Metropolitan Government & Digital Service Delivery: Scaling across Regions
In 2013, Bruce Katz published the Metropolitan Revolution, calling out the future importance of the cities we call home, and an inextricable link to their surrounding metro regions:
“Our language has not yet caught up with the realities. Often when we refer to cities we are actually referring to the broader economic, environmental, and infrastructure networks of the entire metropolitan region of which a city is a part. In this sense, it is difficult to separate the city from its larger metro region — or to separate the metro from the city. In today’s world, the two are inextricably linked.”
“The real heart of the American economy lies in 100 metropolitan areas that after decades of growth take up only 12 percent of our land mass, but harbor two-thirds of our population, generate 75 percent of our gross domestic product and, on every single indicator that matters — innovation, human capital, infrastructure — punch above their weight at dizzying levels.”
Though we all may know of San Francisco, how many of us have heard of the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward Metropolitan Statistical Area? Although we may not recognize the name, metropolitan areas define how we live today. A family may reside in Oakland, but their job, school, recreation, and economic lives are spread across the Bay Area region. Because of this interconnectedness, regional agencies have matured into powerful, complex organizations that coordinate services across these huge metropolitan regions.
I’ve spent the past eight years working to help local governments use technology and data to deliver better services to citizens. As a startup founder and entrepreneur in the civic tech space, I am struck by the opportunity digital services have to scale across these metro regions. How can we bring CIOs and digital services to every locality, not just the Boston/Chicago/San Francisco’s on our map? I believe the answer lies in regional agencies, and I’d like to describe how these governments operate and the immense opportunity they represent for digital governance.
Regional agencies? What are those?
Regional agencies are powerful, complex governments that coordinate services across huge metropolitan regions. Despite their growing role, regional agencies are still often lost in an alphabet soup of unfamiliar organizational names. The most common types of regional agencies are Councils of Government (COG’s) and Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPO’s). Sometimes these agencies are consolidated into a single agency, and other times they are separate. There are 913 regional agencies across this country, here’s a full list, state by state.
MPOs and COGs represent one of the strongest form of regional governance we have in the United States, crossing city and county lines. Importantly, they are required to disperse hundreds of millions of federal transportation dollars annually and were created by Congress to do so. Though their funding comes from a diversity of federal sources (FHWA, Homeland Security, HUD) these regional agencies play a gigantic role in local areas of policy, including: workforce development, community and economic development projects, aging in America, and environmental sustainability across regions.
So, what do they do?
1. Purse strings for entire metros: Regional governments often exist primarily to distribute federal funds at the local level.
2. Accountable to multiple levels of government: though these agencies are locally-defined, they deliver a variety of federal, state, and local programs while providing technical assistance and acting as a convener and visionary to its members, local governments. This means they are accountable to local units of government and also partners to state and federal government.
3. Buying things for many governments, together: regional agencies often serve as a procurement vehicle for entire metro regions. They purchase things like fire trucks, cop cars, and serve as purchasing vehicle for cities and towns.
4. Data clearinghouses: They collect massive amounts of regional data across geographies on transportation, housing, economic and environmental datasets. They often publish this data in a comprehensive and regularly updated manner, promoting open data standards across massive areas.
5. Empowering local communities: Regional agencies are legally required to engage the public in planning decisions and processes. This represents an opportunity to scale digital services, without parachuting, by empowering local communities, and doing so with the thrust of federal funds, and a coordinated, system of policy and data experts.
6. (in some cases) Running regional transit networks: Ever wonder who manages BART, MUNI, and Caltrain to keep them all integrated under one clipper card? Regional Government! Also known as the Metropolitan Transit Commission (MTC).
Continuing to build a movement
The broader public sector innovation and civic tech community has made remarkable progress at the municipal and federal levels. We’ve grown and sustained new governmental organizations and NGOs including 18F, USDS, MONUM, Code for America, and SFMOCI, among others. But if Bruce Katz is right, there’s immense opportunity and strategic value in expanding our reach to include regional governments and organizations in this movement.
Which is all to say…
I’m pleased to announce, this spring, I’ll be joining MAPC, Boston’s own regional council, serving 101 cities and towns across the Boston region. I’ll be growing a team of developers, data and policy analysts under the banner of MAPC’s Digital Services Group, housed in the Data Services Department. We’ll be working on a myriad of problems that all cascade up to goals laid out in MetroFuture (the region’s 20-year plan). We’ll start by providing easier access to metro-region datasets, improving efficient and timely government IT procurement, access to housing information and a growing list of digital services that governments provide to their citizens.
Care to join me in this endeavor? We’re hiring!
Alicia Rouault
@arouault
For further reading: A brief history of COGs and MPOs
MPOs (Metropolitan Planning Organizations) were created by Congress through the Federal Highway Act of 1962 to provide local elected officials input into the planning and implementation of federal transportation funds to metropolitan areas with populations of greater than 50,000. This means for every metro of >50k people, there is an MPO that must (by law) plan and spend federal dollars for the region. There are 420 MPO’s across the USA.
This role has been strengthened under subsequent legislation including the 1973 Highway Act and the Urban Mass Transit Act requiring MPOs in urbanized areas to perform significant planning and programming of federally funded highways and transit projects. In the 1990s, the Long Range Transportation Program (LRTP) and the Transportation Improvement Program (TIP), made MPOs responsible for approving significant expenditures of federal dollars.
COGs (Councils of Government) Also created in the 1960s, of the 39,000 local, general purpose governments in the United States (counties, cities, townships, towns, villages, boroughs), >35,000 are served by COGs and Regional Councils (RCs). COGs and RCs serve as consensus-building, partnership-creating, service-providing, problem-solving, and fiscal managing hub governments. Comprehensive and transportation planning, economic development, workforce development, the environment, services for the elderly and clearinghouse functions are among the types of programs managed by COGs and RCs.
National Association of Regional Councils Map
Policy, Performance and Management in Governance and Intergovernmental Relations
Do you know the name of your local Metropolitan Planning Organization or Council of Government?
