Washington In the 1960s, citizen participation seemed to be coming to low-and-moderate income communities with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. Maximum feasible participation was a baseline requirement for local community action programs. In CAPs, one-third of the seats had to come from the lower income constituency, ostensibly being served by the programs. Model Cities required elections of the board with the candidates from the neighborhood. In the early days after ACORN’s founding in Little Rock, we sometimes contested and controlled in those elections.
These kinds of local boards may have seemed new for lower income families and their neighborhoods, but in talking to University of Houston Professor Mirya R. Holman on Wade’s World and reading her new book, The Hidden Face of Local Power: Appointed Boards and the Limits of Democracy these kinds sub-governmental local boards of citizens have a long history, most significantly as a major political reform promoted by the Progressive movement early in the 20th century, one-hundred years ago. This was largely a middle class, inordinately native and white movement that was trying to break the power of the urban political machines that controlled many city halls from New York to Kansas City to New Orleans, Chicago, and beyond often powered by the delivery of services to newly arrived immigrants. Their mission was to devolve some of city hall’s power to experts, technocrats, business types who would theoretically know better and be less corrupt.
Holman is also clear that subverting both functions and some level of power to an array of local boards, large and small, also abetted segregation and inequity of services. This was especially true in the development of planning and land use boards that in most cities were inordinately populated by real estate interests and development ties. These boards were also more likely filled with some of the key donors to the elected leadership. In some cities this same history is what led to cities run by department directors like Sioux Falls and in other cities to weak mayors and a proliferation of city managers. Little Rock is a good example where the mayor has only been directly elected in recent years, there is a powerful city manager, and until ACORN and its allies won reforms an at-large board of directors, privileging the newer suburbs and elites.
Holman argues that the evolution of so much board-based government also breaks down into weak and strong boards. The Model Cities type boards, human rights boards, women’s commissions, and recreation boards are all examples of weak boards, while planning, civil service, police review, and something like the Sewerage & Water Board in New Orleans are strong boards. She extensively studied how all of this worked in Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Richmond. The weak boards were often where women and minorities found seats for many years. The strong boards, where whites and men predominated, were sometimes so independent and powerful that they could thwart the political will of the elected leaders.
For the most part, it almost goes without saying, because it was so much the point of all of this, the board were unelected, often almost self-perpetuating, and always completely unaccountable to the citizenry. The whole project, as Holman argues, was to create the semblance or in her words, the “veneer of democracy.” This was especially true for the weak boards who were certainly encouraged and allowed to deliberate, but lacked the power to implement any decisions that they might have hoped to make, becoming symbols and not the substance of citizen participation.
Creating and manipulating boards seems to be part of every city mayor or manager’s governing toolkit, but the rest of us by not paying attention or demanding accountability and performance, abet this scam.