Institutionalist
What I learned after my first term in office.
When people ask me to contrast the differences between my second term in office and my first, I often reflect upon my gradual realization of the importance of institutions. As a spry first-termer, I come to office with grandiose and explicit policy or program goals; when I read through my campaign materials or media coverage from the election of 2017, I’m struck by how much attention was given to very specific things, like developing a publicly-owned broadband utility. Being a fan of Rock Island’s historical and cultural heritage (I still think this is one of our greatest remaining assets, btw), I often spoke of resurrecting the John Looney bus tour. In the early years, I’d sit through the City Council’s annual goal setting session and lay out very specific tasks or ideas I hoped the city’s staff could accomplish. After four years of engaging in this sort of useless strategic planning, I have come to realize that work doesn’t get done without sufficient institutional support.
Unfortunately, talking about institutions isn’t particularly exciting. When I speak with constituents or field complaints/requests, I often hear things like “we need more economic development” or an even more specific need like “we need a grocery store on 11th Street.” Many well-intended people (myself included 4ish years ago) run for office and win their elections by simply espousing support for obvious needs like “development.” However, I’ve come to greatly appreciate the incredibly laborious process of building institutions and developing organizational capacity.
Take, for example, the city’s renewed effort to revitalize our downtown. I am always cautious to say we’re revitalizing our downtown, as we’ve had a few decades worth of revitalizing (or attempts thereof) our downtown and, should we fail to succeed, I worry it will lend some to think our downtown simply can never be vitalized. It also completely negates all of the good people, work, effort and spirit that has and continues to already exist downtown. Again, I fell in love with Rock Island and moved here from Davenport on account of frequently visiting our downtown circa 2008—the rising tide of The District’s 1990s high water mark had arguably receded considerably by then. Anyway, in early 2021, the City embarked on a new strategy to develop downtown Rock Island through an agreement with the QC Chamber of Commerce. We paid the Chamber $250,000 to, effectively, create a new Downtown Rock Island Partnership—a new institution.
The agreement was a nuanced but important distinction: the Chamber was hired to develop a new place management organization. They were not hired to do the work of a place management organization. Sure, in the process of birthing a new place management organization, they might do some work that said organization would eventually do, but the product that we were procuring from the Chamber was a new institution. As such, after the agreement was in place between the City and the Chamber, the Chamber went out and hired Jack Cullen for the newly created position of “Downtown Director.” Jack is technically on the payroll of the Chamber, but its a portion of the $250,000 that the City transferred to the Chamber that pays his salary. With a Steering Committee in place, made up of representatives from the City (myself included) and downtown stakeholders, Jack is now in year 2 of a 2-year runway to try and get a new, sustainable, long-term organization in place to manage downtown Rock Island. The original agreement between the City and the Chamber was for two years; if the Chamber can’t get a new place management organization up and running by then, the money stops and Jack’s position goes bye-bye. Without getting too much into the specifics of place management, in order to get a long-term sustainable organization established, a funding mechanism is needed. While there are options, a common way to do this is to create a Special Service Area, which is effectively a small additional property tax levy for properties within the geographic service area. SSAs (or SSMIDs, as they’re called in Iowa) are in place for downtown Davenport, Bettendorf, Moline and East Moline. This is how the Downtown Davenport Partnership, for example, is funded (in part). Rock Island has never had an SSA—nor has it ever had a sustainable way to fund long-term place management work. This mechanism is how hanging flower planter beautification efforts, big events and infrastructure improvements are funded. However, SSAs need to have buy-in from the property owners that will be affected by them. Essentially, Jack’s job is to educate and convince property owners in downtown Rock Island to raise their own property taxes, by approving an SSA, which in theory will revitalize the downtown, increasing their property values, business activities, tenant numbers, etc. It’s a sticky game of getting everyone to jump together, with a hoped pay-off long-term. I do not envy Jack’s job. For those curious—he’s doing a great job, for the record.
When the City was considering this agreement with the Chamber, in late 2020, we had two choices: one was to enter into this institution-building effort to establish a sustainable place management organization; the second was to simply take the $250,000 we paid the Chamber and spend it on needs in the downtown. $250,000 isn’t a ton of money, when considering we’re pursuing a $7,000,000 rebuild program right now, but it’s certainly some money. Reflecting on my distinction between institutions or the work that those institutions do, we had a similar dilemma. How many strategic planning sessions did I sit through between 2017 and 2021 where we espoused goals of “revitalizing the downtown” to our already overburdened staff with underfunded budgets? If you asked any candidate in the 2021 municipal election cycle, they all identified the need to improve our downtown—some even went so far as to bring up specific ideas, like new benches or fixing sidewalks. The reality is, unless we have a sufficient institution in place with enough capacity to do things like replace benches or fix sidewalks, we were all talking just to hear ourselves talk. Nobody every campaigns on institution-building. Even today, when constituents ask me about the downtown, I often fumble through some jargon-filled explanation of setting up a new place management organization. People don’t care about how it’s done, they just want it done. Unfortunately for our community, many elected officials and leaders think like this too.
What I’ve come to realize is that we could take the model that the City of Rock Island has initiated with the Chamber for the creation of a new place management organization and copy it for any number of other institution-building needs. Why do we only have a Jack Cullen for the downtown and not College Hill? 11th Street Corridor? The West Side? All of these strategic locations in Rock Island need their own institutional support to revitalize these essential locations. Let’s not stop there, however—let’s further expand the scope. In a previous post, I harped on the need to move our local economy up the value chain. I believe we need to develop the creative economy in Rock Island, as I think Rock Island’s unique assets and strengths lend themselves very well to the needs of businesses in this industry. The reality is, we don’t know how to do this. If we did, we’d have a burgeoning research and development sector, businesses like consulting or ad agencies and all the other hallmark enterprises of the creative economy. But we don’t. We have a hollowed-out manufacturing economy with a minimal service economy. That’s ok—Rock Island is still loveable—but it is what it is. How do we figure out how to develop the creative economy in Rock Island? I don’t know, but I would support allocating resources to creating an institution that would be tasked with doing so.
Isn’t it funny that zero time is dedicated, whether in the nonpartisan realm of public policy development, or the partisan world of joining a particular political party or supporting a candidate, to talking about institutions? Have you ever heard Bernie describe the kind of institutional support that would be needed to actually have Medicare-For-All? Hitting close to home for me, personally, how many Socialists tweet non-stop about “organizing the working class” without a thought as to what kind of institution would need to exist to facilitate doing so? Frankly, if you’re a close friend or associate of mine, you’ve probably heard me describe my increasing sense of isolation from others. I feel like an island, out here, wanting the tangible goods of certain public policies or programs, but when I ask around for help in establishing an institution that could actually deliver on the goods, I’m not sure to whom I could ask.
Just imagine how weird it would feel to invite someone to a protest wherein the goal was to get the City Council—or whatever—to allocate funding to establish a tenant union. This is actually something I’m trying to secure, right now, so if this resonates with anyone out there, please, seriously, hit me up. Sure, there’s plenty of people that may attend a rally demanding that a City government better inspect rental properties—or some kind of explicit policy demand—but not to provide two-years worth of funding to an outside agency to set up a new sustainable organization. Again, let’s just copy the formula! The City of Rock Island could enter into an agreement with some non-profit out there to hire an organizer to gather up tenants and donors to establish a new tenant union, which would then do the work of a tenant union. To further drive the point home, the City of Rock Island is sitting on $26.5M from the American Rescue Plan Act. Can you imagine how many new institutions we could start over the next three years? Is there an institution in the Quad Cities with a full-time paid Executive Director whose only task is to take on racial justice? There’s an awful lot of volunteers out there, but how many sustainable institutions? Public Health? Immigrant/refugees? Neighborhood organizing? Climate change? Local history/heritage tourism? Basically, think of every -ism or change you want to see in the world and ask yourself if there’s an institution that’s putting in the work 40 hours a week to see it come into fruition. I bet there’s not a lot.
If you’ll allow me, I’m going to stray from my focus on topics related to the City of Rock Island. The matter of institutions is bigger than just my beloved municipality. I think, as a society, we need to reflect a bit more on institutions—because they’re rapidly evaporating. At least for working people. Religion, fraternal organizations, marriage, traditional career hierarchies, social or hobby clubs are all examples of crumbling institutions. Now, before anyone accuses me of calling for some return to patriarchal nuclear family nonsense, I don’t mean to defend some traditional sanctity of the institution of marriage, or whatnot. However, I am concerned about which institutions remain. The absolute failure to effectively respond to the coronavirus pandemic in the US (and many western nations) was due to simply not having much of an institutional base to do so. We’ve got a massively dysfunctional and fractured private healthcare sector, and a federal agency or two that maybe does some research, but for regular ol people at the grassroots level, what kind of institution existed to keep us safe and healthy? Even if a politician wanted to do something about the pandemic, what tools do they have at their disposal? In my darkest moments of despair, I tend to conclude that the only institution that exists is consumption. We have a strong institutional base to facilitate consumption (well, maybe not that strong, what with all the supply chain issues currently ongoing) and that’s about it. No wonder we can’t resolve climate change. No wonder our neighborhoods are crumbling. No wonder we can’t organize the working class. Addressing these things cannot be done within the framework of consumption—you can’t just download an app to negotiate better pay from your boss. However, it’s really easy to call for change. It’s really easy to include “climate change” in a political party’s policy platform. It’s really easy to buy a climate change bumper sticker (this is consumption, btw). What’s hard is building new institutions that will actually address climate change.
We need political parties that recognize the primacy of institutions and focus their work on developing them. I need a Facebook group for Quad Citizens that want to dive into organization development and build institutions with me. I want candidates for local office to have to explain their theory as to the how not just the what of being in support of “economic development.” If such a political party existed that both emphasized a real analysis of power and was willing to use it, as described in my previous article, and recognized the importance of building institutions to secure policy goals, it would be unstoppable.
Maybe we’ll call that new party “Institutionalists.”