Creating Wealth

by Gwendolyn Hallsmith

  She wasn’t as happy about the changes a few months later, when the newly empowered stakeholders organized in opposition to a decision the city had made about the location of a new courthouse. One of the inevitable (and even desired) outcomes of a process where people from a city work together on a shared vision over time is a renewed sense of cohesion that empowers people to take action and hold city leadership’s feet to the fire when it comes to implementing the goals of the plan. For the first time, a diverse group of people got together and successfully challenged a decision by the city that was seen as contrary to their vision. An outside mediator was brought in to facilitate a dialogue between the stakeholders and the officials from the city, and the decision was reversed.

  The Power of Culture

  Nothing short of cultural change was required in Newburgh to make a lasting difference in the way the city worked, and cultural change does not happen overnight. The planning project left a legacy of improved social capital that continued to serve the city as it moved forward with major plans to redevelop the waterfront. Yet at the same time, the corrosive force of corruption and inequitable power relationships undermined the legitimacy and credibility of city government.

  One of the clear recommendations from the process, for example, was a city charter change that would eliminate at-large city council representation and realign councilors with the old ward system. This would almost certainly increase the diversity of the council, since the city was segregated into ethnic areas. The at-large system continued to mean that the percentage of relatively wealthy, white councilors was higher than their proportional population in the city. Since it is a rare moment when people voluntarily give up their power base, this idea failed in Newburgh, and the Council refused to move forward with this change.

  On another front, a scandal erupted when one of the key staff people in the Code Enforcement department was accused of sexual harassment by a city employee who had been active in the stakeholder group. The evidence against him was compelling, and yet when presented with all the information, the City Manager chose to defend the supervisor rather than taking appropriate disciplinary action. Perhaps more than any other misstep, this undermined her credibility among those involved in the project. The Code Enforcement employee left the city within a few months of the accusations, but not before the damage had been done.

  Newburgh went on to draft a Sustainable Master Plan that was adopted by the City Council in December of 2008. One month later, the City Manager was fired; the scandals and broken promises of the past combined with an unfavorable audit on grants the city managed from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) ultimately led to her demise. A quote from one of the councilors illustrates the dilemma many leaders face when moving forward with a substantial change agenda:

  McGrane is “a person of tremendous vision,” Bell said Tuesday. But Bell and others had complained the ex-city manager tried to force her vision forward, even if that meant circumventing the council. “Impose her will — that was Jean-Ann McGrane,” Bello said.11

  It is not sufficient to have a vision as a leader. Leaders must know how to mobilize the whole community to establish a sense of collective vision, and then they must be willing to move with the community toward a common goal. This is necessarily a longer process than simply moving forward with an agenda of your own; it can’t be forced. It is possible to patiently rest assured that the final outcome will be consistent with a sustainability agenda providing that at the outset, people agree to frame the process as a long-term plan, looking ahead 20–100 years. This, combined with a reliance on collective knowledge and aspirations — the wisdom of the crowd — should be enough to moderate hidden agendas and unsustainable habits that tend to drive city planning in the wrong direction.

  Newburgh’s Complementary Currencies

  During the time of the Plan-It Newburgh project, two different complementary currencies were introduced. Edgar Cahn, the founder of the Time Bank system, worked with the city social services department to start a Time Bank. Gwendolyn and Bernard also worked with the city to develop a housing currency of a kind described in Chapter 5. Unfortunately, the corruption scandals that dominated the city made it very difficult if not impossible to actually implement these projects. One lesson we learned from this experience is that, no matter how effectively you bring people together, if the city government cannot be trusted, no innovative initiatives will work.

  enVisioning Montpelier

  In July of 2006, Gwendolyn had returned from the World Urban Forum where Calgary had unveiled their 100 year plan. Newburgh’s planning process was drawing to a close as well, with the action plan due before the end of the year. She picked up the paper one morning and noticed that the planning director in Montpelier, which is where she lives, was leaving. Montpelier is the capital of Vermont, a small city of 8,000 people. Unlike larger cities, Montpelier was unlikely to call in consultants to help them with long-range planning — there just wasn’t the money for it. An attempt to do this a couple years earlier had resulted in a scandal as the price of consulting time flashed in the headlines and contracts were cancelled.

  Yet over the past five years, Gwendolyn had noticed that the city would benefit from a different approach to long-range planning. A proposal for housing in an open field to the east of the city had created an enormous public outcry as the neighborhood around the field clamored to save the open space for parkland. To stop the proposed development, interim zoning was adopted and the master plan was amended — all symptoms of an underlying planning process that might not reflect the aspirations of the people. As a resident of the city since 2004, Gwendolyn hadn’t been aware of any real outreach on the part of the planning office or the city to get residents involved. So she applied for the job and started work as the Director of Planning and Community Development in Montpelier in November of 2006.

  As it happened, Montpelier’s Master Plan was long overdue for a major rewrite. The last time the plan had been updated with any level of public engagement was in 1995. The Planning Commission welcomed the introduction of a planning process that brought in a high level of stakeholder involvement, and the enVision Montpelier project began in the early part of 2007. At the same time the Planning Commission proposed a new way of doing the Master Plan, the city was threatened with flooding as an unusual ice jam in the downtown formed — the result of increasingly erratic climate patterns. The need to approach city government differently in changing times resonated with city leaders in ways it might not have before.

  From the beginning, enVision Montpelier was framed as a learning process rather than a traditional planning process, a new approach that resulted from reflection about the work Gwendolyn had done in the other cities and towns where she had worked. Rapid change in the 21st century is already the rule, and so taking the traditional approach to planning — relying on experts to provide short-term strategies based on what worked in the past — will be increasingly irrelevant as the level of chaotic change increases. Old solutions won’t work in the new world we find ourselves in, and so the most important dimension of any sustainability planning process is to make all the stakeholders conscious of learning. Adults don’t particularly like to be learners — we like to be knowers and teachers. Taking a learning posture to city planning is much more challenging than it might seem on the surface — city planning has traditionally been left to experts.

  Learning our Way to the Future

  As in Burlington, Calgary and Newburgh, stakeholders were recruited and organized into subcommittees. The recruitment process was opened up to the public, and immediately over 100 people signed up to participate. Some targeted recruitment was done to try and involve minority voices, elders, youth and key organizational stakeholders, but even here a wide net was cast. Two VISTA volunteers were hired through the Vermont Youth Bureau, and their main charge was youth involvement, so there was a special focus on recruiting people in high school and college.

  The subcommitt
ees each had a member of the Planning Commission as a co-chair, and then the committees elected another co-chair using the Sociocratic method for elections.12 All of the elected co-chairs, two representatives from the Planning Commission and three representatives from the City Council formed the Steering Committee for the enVision process, which was chaired by the Mayor (as one of the City Council representatives).

  Each of the committees started their work by creating a set of learning objectives, a list of things they wanted to learn about the area of city life they had as a subject area. The six committees for the first phase of the process included Social Systems, Human Development, Governance, Economics and Livelihoods, Built Environment and Infrastructure and Natural Environment. As time went on, the Social Systems and Human Development committees merged, partly due to the overlap in their subject areas and partly due to the new initiative to create a Time Bank led by the Social Systems committee that took all the members onto its new Board of Directors.

  The learning objectives each committee developed framed the early part of their work, as they identified different ways to learn what they needed to know about the assets and issues in the Social Systems in Montpelier, for example, and to set goals for the different needs that were identified. The committees invited professionals to come to their meetings and talk about their work; they read material that was developed for them by the VISTA volunteers; they sponsored community forums on topics such as how the faith community could work together or what the democratic town meeting tradition was like in Switzerland.

  Each committee took responsibility for the monthly stakeholder meeting agendas as well, which were opportunities to invite speakers to give presentations or conduct exercises with the stakeholders to learn more about a topic. So at the first stakeholder meeting about Economics and Livelihoods, the local director of the Chamber of Commerce and a state expert on economic development were invited to talk about their views of the economy in the future. This resulted in the Chamber director becoming an active stakeholder in the process, which helped insure a balanced viewpoint in the discussions.

  By the end of the first year of the project, each subcommittee had drafted a set of goals for each of the human needs included in their area, and the goals reflected both the work they had done learning about the topics and the vision that had been generated for the city by the massive public outreach campaign that was done during the same period. During the second year of the project, the committees took the goals and drafted targets and strategies that would enable the city to achieve the goals. Once this was complete, and the descriptive work was compiled to describe current conditions, the Master Plan moved forward into the adoption process.

  Montpelier’s Complementary Currencies

  The three currencies that Montpelier designed and implemented as a direct result of the enVision Montpelier project were described in Chapters 10 and 11 — two different projects based on the Time Bank model and a food currency. Businesses in Montpelier were also made aware of the new Vermont Sustainable Exchange that is being developed in Burlington, so it’s possible for businesses to join a commercial barter system as well. There is no question in Montpelier’s case that the shared vision for the future and the collective action that was mobilized as a result was key to the success of these currency interventions.

  Moving From Vision to Action

  All of the cities discussed in this chapter have followed a pattern of activity that facilitates taking a long-term vision and turning it into concrete actions to move a community toward the vision. The vision often sounds too ideal for more practical people. One City Councilor in Montpelier was always shaking his head at the “utopian” ideal that the Master Plan was presenting to the city. Yet once clear goals are defined and then further refined into measurable targets and achievable strategies, the vision comes into focus.

  Planning Phase Time Frame Stakeholders

  Visioning 6 months - 1 year Broad cross section of the public

  Goal Setting 6 months - 1 year Committees, with public input

  Targets 6 months - 1 year Committees, with public input

  Strategies 6 months - 1 year Committees and key partners

  FIGURE 14.1 Planning — Activities and Timelines

  The involvement of key partners in the strategy phase is one of the first steps to mobilizing the resources needed to implement the plan. The plan needs to account for activities that are already underway — it can be a resource that describes the overall level of effort in a community toward the goals. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. If the local college is already pulling an arts calendar together, this can be one of the strategies described in the plan under the appropriate target. If the local homeless shelter is working to find transitional housing for people in its care, be sure to mention it in the overall plan. Recognition by the city of all the diverse efforts being undertaken is actually a goal in itself, because a compendium of strategies citywide can also be a resource that makes it easier to identify where gaps exist.

  One result of these efforts was a Montpelier City Master Plan, with a horizon of 100 years, that was formally approved by the City Council in September 2010 and ratified by the Central Vermont Regional Planning Commision in November of 2010.

  Community and Resource Mobilization

  Making real change takes time and money. The types of strategies we describe in Creating Wealth mobilize underutilized resources to meet unmet needs through the use of complementary currencies, which can make the limited funds you have go a lot further. There is never enough money to do everything we want to do, but there often are hidden resources that can take the place of money to implement important strategies.

  If cities are going to play a role in wealth creation for their residents, establishing the policy framework that supports this role and clearly identifying strategies that incorporate complementary currencies sets the stage for successful city action. The planning processes described in this chapter obviously address more than the issues complementary currencies can help address, but these processes are very important — they create a context where innovative strategies which rely heavily on collective action are possible.

  CONCLUSION

  Toward a Monetary

  Democracy

  It is not the creation of wealth that is wrong,

  but the love of money for its own sake.

  MARGARET THATCHER

  Local governments all over the world are struggling to promote economic development to provide better jobs for their citizens, to create a more valuable tax base and to improve municipal services. Yet the ways in which local governments pursue economic development often inadvertently undermines the long-term security of their community. The money and time spent recruiting large, outside companies (in the hope of driving economic growth) often backfires, leading instead to the closure of locally owned businesses, while at the same time redirecting profits from the local community to those of large corporations.

  The resulting trends are well-known — large, big-box stores undermine small, downtown shops. The pressure of higher insurance rates, labor costs and regulations, increased shipping costs and the lack of economies of scale push more and more small businesses into the “failed” column every year. When this happens, local municipalities are left with a lower revenue base, which in turn drives up taxes, the costs of water and sewer fees and road maintenance for the local population. When their low-income residents can’t pay, municipal officials have few alternatives except to discontinue services or initiate tax sales on properties.

  Other troubling trends exacerbate the problem. Fewer people are joining civic and religious organizations, traditionally the glue that holds communities together. The pervasiveness of television and isolating entertainments like video games and computers undermine the social structures that supported community life in the past. New ideas and new institutions are needed to reinvigorate the social system and get people back out into the community, connecting with each ot
her and creating networks of support for everyone.

  Local governments need ways to increase employment and to pay for local services like education, child care, healthcare, waste management, fire and police protection, infrastructure and administration. Even after all exchanges facilitated through conventional money have been completed, there remain clearly a variety of unmet needs in our communities, and at the same time there are underutilized resources available that could meet those needs. As we have explained earlier in Creating Wealth, complementary currencies allow localities and regions to link such unmet needs with unused resources and thereby create additional wealth in the local economy. They also provide a mechanism that ensures that this wealth will benefit local people, rather than being siphoned off to distant headquarters.

  We have all been trained to believe that an economy requires a monopoly of a single currency, and that bank-debt money is the only type of currency that is appropriate for a modern economy. Furthermore, anybody who has taken a course in economic theory is convinced that money is a passive medium that simply facilitates exchanges that would have happened otherwise anyway. In other words, the implicit hypothesis underlying the entire economic theory from Adam Smith to today is that different kinds of money wouldn’t encourage different types of exchanges, don’t affect the relationships among their users or motivate different types of investments. In short, for a conventional economist, using another type of money doesn’t make any sense. That is of course true when one compares the use of different national currencies: they are all generated through bank-debt with interest, i.e., they are all of the same type. But there is plenty of empirical evidence from the thousands of complementary currency systems in existence today that using different types of currencies does encourage different kinds of exchanges, and/or significantly changes the relationships among their users.1 Many complementary currency systems are in fact introduced with the specific aim of changing relationships in a community, and these systems have demonstrated such behavior changes in practice as well.