Ostrowski's Outlook V
Spring 2000
A few years ago I wrote an article for the APWA Reporter Titled "Helping Decision Makers See the Battlefield." In it I described how Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade had current relevance. The poem is usually remembered for the wrong reasons. My favorite wrong reason is the phrase we know as "Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die." Actually, the last part of the phrase was: ours is but to do and die.
We usually remember the quotation as symbolic of courage in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. However, the Light Brigade didn't have a chance and it knew it. They were charging headlong into overwhelming cannon fire because the commander who ordered the charge couldn't even see the battlefield. The challenge for engineers and technologists today is not just to do and die but to help decision-makers see the battlefield and make better decisions.
After Initiative 695, the number of decision-makers has skyrocketed. We now need to be able to explain what we're doing to all the voters, not just a few elected officials. Explaining how public works systems work has always been a challenge and we as a profession never really got it down very well. Technical things have always been hard to explain and it doesn't help much that computers have come along just in time to make life even more complicated. But it's not just the technical world of public works operating stuff, it's also how we fund public works. Because the way we fund transportation grew by amendment over the years, explaining where the money goes also got very complicated. The good news of 695 is that it made explaining things easier by eliminating one tax that went a lot of places to fund a lot of different things.
So why do I bring up an article I wrote three years ago? It's not just to demonstrate the half-life of my better ideas. It is because we have an opportunity this year to explain things better, if we are willing to put out the effort. Because transportation funding got a little less complex and because citizens haven't trusted the agencies providing transportation and because nobody else is planning to make some lemonade out of this thing, we should be preparing an annual report to our citizens this year to tell them where their tax dollars went.
The format is simple: here's how much you paid in transportation taxes and here's what you got for it. The execution is a little more difficult because not everyone pays the same tax but that is a solvable problem. We all get transportation services from more than one agency too so describing what you got for your money is also difficult but solvable. Ideally, the report should be done regionally so that it can give a more complete picture and provide the opportunity for coordination of the various agency reports so they don't sound like political campaigns. Again, this is a solvable problem.
I can hear the complaints already. "It won't work because someone will criticize the report." "It won't work because this is a very complicated subject and oversimplifying it will lead to problems." I'm not any more receptive to the complaints than your customers are. If you were running a lemonade stand and spent all your time complaining to your customers about how difficult it is to make a glass of lemonade and if they only knew how much trouble you had shopping for lemons and how your partner isn't doing a fair share of the work, you wouldn't have many customers. They'd just go to someone who would charge them a fair price for lemonade and give them a quality product in return without the complaints.
Our citizens' needs are just as simple. They want to know what they get for their transportation dollar and we should be telling them. Is anyone willing to give it a try? If you don't try, don't be surprised when the voters send you charging into cannon fire again.