September 21, 1972
Page 31710
ADDRESS BY SENATOR MUSKIE BEFORE INTERNATIONAL CITY MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION
Mr. ERVIN. Mr. President, on Monday the distinguished junior Senator from Maine (Mr. MUSKIE) spoke at the opening conference of the International City Management Association in Minneapolis.
In that speech, Senator MUSKIE urged these local government leaders to join in a drive to make Government at all levels "an open process" by adopting measures that would "systematically disclose actions taken and arguments held behind closed doors or sealed away in inaccessible files."
The Senator further warned–
To many citizens, government at all levels has become a cold, impersonal and unresponsive force, too remote to fight, too complex to change, too powerful to ignore. What should be open to their participation seems closed to their concerns.
The Senator from Maine in that speech has hit upon an issue that must be of the utmost concern to all of us. If our democratic process is to remain strong, the people of this country must know what Government is doing and participate in Government decisions.
I ask unanimous consent that the remarks of Senator MUSKIE to the International City Management Association be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the address was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
ADDRESS BY SENATOR EDMUND S. MUSKIE TO THE INTERNATIONAL CITY MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATION, MINNEAPOLIS, MINN., SEPT. 18, 1972
I am anxious to talk today about a trend in our lives that bothers me a great deal, the tendency of government to escape the control of men. In a recent New York Times article on the same subject, President Nixon's chief speech writer, William Safire, told of an occasion when the President was assured that a pending problem had been referred to "the appropriate mechanism" – perhaps, in this Administration, that is exactly what happened, but even Mr. Safire felt the phrase was unfortunate.
The description, however, reflects a depressing truth about the way Americans see their
government. To many citizens, government at all levels has become a cold, impersonal and unresponsive force, too remote to fight, too complex to change, too powerful to ignore. What should be open to their participation seems closed to their concerns.
This is especially true in Washington, of course, and in the giant metropolitan areas where bigness, almost by itself, defeats the community instinct. Coming from a small city myself, as do many of you, I have greater faith in the harmony such towns can provide. But even in many of them, there is a growing alienation of the individual from his society.
Government, at most levels, is becoming as mechanical and frustrating as a computer ruled corporation. Both seem to be machines whose errors, whether they are minor overcharges or major policy mistakes, are equally frustrating to combat. People who are numbers, instead of personalities, to their bankers, their city planners and their Federal tax collectors lose not only their own identity but their social reality. Statistics cannot generate compassion. Ciphers cannot effect change.
Instead, the temptation grows for the machine to manipulate the faceless mass. Anonymity breeds anomie; first, the individual loses his bearings and his standards; then society drifts after him into powerlessness and insecurity.
I am not a Jeremiah. I do not see decline and doom as imminent or inevitable. America remains strong and anxious to find better answers, to correct injustice, to improve the quality of a civilization that is already the most vigorous the world has seen.
Our size and the size of our problems compel the search for solutions on a national scale. Yet the American genius has always been seen in the guarantees we offered individuals to act and experiment. Our basic goals are easy to state – secure and rewarding work, decent housing, safe neighborhoods, quality schools, clean air and water, adequate health care, full recreational opportunities – but the goals are becoming increasingly hard to reconcile with each other and with the requirement of meeting them for 210 million people at once.
A good job is too often made the excuse for a dirty stream. Sound homes for one group may entail the destruction of a hiking trail. More money for a police force may require a cut in education budgets.
These are familiar problems of choosing among competing priorities. You do it every day in your cities. I do it in the Senate. All of us are under pressure from different interested groups and groups of interests claiming exclusive consideration for their views. And all of us, in the end, have to answer to ourselves for our decisions.
What worries me is not the clash of pressures. We can cope with them, or we should not be trying to govern. Instead, I am disturbed by a silence in the midst of tumult, by an unheard voice, an unregistered opinion. I do not hear – and I suspect you do not either – as often as I should or would wish to from the unincorporated American, the single and singular citizen whose life we are shaping.
Let me give you a concrete example. The Senate Government Operations Committee spent some 30 hours in Executive session in July and August before it favorably reported a bill to establish a Consumer Protection Agency. The legislation is fairly controversial, but it has received little public notice. As a member of the committee, but neither a sponsor nor avowed opponent of the bill, I have received 101 letters or telegrams soliciting my vote one way or another.
One letter was from the Consumer Federation of America, one telegram was from Common Cause. With seven other organizations, they supported a strong bill. Ninety-one other pieces of correspondence, as well as a personal visit to my office by the representative of a manufacturer in Maine, was generated by opposition to the Act – from the Sun Oil Company, Scott Paper, Reynolds Metals, The Teamsters Union, The National Association of Manufacturers, The Farm Bureau, Governor Wallace of Alabama and a Maine newspaper publisher who happens to be my brother-in-law.
Only one letter came from a housewife, the consumer for whose protection, in theory, the legislation had been drafted. She supported the bill, and so, as it happened, did I, but if any of the Senators who hoped they were acting on behalf of American shoppers had had to rely on the voice of those whose interests seemed to be at issue, the Consumer Protection Agency would be a dead letter.
Or at a level nearer your immediate concerns, there is one situation uncovered by my Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations in the field of property tax assessment. In one city we found the largest taxpayer – U.S. Steel – could easily prevent even the mayor from examining the company's financial and tax records. Across the country we have found, by contrast, that individual homeowners have no easy way of determining whether the assessments on their property are fair or are in line with other values in their neighborhood.
The process that often makes it possible for giant companies to negotiate their tax bills in relative secrecy simultaneously baffles the householder who might well have grounds to appeal an arbitrary assessment. In both situations, equity is sacrificed, and the average man's feeling of powerlessness is aggravated.
This imbalance between citizen involvement and special interest representation in decision- making shows up over and over again. In another Senate Committee, we recently finished the first round of a hard fight over reallocating the revenues of the highway trust fund to the needs of urban mass transit.
I believe the federal highway program needs significant redirection. As it works now, it encourages urban sprawl and wasteful land use. It abets congestion in our cities and automobile exhaust pollution in our air. It compounds the social and economic handicaps on those who cannot afford or cannot drive cars, and it ignores the possibility that an energy shortage may force us ... perhaps sooner than we imagine ... to consider restricting private automobile use.
Many Americans . . . many of my colleagues in Congress . . share this concern, and I am hopeful that we can amend the bill in the Senate to free an $800 million portion of the fund for use by the cities for whatever mass transportation programs they wish to advance. We would be blind to continue a system that makes Federal funds for highway construction available at rates up to nine dollars for each local dollar spent, but restricts Federal aid to mass transit to a maximum of two dollars for every one dollar of local funds.
No matter how this issue is decided in this section of Congress, however, the fact remains that very few Americans will participate in this decision, even though almost all of us will be affected by its outcome. The corporations who build roads and sell steel and concrete for them will participate in the debate. The trucking companies whose economic interest is intimately involved in the outcome will bring their influence to bear. I hope some city officials for whom freeways – at a local cost this year of over three billion dollars – have lost their charm will also make themselves heard.
But the worker who must invest in a second car to get from his home to his job will probably not register any opinion. The elderly woman who must depend on the kindness of friends to take her shopping or to a doctor will probably not express her views to the Congress or the Department of Transportation. The ghetto child walled off from the rest of his city by a maze of highways and an inefficient network of public transportation will not go on record in this decision.
Land use policy is another significant issue now before the Senate. Some of us are seeking new policy directions to help cities readjust property taxation systems so that taxes falling heavily on buildings and lightly on land do not accelerate blight in the urban centers but assist renovation and revival of communities that must again become the focus of men's best energies and the setting for our highest opportunities.
Again, though, I worry that the decision will be made and shared and understood by so very few people. And every crucial choice that is made in such a way – by a limited number of knowledgeable or self-interested people without the full expression of public sentiment – diminishes the strength of democracy.
Our strength is diminished when high government officials participate in negotiations to sell wheat to the Soviet Union and then take their inside knowledge to jobs with companies profiting from the export agreements. The democratic process is eroded when officials of a conglomerate can obtain sanction for their merger ambitions in back door deals with the Justice Department.
And citizen influence on government becomes a fraud when we can only learn from stolen documents the truth about key policy decisions and the men who make them in secret.
Why is participation so limited? Partially, of course, because people are understandably preoccupied with managing their private lives. But we risk making apathy a virtue when we discourage people from taking a civic role. We can and do discourage them by treating attempts at intervention as nuisances, by bucking complaints as fast as possible to the next man's desk, by managing paper and not men and women.
Above all, a government that arrogates all wisdom to itself, a system that puts a premium on keeping its doings confidential naturally rebuffs outside interference, no matter how potentially helpful. It is easier and faster to say, "I can't be bothered" than to seek citizen involvement, but it is more than ever necessary to solicit such participation. Without it, we will build even thicker walls around our government and shut out the light and heat of reality.
I do not have any easy solution to the problem I have posed – how to reverse the trend toward government by elites and by experts; how to involve the people more closely in guiding their own destiny. But it seems to me both ironic and dangerous that we can put millions of people into instant touch with a moonwalk or a massacre in Munich, and yet hamper them from communicating effectively with each other and with those they elect to govern them.
To begin with, we must adopt one basic and, I admit, inconvenient principle: government has to be an open process. I do not mean only that our political parties have to have wider representation of minority views than they do even now or that there is a magic formula for alloting places of power according to age, sex, race, economic status or residential or ethnic background.
Rather, I believe we must systematically disclose actions taken and arguments held behind closed doors or sealed away in inaccessible files. Decisions which seem complex or sophisticated cannot, for that reason, be referred to "appropriate mechanisms." They and their likely effects have to be exposed and explained as broadly as possible.
The Senate took one step in that direction last week when it passed a bill developed by Senator Lee Metcalf in my Subcommittee to open to the public the meetings of government advisory committees. Until now, these committees have been serving as secretive conduits for special interest influence on major government decisions.
Let us see, though, what open government ought to mean closer to home – at the local level. The Revenue Sharing Act the Senate adopted last Tuesday carries language requiring city, county and state officials to publish in their local newspapers regular reports on how funds received have been used and are to be used.
In theory, these will be the same reports as those sent to the Secretary of Treasury. In fact, I would hope you would see these reports not as columns of dry statistics embedded in conventional jargon, but as opportunities to inform and involve your neighbors in your decisions. If you choose, the reports can be occasions for real discussion of local priorities.
Whether through a televised city council meeting at which citizens are encouraged to present their own suggestions ... and criticisms . . . for appropriate spending programs or at a series of smaller sessions – neighborhood town meetings, perhaps – I believe you must do everything possible to make the taxpayer feel responsible for the way his tax dollars are spent. I know this means more time spent suffering bores gladly, but the Federal Government is making you and other local officials a grant of trust.
The Congress has rejected the argument that separating tax collecting from spending would merely encourage waste at the local level. It is up to you to prove that our decision was sound.
Your response must be one of carrying the trust a step farther . . . to the people from whom the revenue to be shared came in the first place. You have to tell them what you are doing, why you are doing it and what your actions will mean to their lives. Instead of waiting to be petitioned or invaded by frustrated and angry citizens, our city councils and city managers have to make the effort of going where the people are, of soliciting their constructive participation in the workings of their government.
I fully realize that this consultation cannot be effective unless, as your task force on management criteria recommends, we put Federal grants on a more reliable and less restrictive footing. I am well aware of the frustration that comes from seeing an imaginative local program wither away because funding disappears or from losing an opportunity for action because money that is promised does not come when it is needed.
Revenue sharing is part of the answer. Additionally, I am happy to tell you that my Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1972 was approved by the Senate last Thursday. It is still to be considered by the House, but I am hopeful of its passage there and of a smoother-running system of Federal grants to local governments in the future.
Earlier, I spoke of the need to improve property tax administration. My proposals for reform and relief in this crucial area of local finance are not likely to be acted on at this session. But the momentum built in this area will not, I feel sure, die with the election campaign.
I advocate ... and I hope you will consider the idea favorably . . a system of direct Federal help to the elderly poor with their property tax bills. But my proposal is tied to a reform that would assure each taxpayer's receiving a clear explanation, with his tax bill, of how his property was assessed, how his assessment fits with that of similar property in his neighborhood, and how major taxpayers in his city are being assessed.
Disclosure is the key feature of the system. The change would require more frequent studies of the relationship between assessed and real values than most local appraisal authorities now conduct. I think the Federal Government must be prepared to assist in those studies, with necessary financing at the beginning, with its own, impartial experts when needed, with the property value information its agencies regularly collect and with its own appraisals of complex industrial sites for which no real market value exists. It is essential that governments which rely heavily on property taxation take great pains to insure that the tax burden is not only fairly shared but also is seen to be equitable.
Before loading you down with advice, of course, the Congress must act to put its own house in order and on public view. Our floor debates obviously need to be more informative and inclusive. Too many of our real decisions are taken in Executive Committee session, contrary to the requirement that we involve those we represent.
We must change our rules to make it harder for committees to transact the public business in secret. If we are going to close our committee room doors, we should at least have to explain why we are doing so, not assume, as we almost automatically do, that our performance at the negotiating table cannot be improved by outside judgments.
Finally and, in fact, crucial to dismantling government by machine, the Executive Branch must set the pace toward disclosure. It is bad enough when large interests have easier access to the White House than ordinary citizens; confidence is destroyed when the normal bureaucratic preference for secretive efficiency overrides all consideration of public participation.
We can legislate greater openness in government, and I intend to press for the fundamental reform set out in my Truth-In-Government Act, the institution of an independent board to review all Federal decisions on classification. Until now, we have left the Executive Branch alone to police this area, and, to quote Nikita Khrushchev, the result has been like "setting the goat to guard the cabbage patch." Between June 1967 and July 1971, the government investigated 2,433 instances of violations in the area of national security classification. 2,504 people were punished with anything from a reprimand to a loss of pay.
Every one of those individuals was penalized for failing to protect the secrecy of information in one way or another. In only two cases were there investigations of people who disregarded the decree that "over-classification shall be scrupulously avoided." And in neither of those cases were any administrative penalties assessed.
We must set these priorities right. We must give dominant weight to the people's right to know.
Since 1966 we have been working with the Freedom of Information Act. But it has not had a happy history, because, by itself, it could not explicitly reverse the built-in psychological pressure for big government to use its size as a hiding place for error, a camouflage for soullessness.
Only good and open administration and constant public scrutiny can make government responsive to all its constituents, instead of just the privileged and expert few. As we are men ruled by human laws, not automatons operating in a mechanized vacuum, we are certain to make errors in attempting to build ourselves a stronger and fairer society. What we may lose in efficiency, however, I feel we will gain through a more responsive democratic process. Opening up our conduct of office should also mean closing out a future of alienation and discord.
I began this talk by quoting with approval from a Republican writer. I want to end with a citation from a more familiar and comfortable source ... myself.
A book I wrote this year called "Journeys" has this appropriate passage: ". . . we tend to forget that the strength of the country depends heavily on the social and economic health of thousands of communities, where the lessons of mutual confidence and cooperation are learned or forgotten. These are the laboratories where experiments in national policy are tried, and where successes or failures are enjoyed or suffered. These are the places where such concepts as equality and justice are tested to see if they have meaning in the classrooms and the job markets, on the streets, and in the courthouses. If democracy doesn't work in the community, it won't work at our national conventions or in our national capital, and if our communities are not whole, then the United States cannot fulfill its national responsibilities at home or abroad."