bourdeaux politics versus professionalism

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ARTICLES

Politics versus Professionalism: The Effect ofInstitutional Structure on Democratic

Decision Making in a Contested Policy ArenaCarolyn BourdeauxGeorgia State University

ABSTRACT

Public administrators have long wrestled with the problem of bringing professional policy

knowledge or technical expertise to bear on decision making in a contentious policy arena.A common solution addresses political conflict by developing institutions that buffer

decision making from the regular influence of elected official. This article compares theeffects of politically buffered decision making relative to politically influenced decisionmaking by drawing on case studies of county efforts to site and develop landfills and

incinerators in New York State. Some of these counties created a special district government

known as a public authority in an effort to remove the politics from decision making.Others used their regular line agencies. The cases show that the public authority sitingprocesses were less likely to accommodate political concerns and more likely to focus on

research-based policy or technical criteria. However, this professional focus then made themvulnerable to political conflict and likely contributed to the high failure rate of the public

authority projects. In contrast, the more successful line agency processes, influenced byelected officials political concerns, tended to arbitrage away political conflict at the expenseof professional or technical considerationsbut these processes were more likely to suc-

ceed. One case provides a possible middle ground. Rather than arbitraging away points of

conflict, the administrators aggressively pushed decision making back into the political pro-cess, making elected officials choose the policy options. This process required electedofficial leadership, education, and commitment and resulted in decisions that were pro-

fessionally and technically informed as well as resilient to political conflict.

INTRODUCTION

Scholars of public administration and public policy analysis have long been preoccupied

with the problem of melding professional policy knowledge with democratic decision

making (Bimber 1991; Shulock 1999). A policy area where this is particularly difficult

is in highly contentious and highly technical public sector decision making (OLeary et al.

1999)such as siting nuclear power plants, dredging ports, building new runways at

I would like to thank my father Robert Bourdeaux for his support and encouragement as well as for his helpful

comments during the development of this article. Address correspondence to the author at [email protected].

doi:10.1093/jopart/mum010Advance Access publication on June 29, 2007 The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Journal of Public Administration Researchand Theory, Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

JPART 18:349373

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airports, or the topic of this article, siting landfills or garbage incinerators. Although often

unstated, the concern is that elected officials, subject to intense political pressure from parts

of the electorate, may bog down in stalemate or will not make technically appropriate

choices.

One solution is to shift decision making to agencies (Fiorina 1986; McCubbins, Noll,and Weingast 1987; OLeary 1993) or to develop institutional devices that buffer decision

making from the vagaries of political influences, such as special purpose governments

(Doig 1983, 2001; Doig and Mitchell 1992) or other forms of nonpolitical boards and

commissions. Although there is research and theory that examines when elected official

choose to devolve decision making to another level of government (Fiorina 1986; Horn

1995; McCubbins, Noll, and Weingast 1987, 1989; McCubbins and Schwartz 1984), there

are few opportunities to make comparisons in the same policy arena between processes that

devolve decision making with others that do not. Thus, there is little theory or research on

what to expect. This article draws on four case studies of counties in New York State

attempting to site landfills and incinerators to compare politically buffered processes tothose conducted in a political arena.

BACKGROUND TO THE RESEARCH

This article is the fourth in a series of articles looking at the New York State efforts to

develop solid waste facilities using a form of special district government known as a public

authority. Jameson Doig describes public authorities as the realization of the Progressives

vision of the administrative state (Doig 1983). Public authorities are buffered from regular

political influence by an appointed board and an independent revenue stream, typically

based on user fees (Walsh 1978). As a result, public authority processes are almost purelyadministrative onesthe Executive Director and staff have significant authority to shape

the process and make decisions free from political interference (Doig 1983, 1993, 2001;

Henriquez 1986; Walsh 1978). In New York State, 10 out of 33 counties facing a solid

waste crisis chose to create a public authority to site a facility.

The first article examined why counties chose to create public authorities and through

a quantitative and qualitative analysis showed that they were created for a variety of

reasons including public finance, political division between political parties, and a need

to consolidate interjurisdictional arrangements. Qualitative assessments also showed that

an important expectation was that the public authorities would take the politics out of

decision making (Bourdeaux 2005).The second article looked at how successful the public authorities were at siting and

developing landfills and incinerators and showed that even controlling for political di-

vision, type of facilities (and related issues of cost), and interjurisdictional dynamics, the

public authorities were significantly less successful than counties conducting the process

through a line agency (Bourdeaux 2007a). Table 1 shows the basic statistics. Further, there

is evidence that this outcome was unanticipated. The public authorities were not set up to

failthe elected officials that created them often initially sat on their board, vesting their

political futures in the success of the public authority. The administrators involved often

moved from jobs in planning or public works departments to become executive director of

the public authority. When the public authority projects ended, often elected officials and

administrators themselves concluded that the institutional experiment had been a mistake.

In five cases shown in table 2, the public authority was disbanded or scaled back in size. In

Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory350



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two cases, one of which will be described in this article, when the public authority process

ended, the counties disbanded the public authority and proceeded to complete facilities on

their own. Finally, table 2 shows that the public authority projects did not falter because of

internal problems or professional decision making, the processes were terminated because

of the intervention of elected officialsthe public authorities that were created to remove

politics from decision making encountered political problems.The third article assesses why these public authorities do not look like the highly

successful public authorities often described in the literature and concludes that except for

one case, these public authorities did not have the same level of resources or constituency

to bargain effectively in the political process (Bourdeaux 2007b). Solid waste public

authorities often had to return repeatedly to their parent government(s) for funding until

a facility that would generate revenue was developed. The powerful public authorities

often described in the literature are also associated with more politically popular economic

development and/or infrastructure projects which have constituencies in the business com-

munity or with unions (e.g., Caro 1975; Doig 2001; Walsh 1978). Indeed the one public

authority that unequivocally succeeded in siting a landfill had a mission beyond solidwaste, including a variety of economic development tasks associated with the development

of Ft. Drum, a major military installation in its jurisdiction. Thus, most of the solid waste

public authorities functioned as politically buffered administrators, reminiscent of line

agency staff who have been given considerable policy space to develop a policy solution

but who must ultimately receive support for their proposals from elected officials.

Although this explains why the public authorities were less successful than those in the

literature, it does not explain why the public authorities were so much less successful than

counties conducting the process through a line agency, which would have similar or even

fewer resources to bargain in a political arena. This question is addressed in this article.

DECISION MAKING IN POLITICALLY BUFFERED INSTITUTIONS VERSUSPOLITICAL INSTITUTIONS

Removing administrative bodies from regular political influence has long been an explicit

strategy for achieving efficiency in administrative decision making (Osborne and Gaebler

1992; Wilson 1887, 1989). The assumption stems from the observation that line agencies

are closely attached to democratic political processes and thus are battered by many influ-

ences exerted on them throughout a decision-making process (Appleby 1945; Pressman

1973; Seidman and Gilmore 1986; Wilson 1989). Line agencies must respond to aggre-

gative decision making which bundle individual preferences. Decisions are made

through bargaining and exchange, and the policy solutions that emerge from aggregative

processes, trades, coalitions, and logrolls, tend to be summations of interests in various

Table 1Entity Siting Facility and Completion Rates

Not Completed Completed Total

County sited 10 (33%) 20 (67%) 30

Authority sited 12 (85%) 2 (15%) 14Total 22 22 44

Note: This table includes multiple siting efforts by the same entity.

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Table 2Contextual Detail Surrounding Terminated Public Authority Projects

Public Authority ProjectEvents That Led to

Termination of Project

Broome CountyResource Recovery

Authority

Incinerator Election of County Executive inopposition to facility

State DEC ruling that the BCRRA

plan needed to include more

recycling; reducing the amount

of waste available for the

incinerator

BCRRA returned to county

legislature to request authority to

import garbage to maintain level

of waste for facility Legislature votes in support;

County Executive vetoes the

legislation

Legislature fails to override veto

Public authority disbanded

Western Finger

Lakes Solid Waste

Management

Authority

Incinerator Proposed site of incinerator leads

a county to withdraw from the

public authority making the

economics of the facility no

longer viable

Landfill DEC permits large private landfill

in region to remain open, making

new siting effort unnecessary

One other jurisdiction leaves the

public authority

Serious consideration given to

disbanding the public authority

Montgomery Otsego

Schoharie SolidWaste Authority

Landfill Proposed landfill project has

economic difficulties afterCarbone decision

Two counties try to secede

from the public authority and

repudiate debt

Public authority sues one county to

keep them in interjurisdictional

arrangement

Effort to disband the public

authority blocked by public

authority debt outstanding

Continued




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Table 2 (continued)Contextual Detail Surrounding Terminated Public Authority Projects

Public Authority Project

Events That Led to


Public authority operations

significantly scaled back

Eastern Rensselaer

Solid Waste

Management

Agency

Composting facility Project terminated due to

s the Authoritys desire to be

a consensus-based

governmental unit rather than

a government based on

majority rules;

s the ever-changing political,

economic, and solid waste

management climate in the

local, state, and federal arenas;

s the lack of adequate waste

materials for economic

sizing of any facility

due to environmentally

sound and economically

viable solid waste

management programs

maximizing reduction,

reuse, and recycling;s litigation from within; and

s political subterfuge

(ERCSWMA, 19951996

Compliance Report)

Public authority significantly scaled

back

Oneida Herkimer

Solid Waste

Authority

Incinerator

expansion/landfill

Landfill challenged on science,

location choices on working

farmland

Herkimer County legislature passes

resolution urging public authority

not to site landfill on working farm

In the face of overwhelming public

protest, elected official serving as

Chairman of the public authority

board withdraws projects

Continued




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forms rather than a synthesis. These results are viewed as inimical to good sense, justice,

efficiency and appropriate policy (March and Olsen 1989, 124). These problems are

likely to be particularly acute where significant scientific or technical knowledge is re-

quired to make a reasoned decision. Thus, elected officials are urged to take the politics

out of decision making, which typically means leaving behind the self-interested, paro-

chial, or idiosyncratic preferences that do not fit within a rational or reasoned decision

framework (March and Olsen 1989). But how does one develop institutions that align

incentives to promote more reasoned decision making, particularly in the face of power

being given to institutions that promote aggregative decision making?One solution is to use politically buffered institutions such as public authorities (Doig

1983, 2001; Doig and Mitchell 1992; Frant 1989, 1996). One theory is that such institutions

remove the high-powered incentives to respond to electoral pressures. As a result, the

administrators in public authorities have more opportunity or more policy space to focus

on technical expertise, business-like management, or long-term policy objectives (Frant

1989). This theory suggests that politically buffered institutions are going to be heavily

influenced by internal norms and beliefsin so far as a public authority administrator is

driven to be business-like or focused on technical expertise, there is opportunity to do so.

Case studies of public authorities support this observation (Caro 1975; Doig 2001; Walsh

1978). On the other hand, this sort of policy space may also open up the door to corruption,

mismanagement, or inefficiency (Axelrod 1992; Henriquez 1986; Leigland and Lamb

1986). In the case of the solid waste public authoritiesresource poor but created with

Table 2 (continued)Contextual Detail Surrounding Terminated Public Authority Projects

Public Authority Project

Events That Led to


St. Lawrence Solid

Waste Disposal

Authority

Incinerator/landfill Change of legislature from

Republican controlled to

Democratically controlled softens

support for the facilities

Protest over health impact of

incinerator and impact on

agriculture, problems in developing

recycling program, cost of the

facility and potential need to import

garbage from other jurisdictions

In 11-11 vote, legislature fails tosupport debt to construct the

incinerator

Landfill Protest develops over siting landfill

on agricultural land

Legislature requests that the public

authority change its siting criteria,

public authority refuses

Legislature votes to disband the

public authority




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the expectation that they would bring more professional decision making to a contentious

policy processone would expect that they would bring norms of technical expertise or

policy professionalism to their institution.

However, it is not entirely clear how this expertise-based perspective might distin-

guish the public authority from the line agency in political debate. One hint from Walsh(1978) is that the public authority staff might make the political conflict worse. She quotes

an administrator in a public authority as saying:

The reputation of an authority is constantly in jeopardy before the merciless bombardment of

local politicians. If an authority is developing the benefits expected of it, if it is operating

efficiently, letting contracts without favoritism, hiring and promoting personnel without

political interference, refusing to bow policy-wise to improper political pressures by

changing administrations, then by its very nature it outrages political feelings and it becomes

fair game of every politician within artillery range. (Walsh 1978, 260)

This observation suggests that the public authorities in New York State might haveexacerbated the conflict relative to the line agencies. If they focused on technical expertise

and professional decision making, they may have been less likely to arbitrage away key

points of conflict important to legislators in a political process. This proposition still does

not resolve the question of why legislators, who expected the public authority to take the

politics out of decision making, did not accept these decisions. A political economy frame-

work would suggest that elected officials had forward-looking rationality when they

created these public authorities and therefore anticipated such outcomes (Horn 1995).

However, as noted earlier, evidence suggests that the public authorities produced unin-

tended consequences. One possibility is that elected officials thought that they themselves

could avoid political pressure by devolving responsibility, and this assumption proved in-correct. The public authorities exacerbated conflict by failing to account for political pres-

sures in their decision making, and at the same time, when the decision was forced back into

a political arena, the elected officials then did not have the knowledge about or commitment

to a particular solution that would have enabled them to make an informed decision.

METHODOLOGY

The situation in New York State allows a comparison of public authority and county line

agency processes. The thinness of the theory and the question of why the public authorities

performed worse than the county line agencies suggests a methodology that is inductiveand uses comparative case studies (Yin 1994). The conundrum of inductive case study

research is how to sort through the vast amounts of data to find patterns. The initial case

studies drew on ideas about institutional analysis and focused broadly on institutional

setting, environment and historical context, and actors, including administrators, elected

officials, and opposition groups (Barzelay 2000; Lynn, Heinrich, and Hill 2000; Ostrom

1986). Within this larger framework, the analysis then examined various actors policy

preferences and their policy choices. The particular inquiry in this article is guided by the

finding in table 2 that actions of elected officials led to the demise of the public authority

projects. Thus, the focus of inquiry is on elected officials preferred policy choices relative

to those of administrators.

The case studies were primarily derived from newspaper articles about the debate

(between 201 and 484 articles for each case). Key passages were entered into the computer




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to form narratives, and these passages then were coded using QSR N5 to cluster actors,

preferences, policy choices, and strategies around the common decision nodes/points of

controversy. To triangulate on the information presented and try to reduce distortions

from a newspaper-only focus (Yin 1994), representatives from each of the sets of actors, in

particular the elected officials, administrators, and opposition groups, were interviewed toconfirm and supplement the narratives constructed from the newspapers. Other supple-

mental materials included bond prospectuses, the minutes from public meetings, environ-

mental documents, and interviews with state officials and attorneys involved in several of

the cases. The final case narratives which often were over a hundred pages long can be read

in their entirety in Bourdeaux (2003).

For purposes of comparing two types of processesthe administratively driven

public authority cases and the county government line agency casesthe analysis that

follows is presented in two parts. The first part compares policy choices around points of

conflict that were common across the cases and in particular those that represent a choice

between a professional policy solution versus a political solution. In this context, aprofessional solution is one that might be associated with a professional policy analysis or

one that might emerge from policy documents such as those produced by the New York

State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), emphasizing scientific or cost-

benefit criteria. By contrast, a political solution is aggregative or one based on the exigen-

cies of political power. This part of the analysis follows a strategy of identifying bins or

categories for reducing and classifying information around patterns that emerged in the data

(Miles and Huberman 1994). The results map back onto the proposition that legislatively

driven processes will be more political or aggregative than those conducted by the public

authorities. The second part of the analysis is more loosely structured in keeping with ideas

of inductive research when the theory is not clear or not known. The analysis examines theevolution of decision making around similar points of conflict in two jurisdictions.

Policy Setting and Case Selection

According to a survey by the DEC, in the mid-1980s, over 30 counties faced a solid waste

crisis, or no place to put their garbage (New York State Department of Environmental

Conservation Division of Solid Waste 1987). This problem was created by state and federal

laws forcing higher environmental standards for landfills. Between 1960 and 1987, the

state went from approximately 1,600 landfills to 84 (only 35 actually had permits to operate).

The state further required that counties develop solid waste plans and determine long-termsolutions for places to put their garbage (New York State Department of Environmental

Conservation Division of Solid Waste 1987, 19992000).1

The first part of this analysis assesses four cases of counties grappling with finding

a place to put the garbage. The counties used different governance arrangements to

conduct these high-conflict processes. All the county governments had a county executive

or county administrator and a county legislature of between 17 and 37 members. However,

1 Although waste reduction and recycling figured highly in state and local planning, almost no locality determined

that reduction, reuse, and recycling would be a sufficient solution for garbage disposalmost jurisdictions found

that they needed a landfill or incinerator. Localities also did not foresee the eventual large-scale private sectorinvestment in landfillslocal officials believed they had to find a place to put the garbage in their own jurisdiction

(Anderson 2000; William F. Cosulich & Associates 1991).




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three counties initially chose to use a public authority to conduct the site selection process

for their landfill or incinerator. Cases were selected from the counties that had to resolve

a solid waste crisis and then were selected based on the type of institution used, similarity

of demographics, size (all had populations over 100,000), and geographic proximity. All

are in central New York State and so faced similar policy constraints such as ability to shipwaste to an adjacent jurisdiction.

Levels of Political Influence

Three of these cases include repeated siting efforts or concurrent siting processes. The

St. Lawrence Solid Waste Disposal Authority (SWDA) tried three times to site a facility

with varying degrees of political influence or political buffering. In the first case, site

selection was conducted by elected officials and line staff, but the remaining process of

project development was turned over to a public authority. In the second case, site selection

was conducted entirely by a public authority. In the third case, the county turned over site

selection again to line agency staff. Oneida and Herkimer Counties tried two times to site

a landfill, both times with a public authority, the Oneida Herkimer Solid Waste Authority

(OHSWA). One quirk of their process was that the majority and minority leader of the

Oneida County legislature sat on the board of the public authority. In the first siting

process, the elected officials decided to take a hands-off approach and tried to build

legitimacy by showing that political considerations had not contaminated site selection.

The second case, however, might be considered to be more politically informed because

the elected officials and administrators concluded that the process would be political no

matter their good intentions. Onondaga County sited both a landfill and an incinerator

through a regular line agency interacting regularly with elected officials, and Jefferson and

Lewis Counties sited a landfill through the Development Authority of the North Country(DANC), the one truly successful public authority case. These cases do overselect for

public authority success since they capture the two cases out of the 14 total public authority

efforts that reached the end stages of facility development.

PART I: POLITICS, POLICY, AND POINTS OF CONFLICT

Site Selection

For each process of site selection and facility development, the debates over the facilities

clustered around a series of points of conflict that had political and/or professional

policy resonance and which administrators (and elected officials) might address, mitigate,or ignore. Site selection, or the choice of where to locate a landfill or incinerator (often

called a waste-to-energy WTE facility), forms the heart of a controversy over a solidwaste facility, and the professional policy versus political criteria used in site selection

turned out to provide a straightforward metric for the political sensitivity of the admin-

istrators in the different institutions. In site selection, disgruntled host communities have

differential political capacities to resist a solid waste facility. Major issues in terms of the

local capacity to resist include:

Siting a facility in a low-population area: Although this issue was often framed as

inconveniencing the fewest number of people, (e.g., OSHWA siting criteria), the fewer

the people also meant fewer voters who could mobilize in protest and fewer financial

resources that could be mobilized for politics, studies, consultants, and lawyers.




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Siting a facility on the border with another jurisdiction: The voters in the other jurisdiction

obviously had less capacity to influence decisions in the jurisdiction where a facility was

actually located.

Having a willing host community: In New York State, this criterion meant having a willing

town or city government. Each county is entirely divided into towns and cities, and

there is no unincorporated area. If the town or city at large was not willing to host the

facility, then the protestors could mobilize the taxing power of the jurisdiction to fight

the facility.

Placing a priority on finding willing sellers of property: Unwilling sellers of property

created a highly mobilized, emotionally appealing, and politically active group of pro-

testors. There was also the potential to draw out the process because of resistance to

hydrogeological testing on the property and because of litigation around the process of

eminent domain.2

Avoiding siting a facility in an agricultural district or on farmland: An issue that had

unanticipated resonance in these largely rural counties was siting a facility on farmland.

Any effort to take agricultural land through eminent domain raised the politically resonant

issue of taking a farmers home and livelihood. Politically, if farmers began to protest

a landfill or incinerator, this issue tended to engage the Farm Bureau and the broader

constituency of farmers across a jurisdiction. Finding farmers who were willing sellers

could help neutralize this issue. A further complication was that siting a landfill in

a formally designated agricultural district precluded the use of eminent domain under state

law, in effect, requiring willing sellers.

These criteria for site selection have clear political implications. Some of these mayoverlap with more reasoned or professional policy considerations, but certainly

ignoring these criteria reflects lessened attention to political concerns. A further dimension

of the professional versus political tension is that political criteria often raise questions of

fairness since some of these considerations arbitrage away political conflict at the expense

of political minorities or voteless constituencies, such as communities in other counties.

As table 3 shows, emphasis on these political factors clustered in the explicitly

political processes (the first and third SWDA cases and the Onondaga County incinerator

case, with the politically informed OHSWA case in the middle). As expected, polit-

ical institutions are careful to consider aggregative criteria that arbitrage away political

conflict, whereas the politically buffered institutions do not select sites that include manyof these criteria. Although one might certainly look at these criteria as reflecting different

values relative to technocratic policy-making criteria, the observation still stands that

the political processes emphasized different variables from the politically buffered

processes.

The distinction between these criteria is reflected in the debates themselves. In the

second OHSWA case, the administrators concluded that despite their best efforts to avoid

2 Some willing sellers were not willing to admit publicly that they would sell their land, which could potentially

obscure the visibility of this strategy to the researcher. However, nonwilling sellers typically protested and attempted to

block the hydrogeological testing on their landwhich is evident in the newspaper accounts. Further, one candifferentiate between county or public authority efforts that explicitly and publicly limited their search to properties

with willing sellers and those that did not or only made informal efforts to find willing sellers.




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359

Table 3Political versus Policy Choices

Process Grounded in Explicit Effort to RemovePolitical Influences from Decision Making

PoliticallyInformed

Political SiteSelection Process is Explicitly Political

Politicalaccommodation

OHSWAcase 1: landfill

SWDAcase 2: landfill

DANClandfill

OHSWAcase 2: landfill

SWDAcase 1:

incinerator/landfill

SWDAcase 3: landfill

OnondagaCounty

incinerator

OnondagaCountylandfill

Site selectionWilling sellers No No No No Yes Yes Yes Yes

Low population No No Yes Yes No No Yes No

Willing host community No No No No Yes Yes Yes No

On border with another

jurisdiction

No No No Yes Yes Yes No No

Avoided agricultural land No No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No

Total site selection

criteria 0 0 2 3 4 4 4 1

Other policy issues

Transportation problems

with site

No No No Yes No Yes No No

Nonpolitical

site development

Accommodate 40%

recycling (versus protest)

Yes NA No Yes No NA No No

Ban on importation Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes YesTotal political

accommodation 2 1 3 6 4 6 5 2

Facility sited? No No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Facility constructed? No No Yes No No No Yes No

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politics in the previous case, the process was inevitably political (OHSWA-10 Agency

Official 2002). They added as the second most important criterion in site selection (after

hydrogeology) that the site should inconvenience the fewest number of people. Also

during both OHSWA site selection processes, the county legislatures voted to advise the

public authority not to site in an agricultural district.Similarly, avoiding agricultural land was explicitly described as a political criterion in

the second SWDA case. During consideration of the landfill, the elected officials voted to

advise the public authority not to site on agricultural land. The administrators at SWDA

argued in protest that it would not have been good policy to take this criterion into

account because a large percentage of the county was agricultural land (SWDA-18 Agency

Official 2003). In the third SWDA case, the administrators, now line agency staff con-

cerned about moving their proposed project through the political process, amended the

previous site selection criteria explicitly to include sites that had willing sellers of the

property (thus avoiding the agricultural land debate) and, if possible, a large amount of

adjacent public land.

Policy Issues Beyond Site Selection

Other policy issues beyond site selection are somewhat more ambiguous in their results.

The environmental appropriateness of a site, perhaps the most important policy variable,

was hard to assess because it was constrained by state and federal environmental lawall

sites had to be above a certain threshold to receive approval from the DEC. However, other

issues reflecting an emphasis on a search for efficiency, a characteristic of a professional

policy orientation, might include ease of transportation to and from the solid waste facility.

Low-population areas on the border of another jurisdiction or sites that inconvenience the

fewest number of people may also be less efficient because they are further from major

highways and arterials.

Importation of waste and level of recycling can also be assessed for political expe-

diency compared to the results that might emerge from a more reasoned process of policy

analysis. In 1987, the state mandated a 40% recycling rate. However, several counties

analyzed the level of recycling that was technically feasible and concluded that around

a 30% recycling rate would be ambitious given existing markets for the products and

the change in behavior that would have to take place. In general, history has supported

their analysis.3 Yet, recycling was politically popular and in some cases was viewed as

a way of reassuring the public that the landfill or incinerator was the last resort. A process

that emphasized policy criteria that emerged from an analytical process might resist the

40% recycling rate, whereas one that was highly focused on political criteria would

accommodate this rate even knowing that it might be infeasible in actuality. Processes

that occurred well after the recycling law was in place and therefore had no opportunity to

protest the 40% rate are given NA in the chart.

3 Both Onondaga County and St. Lawrence County concluded at about the same time that a 30% recycling rate

would be ambitious (Davis 1987; Reagan 1990; Tooley 1990) and would come to protest the states mandate. DANC

proposed a recycling plan that was so expensive that the counties took over recycling from the public authority.

Currently, localities count products that are recycled as part of industrial processes as recyclables as a way of gamingthe numbers (OCRRA-11 2001). In 2003, New York City cut its recycling program because it was costing more to

recycle than to simply dispose of the trash.




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Similarly, importation of waste was a policy issue with political resonance. In all the

cases, opponents of facilities argued that their community was about to become a waste

capital. In fact, the community as a whole might be made better off by importation

because it would lower costs of garbage disposal. Again, like recycling, importation was

a policy issue that local officials would cede to in the short run although they might have toreverse themselves in the future.

Looking at table 3, one can see that for these criteria, the picture is more ambiguous.

Most of the sites selected had easy access to transportation. Questions about recycling were

raised in a number of jurisdictions, including Onondaga County, which was a heavily

legislative process. Although Onondaga County eventually ceded to the states 40%

requirement, administrators and legislators pointed out that this amount would be difficult

to achieve. In contrast, OHSWA, a politically buffered public authority, heavily empha-

sized recycling in both casesin part from good intentions but also because they wanted to

build legitimacy for their projects and process. In fact, OHSWA was the only jurisdiction

in these cases to develop a publicly owned and run recycling facility.Importation was banned in all jurisdictions except St. Lawrences first case, where the

public authority actively resisted a legal restriction on importation. The administrators

argued that they would be happy to size their incinerator as though no waste would be

imported but it would be imprudent from a policy standpoint to ban it entirely because they

might need imported waste later to cover costs. In contrast, OHSWA, a public authority,

was so anxious to ban importation in the second case that the authority asked the state

legislature to pass a law specifically prohibiting OHSWA from importing waste, which

they did.

Even though public authorities accommodated certain political concerns or values and

line agencies resisted certain political considerations, overall the differences are striking.The public authorities did change the nature of the debatethey made it less politically

influenced. At the same time, with the exception of DANC, these public authorities had

few resources to compete in the political process, and thus, their dedication to nonpolit-

ical policybased concerns likely contributed to the political vulnerability of the projects.

Onondaga County, however, does present an interesting contrast. Although their inciner-

ator process followed the contours of a politically influenced siting process, the landfill

siting effort was apparently more professionally informed despite the need for regular

negotiations with elected officials.

The comparison of the St. Lawrence SWDA and Onondaga County cases helps flesh

out the stories of what happened and reveals three patterns in the relationships betweenadministrators and elected officials. In the first, administrators respond to political pressure

by arbitraging away political conflict. This pattern is reflected in the site selection pro-

cesses in the first SWDA case and the third SWDA case as well as the Onondaga County

incinerator process. In the second pattern, administrators rely on their politically buff-

ered status and refuse to cede to politically expedient demands. In the first SWDA case

(after site selection) and the second SWDA case, administrators try to reason with elected

officials over policy but ultimately stand firm behind their policy preferences despite

repeated warnings from elected officials. This strategy was also used in the first OHSWA

case that is not presented in this article and repeatedly fails. Finally, in the Onondaga

County landfill siting and in the incinerator case (after site selection), a third pattern

emerges. Here administrators try to educate elected officials and aggressively throw de-

cision making back into the political process. This process is messy, but it is also creative.




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Although it requires legislative leadership, it seems to have engendered a level of elected

official commitment that makes the process resilient to conflict.

PART II: CASE COMPARISONS

The First St. Lawrence SWDA Case: Administrative Experts versus Politicians

The St. Lawrence County SWDA cases illustrate an evolution of thinking about conten-

tious decision making. The county officials initially created SWDA in 1983 in an effort to

bring centralized expertise to an issue that county officials perceived as too complex for

county government. The public authority provided a convenient method of financing a

new facility, was less constrained by regulation, and importantly, provided a method to

remove the political dimension from the decision-making process (Plastino 1992;

SWDA-18 Agency Official 2003). Although the county legislators insured their continued

influence by placing a legislator on the board of the public authority and by requiring that thepublic authority to solicit legislative approval prior to issuing debt, the norm that the public

authority staff adopted was to focus on nonpolitical, policy-oriented decision making.

In the initial political process, all the points of conflict associated with siting both an

incinerator (or WTE) and a landfill were anticipated. This site selection process follows the

first pattern of arbitraging away political conflict. Although the facilities were not put in

low-population areas, the communities were willing hosts of the facilities and in these

early days of the solid waste wars were even touted as an economic development oppor-

tunity. The facilities were to be placed on industrial properties, had willing sellers, and did

not create a problem of placement on agricultural land. The public authority was created in

conjunction with this deal making over site selection. Although the administrators at thepublic authority had to return to the county legislators approximately once a year to solicit

approval to issue debt to finance project development, for almost 7 years they enjoyed wide

support.

However, by 1988, new conflicts rose to prominence. The public authority was now

removed from its original political origins and had internalized the belief that its task was

to present reasoned policy. The authority staff, including a county legislator who sat on

the board, believed that their role was to make a reasoned argument to the public and to the

legislators about the decision that they had determined would be best (SWDA-3 Agency

Official 2002; SWDA-7 Elected Official 2003). Now the second pattern, administrative

resistance to political concerns, came to the fore.The health impact of the facility was a particular concern for the core opposition to

the incinerator, but broader opposition from such groups as the League of Women Voters,

the Environmental Management Council, and the business community began to coalesce

around the public authoritys recycling plan, the cost of the incinerator, and resistance to

importation of waste. Specifically, these groups expressed concern that SWDA was not

aggressively pursuing the states 40% recycling goal, that SWDA would have to import

waste in order to make the facility financially viable, and that the incinerator might be too

costly.

SWDA countered these charges by presenting evidence based on an analytical ap-

proach. On recycling, the SWDA board conducted a study (with the involvement of

a leading environmentalist) and concluded that 40% recycling was too ambitious. As noted

earlier, SWDA staff were likely correct on the merits. Opponents also demanded that




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SWDA definitively rule out importation. The legislature also voted twice to ban importa-

tion, although they had officially ceded the authority to make this decision to SWDA.

SWDA administrators agreed not to size the incinerator based on imported waste, but

despite the urging of the elected officials, they would not agree to definitively rule out

this alternative source of revenue. On the cost of the facility, SWDAs case may have beenmore suspect (SWDA-18 Agency Official 2003). However, the staff argued, correctly, that

the county would suffer serious negative repercussions from backtracking. Over 7 years,

the county made a substantial investment in planning for the facilities, which was entirely

financed by debt issued by the public authority. The county had also entered into public and

private contracts and agreements contingent upon ultimate development of facilities.

Yet despite their expertise and reasoned arguments, neither the public nor (7 years

later) many of the current elected officials had been involved in the original development

of the incinerator and landfill plans. In 1990, support for the facility further softened4 when

a number of new legislators were elected and the control of the legislature shifted from

Republican to Democratic. Although an important change, this shift was not necessarilydecisive. Previous votes for the facilities were broad and nonpartisan, and a Democratic

legislator actually sat on the board of SWDA.

In 1990, after 7 years of project development, SWDA returned to the county legis-

lature for a final vote to issue debt to construct the incinerator. In a dramatic 11-11 vote, the

legislature failed to endorse the debt, and the entire process collapsed. As SWDA had

warned, this came at a serious cost to the countythe private sector partner withdrew; the

state withdrew grant money allocated to help with the project and then moved to close the

last remaining landfills. In addition, $33 million in debt had been issued contingent on

the eventual revenues from the incinerator and landfill facilities. Now the debt had to be

paid by the general taxpayer. Indicative of the lack of understanding between the legislatorsand SWDA were some of the last minute negotiations between legislators and the state

DEC. SWDA had been working on this project for almost a decade and had entered into

consent decrees with the state to keep open several county landfills contingent upon the

timely development of alternative facilities. Yet, just preceding the vote, a legislator called

the DEC to ask if the agency was serious about immediately closing the landfills. Mis-

understanding the response, the legislator then became the deciding vote against financing

the incinerator. Fundamentally, SWDA had not arbitraged away conflict that was causing

political pressure for the legislators. The legislators had final authority to veto the proposed

facility, but they had no technical knowledge about the issues surrounding their decision.

The Second St. Lawrence SWDA Case: An Administratively Driven

Participatory Process

What then occurred was that the SWDA county officials made a choice. Some SWDA

officials assessed the problem as one of a lack of legislative education and engagement and

recommended the creation of a committee of legislators to work more closely with SWDA

(Cartier 1990; Pardoe 1990). Although this committee was constituted briefly, it eventually

fell by the wayside. In contrast, the DEC staff recommended a public involvement

4 The idea that the support had softened was suggested in interviews with opponents of the facility. They did notsee the new legislators as actively supporting their position but that they at least had open minds to opposing the

facility (SWDA-2 Opponent 2002; SWDA-4 Opponent 2002; SWDA-18 Agency Official 2003).




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process be added to SWDAs renewed effort to develop a regional landfill, and this became

the official strategy of the public authority as it attempted to mitigate the conflict associated

with a siting process (SWDA-18 Agency Official 2003).

The public authority was reconstituted with a new executive director and several new

board members. To increase involvement in decision making, the executive director of thepublic authority created a citizens advisory board composed of a broad cross-section of

the community. Sitting on the board were representatives from environmental groups, the

League of Women Voters, a local recycling company, business interests, agriculture inter-

ests, teachers, geologists, and members of local unions (Kidwell 1990). The first order of

business for this group was a resolution that the public should be educated about solid

waste solutions and about the landfill siting criteria that the committee would develop.

Throughout the process, the administrative staff professed a preference for good science

and also openness. They held public hearings at each step in the process. First, the citizen

advisory group developed the criteria for the landfill site selection. Then the administrators

ran a series of screens of the county for land that would fit with the siting criteria. Thecriteria selected were heavily based on hydrogeology: first, finding low-permeable soils;

second, the depth to the groundwater table; third, the proximity to municipal surface water-

sheds; fourth, the impact on surface water; and fifth, the presence of agricultural lands. Using

these criteria, SWDA staff selected 125 sites. These sites were examined and approved by

the citizen advisory committee, and then the executive director scheduled public hearings

on both the siting criteria and the sites. The newspapers noted that SWDA distributed

146 copies of the documents to libraries and other public places across the county (Kidwell

1991b). The criteria and information about the landfills were also covered extensively in the

local newspaper (Hayes 1991; Kidwell 1991a, 1991b). Yet, almost no one showed up for

the first public hearing on the 125 sites. SWDA narrowed to 36 sites and again held a publichearing, only 20 people showed up and none had complaints about the sites.

Again, this process was grounded in an ethos of depoliticization or removal of

aggregative, political criteria from decision making. The legislators determined that they

would take a hands-off approach. Even the legislator who sat on the public authority board

tried to take a nonpolitical view of the process (SWDA-8 Elected Official 2003; SWDA-18

Agency Official 2003). Prior to announcing the final sites, the executive director of SWDA

and the city engineer emphasized publicly that the process had been nonpolitical (Mende

1992a). SWDA then announced the final five sites.

Public involvement notwithstanding, the dynamics that emerged were almost exactly

the same as the latter half of the previous process. The public authority and its citizenadvisory group had not captured political concerns. Their criteria did not include willing

sellers of property, a willing host community, or a low-population area. Although avoiding

agricultural land was included, it ranked fifth after hydrogeology had been considered.

St. Lawrence County had extensive agricultural lands, and as a result several of the final

sites were on agricultural land. SWDA also tried to find willing sellers, but again, this was

not an absolute criterion.

Once the final sites had been identified, hundreds of opponents turned out to the public

meetings in opposition5 and began to lobby their elected officials to stop the process.

5 According to the papers, over 350 turned out for the public hearing in Lisbon, 120 for the public hearing inHopkinton, and over 200 for the public hearing in Potsdam. The newspaper reported that people spilled out of the rooms

designated and into the halls.




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SWDA administrators had learned from the previous process and had voted to turn over

control of importation to the legislature and had launched an ambitious recycling system.

Further, the regional landfill they were proposing would be less costly than the incinerator.

However, the host communities opposed the proposed sites, over half of the landowners

resisted any effort by the public authority to conduct hydrogeological testing on theirproperty, and the opponents protested that the landfill should not be sited on agricultural

land. In fact, the location on agricultural land prompted the Farm Bureau to come out in

opposition to the proposed sites, indicating that opposition was broader than just the local

community affected.

The executive director of SWDA protested that he had used criteria drawn up by the

citizen advisory committee, a plan that had been available for public comment and a plan

to which no one had previously objected. Further, in agriculture-intensive St. Lawrence

County, excluding all sites with any kind of agricultural purpose would mean that some of

the most hydrogeologically sound locations would be removed from consideration (Mende

1992b; SWDA-18 Agency Official 2003).Ignoring his argument, the elected officials voted 18-3 to exclude agricultural land

from consideration. Although not actually binding on the independent public authority, the

political reality was that SWDA had to negotiate with the elected officials to finance the

landfill, and therefore, SWDA staff had to heed the vote and redo the entire ranking and site

selection process. The executive director and his board members then went to the legis-

lature and told them that they either needed to give the administrators at SWDA complete

autonomy to make the decision or alternatively disband SWDA and make the decision

themselves. The county legislators voted to disband SWDA and to take over the process

themselves.

Much like the second part of the incinerator development process, SWDA had againattempted a nonpolitical process that emphasized best practices. This time rather than

simply relying on technical analysis and persuasion, SWDA also incorporated an intensive

effort at public participationin keeping with a broad swath of public administration

literature that recommends participation as a way of ameliorating conflict and improving

government decision making (e.g., Creighton 2005; Herrman 1994; Parr and Lampe 1996;

Rajvanshi 2003). However, again, the fundamental problem was that under pressure, the

elected officials did not back the administrators.

Both the SWDA efforts focused on the application of professionalism to decision

making. The second case also included what seems to have been an honest, if ideal-

istic, effort to engage the community. Ironically, the citizen advisory committee pickedvery professional criteria to guide site selectionthe same criteria might have emerged

from an administrative process. At the same time, the administrators picking the

landfill sites neither managed to anticipate and avoid the points of conflict that

emerged nor did they take any action to educate the elected officials or solicit their

cooperation. Because they wanted a process that removed political considerations,

they marginalized the elected officials or failed to respond to their aggregative con-

cerns. One might argue that the elected officials did not really want responsibility for

a process that they knew was going to be controversial. Yet, the elected officials found

that they were being held responsible politically, whether they were actually involved

or not, and this reasoning ultimately colored the final decision to take over the landfill

development process themselves (SWDA-8 Elected Official 2003; SWDA-18 Agency

Official 2003).




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The Third St. Lawrence SWDA Case: A Political Process

In the third SWDA case, the county legislators abandoned an insulated administratively

driven process and turned over decision making to the head of their planning department,

a veteran of the initial political deal over the incinerator and ash landfill. She revisited the

siting criteria developed by the citizen advisory committee and added some new criteria:

the site selected should include willing sellers of the land and if possible, a large amount of

adjacent public land (Purser 1992). By ensuring willing sellers, she avoided some of the

potential conflicts that might be associated with taking farms for the landfill. The three sites

selected included one in the Adirondack state park, one on the border with another county

and a Mohawk Indian reservation, and the original landfill site from the first siting process.

Eventually the site adjacent to the Mohawk reservation was picked and approved by the

county legislature. This site had the added benefit of support from the leadership of the

town in which it was located, so almost all points of conflict or aggregative concerns were

addressed.6 Again, this process returned to the original tactics used in St. Lawrence

Countys site selection, which was to arbitrage away the points of conflict that might causepressure to be brought to bear on elected officials.

Onondaga County

In Onondaga County, the site selection process for the incinerator appeared highly polit-

ical: the final criteria included willing sellers, industrial property, a willing host commu-

nity, and a relatively low-population area. As such, it looks much like the first and final

SWDA siting processes. However, the landfill site selection process is more interesting and

reflects a third patternnamely educating elected officials. Looking at table 3, one can seethat this process included a significant number of policy criteria and yet was conducted in

a highly political forum.

In contrast to the administratively driven approaches to siting facilities described

earlier, in Onondaga County, administrators and elected officials explicitly adopted a strat-

egy that would force decision making back into the county legislature. Strategically, the

administrators charged with developing the solid waste plan, or the G-Team, decided

that they would make sure the legislators ratified decisions about solid waste at every step

in the process. One administrator on the G-Team noted that the legislature took over

75 votes on solid waste policies during the incinerator and landfill debates (OCRRA-10

Agency Official 2000).As in the second SWDA case, Onondaga County administrators developed the criteria

for the landfill with input from a citizens advisory panel. Then the administrators went

through a screening process to sort the land based on the criteria selected. Key factors

included hydrogeology, avoiding floodplains and wetlands, avoiding parklands, and avoid-

ing airport flight paths because of the birds that might cluster over a landfill (Anonymous

1987). Using these criteria, the administrators began with 145 sites. At about this time, the

G-Team asked for a vote of confidence from the legislators and received it 15-9. The

G-Team then set about narrowing the number of sites to 33 sites based on environmental

criteria. At this point, the county executive insisted that the county pick a site where there

6 The Mohawks did threaten a lawsuit, but they did not affect the political dynamic in the jurisdiction because

they were not constituents in St. Lawrence County.




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were willing sellers of the property, and this became a primary criterion in the effort to

narrow to seven final sites. However, this was the only aggregative criterion that entered

the site selection.

As it became clear that some districts were more likely to be targeted than others, the

legislators began to seek ways to avoid making the selection or avoid the sites that hadcome to the fore. One proposal was to create a committee of five appointees to make the

selection in a nonpolitical waythe legislature narrowly rejected this proposal, 12-12.

The legislators then began to search for alternative sites exploring extensively the possi-

bility that an old quarry adjacent to the incinerator site might be used. This proposal and

variations on it were rejected three times by the state DEC before the legislators gave up.

The G-Team also engaged in some common public involvement strategies. The

administrators drew on three citizen advisory groups, one delegated to study the inciner-

ator, one to study the landfill, and another to study recycling for some public input. These

committees were formed out of the preexisting Environmental Management Council.

Later, a fourth group would be created to study the health impacts of the incinerator.In addition, they conducted at least four public hearings on the landfill and incinerator.

Finally, the G-Team and the legislative leadership made a concerted effort to educate the

elected officials. They scheduled field trips to similar facilities in the region and in partner-

ship with local universities developed education sessions for new legislators to learn about

solid waste policy.

In the end, the legislature selected the site and although there were willing sellers, the

site was neither in a willing host community nor in a low-population border jurisdiction

and was land that was part of an agricultural district. In an agonized debate, the legislators

finally went with the site that the administrators had ranked the highest in terms of hydro-

geology, amount of land available, central location, and cheapness to own and operate. Inthe final debate over the landfill sites, at one point, the chairman of the legislature begged

the administrators to select a site for a landfill and submit it to the legislature rather than

asking the legislature to make the choice. After all, he argued, the county was paying

experts who should know the best site. At this point an attorney with the G-Team

responded Thats part of the problem you have, Bill, is the notion that somehow with

the aid of God, you can pick the site that will be the perfect site and it aint going to happen.

There is no such site. Youve got to make the hard decision. The attorney went on: There

are socio-economic and political factors involved. Thats why we do not leave the business

of war and peace in the hands of generals (Cazentre and Bramstedt 1989).

There was also a debate over recycling, although the legislators did eventually give inon this as well. In 1987, the DEC told Onondaga County to prepare for a 40% recycling

rate; however, in 1988 after an analysis of recycling, Onondaga County administrators

announced an aggressive recycling plan of 30% including a law that would impose fines

on those who did not recycle. The legislators passed the recycling bill by a wide margin but

only included the 30% criteria. Only after the state passed the 40% recycling rate

requirement into law did the county amend their recycling bill to include a 40% recycling

rate.

On importation, the legislature was less equivocal. In 1989, the legislature unani-

mously passed a measure to ban the importation of waste. However, in later years, they

would selectively repeal this ban to help support the incinerator financially. Where SWDA

resisted aggregative demands that were potentially poor policy, the G-Team did have to

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With this mix of policy-based and political decisions but importantly also with leg-

islative buy-in, this process proved remarkably resilient. Two aspects seem to have been

critical: the emergence of legislative leadership and the understanding by rank and file

legislators that the facilities were important. Several examples illustrate these points.

During the debate over the incinerator, a citizens advisory group created to study thehealth impact of the facility made an unexpected announcement. In front of 500 people

gathered at a public hearing, they announced that they were going to recommend the

incinerator be relocated. The County Public Health Commissioner who had chaired this

committee then came out in opposition to the facility. Reviewing the concerns of this

group, the G-Team revised the environmental impact statement causing the risk to cancer

from 24-h exposure to the WTE plant from 4.5 in a million to 9 in a million. Although the

risk remained small, the legislators in the ranks began to waiver even as they had to take

a vote on the environmental impact statement. The Chairman of the Legislature openly

worried that the process might no longer be viable. At this point, the County Executive

Nick Pirro called in his political allies, the trade unions, to lobby in support of the facil-ityostensibly because the facility would bring jobs. The vote carried by 13-10.

At another point, the G-Team and the legislators had to take a series of votes to accept

the private vendor for the contract to build the incinerator, to approve the financing

arrangement for the incinerator through the use of a public authority, to turn the garbage

generated by the county over to the public authority, and to approve $2.6 million in debt for

the solid waste planning process by a two-thirds vote. (They actually planned to create

a public authority like SWDA and OHSWA to finance the facilities; however, unlike these

other counties they did not create the public authority until after the most politically

contentious parts of the process had been completed.)

In June of 1989, Pirro brought the creation of a public authority to finance and managethe WTE to the legislature for a vote. Without a public authority to issue the debt, the

county would not be able to afford the $178 million WTE, and the facility would go down

in defeat. The vote failed by 9-10, not even receiving the 13-vote majority needed to make

the vote valid. However, whereas in St. Lawrence County a failed vote brought down

the entire process, in Onondaga County, the process did not collapse. The leadership in the

legislature kept it moving, and the legislators realized they could not just abandon the

facilities. The next day, the county executive brought the measure up again, and this time it

passed by a bare 13-7 majority. For this vote, a Democrat (the legislature was controlled by

Republicans) switched his vote on the public authority to keep the process moving. I did it

for the greater good even though it conflicted with my parochial interests, the legislatorstated, and this was truethe legislator represented a district adjacent to the incinerator

(Sanders 1989).

In 1989, seven new legislators were elected, and the county executive feared that the

support for the facility would be soft among the new legislators. Expres

bourdeaux politics versus professionalism

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