Snap analysis speeds action but not results

Four things illustrate that too often, governmental action focuses seemingly on the problem, but if the analysis is faulty, the action chosen is faulty, and the likelihood of success is remote.

1. Bill Crews was fired as zoning adminsitrator. See "District zoning chief ousted," from the Examiner. My sense is that he was fired because in the recent past, he was the most neighborhood oriented of any of the people in the position especially his immediate predecessor, or the guy who ended up working for Holland & Knight, and likely that doesn't sit will with the land use bar that mostly represents big developers. Sure they trot out some mistakes that Crews made--but the job is impossible to carry out perfectly without more money and more staff because the Zoning regulations are complicated, very complicated.

In short, they used a couple failures as reasons for firing him but it's really to ease in a more pro-developer Zoning Administrator... we'll see.

It's also to show that the perennially troubled agency is doing something, anything, even if not focused on what really matters... which as I was talking with an architect a couple weeks ago, is taking Zoning and Building regulation out of DCRA, and putting it into a standalone agency.

2. The Prince George's County Executive keeps saying that the problem with Dimensions Healthcare and the perennial financial problems with PG County Hospital is bad management, not the fact that more than 50% of the patients are indigent and that the amount of money provided to the management group is not enough to invest in improvements to a deteriorating physical plant, not to mention that the health care crisis is a regional problem, not just a problem for PG County specifically.

See this editorial, "Hospitals on Life Support," subtitled "In Prince George's, a health-care system is living hand to mouth." from the Post.

3. In an Examiner article that I can't seem to find through the search engine "Metro considers adjustments to bus line service," Joe Rogalsky reports on bus line changes including staving off closing the least use bus service in DC, the Adams-Morgan Link, the 98, which duplicates extant service on the 90s lines.

It happens I wrote about this in email on Friday. According to the email, plans to continue the service will cost $70,000, while the Examiner article says $700,000. In either case, it's a waste of money.

Even though my primary work is in commercial district revitalization--that most of these kinds of bus lines are boondoggles that are created in response to merchants and business proprietors clamoring for more business. But in most instances with urban commercial districts, the issue isn't mobility (how to get there) but accessibility (having stuff there that people want to go to in the first place).

In this case, people aren't likely to travel between the districts. And is it that big a deal to walk from Woodley Park Metro to Adams-Morgan?

4. The DC Public Schools. The problem with the schools (like the problem with DCRA) is structural and systemic in every way. Hiring someone who does some work placing teachers to be the superintendent likely addresses the wrong problem. See "Fenty's Picks Have Ties to System, And Its Reforms," subtitled "Their Nonprofit Group Has Contracts To Help Recruit and Screen Teachers," from the Post.

But it shows action. Longer term, we'll know if any of these changes make a difference.

But there is a big difference between calling something change and seeing improvement.
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This is something I wrote in another entry;

1. There is a difference between first order change (moving things around) and substantive, second order change. (See Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution)

2. If systems and structures aren't working, that's where the focus needs to be. (My reading of the "hygiene" part of Herzberg's theory. (2 Factor Hygiene and Motivation Theory.)

3. The flip point of the idea of the "Wisdom of Crowds" is the need to build our capacity to function as participating citizens. When we don't build the capacity of our democracy, we don't function very well.

4. Reform isn't necessarily "change."

5. And "change" isn't necessarily "transformation."

for the schools, also see "Amplifying positive deviance in schools."