78-11-B5
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Local Government Center
TranscriptFaced with the threat of tax limitation, municipalities across the country are seeking ways to operate more efficiently. Fortunately there's someone to show them how. I'll be right back. Several years ago, a couple of bright young men named Mark Frazier and Robert Poole recognized an important unmet need. That was to develop efficient ways for cities to meet their public service responsibilities. Poole an urban systems analyst for a California think tank and Frazier, a journalist just out of Harvard, got together and organized the Local Government Center in Santa Barbara, California. They began to accumulate information on good ideas for making municipal services more cost effective including, especially, the use of private contracting for garbage removal, public works and even fire departments. Under the sponsorship of the National Taxpayers Union, Poole launched a copyrighted monthly newspaper column called Fiscal Watchdog. The center published a booklet entitled, 'Cut Local Taxes' which focused not on cutting out municipal programs, so much as putting them on an economically sound, cost-effective footing. Some of the center's discoveries are astounding. They found that private paramedic services were as much as 70 percent less in cost than comparable publicly run services. They unearthed a Columbia University study showing that it cost 68 percent more for a city department to collect garbage than for a private firm to do it. Los Angeles county found a management system that was able to cut the welfare error and fraud rate from 14 percent to 2.67 percent in just four years. Scottsdale, Arizona has pioneered in contracting out its entire fire protection program to a private firm. Contracting out is not the only way a city can conserve scarce tax dollars. The Local Government Center did a survey of user fee systems and found numerous examples of cities trying to apportion the cost of recreation, tree trimming, library, street sweeping and other programs directly to those who benefit from the programs instead of imposing the costs on all the taxpayers. The passage of proposition 13 tax limitation amendment in California has suddenly sent city officials all over the country looking for ways to maintain essential services within much tighter budgets. Fortunately, the Local Government Center has just completed a remarkable multi-volume management study called 'More For Less.' This is a compendium of proven techniques for cost-effective local government along with first-hand commentaries by the people who made the programs work. Included are pieces by Lou Weitzman, the Scottsdale fire chief, Pat Gallagher of the Police Foundation, Dr. Barbara Stevens of the Columbia University Solid Waste Efficiency Study and Robert Carlson who was United States Commissioner of Welfare and earlier spearheaded our successful California welfare reform program. With tax limitation catching on everywhere, the Local Government Center is likely to move a lot of copies of 'More For Less.' If you're interested you can get more information from the Local Government Center 221 West Carrillo, that's C-a-r-r-i-l-l-o, Santa Barbara California, 93101. Zip code 93101. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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