Four finalists have reportedly emerged to replace retiring Phoenix City Manager Frank Fairbanks. All are current City of Phoenix employees. They're good men, and David Krietor and Ed Zuercher especially hold promise. Still, the finalist lineup reinforces the sense of Phoenix's parochialism and inward-looking mindset. It's a problem that extends far beyond City Hall. But it's significant given government's huge footprint in a city with no major corporate headquarters, influential civic stewards or powerful business interests beyond building more sprawl (which apparently extends to self-dealing city council members). There is, simply, no other major American city as limited as Phoenix in its economy or centers of power -- or its lack of self-awareness. So something that elsewhere might seem routine, carries big weight and risk here.
This is also a portentous moment for a changing of the guard. When Fairbanks became city manager in 1990, Phoenix was in a nasty real-estate recession but otherwise still on a sunny trajectory it had enjoyed since the end of World War II. City Hall's reputation for clean government and efficiency earned it the Bertelsmann Prize as one of the two best-run cities in the world. In the early '90s, the city still had corporate leaders such as Dial and Valley National Bank. Chastened by the real-estate bust, leaders established the Greater Phoenix Economic Council and worked to diversify the economy. Phoenix was the uncontested regional leader; the suburbs were still relatively small. Its population was much more middle class.
Fairbanks' successor will inherit a far different city, and not merely one that has grown to 1.5 million from 983,000 in 1990.
Phoenix has slowly seen its economic and political influence eroded by the suburbs -- the nightmare that caused decades of City Councils to continue annexing until the city reached 517 square miles in size, to no avail. The region's limited technology sector is focused in Chandler. Similarly, Wells Fargo chose Chandler, rather than downtown Phoenix, for its thousands of back-office employees. What remains as Arizona's corporate and entrepreneurial center is at the Scottsdale Airport. Scores of office "parks" in surrounding suburbs have taken Phoenix jobs in the zero-sum game left when real economic development was tossed aside in favor of the growth machine. Phoenicians were suckered into paying for the freeways that sucked away their city's jobs and much of its middle class.
Ominously, Phoenix has aged into a Sun Belt version of the older eastern cities it sought to avoid emulating. It has a huge underclass in miles of linear slums (once the tract houses of the middle-class American dream). The suburbs ensure that the region's social problems are dumped on Phoenix. While the city has its own "suburbs," with little loyalty or sense of community with the central core, it can no longer win in the development-fee or sales-tax battles against the newer suburbs. Unfortunately, it has no real economic strategy to replace the old model. The effort to create a Texas Medical Center-style complex in downtown Phoenix has been badly bungled. A retro move to establish a "second downtown" on the edge of north Snottsdale has ended in the state Supreme Court, threatening all city economic efforts.
Meanwhile, the city has few friends and many determined enemies in the Legislature. This has made every major project a battle royal, for the Kookocracy is both uncomprehending of, and hostile to, the needs and issues facing cities. State shared revenue was already leaving Phoenix for the suburbs, even before the economic crash. The Legislature has been a key impediment to making speedy advances on the Phoenix Biomedical Campus or downtown ASU -- failures that have helped freeze the city in a poor position compared with its rivals nationally and internationally.
The convention center, ASU campus and light rail have all been successes. Unfortunately, they also showcase Phoenix's weaknesses, all being creatures of city funding rather than a robust private sector. The empire of Sky Harbor International Airport, once Krietor's domain, rolls along, although it seems to benefit the suburbs a tad more than the city. All the finalists for city manager have had a hand in the advances. One, Rick Naimark, gets demerits from me for turning the Henson Homes Hope VI project into an ugly suburban clone instead of an extension of the center city -- and turning old Henson's grass and trees into gravel (although that may have come from "Rock" Fairbanks). Indeed, the Hope VI came from the efforts of a neighborhood group; the city was disinterested and even hostile at first -- which tells you something about the insularity of City Hall.
In any event, Fairbanks successor will take over a very different Phoenix -- and these were the challenges that existed before the Great Recession cratered government spending, crashed the growth machine and permanently altered much of the economic landscape -- and all to Phoenix's disadvantage. The winner might find himself in the mindset of President Kennedy the day he was visited in the Oval Office by his likely 1964 opponent, Sen. Barry Goldwater. A weary Kennedy said: "So you want this fucking job?"
In Phoenix, it may well be a job that has outlived its usefulness. Phoenix is by far the largest city with a council-manager form of government. That worked fine in the moment of history that Phoenix arose, when the automobile and sprawl seemed like the bright future, and when it was a smaller place. Now it makes change difficult, particularly the radical measures needed to revive Phoenix. A strong mayor, combined with smaller council districts alongside a few at-large members may be the only thing that finally shakes up a city government that's still living in 1993. That's still living in Fairbanks' "move slowly across the water without making waves" mindset. Phoenix is in decline. City Hall, the town's last major headquarters, just doesn't realize it.
A city like Phoenix would be hostile to any visionary and given its current struggles, hostile to anyone who hopes to stem the city's bleeding. There isn't much else going on except perpetuating a myth that Phoenix is a "winner" city. Right-wing media like Forbes Magazine and The Wall St Journal will do their part but it's probable this cheerleading will sound a little tinny when the growth slows to a crawl.
We've defied gravity for a couple of decades now and a peek downward will not comfort the faint of heart. Pessimism isn't a strategy but it does afford striking vistas as the mirage dissipates.
Managing our civic retrenchment will be the leading task of the next City Manager. There will be disappointed citizens and municipal employees. The worst thing will be the gradual realization that this new state of affairs could become chronic, that Phoenix's onward-and-upward trajectory has now become a snail's random travels around a shrinking garden. Nostalgia for the boom years will slowly replace the boom itself as our default social reality. Remember when? Yes, we do and it doesn't change a damn thing.
Posted by: soleri | October 23, 2009 at 04:36 PM