Regional corruption: Baltimore

Unlike the Post, the Baltimore Sun puts its stories on corrupt and illicit dealings in the City of Baltimore on the front page. Yesterday's paper had two stories related to the ongoing investigation of Mayor Dixon:

-- "Lipscomb gets probation for campaign violation" (plus today's follow up "Lipscomb apologizes for role in City Hall scandal" and coverage from earlier in the month, "Dixon's lawyers plan appeal on perjury charges ruling")

-- "Baltimore panel blocks company's payment to the City Foundation"

The City Foundation is a 501(c)3 conduit that allows developers and others currying favor with the city government to make donations or to have community benefits directed to this organization so that payments are considered charitable deductions.

The City Foundation story is not dissimilar to the unit set up by the DC Housing Authority. Likely by the way that Michael Kelly of the Housing Authority (and he was one of the best government officials in the City Government over the past 8+ years, reforming a department that had been previously termed one of the absolute worse public housing authorities in the U.S.) was "eased out" (see "D.C. Housing Authority Director Takes New York City Job" from the City Paper) had to do with this Parks contracting debacle and his likely distaste for working outside of the law.

From the article:

The Baltimore Board of Estimates on Wednesday blocked a company's payment to the embattled Baltimore City Foundation, and the city comptroller called for a halt to all donations to the private nonprofit group amid questions about how it oversees spending.

Later in the day, Mayor Sheila Dixon called for an outside consultant to recommend new oversight procedures for the city-controlled foundation, her strongest response since a Baltimore Sun investigation revealed questionable transactions by public employees using charity money.

As inquiries continue about whether the group's board of directors employs adequate safeguards to ensure that donations are properly spent, City Comptroller Joan M. Pratt requested that a scheduled $50,000 payment to the foundation set for approval on Wednesday be sent directly to the city's coffers.

"Right now, I think contributions made for the benefit of the city should go directly to the director of finance," Pratt said, adding that foundation board members "don't have the appropriate oversight." She later said she wanted to review five years' worth of independent audits before donations resume. The Board of Estimates did not act on that suggestion.

Also see "Audit of City Foundation sought." The article is a follow up to a Sun investigation of the Foundation.

Seems like the Baltimore Sun is stronger at investigation of the local government than is the Washington Post. The Post can be proud of its investigation of problems with funding of care services to HIV patients ("Wasting Away: The Squandering of D.C.'s AIDS Dollars") but the reality is that such an investigation doesn't get at the systematic corruption of processes, systems, and procedures that typifies the Executive and Legislative branches of the District of Columbia municipal government.

Such investigations give the appearance of concern and industriousness, without leading to substantive changes.

About 20 years ago I read a speech by the founder of a media watchdog group, and he talked about what he called the "bias of the middle" of news coverage on U.S. federal government actions overseas--that events like overthrows of overseas governments had good intentions, that mistakes were made, but they were aberrations, and that they would never occur again.

All the while, the government machine, what Harvey Molotch calls the Growth Machine in the municipal government context, keeps spinning along.

From a past blog entry:

I am a fervent proponent of the Growth Machine thesis, first laid out by sociologist Harvey Molotch, in the seminal article, City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place. From the abstract:

A city and, more generally, any locality, is conceived as the areal expression of the interests of some land-based elite. Such an elite is seen to profit through the increasing intensification of the land use of the area in which its members hold a common interest. An elite competes with other land-based elites in an effort to have growth-inducing resources invested within its own area as opposed to that of another. Governmental authority, at the local and nonlocal levels, is utilized to assist in achieving this growth at the expense of competing localities. Conditions of community life are largely a consequence of the social, economic, and political forces embodied in this growth machine.

Political scientist Clarence Stone, a professor at University of Maryland has a competing thesis, that of the "urban regime." I don't think these theories are competing so much as different sides of the same coin. "Growth Machine" theory explains the motivation of "the land-based elite," and "urban regime" theory explains in detail how the land-based elite operates and functions.

Professor Stone was kind enough to send me a recent paper, "Now What? The continuing evolution of Urban Regime analysis," from 2005. He writes:

An urban regime can be preliminarily defined as the informal arrangements through which a locality is governed (Stone 1989). Because governance is about sustained efforts, it is important to think in agenda terms rather than about stand-alone issues. By agenda I mean the set of challenges which policy makers accord priority. A concern with agendas takes us away from focusing on short-term controversies and instead directs attention to continuing efforts and the level of weight they carry in the political life of a community. Rather than treating issues as if they are disconnected, a governance perspective calls for considering how any given issue fits into a flow of decisions and actions. This approach enlarges the scope of what is being analyzed, looking at the forest not a particular tree here or there. (emphasis added, in this paragraph and below)

In discussing Atlanta, Stone writes: "Land use, transportation, and housing formed an interrelated agenda that the city's major economic interests were keen to advance;" and

By looking closely at the policy role of business leaders and how their position in the civic structure of a community enabled that role, he identified connections between Atlanta's governing coalition and the resources it brought to bear, and on to the scheme of cooperation that made this informal system work. In his own way, Hunter had identified the key elements in an urban regime – governing coalition, agenda, resources, and mode of cooperation. These elements could be brought into the next debate about analyzing local politics, a debate about structural determinism.

In short, it's the "system" of governance, and how it operates, rather than looking at recurring events separately, as if they are not connected.