. They have not led to basic changes in how towns within a region make regional decisions, except in a few cases where states or counties have played a leadership role in requiring local municipalities to cooperate (Oregon), accept a fair share of affordable housing (Connecticut, Massachusetts, Tallahassee and Tampa, Florida), adopt inclusionary zoning policies (Montgomery County, Maryland), equalize school funding, adopt planning for growth (New Jersey), or share revenue (Minnesota). Clearly, states have an important role to play, a role which is becoming even more prominent because of the devolution of federal programs to the states.

All of these initiatives still face major obstacles, especially complex rules and regulations. The Hudson River Advisory Board on Sustainable Development was sobered by the regulatory morass which, by default, is leading to degradation of what matters to people who live in the region. The only solution the Advisory Board could see was less government and more collaboration. Of course, this cannot occur without the support of states and the federal government. All of the initiatives need support and encouragement from their state and the federal government to overcome local political structures and a complex web of local, state, and federal regulations which hamper them.

Not all of the issues, however, are due to rules and regulations. Many have to do with how to increase awareness of critical issues, spur action and act effectively. In other words, they have to do with how to create powerful community learning processes. Proponents of regional collaboration have some common questions they are striving to answer:

Increasing Public Awareness and Understanding: How do we engage citizens? How do we spur desire for action by showing either that there is a crisis or a big opportunity in regional action? What mechanisms can be used to put key policy questions to the citizens?

Increasing Ability to Act: How do we move from visioning to action, especially if major structural changes are needed? How do we create institutions or networks to deal with cross-cutting policy issues? How do we get representation and accountability at the regional level? How do we get alignment between issues, representation, and taxing jurisdictions?

All of the initiatives need support and encouragement from their state and the federal government to experiment with answers to these questions, to share what they learn, and to continue to improve. At the same time, the communities where there is still little or no experimentation with regional collaboration need incentives to take the first step.

While the federal government should not mandate regional policies, it can respond to the publicís demand for more efficient public investments and more efficient government.

Government -- with compartmentalized functions and policies -- has been a barrier to experimenting with more collaborative practices, but it can become a source of encouragement for flexibility and innovation. This has been true of both the executive and legislative branches of government, and both have an important role to play in achieving the vast potential for metropolitan collaboration.

The Federal government can help to empower citizens, provide critical pieces of the financial resources they need to advance their strategies, and offer regulatory flexibility needed for them to pursue locally appropriate solutions. It can also convene and facilitate, shifting gradually from prescribing behavior to supporting responsibility by setting goals, creating incentives, monitoring performance, and providing information.

The federal government can help regions to empower local citizens through a Smart Citizen component. The Smart Citizen component includes (1) information: data collection and aggregation, measurement tools, local scoreboards, and GIS systems. (2) transfer of ideas and technologies across regions, (3) use of technology transfer to build regional infrastructure and (3) support for training to build capacity for regional collaboration, facilitation, and problem solving.

The federal government can help regions to more easily finance creative initiatives through a Smart Money component. The Smart Money component includes (1) targeting funding from existing authorities, (2) allowing for the flexible use of federal funding programs in exchange for innovative projects, and (3) allowing for the creative use of capital assets, procurement, etc.

The federal government can help regions to cultivate locally appropriate solutions through a Smart Rule-making component. It is very difficult for locally initiated solutions to problems to succeed given the public policies they must navigate. From environmental regulations that unintentionally inhibit urban redevelopment, a federal tax structure that favors low density single family dwellings, and an infrastructure investment bias that allows motorists to evade the full costs of their driving. The Smart Rule-making component includes (1) involving local regions in key rule-making efforts, (2) providing waivers to allow for local innovation with the potential to exceed current standards, (3) building flexibility into new rules so that places can decide the best way to achieve standards, and (4) providing incentives for performance and accountability.

Smart People

The federal government could help a lot by providing from its data sets detailed information about local economic, physical, and social conditions and of the dimensions of alternative strategies. Today, many different local, state, and federal agencies are compiling computerized geographical information systems, but no one is making sure they are all compatible or can accept the same data.

Some of the measures which regions are exploring include measures of physical capacity, health and condition (land, infrastructure, and ecosystems), financial measures of cost, revenue, assets, liabilities, and net worth of a communityís capital assets (public and private), measures of population, behavior and usage that define demand and consumption, and measures of communityís preferences, priorities, and choices, both today and how they have changed over time. The federal government could help make these data bases ìknowledge basesî such that content or meaning is built into the flow of information.

For example, the Cowlitz-Wahkiakum Council of Governments has been awarded a grant form the National Spatial Data Infrastructure program to create a Geographic Data Clearinghouse Node on the Internet for the Southwest Washington region and promote the use of federal data standards. The purpose of NSDI is to make current and accurate geospatial data sets easy to find and use for local, regional, and national efforts to improve economic, environmental, and social welfare.

The federal government could play a leadership role in innovation in metropolitan collaboration by facilitating place-based dialogs to bring diverse people together. For example, in the environmental arena, forums could focus on the management of conflicts of particular regions and how to give more opportunity, power, and responsibility to communities to address natural resource questions that affect them directly and primarily.

The Federal government could establish goals for regional initiatives and support their local implementation.

The federal government can improve local decision-making by providing information on best practices in other regions around the country. It can monitor, evaluate, and publicize local programs, so we can all learn together. It can offer technical and logistic help.

It can help develop methodologies to measure benefits of collaborations, and tools to compare the costs and benefits of local investment decisions.

Smart Money

Metropolitan strategies almost always involve some federal resources, such as transportation, education, training, economic development, or trade assistance. Delivery of these resources needs to be coordinated with regional planning that sets economic, environmental, and social goals. The goal should be to flexibly direct the federal governmentís substantial investment resources to locally-determined needs and optimize public investment through a regional approach.

For example, public and private organizations in the Miami, Florida metropolitan region have reached agreement about physical infrastructure plans to support the regionís trade and transportation and tourism clusters. They also see as a high priority cleaning up the Everglades and other ecosystems. Miami leaders need national infrastructure and redevelopment investment decisions to support their local strategies for economic competitiveness, environmental quality, and social equity.

In New York State, several Hudson Valley towns which set up joint tourism planning ventures were rewarded for this by higher grants from both the State DOT and DED. To the degree that statutes allow it, funding programs should be reworked so that towns that are cooperating with each other get quicker responses and higher funding than towns that are going it alone.

Because there are still only a small number of innovative broad-based collaborations -- and even these struggle with small resources -- the federal government could provide grant money for exemplary collaborative processes to address crucial regional problems. It could share best practices across the nation. It could also fund technology development that addresses cross-cutting problems through collaborations with multiple local initiatives.

Another opportunity to help is through purchasing and procurement policies that favor practices promoted by local collaborations.

Another is to begin to use funding for single issue programs to encourage communities to explore linkages. For example, federal investments in inner-cities and urban businesses ought to be linked to regional opportunities, not isolated by gridlock, quarantined by exclusionary zoning, and drained by suburban growth. Also, federal investments in open space could reinforce regional habitat reserves, greenbelts, and urban limit lines.

Federal investments in transit should be supported by land use patterns which put riders and jobs within an easy walk of stations and by a coherent regional plan which strategically clusters development. Investments in highways should not unwittingly support sprawl, inner-city disinvestment, or random job decentralization. Federal investments in affordable housing should place families in economically diverse neighborhoods where services, decent schooling and transit are available.

As responsibility is devolved from the federal to local levels, it will be important to explore how programs and policies can be fundamentally changed so they serve to strengthen communitiesí abilities to manage their resources effectively rather than merely shift public power from one level of government to another.

Smart Rule-Making

Problems aren’t better solved at a local level if local governments have no interest in solving them. The combination of local fiscal responsibility and national mobility could set off a perverse competition that drags the whole U.S. down to the lowest local standards. In a land with free mobility, no place can maintain social or environmental conditions better than its neighbors. The way to prevent sinking to the lowest possible denominator is to set high common denominators, strict and impartial, and federally enforced. Therefore, the most important step the federal government can take is to reward the good local programs with more federal support, not punish them with bigger loads.

Once these high standards are in place, the role of the federal government should be to reward collaborative efforts and provide incentives for them. For example, the federal government could amend rules that are barriers to local multistakeholder processes and promote them. It could waive state matches for transportation planning funds where there are especially strong collaborations. Or, for projects that exceed performance requirements, it could provide more favorable federal and state tax treatment for site clean ups. In any case, it should coordinate and consolidate various state and federal site standards and pollution cleanup requirements.

There is a great deal federal agencies can do under existing authorities to support collaboration. In a pilot project, the Forest Service found that 70 percent of its regulatory barriers to taking an ecosystem approach were self-imposed rather than required by legislation. Legislation usually inhibits inter-organizational cooperation rather than prohibiting it. At the staff level, many federal employees are experimenting with ways to overcome structural barriers. They need help and rewards.

Already, in 1994, Vice President Gore and the heads of nine federal agencies -- the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Departments of Education, Labor, Justice, Commerce, Agriculture, and the Office of Drug control Policy -- signed the "Oregon Option," a Memorandum of Understanding with the State of Oregon, the City of Portland, Multnomah county, the Oregon League of Cities, and the Oregon Association of Counties, to encourage federal interagency cooperation and regulatory flexibility in working with the state and local governments to support implementation of locally-developed performance-based benchmarks. This kind of initiative needs to be taken more broadly.

A good example of the way the federal government can facilitate metropolitan collaboration is through vigorously implementing the intent of ISTEA. ISTEA brought an end to the era where transportation policy was set almost entirely in Washington. U.S. DOT should have a new role in assuring that all voices are heard when decisions are made, in making sure long term consequences are considered, and in evaluating the effectiveness both of the projects selected and the agencies undertaking them. There needs to be federal certification of MPOs to assure that ISTEA’s requirements are begin faithfully carried out. Also revise rules for MPOs are needed to assure that the membership on an MPO board represents the population it serves.

U.S. DOT also has an important role to play in supporting the role of communities in transportation projects. One result of ISTEA’s greater focus on the impacts of transportation facilities on communities and neighborhoods is the many smaller projects which are often conceived by community groups. Under current federal rules these organizations are not allowed to take a formal role in administering the implementation of the projects they have conceived even if the department of transportation in their state wishes to turn over administration of the project to them. This needs to change.

Conclusion

The federal government could play a key role in spurring innovation in metropolitan cooperation. It has already taken some of the first steps in recent housing, economic development, and environmental initiatives. It is time to raise the bar. In a companion paper, The Federal Role in Metropolitan Cooperation, Clem Dinsmore describes how the federal government could do use existing authorities to take the next step.