Back in 2009, IBM announced it was opening a technology center in Dubuque, Iowa, a move that would bring 1,300 jobs to the region. Not long afterwards, I read an editorial by a TV commentator in Madison, Wisconsin: “IBM could have located here, and chose Dubuque. That’s just not right.”

Source: Dirk Hansen

What seemed remarkable to the author the opinion piece was the notion that a small, Iowa city would be selected instead of a more recognized technology “triangle” or “corridor,” but it wasn’t much of a surprise to me. Dubuque was an all-America city winner in 2007 and I knew that it was an unusually innovative community. What it lacked in glitz and cachet, it more than compensated for with pluck, organization and civic spirit.

To be selected a finalist for All-America City Awards each community must submit an application that tells its story and describes three community-improvement projects and Dubuque had quite a dramatic story. In 1985, it had one of the highest levels of unemployment in the country, upward of 23 percent. The city’s largest employer, John Deere, recently had shut its doors, and residents were leaving in droves. Old-timers remember when a joker put up a billboard outside town that said: “Will the last person to leave Dubuque please turn out the lights?”

A few years later, the city undertook an ambitious public planning process called Vision 2000, in which citizens from across the region met to lay out a road map for economic recovery: The vision that emerged was a “diverse and balanced economic base that provides job security for all segments of the community … secured through the support, retention, recruitment of retail, manufacturing, hi-tech, services, year-round tourism, recycling businesses and industries.”

Source: Gregory Davis

Focusing on bringing in new industry – insurance, technology, publishing, health care, education and tourism – Dubuque rose to No. 1 among Iowa’s metro centers for job growth. A revitalized waterfront with hiking trails, restaurants, a museum and an aquarium reconnected the city with one of its great resources, the Mississippi River.

Vision 2000 was the first of four strategic planning processes that took place in Dubuque over about a dozen years, the latest being Envision 2010 in 2005, when thousands of residents convened to dream up 10 “big” ideas for the future.

One of those ideas was for downtown Dubuque to be a “cool” place to live, where people surf the Internet and chat in cafes with original art hanging on exposed brick walls, a place that would draw young professionals away from Chicago and the Twin Cities because of its combination of livability, affordability and opportunity.

“It all started in the 1980s when people decided we had reached the bottom and collectively wanted to make it a better community,” said Mayor Roy Buol. “The new Dubuque, that’s what I call it. People really bought into the idea. There was a common desire to better the community and make it place where everybody has opportunities, a place people want to come, and when they do come, to stay.”

Last year, when we were doing a special issue of the National Civic Review on environmental sustainability, Dubuque’s name came up again—as a case study in community-wide successful environmental sustainability planning. Again I wasn’t surprised.

Few, if any, winners of the All-America City Award have exemplified the spirit of regional cooperation, civic engagement and community innovation more effectively than Dubuque. It’s a story that we love to tell and tell again.

To learn more about the National Civic League, click here, or to nominate your city for an All-American City award, visit here.

Is there a similar story of rebirth and rejuvenation for your town that you would like to share? Please do let us know, we would love to hear about it.

Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.

Civic Engagement and Fiscal Innovation in California

Cities everywhere are facing the worst fiscal crisis since the Great Depression, but California municipalities have been at it a lot longer. California was the testing ground for a grassroots tax rebellion that swept the country in the late 1970s and early 80s. A combination of economic volatility—booms and busts—and the lack of a statewide political consensus on fiscal policy has made local governance unusually dicey and difficult.

State government has been having a running budget crisis since around the time that Governor Gray Davis was recalled in 2003, and one of the strategies of subsequent governors, both Republican and Democratic, has been to exact “take-backs” from localities, withholding tax revenues to lessen the budget imbalance in Sacramento.

Much of the country, I know, views California as a negative role model because of its dysfunctional politics and fiscal paralysis, but it should have another reputation, as a state where there has been a great deal of grassroots civic innovation in spite of or, perhaps because of the dysfunction.

I noticed this several years ago when I was working on a research project for Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE), a report on local government’s role in promoting civic engagement. One of the problems I faced was finding sufficient numbers of examples in other parts of the country to counter-balance the usual amount of civic innovation I was finding in West Coast, especially the Golden State.

I remember doing a briefing for the PACE board of directors in San Francisco. From where I stool in North Beach, I could drive twenty miles in any direction but west and find a striking example of local government innovation. But it wasn’t just Northern California. It was Chula Vista, Los Angeles, Ventura and Pasadena.

The journalist Carey McWilliams once called California the “Great Exception,” but he could just as easily have called it the “Great Experiment.”

In recent years, Brea, California, a city of 40,000 in northern Orange County, has become a case study in innovative fiscal management. Facing declining revenues and a big deficit, the city’s public managers rejected the top-down approach, opting instead to start a process allowing city employees to come up with ideas for restructuring the budget.

In the spring of 2008, an e-mail went out to all the city’s employees explaining the dire economic conditions facing the city. About 75 employees show up to a participatory budget meeting to develop solutions for the city’s fiscal crisis. The organizers had developed a collaborative process for the meetings. The participants were given a set of open ended questions and asked to meet in small groups to come up with answers.

Each of the groups recording their findings on flip charts and presented them to the larger group. Finally, a consensus would be developed in the larger group and the participants would move on to the next question. Brea city staffers call this the “problem solving model.” No ideas are rejected out of hand.

The next step was to hold two community-wide meetings. About 100 people participated in these meetings, not a bad turnout for a city the size of Brea to discuss priorities and community values to be considered when budget cutting.
The volunteer employee group developed tiered lists of reductions for each city department and used those lists to develop a balanced budget that was then submitted to the council. In all about 50 meetings were held during a ten month period with the average employee attendance of about 30-40.

The end result was a balanced budget elimination of 35 positions (though only about 11 of those resulted in actual layoffs or early retirements). The process was controversial at the time. Some council members reported were distrustful of it, concerned that the city manager had abdicated his responsibilities by giving power to the employees. Some citizens complained about city employees spending their time in endless meetings. The first year, the staff missed its budget deadline by three weeks, resulting in more complaints.

But in retrospect, most people see it as a success. The city has made some tough decisions and put itself in a better position to face the ongoing fiscal crisis with balanced budgets and less disruption than other California communities.
You can read about Brea’s experiment in collaborative budget making by linking here.

Mike McGrath is senior editor and chief information officer for the National Civic League. A former newspaper reporter and magazine writer, he is editor of the quarterly National Civic Review, which will be beginning its centennial year of publishing this spring.

Mike’s posts will appear every Thursday on the State of the Re:Union website.