It’s the end of the year, so I’m taking some time to do a little inventory of the projects highlighted by the finalist communities in the All-American City Award. The award is given to communities for outstanding civic accomplishments. Each finalist community gives a description of three projects in their applications. Counting and categorizing the different projects gives me a unique perspective on the issues that are reoccupying American communities in any given year.

Obviously, it’s not a scientific survey, and there are certain factors that may skew the results. For instance, most of these projects are at least five years old, so it may reflect a lag effect. Also, we have to factor in the not-always-so-subtle clues the National Civic League gives to communities based on our organizational priorities in a given year.

In 2011, the third year of a serious economic crisis, one might expect the finalist communities to be focused laser-like on job creation and economic development. Indeed, there were a large number of community projects in this year’s competition related to jobs and the economy, there always are, but surprisingly the largest number of any category among the 2011 finalists was environmental sustainability, of which there were 14 projects.

In fact, one community, Kenai, Alaska, focused all of its projects on the environment. Lakeview, Oregon, had two projects in the alternative energy area. This focus on the environment may reflect the National Civic League’s recent emphasis on environmental sustainability as a community engagement goal, or it could reflect the fact that communities feel they may have more control over their local environments these days than over jobs and the economy - very much influenced these days by national and even global trends. The emphasis on environmental sustainability at the local levels seems to be a long-term trend that bodes well for the health of the planet.

The next highest number of projects was in the area of neighborhood and commercial revitalization. This is always a popular area among All-America Cities. Revitalizing a once neglected neighborhood or commercial area is a tangible way of improving the quality of life in communities, and it is something for which city councils and city managers are held accountable. There were eight of these projects. (Admittedly, the commercial revitalization projects in most instances could have fallen into the jobs and economic development area).

There were seven community projects to improve educational outcomes, a number that probably reflects NCL’s instruction in the applications form to list at least one project that is youth led or youth serving. But it is also increasingly clear to local officials and civic activists that entire communities should take a more active role in improving educational outcomes, not just parents, students, teachers and school districts.

There were six projects related to jobs and the economy or economic development. Again, my only surprise there was that were not more of them. The surprise—or trend—that I see is that there were also six projects related to health and wellness, a growing area of activity by many communities.

More and more local officials and civic groups are seeing the health of community members as an indicator of the desirability and strength of the community. I’ve already blogged about Ann Arbor’s standout farmers’ market and its efforts to get low income residents and food stamps recipients to eat healthier. Another interesting project is in Beloit, Wisconsin.

Rock County Youth2Youth is an initiative consisting of 200 seventh to twelfth grade students who get training on the harmful effects of tobacco and go around to schools and city leaders to give presentations. According to the Beloit All-America City applications, there was a 38 percent reduction in the number of Rock County high school smokers in eight years, a 53 percent reduction in middle school smokers, a 19 percent reduction in adult smokers, and a 12 percent drop in cigarette sales.

The Smoke-Free Air project engaged 400-500 young people who worked closely with Beloit over eight years to make the city smoke-free. They petitioned and talked to community and city council members about the advantage of being a smoke-free city. Four yeasts ago, Beloit became one of thirty-seven cities in Wisconsin to go smoke-free thanks to the partnership between Y2Y, city council, and the city staff of Beloit.

Going back over these projects reminds me what an impressive groups of finalist communities we had in 2011. The jury of civic experts who selected the ten winners had a tough time eliminating some of these contenders from the final ten. Maybe we should come up with an official All-America City calendar with big glossy photos of award-winning community projects. Something to consider for New Year’s resolutions in 2012.

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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.

I’ve wondered about this. In science fiction, technology is often viewed as a threat to democracy, individual freedom or even (as in those cases in which robots try to take over) humankind itself. In real life, however, technology can help make our democracies work better.

I’m always looking for good examples of communities using technology or social media to engage people in the process of local problem solving and decision making. Here’s one: Olathe, Kansas, recently was named one of the top “digital cities” by the Center for Digital Government and Government Technology magazine.

Like most communities, the city has public meetings to discuss budget issues and holds them in different venues in an effort to get people to come. “In our experience, budget hearings at city hall were dwindling,” says Erin Vader, the city’s manager of communications and public engagement. “So you take it on the road and do road shows.”

But even going out to the neighborhoods and bringing meetings to the people didn’t seem to get the crowds, so the city’s communications and public engagement department went in search of new ideas.

So they decided to hold an E-Town meeting in the studio of the local government access cable station and to drive interest and participation with social media. Chris Hernandez, a Kansas City TV news personality hosted the meeting, which was cablecast and live-streamed, and members of the public asked questions to city council members via e-mail, the city’s budget web page, Twitter and facebook.

The city launched an online forum six days before the scheduled e-meeting, asking citizens to submit questions. Questions could also be submitted live during the meeting.

Local officials consider the experiment a success. The city’s facebook page saw an increase of about 60 percent in post views during the live-cast of the event and traffic on the city’s budget web page increased nine fold.

“We’re trying to meet the citizens where they are,” explained Chris Kelly, the city’s IT director Chris Kelly, “which is online.”

This is the 11th year the digital cities award has been given for cities that increase efficiencies and achieve better results by using technology. Olathe won first place in the category of cities with between 125,000 and 249,999 residents. The e-town hall wasn’t the only one reason for their award. Olathe has used technology to consolidate its 911 dispatch system with the county and used improve meter reading machines to save money, which is being used to promote other energy saving measures.

Getting people out to budget hearings can be a tough sell, especially in these days when the choices are almost always sub-optimal. Ordinarily, the public only gets involved when some favored program or department is facing the chopping block. But it is important these days when the choices are so tough that the public is both aware of and engaged in the process, and technology can help. Not just in discussing the issues, but also in giving citizens a role in helping local government do more with less.

One of the other localities named in the digital cities survey was Long Beach, California. I’ve been doing some research on the city’s efforts to eliminate its “structural deficit.” Better use of technology is one of the ways they are trying to save on labor and money.

The city recently unveiled its “Go Long Beach” app, which allows citizens with smart phones to report problems like graffiti, pot holes, downed traffic signs and weed strewn yards so the city can respond to them more quickly and efficiently. The app allows a user to take a picture of the problem and the GPS on the smart phone tells city crews exactly where to go.

Long Beach has also made strides in using technology for more efficient document storage, upgraded its fiber optic networks and used streaming video and social media to keep citizens in touch with what’s going on at city hall.

Technology is no panacea. And there is always a risk that the robots may in fact decide to take over, but in the meantime, these cost savings and interactive engagement possibilities can increase citizen trust and understanding of government and the challenges facing localities in this time of financial crisis.

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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.

Lately I’ve been browsing the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading website, which has a feature called “Bright Spots,” a collection of local success stories about reading programs.

One of those bright spots is Morningside Elementary School in Brownsville, Texas. About 99 percent of the kids are Hispanic. About 99 percent are on the free or reduced-price lunch program (FARM). About 80 percent are Spanish speakers.

This is a demographic that typically haunts the less- than-excellent categories of statewide standardized performance tests. Not at Morningside. Quoting from the website:

“During exam time at Morningside Elementary, big posters appear with a simple message: 90%. ‘I expect everyone to get at least 90 percent on the test,’ says Principal Dolores Cisneros Emerson. Ambitious? Yes, but consider that 100 percent of Morningside third graders — virtually all from low-income families —were reading at grade level on the state assessment test last year, and 55 percent were commended for having no more than three questions wrong. Emerson expects excellence from Morningside students, no matter where they come from. Benchmarking, regrouping, individualized instruction, tutorials, and relentless optimism get results.”

“It’s true,” said Morningside Principal Delores Cisneros Emerson, when I asked her about the bright spot description. “We’re awesome. Let me tell you. We’re the best.”

The school uses the aforementioned benchmarking to determine individual strengths and weaknesses. Kids who are performing poorly are placed in smaller sized classes and meet with an “interventionist” to work on skills.

The school has regular tutorials, three days a week in the fall and spring, to help kids who are not doing well and kids who could be doing better with a little push. Ten times a year the school has tutorials on Saturdays to make sure the kids get enough time with the teachers.

“There are a lot of facets that contribute to students’ success on the campus,” said the principal. “One of them is the teachers really caring about the kids and doing everything possible to make sure they get what they need and treating each child as an individual. Second, the interventions with the kids who aren’t doing well and benchmarking the kids really often and seeing what skill they are lacking and working on that skill for those kids.”

The third key to success, says the principal, is parents. “I have a very strong parental base,” she says. “They may not be here every day sewing or cutting or making copies, but they support the school. They send their kids to school. Last year I had an ADA (average daily attendance) of 97 percent. They are trying to survive themselves, but the best way they can support me is to make sure they get their kids to school.”

Research tends to bear this out. One of the critical barriers to performance by low income kids is poor attendance.  Attendance is one of the three critical areas the campaign is asking schools and communities to focus on as a way of upping reading performance. The others are school readiness and the summer reading gap, the fact that low income kids lose ground during the summer months if they are not reading regularly.

Another key to success: “I know where the kids come from,” she said. “I know what their future is if they don’t become educated.”

She grew up in Brownsville, a city of about 175,000, across the Rio Grande from Matamoros, Mexico and attended local public schools, a local university and a local graduate school. She learned her management skills from another dedicated educator, Ernestina Treviño, who recently retired as principal of A.S. Putegnat Elementary, another school with mostly Hipsanic low income kids that has shown excellent results in the performance tests.

“She would always try to think what she could do more for those kids to succeed,” she said. When she got her own school, she was determined to duplicate her mentor’s performance. When she came to the school, it had not made the AYP (average yearly progress) benchmark under the “No School Left Behind” law. Her first year, it made the AYP but just missed being classified as exemplary. “The second year, we became exemplary and we have been exemplary ever since.”

We used to run an awards program for outstanding educators, and I interviewed a number of the honorees. How to describe? “Dedicated,” doesn’t quite get it, “energetic,” yes, “confident,” that would be an understatement. I’m talking teachers and principals who work in low income, high crime parts of our cities and seem to have no problem mobilizing kids, parents, teachers, community and business people—any and everybody—to buck the expectations and statistics. It’s like what the NASA guy says in the movie, Apollo 13. For these people, failure really isn’t an option.

Does this remind you of a school you know? Tell us about it. We love to learn about communities and schools coming together to help their children achieve success.

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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.

When I was young, I watched a lot of wildlife/outdoorsy shows, and in middle school I briefly considered a career in freshwater ichthyology. This career track was abandoned later in life when I had to take high school biology.

Sadly, I have not turned out to be the adventurer/outdoors-person I once hoped to be, but I have done some backpacking, hiking, cross country skiing and scuba diving over the years, and it is always a special thrill to see something wild and scary, a puma crossing a high meadow or a black tipped shark swimming twenty feet below.

One thing I’ve never seen (outside of a zoo) is a bear. In fact, I’ve gone out of my way to avoid seeing bears, especially grizzlies. I find that singing “What Do You Do with A Drunken Sailor” at the top of your lungs is an effective bear avoidance strategy while hiking near West Yellowstone, Montana. Black bear encounters when camping in the Rockies and Sierras can be minimized by tossing a weighted rope over a tree limb and hoisting all packages of freeze dried spaghetti and ground beef Stroganoff into the air.

As any fool knows who has ever watched Animal Planet or an episode of Yogi Bear knows, it’s never a good idea to feed the bears.

Welcome to Kenai, Alaska, a town where the police are as likely to get a “negative human/bear interaction” call as a burglary or homicide. A major salmon fishery, Kenai is home to hundreds of hungry bears, both of the relatively innocuous black variety, and the more frightening subspecies of brown bear, the grizzly. Even the Latin classification—ursus arctos horribilis—is enough to inspire dread, and not without reason.

The sad fact is, however, that in the course of all these negative bear human interactions, a lot more of them get killed than us. Killing more than 20 Kenai bears a year, wildlife biologists say, could decimate the population. During the past decade, the number of bears killed by cars, citizens or authorities in or around Kenai doubled.

The main reason for these negative bear interactions, of course, is the careless storage or disposal of food. The city has what are known as “bear highways,” where bears know they can find garbage, bird seed, dog food, fish carcasses or fish in smokers or livestock feed. Bears get into freezers and tear down fences. They break into garages and homes. The locals see them wandering through parks and golf courses or strolling past bedroom windows in the dead of night.

Several years ago, the Alaska Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Alaska Audubon Society, Waste Management, Inc. and the City of Kenai instituted a “Bear-Safe Neighborhood” program. The upshot was no negative bear reports for a period of two years.

Because of its success, Fish and Game and the city decided to expand the program citywide. Kenai’s Wildlife Conservation Community Program has become a model for other Alaskan cities seeking to deal humanely with their bear issues. The main feature of the program is subsidizing the use of bear-resistant garbage containers in residential areas and local parks, but funds were also used to purchase and distribute thousands of copies of the Audubon Society’s “Living in Harmony with Bears,” a publication well worth reading if you live in bear country. Volunteers go door to door handing out info on bear safety and answering questions from residents. The success of the program has attracted interest from communities as far away as Crested Butte, Colorado. It is one of three projects—all devoted to environmental issues—the Kenai delegation will present at the annual All-America City Awards in Kansas City, June 15-17.

It’s heartening that Kenai—and several other finalist communities—have focused on wildlife preservation/environmental themes. Thanks to the news media and the political culture, a stereotype has been perpetuated to the effect that denizens of small towns in general and Alaskans in particular are especially hostile to environmental concerns.

You certainly can’t say that about Kenai. Click here to find out the communities three green themed All-America City projects—the Wildlife Conservation Community Program, the Kenai River Working Group and the Caring for Kenai initiative.

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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.

I remember the moment as if it were yesterday. It was 1989 and I was at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, a friend having wrangled tickets to game three of the “Bay Bridge” series. The Oakland A’s great Bob Welch was about to take the mound. I say “great” because he was a Cy Young Award winner who had managed to win 27 games in one season.

But he also had the reputation of being something of a “nervous” pitcher, subject to the odd mood-induced erratic outing. So my first reaction upon feeling the concrete heave beneath my feet was: uh oh, earthquake, that can’t be good for Bob Welch’s nerves. Funny how myopic we can be at times.

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Here I was worried about a pitcher’s mood after the worst Bay Area earthquake in decades.

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Of course, the game was called, and when it was played 11 days later, Oakland fans rode the ferry from Jack London Square to San Francisco, because the unthinkable had happened—a chunk had fallen out of the Bay Bridge, making that section of U.S. Highway 80 impassable.

I remember during those following weeks and months a laudable increase in earthquake preparedness activity. People were organizing phone trees, block groups, neighborhood preparedness plans, storing food and water in their laundry rooms and garages. But a year passed, then two, and people began to slack again.

Planning and preparing for a major, terrible, horrible disaster that may be far in the future really isn’t in our DNA, but every now and again, nature has to give us a little nudge to goad us into thinking about the unthinkable.

For Seaside, Oregon, the reminder came in 2004, when an earthquake/tsunami devastated Southeast Asia. Seaside is near an area of the Pacific where one tectonic plate is sliding under another one, a geological twin to those coastal areas of Indonesia and Thailand.

With its low-lying level topography, Seaside would be one of the most vulnerable communities in Coastal Oregon in the event of a tsunami. Four of the city’s five schools are located in the inundation zone of a possible tsunami, so these days the schools conduct twice yearly evacuation drills.

In 2005, the city hired graduate student Darcy Conner to design and implement an outreach program to educate locals about the danger posed by tsunamis. The grad student set up a voluntary citizens group to help implement the program once her contract with the city expired, and the city hired a part-time coordinator.

TAG, the Tsunami Advisory Group consists of Ham Radio operators, a local geologist, a nurse, a firefighter and an engineer. During the past three years TAG has, among other things:

• Conducted three “emergency expos”
• Created a PowerPoint presentation to educate residents
• Amassed 100 barrels of survival gear and rations placed in households outside the flood zone
• Developed evacuation maps and emergency kits to be distributed throughout the community

The city’s part-time tsunami preparedness coordinator has been hired by the state to spread the word around the state, and the Seaside program has become a model for communities up and down the coast of Oregon. Seaside’s precautions were further vindicated in March with the tsunami in Japan.

Tsunami preparedness is one of three community projects listed in Seaside’s bid to be an All-America City in 2011. It may seem like a prosaic matter, developing emergency plans and educational materials for a potential disaster, but it requires civic leaders and ordinary citizens to do a lot of clear thinking about events that are both rare and unthinkable.

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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.

Most cities have a founders’ story, a narrative—real or imagined—that explains its existence or in some cases location. Rome, Italy, for instance, was said to have been built by twin brothers who were raised by wolves. Taylor Landing, Texas (population 228, elevation 18 feet), has one to rival them all. It was founded in order to rebuild an aging sewage treatment plant.

Which would be little more than a cute story had not Mother Nature intervened. Five days after the vote to incorporate, Taylor Landing was hit with three major hurricanes within a period of three years.

The beleaguered community began as a resort/real estate investment near a golf course in the Cajun country of southeast Texas, five miles from Spindletop, the site of the original Texas oil boom. This is the heart of the Texas Oil Patch and also the home of two of the largest bird sanctuaries in the country.

Situated on an uplift of sandy loam surrounded by marshland, the homeowners are unable to use septic system, the usual option for small, rural communities without access to municipal services. The composition of the soil—tidal mudflats, really—would not have allowed it.

Counties don’t do sewers in Texas. It’s not part of their job description, and the neighboring city of Port Arthur was unwilling to annex them. (The tax base would not be nearly large enough to offset the cost of providing municipal services.)

So the homeowners were left with three possibilities: create a private company to provide sewer services, form a special utilities district or incorporate as a municipality. “It was almost impossible to take an existing community and get it into a private water company,” explains Mayor John Durkay. “Someone would have to own it, which automatically created conflicts of interests between the homeowners, and the amount of labor, volunteer time and government intervention to incorporate was almost the same as creating a special district.”

So the residents voted to incorporate, just eking by the minimum threshold of 200 residents as required by state law. Duly incorporated, the city began the process of filing the paperwork for the financing and licensing of a new sewage treatment plant.

The city government consists of a mayor, two commissioners, a city clerk, a public health officer, a hospitality chair, an animal control officer and a public works director—all volunteers except for the city clerk who is reimbursed for costs. Meetings of the city commission are held in the garage of Dan Newton, the public works director.

The vote for incorporation took place on September 19, 2005. On September 24, Hurricane Rita blew in. “Rita was a Category 3 that cost an estimated $10 billion in Jefferson County,” says Durkay. “It was a huge storm.” In 2007, the eye of Hurricane Humberto went directly over Taylor Landing. A year later, Hurricane Ike created one of the highest storm surges in Gulf Coast history.

The fledgling city’s lofty elevation of 18 feet protected its houses from flooding, but the new sewage treatment plant, still under construction, was not so lucky. To complicate matters, the Army Corps of Engineer’s office in Galveston was destroyed by Ike while it was reviewing Taylor Landing’s sewer project. The tiny community had to apply for a FEMA loan to rebuild the damaged sewer lines and to do it in compliance with a new set of greener standards than originally encountered.

Another complication of the hurricanes—being a city meant complying with the more rigorous emergency planning rules that were implemented after the disaster of Katrina. An unpaid city government consisting of a handful of people meeting in the garage of the city’s volunteer public works director was expected to meet emergency planning standards no less rigorous than the megalopolis of Houston, Texas.

Ever resourceful, the community was able to evacuate its residents, account for them on return, protect their property, distribute fuel, water and food and provide area responders with appropriate reporting and incident management information. After providing FEMA with all necessary reports, and hazard mitigation and reconstruction plans, Taylor Landing was informed that it has passed muster with flying colors.

The new sewage plant is expected to come on line in the next month or so, representing a moral victory for the community.

City meetings, however, are still being conducted in Dan Newton’s garage.

Taylor Landing is one of 26 finalists in the 2011 All-America City Awards, which will be held June 15-17 in Kansas City, Missouri. It is the smallest of the finalists this year and possibly one of the smallest in the 62-year-old awards program.

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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.