The business treatment

By Jeff Bailey

My favorite government reporter in Chicago is a model for how business reporters could add value to the coverage of the public sector.

Ben Joravsky, who works for the Chicago Reader, has carved out fabulous beat writing about Mayor Richard Daley’s use of tax-increment-financing districts to gain control of vast sums of public money with far less scrutiny than the mayor would face for normally-budgeted expenditures. To do so, Joravsky, 53, follows the money, rather than what politicians are saying.

With state, local and federal governments all in financial trouble, and coverage up for grabs at many publications due to staff cuts, some great stories could result from giving government and politicians what I call the business treatment. And it could also perhaps extend the careers of a few business reporters who just now are finding a reduced interest for traditional corporate and industry coverage in shrunken business sections.

Joravsky does a lot more than just TIF-related coverage. But his mastery of that dense subject has given him great confidence in reporting on all manner of public finance and government operations. His coverage of the city’s hasty leasing of its parking meters told in simple chronology, sparked coverage by mainstream papers and some rare public outrage, and apparently rose to the level of nerd chic so that Flavorpill, an arts listing Web site that caters to young urbanites, wrote about the mess this week, citing Joravsky’s work.

Joravsky’s doggedness has also paid unexpected dividends to his readers. When workers at the shuttered Republic Windows & Doors plant in Chicago last December became a national story by occupying the premises and refusing to leave, it was Joravsky who wrote that the plant had received $10 million from local government expressly to keep workers employed there. Only a TIF-obsessed reporter would have known that.

Joravsky calculates that Daley has gotten control of roughly $550 million a year outside normal budget channels by slapping TIFs all over town. The districts are meant to divert tax money to lift up blighted areas, but the original intent seems to have been stretched considerably. “It was pretty clear to me it was the heart and soul of Daley’s machine,” Joravsky told me. The stories can be dense. But Joravsky begs readers to plow through them: “The city wins when your eyes glaze over.”

Personally, I find the stories well worth the time.

At most papers, of course, you’re either a metro reporter or a business reporter, and that’s too bad because financial acumen can be scarce in the city room. I had the benefit of spending most of my career at The Wall Street Journal, a spot where we were all business reporters expected to write authoritatively about non-business topics. I had no interest in covering politics. But when I saw government operations – they’re service businesses, really, only publicly-financed – all gummed up, it attracted me and resulted in pieces (forgive me for using my own stories for illustration) like this:

LOS ANGELES – Glorified in television dramas of years ago, the Los Angeles Police Department has more recently been reviled for the videotaped beating of Rodney King and ridiculed for its handling of evidence in the O.J. Simpson case.

Now, city leaders are looking at the LAPD in a new light: as if it were a business. A swarm of management consultants has been set loose on the $1 billion-a-year department in recent months, picking it apart the way they would a major service or manufacturing company. Their findings suggest the LAPD is far from a return to glory.

Officers who literally couldn’t shoot straight, known internally as the “chronic 31,” repeatedly failed firing-range tests yet were deployed as patrol officers. Some police-academy graduates aren’t any good at using a radio because, the LAPD being short of radios, they were taught by pretending with wooden blocks. Some routine tasks — exchanging shotguns between shifts, scheduling the patrol force – are done in such outdated ways that, added together, they squander the services of hundreds of officers at a time when the crime-weary city is desperate to put more policing power on the streets.

“We were amazed at the lack of discipline and analysis,” said Blue Marble Partners, one of the consulting firms called in to assess the LAPD, in its report.

And this:

LOS ANGELES — The first light of dawn stretches across the Bureau of Sanitation parking lot, time for a daily ritual in Mayor Richard J. Riordan’s drive for better government: counting the trash trucks.

Mr. Riordan swept into office almost two years ago on a promise to run government like a business. Among the early surprises, he found the city was piling up millions of dollars in overtime expense because sanitation drivers weren’t finishing their routes on time. Simple enough. Hustle, the former businessman warned the workers, or the job will be contracted out to private haulers. That jolted drivers and sanitation managers into offering productivity gains of 25% over three years.

But there was a catch. On many days, 30% of the city’s 900 trash trucks were stuck in a repair shop. Drivers sat and waited, too, sometimes for an entire shift, for another driver to finish his route and hand over a truck. Garbage also sat, and complaints poured in.

Highly visible problems in trash collection impelled city officials to examine Los Angeles’s 21,000-vehicle motor pool, a mundane but important operation that supports virtually every municipal service. The motor pool is one of many operations that cities often manage poorly, bloating costs. Yet many private firms manage similar operations with precision.

On this latter story, on the motor pool, I literally ran around Los Angeles comparing private-sector fleet maintenance to the city’s vehicle maintenance. And I was amazed on the LAPD story how many parts of the police department, when viewed as discrete operations, were comparable to some private-sector operation. The hardest part was engaging public officials in this sort of thinking. Most just aren’t accustomed to it. And that’s part of why government remains so screwed up, and why business reporters should do more government reporting.

Jeff Bailey, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, writes for national magazines. He lives in Chicago.