But a university is not like any other large organization. Its students, faculty, and staff have characteristics different than any other community-within-a-community. However important their presence as residents, taxpayers, employees, and voters, the unique thing about them is the substance of their work. And if their intellectual endeavors are connected in the right way to the life of the community, the results are so profound that I now believe that a mayor who is granted one wish for any feature to add to her city—a stadium, a major corporate headquarters, a state capitol—should find the answer obvious: pick a world-class research university.
Our classic example of this was a collaboration that began before I took office, whose fruit today is my rightful boast that South Bend has the smartest sewers in the world. While wastewater management is not known for its power to fascinate, our city’s experience with innovation in the field is among the most important local developments we’ve seen—and a model with implications for other cities across the country.
It happened because Gary Gilot, the public works director under my predecessor, understood that things going on at the university had yet-unimagined potential to solve some of the problems on his plate. Tall, soft-spoken, and deferential, bald with a crown of gray hair and a beard that he shaves below the lip, he resembles nothing so much as an engineering professor. He was a civil servant for as long as I had been alive, an exception to the norm in his field of spending perhaps half your career in the public sector before transitioning to the more lucrative realm of an engineering firm.
Impressed by his creativity and decency, I pleaded with him to stay on as my public works director after taking office. But he was ready to spend more time with his wife and focus on mentoring young engineers and community volunteers, so he declined—only to stay in the position for several months, unpaid at his own insistence, while we searched for a successor. Only once do I remember him being late to a meeting, explaining that he had come from taking the second in a series of rabies shots after being bitten by one of the many stray cats he feeds outside his home. It was a fitting metaphor for his career-long endurance of the various indignities of public service. Once, at a neighborhood meeting in someone’s living room, I saw him absorb a sequence of dressing-downs by fussy residents who were demanding an unworkable gauntlet of speed bumps on their street. I observed him politely nodding while another neighbor launched into him, beginning: “Well, I’m not an engineer, I’m just an ordinary scholar of international law, but I can’t understand why the city won’t . . .” And that was when I realized that the patience of a consummate public servant can be saint-like.
Somehow, rather than being beaten down by his job, Gary seemed unfailingly energetic and optimistic, always searching for interesting new ideas and engaging with a younger generation of people that cares about civic innovation. This must be what made him eager to cooperate when some researchers at Notre Dame began to develop a technology for sensing water levels in sewers. Recognizing the potential value for a city that still had employees manually checking water levels under manholes full-time, he worked with the researchers to place Wi-Fi-enabled sensors across the city’s sewer network. That would allow the system to automatically detect blockages, alert operators, and send instructions to smart valves that would redirect the flow of wastewater from overflowing pipes to empty ones. It was the Internet of Things, a few years before the term became popular.
The significance of this effort, Gary knew, was far greater than just relieving a two-man crew of manually checking our sewer overflows every day. South Bend, like many other Midwestern cities, had a “combined sewer” system, which means that wastewater and stormwater go through the same pipes. Under normal conditions, the system works well, but when high volumes hit the system, such as during a major snow melt, the combined sewage cannot fit through all the pipes, leading to backups that send untreated sewage into the river. This violates the Clean Water Act, which prompted the EPA to pursue several such “combined sewer overflow” cities beginning in the late 1990s. South Bend was one of those “CSO” cities, and Mayor Luecke signed a consent decree a few days before leaving office in 2011 committing the city to a series of upgrades to reduce the overflows, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. It was a political no-win: inaction meant continuing to violate the Clean Water Act and courting federal penalties, but signing up for the deal meant promising that the city would accomplish unprecedented infrastructure upgrades and enact the rate increases to pay for them. By finalizing terms of a deal just before I took office, he had jumped on a political grenade for his successor.
Sewer management was not on the syllabus of my History and Literature program in college. But by the time I took office, it was clearly going to be a major part of my job. Just to comply with the consent decree, I would have to preside over the largest and most expensive public works project in the city’s history. But the mandate came without funding: we were required to find the money locally. Forced to look for new ideas and better answers, our administration used the smart sewer network to get a better understanding of the situation. Using real-time data from the sensors and sophisticated models to simulate different scenarios, we were able to game out how the planned upgrades would work—and what it would take to fully implement them.
The early answers were dire. By using the sensor equipment to run more realistic models than what was available to my predecessor in 2011, we learned that the original plan would cost more than we had thought—nearly a billion dollars altogether. That meant almost ten thousand dollars for every man, woman, and child—in a city whose per capita income in 2017 stood at $19,818. The only way to pay for these improvements would be for people’s rates to go up, meaning that if we carried out the plan with no changes, one in ten of our households would be paying 14 percent of their income on their sewer bill alone. Worse, the models showed that the highly expensive plan wouldn’t actually achieve the level of control and environmental improvement that was intended—we could do the whole thing and still be in violation.
But the data also unlocked a better way. Because the simulations could tell them the likely level of water flow at every key node in the network, the team could develop a much more efficient and effective solution. Based on this information, engineers created an alternative plan, costing about $500 million less, and began a process of renegotiation with the EPA that continues to this day. The outcome is not certain, but the stakes are in the hundreds of millions of dollars; overall it stands to be a pretty good return on the $6 million or so that it cost to put the system in to begin with.
More than just a clever use of sensors, it proved how a city could gain by allowing itself to be a guinea pig for an interesting new technology. The researchers benefited from the chance to deploy their work in a real-world environment, while the city wound up getting key technology at a deep discount that ultimately saved us a tremendous amount. Best of all, in the case of EmNet, the intellectual property that was created became the core of a company that now has offices in South Bend, where skilled workers are developing this product and selling it to cities all over the world. Hoping for more positive experiences, we have since intentionally styled South Bend as a “Beta City,” sitting at just the right scale and level of complexity for new ideas and technologies to be tested.
By the time we put our proposal together for the new round of EPA negotiations, it was clear that I had inherited not just an interesting technology, but the building blocks of a completely different architecture for university-community relations. This style of city-university collaboration has become the pattern for what I would call College Town 2.0, a framework in which cities look to universities not only for the size of their endowment and the capacity of their students to spend money, but in terms of the substance of their work.
In 2015, I found myself speaking at a White House event, sponsored by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, to preach the value of this kind of collaboration for other cities across Ameri
ca. Together with officials from Pittsburgh, who had undertaken a comparable project with Carnegie-Mellon University that involved improving traffic congestion, we inaugurated the MetroLab Network, an association of city-university pairs across the country that committed to work together along such lines. Soon the network had over forty participants, working on issues from bus reliability in New York to air quality detection in Portland, Oregon.
This and other efforts have yielded a breakdown of the campus “bubble,” in which the idyllic and tidy world of university students never touched the complex life of diverse and low-income areas just a mile or two down the road. Whenever possible, the city backs such efforts, as with an engineering-oriented collaboration called the Bowman Creek Educational Ecosystem that links students from multiple colleges with neighborhood groups, high schoolers, and an African-American church to pursue projects that will improve the area around an environmentally impaired underground tributary in a low-income neighborhood.
Other efforts have been generated entirely by students, who have begun to realize that they can respond to the economic inequality around them by working not just to serve but to empower others. In 2011, a sophomore named Peter Woo returned from a summer of service-learning in India and realized that what he’d observed with cash-lending practices there applied in South Bend, too. After estimating that predatory lending in our area costs low-income South Bend residents $3.5 million a year, he gathered some interested friends to launch a micro-lending nonprofit called JIFFI. Working to create alternatives to check-cashing lenders, the organization continues to serve residents on our West Side.
SOME UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENTS have fairly obvious inroads to collaborate with their surrounding communities, working in fields like urban planning, civil engineering, or law. But some of the most compelling partnerships grew out of departments that I had never expected would be so well equipped to engage in the life of the city—such as the neuroscience students I met one night while visiting a support group for mostly ex-offenders at a community center on the West Side.
The taco meat was mostly gone by the time I arrived, so I went to take a seat among the twenty or so chairs in a circle. It was a diverse group. One man looked about sixty-five years old, African-American, with jeans and a dark shirt and glasses; another did not look like he could be eighteen yet, a slim Latino kid in a gray sweatshirt with jeans and white shoes, with tattoos from the side of his neck to the tops of his hands. One woman stared straight ahead of her, talking to no one, while others made small talk with the people next to them. The only people who looked altogether out of place, besides me, perhaps, were four sunny Notre Dame undergraduates, huddling over laptops and trying to make a projector work. In addition to the usual support conversation, the evening would feature a presentation about their field, which turned out to be neuroscience. In particular, they explained, they wanted to talk to the group about neuroplasticity.
I’m about as generous-minded toward undergraduates as it gets, but I suspect my face revealed my inner thoughts at that moment, something like: Please tell me you know what you’re doing here. Were these mostly white kids really going to inflict a PowerPoint about the finer points of neurological research on a room full of reintegrating ex-offenders who were just trying to get their lives back together?
The projector wasn’t working, so three of them held laptops up while another took turns talking. The slideshow explained the development of neurons in adolescence, the electrical and chemical basis of neurotransmission, the relationship of the amygdala to other parts of the brain. They had made it fairly accessible, but it was hard at first to tell if the silent faces of their audience were showing any interest. The students talked about self-control, describing the famous study in which children capable of resisting eating a marshmallow in front of them would earn two later on—and those kids would, it turns out, go on to earn higher incomes and have generally more successful lives. They talked about Buddhist monks’ ability through meditation to activate different parts of their existing neural networks, and the relationship between what you eat and how your brain works. Then the questions began.
“So, you’re saying the neurons I have today are the same as the ones I had when I was a kid?”
“Yes, but they branch off and form new connections, too, and this can keep developing even in adulthood.”
Another asked: “You said that a traumatic event changes your brain.”
“Yes, it can cause connections between your neurons to develop differently.”
“So, how do you change it back?”
A conversation transpired on how PTSD had been treated partly by having subjects train their minds to reframe the events that had harmed them from an outside perspective.
A man who said he was first incarcerated at the age of fifteen got interested. “I’ve seen people raped, stabbed, and set on fire. How am I supposed to think about that from an outside perspective?”
The student looked a little helpless, but another participant, a man in his twenties with a perfectly flat-billed baseball cap on, jumped in. “That’s how it was for me. I got shot five times and lived, and was ready to tear up everything, but when I saw it happen from the outside I could start to let it go.”
I tried not to look shocked when he went on to explain that he got shot on a second occasion as well, and that was the one that really prompted him to set out on a different path. Then he challenged the older participant to apply what he had just learned about mastering the neurological impact of his trauma during incarceration.
The students didn’t have all the answers, but they had some very relevant things to say to a group of people trying to move past violence and addiction. In a different life, the students might have decided to help ex-offenders by helping cook dinner at a halfway house in town. That would have been a worthy project, too, but who knows if these kids had any special talent when it came to cooking. What they did have was real expertise in a field that directly impacted this audience. When one of them asked how long it would take the impact of addiction to be potentially reversed in the brain thanks to neuroplasticity, this wasn’t a theoretical question—it was a personal and urgent one.
This could be the future of what it means to be a college town, as students and faculty at the top of their fields get more involved in the life of the cities around them. Those at the university can come to see community members not as the subjects of a service project but as genuine neighbors who can draw benefit from their work, while helping to educate them in the realities of the problems they are trying to solve. The residents can offer the students a far richer education than they can get on campus alone, and in the process the students form a relationship with our community not just as a place they passed through but as part of what shaped them, no less than the university itself. If talent continues to prove the coin of the realm in today’s economy, then this is a style of development we have only begun to understand—one in which talent is reinforced through a community that knows how to connect talent with purpose.
11
Subconscious Operations
John Martinez has a problem. About my age, with a shaved head, a dark beard, and eyes that dart around looking for the next problem to solve, he is one of the stars of our Venues, Parks & Arts team (formerly Parks and Recreation). He oversees a parks maintenance staff that numbers about fifty in the wintertime and swells in the summer as seasonal workers join us to mow lawns at parks and vacant lots, irrigate soccer fields, repair lights on trails, clear storm damage, and fix whatever else needs fixing across a city with over sixty park properties.
John’s problem is that the three supervisors who collectively oversee all of his operations have untold amounts of knowledge in their heads—and are all close to retirement. We’re in my conference room going through numbers and flowcharts for the quarterly “SBStat” meeting for parks. Inspired by the “CitiStat” model that brought modern performance management to Baltimore under Mayor Martin O’Malley and becam
e a template for data-driven local government everywhere, SBStat is a sequence of intensive meetings where we identify issues and vet new ideas, with rigorous analysis by city staff as the basis for our conversations. We explore lots of advanced and novel ideas in these meetings, but the title slide currently being presented bears a phrase I’ve not seen used before: “Subconscious Operations.”
The question John brings up is how to get processes and procedures onto paper—outside of the supervisors’ heads, mapping steps that they don’t even know they’re taking. Interviewing the supervisors and drawing process diagrams, the team has tried to get a better idea of what the supervisor does, some of it so automatically that he doesn’t think about it. They have found, for example, that by the time the downtown grounds maintenance supervisor gives the daily list of jobs to his staff, he has gone through sixteen previous conscious and unconscious steps. Often without even thinking about it, he adjusts tasking based on equipment conditions, weather, or even just the day of the week. If it’s, say, the first Thursday of the month, he just knows by instinct to route more resources toward preparing the area around Michigan Street, which gets more foot traffic for downtown’s monthly “First Fridays” events.
ANALYTICAL WORK SESSIONS like this meeting aren’t just the result of a mayor indulging his inner geek, though I admittedly enjoy them for this reason. More importantly, they are the backbone of our effort to make the city’s management more rigorous, efficient, and fact-driven. When I took office, it was clear that too many decisions were still made based on gut feel, rather than data—and some operations never got rigorously analyzed at all. Old-fashioned local government is notoriously full of seat-of-the-pants operations, even as financial pressures and resident expectations should be forcing us to become hyper-efficient. No one could tell me, when I took office, how much it cost to fill in a pothole, or how many times we missed a trash pickup in a given neighborhood in a given week. If a problem arose, I would hear about it only when it became serious enough that someone contacted a council member to complain, wrote a letter to the newspaper, or buttonholed me at the supermarket to talk about it.
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