Government Can Work
Eisenberg, Michelle Cottle, Sherri
Government Can Work The Santa Monica Story BY MICHELLE COTTLE AND SHERRI EISENBERG QUICK-NAME A MAJOR SUCCESS THE federal government has enjoyed in the last 30 years. Public school...
...Although the achievements of the Santa Monica Freeway project are impressive, it shouldn’t take a natural disaster to shake government from its bureaucratic complacency...
...on January 17, the Northridge quake rippled through the Los Angeles area, shahng down houses and office buildings, injuring more than 1,500 people, and disrupting power and water service to tens of thousands of residents...
...government in the last three decades...
...Rural electrification and the interstate highwaysystem...
...beyond that, the state had responsibility for 20 percent of the bill...
...recognizing that they’re operating in the public spotlight typically decreases people’s tendency toward chicanery...
...Clinton declared Los Angeles a disaster area (something many of us had suspected all along) and targeted freeway reconstruction as a top priority...
...Of course, citizens always run crying to their government in times of crisis...
...Contractors submitted bids based on projected construction costs, ‘A,’’ and the estimated number of days, “B,” they would need to reopen the road...
...Project planners, however, did not use time concerns as an excuse to waive standard contract regulations...
...truckers had to follow long and costly detours...
...Normally, open bidding allows all interested contractors six to eight weeks to respond to an official Request for Proposal...
...Of course, no project is perfect-particularly one operating under such a tight deadline...
...Contract approval took one day, as opposed to the typical 30 to 60...
...Incompetence and corruption thrive in the shadows...
...Public school reform...
...Nothing motivates a supervisor so much as the knowledge that she will be held accountable for the quality of a job performed by her agency or department...
...Without public heat on FEMA, Midwesterners hit by the 1993 floods would not have received such praiseworthy assistance...
...Especially when you consider that typically, a year of the project would have been eaten up with planning and contract approvals...
...An example of government at its best-which occurred, ironically, just as anti-government sentiment was paving the way for the Republican Revolutioncould be seen in the aftermath of the 1994 earthquake in southern California...
...The winning firm was northern California-based C.C...
...Forget bureaucratic procedure...
...The governor’s office estimated that each day the freeway was closed cost the local economy more than $1 million in lost production and wages...
...It is just as vital, however, to recognize government’s more pedestrian, yet equally important, small successes, like the Food and Drug Administration’s handling of public comments on proposed tobacco regulations (see sidebar), or the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA’s) response to the Midwestern floods of 1993...
...In addition to the project being under intense public scrutiny-nothing generates interest in California like its roadways-cost was a major concern...
...You’d burn out the construction industry if you tried to operate this way on a regular basis,” says Drago...
...Ouch...
...into a giant Disney theme park...
...It also decreases the need for time-consuming, mind-numbing bureaucratic procedures, so many of which are aimed at ensuring that activities such as contract awards and personnel hiring are handled fairly (and so many of which are easily circumvented, as evinced by the countless news stories on the cronyism that guides much of the District of Columbia’s awarding of contracts and hiring of school administrators...
...In addition, public attention places pressure on government agencies-and private ones, for that matter-to perform honestly and well...
...The bidder with the lowest total costs (A+B) won the contract...
...Within 12 hours of the quake, Peiia approved nearly $4 million in demolition contracts, and the clearing of debris from the roadways began that same day...
...In fact, the company reopened the freeway in just 66 days, earning an additional $14 million in incentive pay on top of the $14.9 million it had bid in construction costs...
...But, this being California, the most newsworthy aspect of the damage was the collapse of the stretch of 1-10 known as the Santa Monica Freeway...
...It was certainly in the state’s interest to expedite repairs...
...After all, it is on the domestic front, with the not-so-glamorous projects, that bureaucratic lethargy most often threatens to sabotage action...
...Transportation Secretary Federico Pefia called for slashing bureaucratic red tape to push through emergency repair funds (the DOT awarded $45 million the first week and another $50 million the following week), and outlined a variety of innovative contracting techniques to speed reconstruction...
...Commuters had to be diverted onto alternate highways and surface streets...
...According to the state transportation department, CalTrans, a reconstruction project of this size normally requires two years to complete-one year for design planning and award of contracts, and one for actual construction...
...After all, who would argue that stuffing a basketball through a nylon net is a skill of intrinsically greater value than teaching a child to read...
...To achieve this miracle, contractor Clint Myers radically expanded his workforce, hiring more than 200 carpenters (65 is average for such a project) and 134 iron workers (the average: 15...
...Myers, which pledged to complete the project in the allotted 140 days...
...The state set a ceiling of 140 days...
...Focusing the public eye on the everyday worlungs of government would do much to increase workers’ pride in their jobs and their inclination to excel...
...Traffic crawls and blood boils, turning commuting into the vehicular equivalent of roller derby...
...Far from resenting the project’s demands, workers were happy to take home paychecks fat with overtime bonuses...
...It will take our more constant attention to goad agencies into jettisoning the dead weight, rooting out the inefficiencies, and workmg to show the public exactly what they can accomplish...
...But it has long been the mission of this magazine to show that government can work...
...Anyone who’s ever experienced rush hour in L.A...
...Not exactly...
...Government Can Work The Santa Monica Story BY MICHELLE COTTLE AND SHERRI EISENBERG QUICK-NAME A MAJOR SUCCESS THE federal government has enjoyed in the last 30 years...
...Health care reform...
...Of course, government’s grand, far-reaching achievements are the most memorable, whether they be the accomplishments of the Peace Corps and NASA in the 1960s, or the military’s 1990s performance in the Persian Gulf...
...When the nation’s security or welfare is on the line and the entire country is watching, bureaucrats and politicians are loathe to risk public embarrassment and outrage by dragging their feet or behaving in their own narrow self-interests...
...SHERRI EISENBERG is editorial assitant for The Washington Monthly...
...Instead of being allotted the usual 6 to 8 weeks at the onset of a project, the freeway’s detailed construction planning took place concurrent with construction...
...The Santa Monica Freeway is the nation’s busiest highway, carrying well over 300,000 vehicles each day...
...One of the most dramatic turnarounds of the last decade, the rebirth of FEMA in the early OS, was spurred by public outrage over the agency’s pathetic performance following Hurricane Andrew’s devastation of southern Florida in 1992...
...It is, after all, human-and institutionalnature to perform at your best when there’s a sense of urgency to your mission, a feeling that your work has weight and a greater purpose...
...The contractors assumed a substantial amount of risk in submitting bids, because they were working with incomplete construction plans...
...After intense consultation, officials from the Federal Highway Administration and from CalTrans pledged to reopen the Santa Monica Freeway within six months...
...Still, with all of Washington’s much-publicized failures, it is easy to see why conservatives’ governmentbashing strikes a chord with so many Americans...
...Contract awards were determined using an incentive-based formula known as A&B contracting...
...But until the people who implement policy start receiving even a fraction of the attention we give the politicians who craft it, government will most likely continue to shine only in the worst of circumstances, when called upon to clean up the devastation caused by floods, fires, or airplane crashes...
...In a recent survey conducted for the Council for Excellence in Government, 42 percent of surveyants could not offer a single important success of the U.S...
...knows the going is tough under the best of circumstances...
...For every day it went over, it had to pay $200,000...
...Each day of “B” was valued at $200,000, the estimated direct cost to the public of having the highway closed...
...But when talking with state and federal officials about the experience, they fixate on the project elements that would not translate well, like the 24-hour work schedule and the sacrifice to other projects the contractor endured...
...And when it does work, the onus is on all of us to highlight the successes and see what lessons can be applied to other areas...
...As an added impetus, this high-profile federalstate partnership affected the politically key, voter-rich state of California...
...With the entire nation watching, both state and federal governments went into no-bullshit mode...
...You got us there...
...Much of what made it possible was that the venture was transformed from a boring infrastructure project into a point of civic pride through public attention and a sense of importance...
...Neither President Clinton nor California Gov...
...For the major construction projects, CalTrans compiled a short list of contractors with freeway construction experience and gave them five days to bid on the project...
...And, perhaps just as importantly, the people involved understood that they were working toward a common goal, laboring to achieve something for the community...
...Just think about the difference in attitude and job commitment between an army private and a file clerk down at the DMVJ And workers’ sense of pride and purpose are driven as much by the public perception of their jobs as by any specific tasks they perform...
...Wilson issued an emergency declaration, allowing the normally interminable contract approval process to be scrapped...
...For reconstruction, state and federal officials decided that time would equal money -literally...
...And with the daily news reports of government corruption, incompetence, and waste run amok, why wouldn’t Jane Q. Public entertain fantasies of ousting the bureaucrats and turning D.C...
...Myers’s employees and subcontractors worked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, regardless of the weather...
...Pete Wilson (who was up for re-election that year) could afford to have it fail...
...The federal government was responsible for picking up 100 percent of construction expenses incurred within six months of the quake...
...At 431 a.m...
...great things can happen...
...When the 6.8 magnitude Northridge quake exploded concrete columns supporting two of the freeway’s bridges, the resulting effect on traffic could in itself have been designated a major disaster...
...The contractor’s guaranteed payment, however, was only for the ‘A“ amount...
...This risk, coupled with the accelerated schedule set by the Federal Highway Administration and CalTrans, called for establishing serious financial incentives to win contractors’ interest...
...Says CalTrans spokesman Jim Drago, “It’s the classic model that, when the community bands together...
...Then, for every day the firm came in early on its time estimate, it was to receive $200,000...
...But there is more to the Santa Monica success than grueling work schedules...
...The bidding process remained competitive, and the project still observed federal requirements concerning disadvantaged business participation and “buy American steel” provisions...
...Certainly, there is much to be learned from the 66-day reconstruction of a major freeway -lessons in cooperative planning, incentive programs, and effective project oversight...
...But Los Angeles is car dependent, and the closure of a major freeway for more than a few months had the potential for a backlash that would make the city’s 1992 riots look like a junior-high pep rally...
...In Santa Monica’s case, the freeway’s carpool lane was omitted from the redesign, and minor seismic retrofitting had to be done on the bridge columns after the road was reopened...
...The wildly popular War on Drugs...
Vol. 29 • May 1997 • No. 5
