Public Officials of the Year
Governing magazine has named Mayor Bill White one of its Public Officials of the Year. Since their inception, the Public Officials of the Year awards have become the nation's preeminent honor for state and local officials.
The following is an excerpt from the article:
He's not on a crusade to take over the schools, bust up the bureaucracy or build expensive sports stadiums. Rather, he looks for definable problems with serious consequences and then figures out how best to use the power of his office to solve them. Two of White's biggest coups include shoring up the pension systems for city employees and police officers, and signing a labor deal with the city's firefighters, who had been without a contract for five years. White tries not to focus on more than four or five priorities at a time, he says, "because successful organizations, like successful people, can't optimize everything at the same time."
The first issue to attract White's attention was traffic congestion. White had signals coordinated along major corridors as one part of a broad "mobility" program. The mayor also imposed order on tow-truck drivers, who used to descend like vultures on highway accidents in a dangerous free-for-all that only made traffic tie-ups worse. Within months, Houston drivers could notice a difference.
Another of White's quality-of-life priorities is mitigating air pollution. In Houston, that's a task that leads directly to the local refineries and petrochemical plants. White wasn't thwarted by the fact that regulating air quality is supposed to be a state job. He negotiated an enforceable agreement with Texas Petrochemicals to reduce emissions of a carcinogenic chemical and is currently trying to extract similar agreements from plant owners located outside Houston's city limits.
Bill White may be a businessman-turned-mayor, but he's not one to say government should be run like a business. He's seen too many companies fail to believe that old saw. "It doesn't matter if you're in the public sector or private sector," he says. "If you listen to the customer, you'll be able to run a good organization."
