Flim-Flam, Double-Talk and Hustle: The Urban-Problems Industry
Kalish, James A.
FLI M-FLAM, DOUBLE-TALK, AND HUSTLE: Theurban-Problems Industry by James A. Kalish In 1830 the Secretary of the Treasury contracted with the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia for a study...
...The principal product of a major part of the industry is one or another thing that studying urban problems can help sell...
...There is no way of calculating precisely how big, in dollar terms, the urban-problems industry is, but it is safe to guess that it receives something like half a billion dollars of federal money a year-$2.25 per citizen...
...Professional city planners spread the word that Waterbury had been “had” again by consultants...
...Last year (fiscal 1969) it bought $13.5 billion worth...
...It usually bulges with resumes, a history of the company, and other inconsequential materials, and it is almost always lodged between flashy covers of colored cardboard on the theory that bureaucrats read pretty documents before plain ones...
...Friends, casual acquaintances, and former colleagues in government are systematically lunched and quizzed for the inside story on who needs what when...
...This can happen when the agency gets an answer it does not like, or when a study has unearthed a situation that is politically threatening to the agency...
...Those interested in a specific RFP attend a pre-bidders’ conference at which agency officials describe their project and prospective bidders size up their prospective competition...
...Travelers Insurance developed so much computer and systems capability for its own use that it now has overcapacity and excess manpower to sell to villages and towns in New England...
...It is the mental set that produces, in a study of mass transportation, a sentence like, “Comfort is a complexly distributed random variable,” which, in the doubtful event that it means anything, means that since you can’t quantify comfort, youmight as well forget about it and leave the strap-hangers with their elbows in each other’s ribs...
...Each firm then prepares and submits a proposal...
...ems industry in one breath because, intellectually and spiritually- and to a large degree physically as well-the former is, in the characteristically pseudo-scientific trade metaphor, a “spinoff” from the latter...
...the firm was paid $9,500 to do that and never Once in its report did it even allude to housing discrimination as a central problem...
...In addition, it is sometimes something that hasn’t happened, isn’t happening, couldn’t happen, and shouldn’t happen in a city, a suburb, a metropolitan area, or anywhere else, like, say, Cooperative Behavior as a Function of Group Similarity in a Two-Person Game...
...Whether he should even take on work that he believes is worthless is a problem with which he and his conscience must struggle...
...After 43 firms sent in extensive proposals, officials at OEO informally admitted that they did not have any idea what they wanted or why...
...to attack and resolve complex urban problems...
...Ideological Foundations for Negro Action, a Cornparative Analysis of Militant and Non-Militant Views of the Los Angeles Riot...
...The government job of monitoring a contract during its life is seldom performed very diligently...
...Whole sections of federal documents are blatantly reproduced and pawned off as original work...
...and Cooperative Trusting Behavior as a Function of Ethnic Group Similarity, Dissimilarity, and Delayed Reward in a Two-Person Game...
...The time of a $10,000-ayear man, who is the most inexperienced and inexpert man a firm is likely to have, will cost the government at the rate of $25,000 per year, which is a good deal more than most people in the federal civil service earn...
...The situation Waterbury, Connecticut, got itself into recently exemplifies the shortcomings of the consultant contract system at the local government level...
...The Economy of Harlem...
...Six months later,if you somehow find about a $100,000 study and ask for a copy of it, you are told to come up and use the file copy, if it can be found...
...Sometimes the total process is a sham...
...One hundred thousand dollars will buy the time of perhaps three or four men for the equivalent of one year...
...Restrictions are written into most consultant contracts stating that the report and all that went into it is the property of the funding agency and that the consultant cannot release the documents without prior approval...
...Even the staff director of the Joint Economic Committee, who was interested in manpower training programs for Indians, found it difficult to get a copy...
...Full Speed Ahead...
...Government has the power to change the system,if for no other reason than that it pays the bills...
...The required 25 or 50 copies are quickly distributed to the files, and the 200-word precis are inserted into the computerized but little-used government research data banks...
...As the foregoing paragraphs suggest, competition for government contracts to study urban problems is fierce...
...The faster a study is submitted, the more profits there are...
...Thus, based on the restrictive channels of movement, the high degree of rental property, and the apparant inability of Negroes in the ghetto to participate in the normal choice in housing, some new approach is required...
...And of course hundreds, perhaps thousands, of academics are free-lance urban specialists who work directly for the government or for firms carrying out government contracts for per-diem stipends ranging from $100 (the government maximum) to $300 a day...
...A firm or institution can be given a “sole source” contract on the grounds that no one else can possibly do the work under the circumstances...
...A medium-sized research or evaluation contract from HTJD or HEW is worth something like $100,000, It is not unusual for 75 separate firms to take an active interest in such a contract, with 50 delivering formal proposals to the agency...
...Local newspapers criticized the city for pouring money into planning without getting results...
...thus even the few available, knowledgeable government reviewers have difficulty understanding how the conclusions were arrived at...
...When the written materials do arrive, there are few readers who are equipped to understand the technical aspects of the work...
...The Stanford Research Institute, Battelle Memorial Institute, and the Mid-West Research Institute are other big notforprofit corporations battling for urban contracts...
...Then there are over 50 “not-forprofit” corporations originally created by the Defense Department as independent institutions that could provide services for a government agency without depending on the annual authorization and appropriation cycle of that agency...
...An agency can require potential bidders to submit a pre-proposal “capability” package and then go through a competitive process limited to the few firms adjudged capable...
...Raymond and May was afraid of the bad publicity, and the Planning Commission was angry that its professional ability to select a consultant had been questioned...
...It claimed that although the firm had contracted to do original data collection and analysis, it had simply reproduced old maps, photostated outofdate 1960 census figures and cribbed from other reports...
...The HUD Regional Office withheld approval, a very unusual action for it to take...
...As one veteran put it, “Use lots of vague phrasing...
...These components include system objectives, data inputs, collection mechanisms, processing procedures, and utilization patterns...
...To avoid further inter-agency quarrels, HUD confiscated all the copies of the report, even though many HUD officials believed the accusations to be accurate...
...This is really a taxpayer’s expense, because the firms that incur it are sure to include it as part of overhead costs next time they are awarded contracts...
...No government agency has, or could have, on its permanent payroll all the different kinds of experts whose services it occasionally needs...
...A look at the personnel of the urbanproblems industry will confirm the justice of this last assertion...
...These conflicting pressures on the consultant’s loyalties have impaled the industry on a dilemma from which it has not been able to lift itself on its own power...
...This income, applied to overhead, also pays the staff for the time it is not working on a contract, time usually spent in looking for more work and preparing p.ew proposals...
...you get caught later if you are too clear on what you mean...
...Senate Bill S.2699 was introduced this fall by Senator Wallace F. Bennett (R-Utah) as a private bill prepared by this group of consulting planners...
...Few proposal writers can say something intelligent about every subject they write about, and so most proposals talk in generalities, using jargon that can be, and sometimes is, used interchangeably among proposals...
...However, there is a field, if such soggy terrain can be called a field, that for 10 years or thereabouts has been making small but steady gains on defense and space as a suitable seed-bed for governmental research - and- development money: urban problems, which means, to cite the titles of a handful of recent studies American taxpayers have bought: Delivery and Financing of Health Services to the Poor...
...What the government gets for this $1oO,OoO-plus is some manpower and presumably some know-how...
...Reports can include highly controversial recommendations, or they can include inaccuracies and misstatements which must be corrected before the government gives any public indication of accepting the validity of the recommendations...
...There literally are no standards of experience or expertise or performance or, especially, ethics...
...McKinsey & Company and Booz, Allen and Hamilton have been known to act as organizational hatchet men for newly appointed administrators faced with a hostile second-level bureaucracy...
...Huge amounts of time and money are being wasted...
...unsolicited ideas have been stolen from the writers and handed over for execution to rival firms, favorites of this or that agency...
...Moreover, the American Society of Consulting Planners, an organization representing a few of the country’s planning firms, is currently lobbying strenuously to ensure by law that the objective of the 701 program is abolished...
...After finishing a large contract to prepare a city-wide urban renewal program, the firm became the center of a public storm...
...The city planning firm of Candeub and Fleissig “owns” many of the small towns in New Jersey...
...The contract set aside $11,900 for the consultant to design a citizen-participation program for future urban renewal projects...
...So far, “concerned” foundations and organizations- The Urban Institute, Urban America, the Ford Foundation, the General Accounting Office, the Senate Governmental Operations Committee, the Department of Housing and Urban Development - have all backed away from funding any inquiry into the industry...
...There comes a time in almost every contract when these demands come into conflict...
...Since few urban problems ever have been solved, few of the people who let out contracts know what a solution looks like, much less how to arrive at one...
...When such an industry takes advantage of the government’s need for it by double-talking, by flim-flamming, by feathering its own nest - which is what the urban-problems industry does fairly consistently todayit does more than fail to solve urban problems...
...Despite warnings from the Mayor, the Commission signed the contract...
...Office of Education, $131 million...
...On the “non-profit” side of the industry, perhaps the best known outfit is the MIT-Harvard Joint Urban Studies Program, which used to be headed by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and now is headed by the former Under Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Robert C. Wood...
...The firm and its protector, the City Planning Commission, rose in arms...
...The government has been buying studies ever since...
...Cost of Negative Income Tax Plans in Vermont...
...The Institute for Defense Analyses is trying to establish a reputation for expertise about crime...
...Urban problems are complicated and many of the top-level bureaucrats charged with dealing withthem, including some of the most competent, owe their positions to their administrative, not their technical, skill...
...Consultants get paid in one community to design a shopping center or prepare a land-use zoning code and get paid again in another community for using essentially the same plan...
...Somebody outside the industry must do the job...
...Presentations (“dog and pony shows”) are carefully prepared for prospective clients...
...An agency sometimes solicits a consultant friend ’to submit an “unsolicited” proposal for funding, on the assumption that he will receive the contract on a “sole source” basis...
...This would be a small price to pay for the solution of even one urban problem...
...The objective of the company is to keep this “down-time,” time spent not working on a contract, to a minimum...
...One veteran campus urbanist has said, “You need the federal loot to do the research to do the book to get the loot...
...It would be nice if someone found the time and the courage to study the studiers, to analyse the analysts, to measure the measurers, and to make some strong recommendations about the recommenders...
...the wrong questions are often asked, the wrong people do the work, and the research is often of questionable quality or usefulness...
...The fact that the urban-problems industry has such a strong and direct military heritage does much to explain why it deals with urban problems as it does...
...The initial background report by the consultant described all sorts of irregularities and government program redundancies and made some imaginative suggestions about coping with the situation, including many that would have forced major changes in the operation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs...
...The trouble is that a consultant must serve several masters at the same time, and in so doing he all too often serves none of them adequately...
...of Washington...
...In the face of this, the City Planning Commission decided to award Raymond and May another $124,000 contract to prepare a long-range urban development plan...
...There is little question that the firm had engaged in aggressive lobbying...
...They have said that it is not within their mandate or that they cannot knock their competition or that they have on their board of trustees a consultant who would not permit it or that they are afraid of being blacklisted from every government and foundation grant source in the country...
...A proposal takes from 10 to 20 man-days to prepare, and costs from $3,000 to $5,000...
...The mental set that successfully creates missile delivery systems - a paradoxical combination of “More Bang for the Buck” and “Damn the Expense...
...Waterbury is not the only place where such excesses have occurred...
...That, to say the least, is an oversimplification...
...Leaving aside the occasional instances of officials being given kickbacks, or campaign contributions, or football season tickets, or promises of future employment, the competition still is not always competitive...
...With the announcement of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and especially with the attempt to create that Great Society by imposing the Pentagon’s Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System on civilian departments, the urban-problems industry, already growing apace, experienced its finest hour...
...A more effective business-getter than playing word games on the letterhead is finding a black partner or associate...
...Such terms as “delivery systems,” “interface,” “stochastic,” “meaningful analysis,” “empirical,” “feasibility,” “time frames,” “indicators,” “decision flows ,” and “alternative system models” roll onward through the proposals...
...For many years Waterbury has been a steady customer...
...In addition, much government staff time, and therefore money, is spent in reviewing proposals, deciding on the winner, and negotiating contract details...
...One clue, a very rough one, is the amount of money contracted out for research development by agencies concerned with the urban problems: HUD, $46 million...
...But perhaps the biggest reason is that studying urban problems is a wide-open game...
...Finally, there was the coming of age of the computer, which, with its ability to arrange, disarrange, and rearrange millions of pieces of information simultaneously, tends to give its operator a feeling that the solution to any problem in the world lurks somewhere in the circuitry and shouldn’t be too hard to locate...
...The Office of Economic Opportunity last spring asked for proposals to measure empirically the national progress made in civil rights, including a requirement to record in a numerical index “weekly data on ghetto tension in cities across the country...
...The paragraph could just as well have been talking about missile systems, and indeed may have been when it was first written, for plagiarism is an everyday phenomenon in the industry...
...Instead, technical studies would have to be contracted to private firms...
...An urban-problems industry could beindeed shouldbe - the public’s technical arm in this endeavor...
...After final reports are submitted, many of the concerned parties never get a chance to look at them...
...The Mayor, who must ultimately authorize any city contract, disavowed the city’s responsibility to pay the consultants.The firm announced at a press conference they would sue the city for breach of contract, although the contract had no validity until the Mayor approved it...
...It amends section 701 and 702 of the Housing Act of 1954 that prohibits an areawide planning agency from providing assistance to a local government...
...They use a gamut of tactics in their efforts to survive...
...The Public Disclosure Act, which isn’t very helpful to begin with, cannot help at all when the public does not know that a document exists...
...it actively impedes their solution...
...Only occasionally do such reports find themselves translated into a professional journal article or, under contract from the consultant firms, commercially distributed through“specia1ty” publishing houses such as Community Services, Inc...
...Advertising as such is taboo in the industry, but you can buy part of a page in a professional journal or a “public message” ad in Time or Fortune or send out embossed cards announcing a new vice president of the firm...
...Indeed, many of the officials who oversee the research and development programs of such departments as Housing and Urban Development and Health, Education, and Welfare spun into their jobs from the Pentagon...
...Under these circumstances, agencies and individual government officials are bound to have favorites who are selected for contracts regardless of the quality of their proposals...
...Washington is a major focal point for all this marketing activity, and most of the large firms either have an office there or a paid representative...
...PPBS, with its “hierarchies of goals and values,” its guesses about what will happen five years from now, its assumption that all phenomena can be reduced to numbers and all numbers can be arranged in systems, is something that flusters Assistant Secretaries and thereby makes consultants rich...
...For another, in the intellectual community-on whose fringes, at least, most consultants hover-concern with urban problems is a way of showing how public-spirited you are...
...This money never shows up in the federal budget as being contracted out to private industry...
...The firm of Raymond, May, Parish and Plavnick conducts dozens of city planning studies for communities in the East and Northeast every year...
...Clearly the government needs such advice...
...Moreover, problems of the size and scope of crime and traffic and education and pollution and housing cannot be solved by the government alone...
...In the last few years there has been a desperate search by the urbanproblems industry for black employees, and, more recently, for Chicanos...
...Bureau of Public Roads because they always follow its wishes when working for state and local highway departments...
...The National Association of Public Administration calls its consultant arm the National Academy of Public Administration and has contracted for work with such agencies as HUD, the Port of New York Authority, HEW, the City of Cleveland, and the Council of Library Resources...
...At the same time,a firm tries to develop a reputation as a “good guy,” willing to help out this time without getting paid for it...
...A proposal to OEO for an automatkd data system to keep track of civil-rights progress indicated concern for blacks and MexicanAmericans by using this language: The initial step in developing alternative system models will be to use the analysis of existing and proposed systems as the basis for constructing several different designs for each system component...
...solving any one requires the participation of the public...
...It is reasonable to speak of the urbanproblems industry and the military-probJames A. Kalish is a Washington-based free-lance adviser to local and federal government on urban planning, management, and policy...
...He is charged with solving problems, with “telling it like it is...
...is not suitable for creating livable cities...
...The key variable of difference appears to be Negro families versus white...
...Anybody can play...
...When the hours of work originally assigned to a contract are used up, the consultant wants to be able to redirect his attention and his staff to other incomeproducing activities...
...From time to time and for various reasons, reports disappear and the public that paid for them never gets a chance to read them...
...According to one viewpoint - the bureaucrat’s- when a consultant firm signs a contract with a government agency, its loyalty should be totally committed to that agency...
...FLI M-FLAM, DOUBLE-TALK, AND HUSTLE: Theurban-Problems Industry by James A. Kalish In 1830 the Secretary of the Treasury contracted with the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia for a study of boiler explosions...
...What the agency does is insert a Request for Proposal (RFP) in the Commerce Business Daily, a journal whose principal function is to broadcast the government’s request for bids...
...Instead of developing a rational priority system, it selects the studies to be contracted for either on a first-come, first-served basis or because they are pet projects of influential bureaucrats...
...Peat, Marwick, Mitchell and Co., one of the country’s largest certified accountant firms, uses its many accounting offices across the country to help get work for its urban-problems entry, Peat, Marwick and Livingston...
...The industry is careful to watch for new legislation and for changes in department administrative procedures, as well as for the comings and goings of key government personnel who might turn out to be customers...
...The most famous, RAND, has a contract with New York City to study police and fire department problems, a contract that has been renewed or extended several times...
...Site visits are discouraged, and often the inexperienced government project monitor has relatively little idea of what is going on except for what he reads in the final report...
...The old-line defense and management firms have traditionally been all-white operations...
...But it is a big price for the performance the urban-problems industry actually delivers...
...Everybody knows how much less pressing they are than military problems, and how much easier to solve...
...A favorite one, for whatever good it does, is to devise a presumably catchy firm name, preferably by making a goulash of such words as “research,” “system,” “dynamics,” “technical,” and others of the ilk: Systemetrics, Information Dynamics Corporation, Opportunities Systems, Inc., Decision Research Corporation, Consultec, Techumanics...
...Later, after the applicants had gone through the complete competitive process, OEO notified the winner that it was not going to fund the project after all...
...Just about every large manufacturing corporation, insurance firm, utility and transportation organization in the land has a division or a subsidiary active in the field...
...The agency reviews the proposals, using either a panel of outside experts or a group of agency employees...
...Occasionally this is a risky procedure...
...One last curious form of non-profit urban consultant is the professional association that presumably exists solely for the purpose of serving its membership...
...The process is seldom as effective or as fair in practice as it is in theory...
...Grants, as distinct from contracts, Can be awarded to non-profit organizations without going through any bidding process...
...Firms are “wired in” to a contract before the competition even begins and go through the motions of competing only to meet regulations...
...Many of the government Requests for Proposals are trivial, vague, or ill-conceived...
...The federal government has ~ in sum, given scant attention to any overall urban research strategy...
...The Mayor tried to hold out, but, the city’s aldermen turned against himland HUD suddenly sent a letter to Waterbury approving the previously unacceptable work without any explanation...
...The alternative view is that the consultant is first and foremost responsible for the professional work laid out for him in the contract...
...Big ex-government names are a staple of the industry: General Gavin at Arthur D. Little, Francis Keppel, erstwhile Commissioner of Education, at General Learning, and Stewart Udall, chairman of the board of The Overview Group, which specializes in environmental problems...
...With BIA’s help, a tribal election was held, the reservation administration was changed, and the consultant was kicked off the reservation...
...In theory, the process works something like this: When a government agency thinks it needs technical assistance in dealing with some aspect of poverty, urban growth, housing, education, crime, or what have you, it calls for what is loosely termed a study-or more tightly termed, if you’ll pardon the trade talk, a comprehensive plan, or an economic feasibility study, or a cost-benefit analysis, or a project design, or a project evaluation, or an information and data system...
...Periodic written reports and an occasional review meeting in the offices of the agency are usually the extent of such monitoring...
...A report by members of the mayor’s staff called the firm’s work inadequate...
...But the fact is that the government and the people are not getting the information they need to make sound urban program and policy decisions...
...In addition, some small but unknown fraction of the $16.7 billion in grants-in-aid that the federal government gave state and local governments last year was reawarded to the urban-problems industry...
...It is the mental set that, in deference to cost effectiveness, puts freeways through slums and parks...
...It is not a system that encourages quality: a conscientious firm can easily become a bankrupt one...
...Compared with studying military problems, studying urban problems is a small industry and doubtless always will be...
...What the industry is supposed to deliver, according to the claims it makes to the world and the contractual promises it makes to the government, is expert advice about the policies the government should pursue in dealing with urban problems, the resources it should allocate to guarantee that it is able to pursue those policies, and the technical measures it should take to make sure that those resources are used effectively and economically...
...In return the consultant gets paid and gets another contract...
...These men started emigrating from military work in the late-Eisenhower, or maybe early-Kennedy, years...
...Then, presumably, the best proposal from the best firm is chosen...
...If the program is inadequate or corrupt and the planning requirements ludicrous, then the consultant should say so...
...Progress is measured by the number of hours the staff has clocked in on a project, rather than by the quality of the work...
...Its 1968 profits were $2.8 million on $57 million of sales...
...n short, an urban problem is anything that has happened, is happening, could happen, or should happen, in a city, a suburb, or a metropolitan area...
...the result was two pages suggesting that schools should teach urban problems, four pages describing what other cities had done, and almost nothing about citizen participation...
...Grants also go through quite a different in-agency review process which can avoid, if necessary, a bureaucratic bottleneck or a difference of opinion on the merits of the project...
...As in every year for a generation, the subject of most of those studies was either making war or exploring space-two activities about which, if expenditure of public funds is a reliable indicator of intensity of public interest, the American people have a curiosity that is not only insatiable but almost exclusive...
...Planning Research Corporation, a “professional service organization engaged in total systems analysis,” has acquired a string of specialized consulting firms so that, in the words of PRC’s brochure, “Multi-discipline teams can be assembled...
...For one thing, of course, it can be a lucrative business, either directly or indirectly...
...In accordance with this sound advice, proposal writers have developed an amazingly useless vocabulary...
...There are good reasons for treating a report as “executive confidential” for a period of time...
...Another requirement was to lay out a course of action to solve an acute housing problem for the city’s blacks and Puerto Ricans...
...Even when the competition is legitimate, agencies find it difficult to distinguish between good proposals and bad...
...consequently, the total dollar cost of the proposals for a contract can easily exceed the value of the contract...
...At the same time, perhaps because for once it didn’t have its mind on a war, the country was beginning to perceive that its cities were deteriorating...
...For example, HUD’s 701 program, the major source of general planning money for cities and counties, had 45 per cent of its $45 million last year forwarded to private consultants, even though one of the program’s objectives is to increase the in-house staff capability of local government...
...There are different ways of calculating this figure, but it generally comes out to be two and a half times the direct salary of the professionals the consultant says will work on the project...
...And perhaps the most profitable of all are the giant think tanks that study anything or everything - like General Gavin’s Arthur D. Little, Inc., and Herman Kahn’s Hudson Institute...
...At the recommendation of his staff, the mayor, George Harlamon, decided to put an end to the Raymond andMay monopoly...
...If the hand that feeds him is part of the problem, the consultant must not hesitate to bite it...
...Granted that it is in the nature of research that much of it leads nowhere, still it is hard to understand why the taxpayers should have paid for a study entitled Inter-Urban Residential Mobility in Seattle as I t Relates to Poverty and OEO Programs, at least if the summary its authors wrote is accurate: The analysis in the report demonstrates that the patterns of residency change of poverty families in the central area of Seattle differ vastly from all other segments of the Seattle population...
...There are several dozen research centers constructed on the HarvardMIT model...
...This confidentiality clause, however, sometimes is used simply to kill a report...
...The academics are not necessarily inspired by motives different from those that make the profit-making firms run...
...to participate in the normal choice of housing...
...It is the mental set that describes a slum landlord or a discriminatory banker or a callous and lazy official as a“component in a rational system,” rather than as a villain who should be abolished...
...However, in many urban situations a firm simply must have black employees even to be considered for a contract...
...Beyond working to further his personal interests and the interests of his organization or institution, he must balance the demands of the contract funding agency against a professional responsibility to come to impartial conclusions, even though that agency gets hurt in the process...
...All data, insights, rumors, inside information, and opinions should be turned over to the agency, and, if the client chooses to alter the consultant’s work or change his recommendations, that is his right...
...The highest level of management in the urban-problems industry is usually responsible for sales, and its techniques are powerful...
...PRC is one of several giant consulting firms listed on the New York Stock Exchange...
...Some new approach sure is required when a team of professors gets paid for giving the government the astounding news that Negroes in the ghetto have an “apparent inability...
...Economic Development Agency, $17 million: OEO, $48 million: Department of Transportation, $411 million-much of which pays for demonstration projects...
...Several of the larger firms automate this process by using computerized memory typewriters to store up paragraphs, tables, and charts to be later spit out at the touch of a button and inserted into a new report...
...Within a few months the city will put out bids for a central business area study worth several hundred thousand dollars, and already word has it that Raymond and May are sure to get that contract...
...Economic Analysis of the Northeast Corridor Transportation Alternative...
...Project directors, who earn at least $20,000 and usually much more, cost the government at the rate of $50,000 per year and up...
...The way contracts are obtained tells a lot about the urban-problems industry...
...It is not unusual for a federal employee to ask a consultant friend to prepare the RFP itself...
...155 pages...
...sometimes just the presence of a black face during the bidding process will do, even though it is never seen again, there being other bidding sessions to attend...
...Management firms like Booz, Allen and Hamilton, and McKinsey & Company work on urban problems...
...Lockheed and North American Aviation operate consultant firms that sell advice to airport authorities and transportation agencies...
...The passage of this bill would be a body blow to the current struggling effort by states and others to improve the internal capability of local governments to think and act on their own...
...The federal government has shown no interest in even modifying the system, although many individual employees who have been involved are personally concerned and disgusted...
...Americans had stopped fighting in Korea and hadn’t quite started in Vietnam and, as a result, military research was in a temporary slump or, to resort once more to the argot, had “unused capability”and everyone knows how much nature abhors an unused capability...
...Etymologically, its roots trace to early McNamaran and to the nonsense words of virtually every discipline...
...HUD contracted last year with a consultant to work with an Indian reservation to develop a “model cities” type of program...
...No wonder almost anybody feels he has a decent chance to get a contract...
...Basic assumptions and technical computations are often left out of a report...
...The public never has been allowed to read the report...
...It is not much of an exaggeration to say that all some consultants do is change a few numbers, insert the name of the client, and put in a different letter of introduction-and the report is finished...
...If a career systems analyst, which is what many of the most prestigious and prosperous urbanists are, is more than 35 years old, it is likely that he got his start in military research...
...Nobody even knows for sure how much money the government gives the urban-problems industry, although the National Science Foundation keeps copious data on other kinds of government research...
...And it is the mental set that, in the best tradition of military contracting, produces study after study whose principal purpose is to lead to study after study or, for that matter, to create a market for the studier’s management services or hardware...
...There is little coordination among departments or even among agencies within a department...
...By now most of them have moved far off their original turf and in many ways operate much like highpowered private consultant firms...
...Many reports are simply rewritten versions of previously prepared materials, ideas, and recommendations, which may or may not fit the situation at hand...
...The National Association of County Officials and the American Institute of Planners, among many others, have set up subsidiaries to bid for and undertake government contracts, sometimes at the urging of the government...
...There are also ways of getting government contracts without even pretending to go through the competitive process...
...Parts of studies prepared by a consultant under contract to the Economic Development Administration have been used and paid for again recently, under another contract with the Department of Housing and Urban Development...
...Philco-Ford has its Tech-Rep Division, Xerox has its Basic Systems Inc., Time-Life and General Electric have teamed up to form General Learning Corporation...
...There are even conglomerates...
...Charge rates of $30 and $40 per hour for supervisory and management-level personnel are common...
...These last figures include a factor for overhead, or “burden” as it is called in the industry, to pay for secretarial services, rent, equipment, and printing and to provide profits for the firm...
...Alan Voorhees and Wilber Smith, two of the country’s largest transportation planning firms, are said to be “owned” by the US...
...Consultants are masters at parroting back the RFP in only slightly different words, and they are fond of describing in elaborate detail the obvious...
...No wonder hundreds of new firms and organizations are created every year to “solve” the urban crisis - and that many of them fold or sell out to one of the giants before the year is up...
...AVCO and Litton Industries operated Job Corps camps where they were able to test programmed learning techniques they were planning to sell throughout the country later on...
...The Mayor was forced to capitulate and sign the new agreement...
Vol. 1 • November 1969 • No. 10
