Outsourced

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?

21 thoughts on “Outsourced

  1. The Wal-Mart parking lot is plowed by private contractors long before the street leading to the Wal-Mart parking lot is plowed by city crews.

    That’s because there are hundreds of landscape contractor employees biddingn on snow plowing work all winter versus 80 City of Saint Paul snow plow drivers working overtime at union wages.

  2. My small Wisconsin town is quite proud of the fact that it has never had ANY debt, nor issued any bonds. We do have a town hall, some parks, and a few part-time employees, but everything else is contracted out. We had a candidate who moved in from somewhere in the cities and wanted to “upgrade” our town services — she lost in such a landslide that I think only her own family voted for her.

  3. This could be the beginning of the end of the Great Society/War on poverty. Meanwhile Detroit might need the UN to come in…

  4. “They’re supposed to have all the poverty and all the social problems and deal with them?””

    Poverty is a hard problem, and the poor address that problem every day that they exist as “the poor”. But a lack of money does not make unable to deal with problems, unless tyrants in government tie your hands (“you shall not defend yourself”, “you shall not price your labor competitively”, “we will pay you to not work and learn valuable skills”, …).

    It should be clear that the purported defenders of “the poor” have no respect for “the poor”, and that their defense is not only inadequate, but counterproductive.

  5. I was part of a south metro citizen focus group that met to get a feel for public sentiment regarding privatization of some currently public-provided services.

    There was overwhelming private support for privatization. I realize that the results were probably not statistically significant, but I didn’t get the sense that my group was composed members with an agenda. If privatization becomes the standard, I hope those in power are careful about how contracts are let out and services provided. If so, it would provide quite a savings …

  6. bosshoss429:
    The money you ‘paid into’ the system when you were working went to pay for your father’s generation. It’s gone. Your children’s taxes will pay for you. But there aren’t enough children, and your generation is living too long. That’s the problem for every one of these pension systems. They were fine as long as the workforce grew and life spans didn’t. Whoops.

  7. Emery, to rephrase what you’re saying, Social Security and Medicare worked until you started telling people that Uncle Sam, and not their children, would take care of them when they got old. So they didn’t have as many children, and thus my generation is facing old age with neither solvent Socialist Insecurity/Mediscare or children. Oops.

  8. Emery,
    There’s a name for that type of investment program. It’s called a Ponzi Scheme, and you get thrown in jail for running one, unless it’s a government mandated one. Just goes to show, the government really doesn’t like competition.

  9. and any money me and my millenial generation put in to SS now we wont see at 65… Thanks Baby Boomers

  10. Good point, Scott. I recall a television show in which the then-head of Social Security denied the system was insolvent. He took the reporter down to the vault to see a pallet full of promissory notes issued from the General Fund to the Social Security Fund. His theory was that when Social Security needed the money, they’d call those notes and the General Fund would pony up. Of course, if the General Fund had any money, they wouldn’t have NEEDED to issue promissory notes, so we all know those notes will never be honored.

    It’s like the end of “Dumb and Dumber” where the two idiots have spent all the money but give the kidnapper a briefcase full of IOUs. Right, like those two losers will ever be able to make good on them. Or the 534 losers in Washington, for that matter.
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  11. No, I think they’ll pay the SS benefits in full, but in dollars with the purchasing power of Turkish lira.

  12. Mr.D more like the Zimbabwe dollar. You know the currency that had to print a $100 billion note to keep up with their inflation.

  13. I stand corrected — the Turkish lira is trading at 47 cents to the dollar and the value of the dollars we’ll get will be a lot less than that. Make it a Weimar Republic Deutschmark.

  14. I seem to remember a picture I saw of a German going to buy a loaf of bread after WWI and he had a wheelbarrow full of the near worthless money he’d need to make the purchase. I shutter to think what our dollar will be worth if they don’t stop the printing presses.

  15. Canada has done many things well. I like that they have taken their social security (social insurance) pension for old people and walled it off as a semi-independent federal body, so all of the social security taxes go to that body, and they have to balance their books. If only the US had done that 20 years ago.

  16. Emery pines for THE LOCK BOX. Yeah, that was a good one, wasn’t it? A real knee-slapper. Right up there with Jack Benny’s line: “I’m thinking.” Funny lines, indeed.
    .

  17. I think the Canadian system is good. SS was a criminal disaster from the word go. Terrible.

  18. Social Security is successful if you consider its original goal, which was reducing poverty amongst elders, particularly widows. To sell it to the public, FDR called it a savings plan for old age. Of course it isn’t, and that leads to a lot of the arguments about who should pay, who should receive benefits, and how large those benefits should be. I think social security should be a system to prevent poverty among the old and infirm, including orphans (they’re included now). Picking an age for eligibility is arbitrary, but necessary. Sending checks to people who don’t need the money is just extending FDR’s fiction that this is a savings plan. If this were a savings plan, there’d be savings. There aren’t. Let it continue as a anti-poverty plan.

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