"TM: Sylvia Lovely is executive director and CEO of the Kentucky League of Cities and president of the NewCities Institute. She recently received the Vic Hellard Jr. Award for public service, presented to her at the Long-Term Policy Research Center's annual conference in Frankfort. Previous recipients of the award include such esteemed and prestigious Kentuckians as Judge Anthony Wilhoit; the late Dr. Thomas Clark, Kentucky state historian; and Virginia Fox, the long-time executive director of Kentucky Educational Television, KET, and former Kentucky secretary of education. We are quite honored to have you with us for this conversation, Sylvia.
SL: Always great to be with you.
TM: In your acceptance speech, you observed that leadership is undergoing something of a fatigue and a sense that there's nothing that any of us can do to make a difference. However, something remarkable happened on November the seventh. There was evidence of a great deal of bipartisanship among voters. Do you sense that perhaps there's a glimmer of hope in that outcome, that maybe people do make a difference after all?
SL: Oh yes, what an interesting event this election was. The only nagging concern I have, and this isn't a bad thing - there is an anger out there, there is an anger and it's boiling below the surface, and it erupted. In fact, voting across the country was up, which is something that we want and that we are out there promoting - informed voting. Now, the question is, will anything happen as a result of it? I think we had some new kind of candidates out there. I think all of that is very hopeful. That's my belief in a democracy that is over 200 years old, and there are many historians who say they don't last much longer than that, because apathy happens and all of that. Well, I think we had anything but an apathetic public out there. Now, whether at the end of the day they will see anything that meets their anger and their needsI have sort of an interesting take on citizen responsibility and citizen engagement. One of the reasons I'm so passionate about doing it and getting people involved is I think, a lot of times, we let our citizens off the hook too easily. They have a huge responsibility; it's a "we or us" kind of thing, and I think we need to educate them. When I started the NewCities Institute, one of the reasons was because I was seeing civic leaders just dropping like flies and people not wanting to run for office anymore, because their take on it was that people didn't care. Well, their examples were people who would show up in the afternoon and protest the cuts to the senior citizen's center, and then show up in the same evening and protest tax increases. Well, we've got to put those things together and realize that we as a public have to decide what services we want. Again, maybe consensus won't always happen. We have to care across a spectrum of people. You have to understand that people are important - every single one of them, and so there will never be enough resources to take care of all the needs. So how do we do that? How do we come together as a collective and representative government and make those tough decisions? It's not as easy as getting on the computer and finding the answer to the question you have today. But Election Day was hopeful, because it showed that people are not apathetic at all.
I would also add one other thing, Tom. You asked what would make a difference in civic engagement and getting people involved. I believe strongly in the media and in creating new kinds; we have a vast opportunity out there with various kinds of media. If you keep telling the stories of success, if you tell more of those stories, I think people will connect with the idea If all you're doing is watching the 24-hour news, you're overwhelmed, but if you really see that every single day there is incremental progress made, I think that can give people a lot of hope that they, too, can make a difference.
TM: That dichotomy that you mentioned between taxation and the delivery of demanded services may be at the root of the perception that we heard frequently. We've been subjected to many years of communication to the effect that taxation is radioactive, yet I dare say many of the same people who would say that at some point in their life turned to the government for some sort of service. It does not come out of thin air, and I wonder how we fix that? How do we get back to the point where we can fund the things that we expect?
SL: Oh, and you know, we're trying to figure out how to make that less labor-intensive, because it's remarkable. If you sit down with people and you explain things to them, they're remarkably receptive to the idea. I mean, they run their households every single day. They know you have so much input and so much output, and you can only balance those two things at the end of the day. The thing about it is that it's labor-intensive to gather people together. That's why I think that the new technological tools that we have at hand can be our gift, rather than keeping people kind of alone in their house at night in front of flickering screens; we can bring people together using technology. That's what we're exploring with as much speed as we can, because I think education is going to be critical and we're working against a tide. You know, in campaigns, just as an interesting example, they say that negative advertising is bad. You walk up to people on the streets and negative ads are bad, but they work. And so, we're not going to get away from that anytime soon, so what do you do? You try to cut through that with more education, and I believe that one thing that is emerging, which is hopeful to me, is positive leadership. At the same time there might be negative ads, there is also this: I will make the decisions, I will try to lead. I think the big test of November 7 is going to be people say they want reform and health care. Of course, there are a thousand different opinions on what that means exactly, but people are struggling with the day-to-day issues of paying for health care, getting their kids to college, all of those kinds of the dwindling middle class, all of those issues - they're saying they want those things addressed. At the same time, you know, 50 percent of Americans now say every member of congress is corrupt; that was sort of the impetus leading into November 7. This is a canvas on which people like my organization can write a script, if we will, and it's not going to be easy, but you know, it never was. I think that's the other thing we have to remember. We are so bombarded with information now that we know almost too much. It's almost like we are card-carrying members of the "I-know-too-much" club, but we have to settle down, and we have to do what we can and build great places just one at a time. You know, the paradox of the world getting bigger is that our work begins locally and then we reach out, and you're seeing examples of that. Immigration is being addressed at the local level (wow!), health care being addressed at the local level. Not that that's perfect, but at least it shows us something is happening out there.
TM: You have a broader sense of this since you work statewide and maybe there are other great examples of this too, but we know here in Lexington that our government, our merged city and county government, is structured such that elective office is attained through a nonpartisan process. So, that has relieved us of a great deal of the partisan bickering we experienced, perhaps, on the statewide level, which is very partisan. And the influence of the democratic and republican machines is not quite so prevalent here. It plays a little role; we can't deny that, but it's not quite as heavy-handed. Do you see something very positive in the way that that has turned out?
SL: Well, I think that's why the action is starting to happen at the local level, and we see paralysis at other levels. Partisanship is probably - I know that was debated early on in the founding of our country, whether that was a good idea or not, and maybe checks and balances will bring it back into more of a balanced kind of view. But I think that's one of the reasons you're seeing local politics being quite different. It's about issues at the local level. I think that was heartening. I think we saw that throughout the commonwealth, and only a handful of our communities run on partisan races. But I will say even in those instances, you know what happens at the local level is people will make you deal with local issues, and that's kind of the beauty of the system. You have to deal with the local economic situation, and you have to deal with all of those local issues that don't neatly fit into partisan battles, and I see that across the country as I travel the country. It really is much more basic at the local level. I think with our levels of government and the way our federalism system is set up, I actually believe it needs some adjusting. Katrina showed us that in living Technicolor, that the system was somewhat broken down. You may have seen the recent compact - between Louisville, Indianapolis, I believe, and Cincinnati, where they're going to form a compact. Now, there's regionalism, and that's exciting, to come to each other's aid if disaster occurs. You're going to see a whole lot more of that, because as I have heard over and over from mayors - from Joe Riley in Charleston, South Carolina, the mayor of Beaumont, Texas - as they were struck by the hurricanes, the first statements out of their mouths were, "We have to be the first responders." We will have to do that, however we can't do it alone. There is no way a New Orleans could have dealt with that issue and no way a Louisville, Kentucky, could deal with a spate of tornadoes that would come in and rush across them. You would have to have help from elsewhere, so they're beginning to form these compacts, and it's interesting to see where that will go and to see how responsive the federal government will be to meeting those needs. I think Katrina played a big role actually in this recent election, a hidden role that nobody acknowledged. Everybody said it was Iraq, but I think it was Iraq coupled with Katrina, and then everybody said it was national, not local, and my feeling was it was always local. It was sort of like, "Wow, what if this happens to us?"
TM: Discussions are underway in earnest about finding ways to be more collaborative and cooperative across municipal and county borders in Kentucky as a matter of survival. Do you see us evolving into more of a regional state?
SL: Oh, I think we'll have to. As we look across Kentucky, we're a small government state. We have 120 counties, at last count 419 cities, and those are tiny places. I mean, in Northern Kentucky, you have 31 small cities. In Jefferson County now, many cities have consolidated, so you're down to, I think, 80 small cities, which is still an astronomical number, and so you have all these small identities. That's an important Kentucky quality, a small town identity, and we do have mechanisms now where cities can merge and we believe that's fine. We have no mechanisms where counties can merge, but I think what you're going to see is a lot of pressure for those communities to come together. I think that'll be what happens as a result of economic pressure and people pressure, but I will say this: people love their identity. They identify with small places, and so that's not a bad thing. You know, one of the great qualities of today's thinking in public policy is thinking big and small at the same time.
Some of that public policy needs to happen in the state legislature, and we're pushing for a lot of that, where you get incentives, for instance, for coming together, because many of our cities and counties have actually begun tax-sharing arrangements on their own.
TM: What are the priorities of the Kentucky League of Cities for the 2007 General Assembly?
SL: What we will be pushing for and be thinking deeply about, and it may not all happen in '07, is we really want to recognize one big important factor. Our communities, each one of them, and I'm not even distinguishing between cities and counties or whatever, are competing nationally now with 18,000 others in the U.S. alone, and that doesn't even include the global competition that we face. As a result of that, our communities need to be unique and different, and they are unique and different. Paducah is as different from Ashland as night is from day. They need to have flexibility at the local level to raise revenues, to meet the fiscal issues that they face. We could spend a whole other half-hour talking about pension costs and what's happening at the local level on those, health care costs, all of those hidden costs that people don't know about that cities are having to deal with. At the same time, they're having to build quality of life. You know, one of the things we say is quality of life equals prosperity in the future. Paducah is a great example of that. They're building a downtown artist colony. They're becoming an art capital of the region down there. They're building restaurants. They're renovating their downtown. It's a phenomenal place, and I would invite anybody to go to it. But they need to address their needs differently from what Campbellsville, Kentucky, does, or what Lexington, Kentucky, does. There are just a lot of issues like that, so we'll be talking about that with our legislature, about how we can provide more flexibility in our local governments. We'll be talking about putting tools in our community's hands, tax increment financing - all of those kinds of things that will enable us to build the unique communities. They once said place was dead as a concept; it's not at all. Place is very important. It becomes more important as we move into a global world and your place needs to be unique and needs to play to its unique strengths.
TM: I have to ask this question: Are you - and I will close with this - are you quite comfortable in the role that you're playing now in your leadership with the Kentucky League of Cities and the NewCities Institute? Or do you aspire to public service in some way?
SL: Well, I love what I do. I love what I do. Well, no one would ever say that they'll not do something, but you know, I kind of like this side of things. I get to go out there, I get to talk to people all the time, and I get to celebrate these heroes that are out there at the local level. For right now, I'm loving what I do. I just love it.
TM: Thank you very much, Sylvia. I really enjoyed it.
SL: Thank you.
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