New Charter: Now Make It Work

If a city tree falls in the urban forest, will it make a sound that’s heard in City Hall?

Saturday, the new city charter that voters passed a year ago took effect. After 75 years, a revamped set of rules and relationships governs the mayor, City Council and the 34,000 city employees. As of today, everything and nothing have changed.

Traffic lights still turn from red to green, lifeguards still are in their towers at 55 city swimming pools and the green city trash trucks still are being prepared to lumber down streets on schedule.

But much will change. The new charter shifts some power to the mayor, streamlines departments, refines the council’s policymaking role and launches an ambitious network of planning commissions and neighborhood councils designed to connect now-disaffected residents with City Hall. The charter is a declaration of faith from neighborhood activists, City Hall insiders and the voters around the city who approved it, faith that government can do more to improve people’s lives even in this vast city. How much things improve will rest on the goodwill, political skill and diligence of city officials and residents alike.

What are the immediate challenges?

The promise of better delivery of city services sold the charter to voters. Now department heads have to use the new charter’s flexibility to respond more quickly to problems, better anticipate needs and coordinate across agencies. When the city tree falls, crews should not just remove it, as they do now, but replace it and tend to the new one. Street repavers will have to work more closely with utility departments so the same stretch of asphalt isn’t torn up over and over.

The mayor, who can now boot out lazy or incompetent department heads, will have to closely monitor their performance. Since residents are used to complaining to their council members about street-level problems more than to the mayor’s staff, and are likely to continue to do so, how will the mayor’s office know which departments respond and which don’t?

Members of the seven new regional planning boards face a steep learning process before they can make thoughtful decisions about new development projects. The success of the new Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, charged with launching a network of community councils next year, will depend on encouraging ordinary residents, not just NIMBY-ist homeowner activists, to roll up their sleeves and improve their neighborhoods. That will be hard, given the longtime apathy of most residents.

The first step toward a more responsive city might just be the toughest: The mayor and the City Council--now and in later administrations--will have to forge a new relationship, one less contentious and more constructive than the mutual animus and gamesmanship that led to calls for a new charter in the first place. Residents have had enough of finger-pointing and politics-as-usual. What they want is a cleaner, more attractive and more livable city.