Georgia town privatizes just about everything that’s not elected; the experiment has been a raving success.
Sandy Springs, Georgia has, for the past nine years, privatized just about every facet of government:
To grasp how unusual this is, consider what Sandy Springs does not have. It does not have a fleet of vehicles for road repair, or a yard where the fleet is parked. It does not have long-term debt. It has no pension obligations. It does not have a city hall, for that matter, if your idea of a city hall is a building owned by the city. Sandy Springs rents.
The town does have a conventional police force and fire department, in part because the insurance premiums for a private company providing those services were deemed prohibitively high. But its 911 dispatch center is operated by a private company, iXP, with headquarters in Cranbury, N.J.
“When it comes to public safety, outsourcing has always been viewed with a kind of suspicion,” says Joseph Estey, who manages the Sandy Springs 911 service in a hushed gray room a few miles from city hall. “What I think really tipped the balance here is that they were outsourcing just about everything else.”
Critics’ response, summarized? “Yeah, but Sandy Springs is wealthy! And white! And privatizing government leads to gated communities!”
Responses?
- Sure, it’s wealthy! (And 30% minority). And they get to keep a lot more of that wealth than if they were in a city where government was the biggest for-profit enterprise.
- Flint and Detroit were wealthy, too, before successive waves of government and big-union rent-seeking gutted them like deer.
- If people decide to vote with their feet and hard-earned money for “gated communities”, that’s more a verdict on government than on them. But it’s irrelevant; Sandy Springs is not a “gated community”; it’s a city that privatized every government function that could be put into a contract.
Mention this in the Twin Cities, of course, and people will recall the Saint Paul suburb that tried to contract out its snow-plowing. According to accounts (written by government union members), it didn’t work well. Of course, the contract – written by those same government workers – didn’t spell out performance standards, or at least spelled them out in a form that befitted a group of unionized city workers, if you catch my drift and I think you do.
You can predict the panic in response:
The prospect of more Sandy Springs-style incorporations concerns people like Evan McKenzie, author of “Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government.” He worries that rich enclaves may decide to become gated communities writ large, walling themselves off from areas that are economically distressed.
“You could get into a ‘two Americas’ scenario here,” he says. “If we allow the more affluent to institutionally isolate themselves, then the poor are supposed to do — what? They’re supposed to have all the poverty and all the social problems and deal with them?”
Evan. Bubbie. Listen up.
In Chicago, the places were Rahm Emanuel and the Obama family live are as safe as a pediatric ICU. Mere blocks away, the streets are shooting galleries. This, in one of the most over-governed, over-bureaucratized cities in the country.
We don’t have “two Americas” now?
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