For far too long, the people of Baltimore City and the neighboring counties have looked to mayors and county executives to set the pace for change.
If relying solely on elected leaders was ever a good idea, it's dangerously wrong today.
Few people believe that Baltimore's Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke will ever lead the city with the aggressiveness that William Donald Schaefer exemplified.
In the counties, hero leadership has faded too. Last fall's elections swept in new executives who ran more as protest candidates than torchbearers of a new vision -- such figures as Charles L. Ecker in Howard County and Roger B. Hayden in Baltimore County. Their energies have been quickly absorbed by the struggle to balance budgets in a difficult recession year.
Will any politician around the Baltimore region soon rise above stamping out brush fires? Is another Mayor Schaefer or Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin about to appear? Are the counties likely to see leaders who match the energy shown by Theodore Venetoulis and Dennis Rasmussen in Baltimore County, Habern
Freeman in Harford, James Lighthizer in Anne Arundel?
Probably not. Not just here, but all across America, there are few communities where people gladly let anyone -- government leaders, political organizations, business heavies -- make decisions for everyone else. We seem to be moving into an era of what some call "the democratization of power."
We're likely to see more partnerships in place of government dictation, consensus-building rather than order-giving, collaborative rather than heavy-handed leadership.
The regions that succeed in the '90s will be those with leaders who have learned to share power and to look for a diversity of talent: women as well as men, minorities as well as whites, county as well as city people.
If Baltimore area residents need any proof that politicians are failing to provide real leadership, they don't have to look far. No challenge facing the Baltimore region today is greater than growth management and protecting Maryland's most splendid asset -- the Chesapeake Bay.
The Maryland General Assembly flinched at the prospect of passing landmark growth management legislation, which resulted from a 1988 report on the bay's declining health and recommendations of a gubernatorial task force. The proposal has been put off for summer study.
Yet polls on growth management have shown Marylanders -- in the city, the counties, across the state -- leagues ahead of the politicians. They want action. And there's nothing especially radical about the proposed law. It simply places mild restraints on sprawling development to save the heavy consumption of "raw" land that magnifies the silt-laden runoff and pollution of the bay.
The state wouldn't dictate precise land use: It would simply require counties and cities to develop their own plans to minimize sprawl, focus development in established towns and cities, and protect the natural environment.
Similar statutes in Oregon, Vermont, Georgia, New Jersey and Florida haven't crippled development or caused anyone inordinate harm. Michael D. Barnes, the former congressman who chaired the bay task force, says moderate growth management could save 400,000 acres from development in Maryland. The state's rural scenery and quality of life would be protected. The program could save local governments millions of dollars they'd have to spend on new roads and sewers for new shopping strips and subdivisions.
As in other states, the proposal is opposed by county officials leery of any curbs on their powers. The parochial politicians are joined by farmers, developers and land speculators who believe controls would impair their potential to sell off their lands for big profits.
Yet if there were ever an issue on which the people of the Baltimore region need to educate themselves and then fight in unison for state action, this is it. Growth management legislation might not produce miracles. But it would contribute to a revived bay, one of Maryland's greatest assets and strongest economic tools.
And if rapid-fire growth were slowed at the urban periphery and encouraged in the center, Baltimore City would be better able to attract new residents -- a win-win scenario for the counties and city alike.
A few years ago, Governor Schaefer's embrace might have been able to force a growth management plan through the legislature. No longer. He doesn't command that kind of power now. The politicians are defaulting. People power is needed to force action.
What's the way to create broad and powerful constituencies for change, alliances that neither government nor entrenched special interests can overlook?
One answer, but just a partial one, is through enlightened business leadership. It can be an immense assist -- in demanding, for example, regional economic planning, in pushing for stem-to-stern school renewal, in supporting community development corporations.
There's a problem: Baltimore's recently lost many top civic-minded business leaders through bank buyouts and corporate restructuring.
Yet the prospect is not altogether dim. Among top business organizations across the United States, the Greater Baltimore Committee is greater than most of its counterparts. The GBC didn't earn its position in the top echelon, along with such groups as Cleveland Tomorrow and Pittsburgh's Allegheny Conference, just by signing up all the big CEOs in town. It did so by some farsighted economic thinking and by undertaking such efforts as the "Commonwealth" plan to improve the city's dysfunctional public schools, working with such unlikely partners BUILD, the grass roots, church-based organization.
That alliance is a signal to how other groups -- neighborhood, civic, city, county, professional -- need to be pulled into the leadership act.
Where will the leadership be found? A first source could be the several hundred graduates of programs sponsored by the GBC and the Howard and Baltimore County Chambers of Commerce. It's a process in which bankers get to learn about welfare, civil rights activists about job creation, journalists about the excruciating process of actually making things happen.
Neighborhoods also need to be in on the new leadership mix -- not just in Baltimore City, where they've received more recognition in the past, but the undeclared but potentially vital neighborhoods of the counties.
And we believe that foundations, which have grown dramatically in Baltimore over the past decade, should be major players too. A great opportunity is lost when foundations just give to "safe" colleges or hospitals or arts groups.
They must also be ready to fund advocacy for the region's most pressing needs -- better schools, children's health and welfare, neighborhood development and protection of the environment.
A good example of how the new system needs to work is the Goldseker Foundation's gift of $250,000 to Baltimore's Citizens Planning and Housing Association so it could create a Neighborhood Resource Center.
The gift was unusual because Baltimore's foundations have offered anemic support for community development. Foundations in such cities as Boston, Cleveland and Chicago have provided many times as much neighborhood support, creating a much stronger network of activist neighborhood organizations than Baltimore enjoys today.
Everyone's grand new hope, of course, is the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation with its astounding $900 million -- overnight the 12th-largest foundation in America. If the Weinberg Foundation trustees target their funds into the city, and if they set up a professional staff that shares a vision of a revived Baltimore, there'd be a stunning opportunity to choke off endemic poverty.
Baltimore and the counties need a forum in which citizens can reach a consensus on public interest -- rather than special interest -- solutions. And the politicians need to get assurance there'll be a constituency supporting them, that they won't be left twisting in the wind when they pick up the citizens' approaches and demonstrate courageous leadership.
A first step, we suggest, would be a one-time Civic Congress, a sort of constitutional convention for the Baltimore region. The delegates would be citizens from each of the five neighboring counties and Baltimore City. A top item ought to be
forming a Baltimore Region Civic League.
Such a civic league, open to all interested citizens, could form task forces which would focus on regional issues the political system handles poorly -- from the environment to education to building regional governmental structures.
Citizen task forces might take on the issue of state and regional parks along the Patapsco and Severn rivers. Or look for ways to make Baltimore's lovely Druid Hill Park a safer place, so that people from across the region will again use the whole park, not just the zoo. Or to consider possible expansions of the light-rail line -- perhaps a spur into Howard County to the Columbia/Ellicott City area or directly to Baltimore-Washington International Airport.
Most important, citizen leadership is needed to prompt the politicians to rethink and redesign the ways government does things.
Even in boom years, demands for services are rising much faster than taxpayers' willingness to pay more. The problem isn't just dividing up the pie differently (the way politicians normally think). It's fundamental redesign so we don't keep packing our jails, warehousing students or building new roads and firehouses to feed our appetite for sprawl development.
Such metropolises as Minneapolis-St. Paul and Cleveland already provide examples of how a regional citizens' organization can produce high-quality proposals on how to make government work. The idea isn't to produce "take it or leave it" policy stands, but rather to engage public officials and the media in ongoing conversation and debate.
Why, if this is such a sensible idea, hasn't it long since been launched? Probably because no group in the region feels it has "permission" to take the lead.
We suggest that the leadership program graduates would constitute an ideal group of conveners for the Civic Congress. In addition, people active in neighborhood organizations, academics, and heads of area foundations and non-profit organizations might participate. Perhaps some of the region's most respected citizens might act as civic midwives, urging the leadership alumni to move ahead.
Names which spring to mind: James Rouse, developer of Columbia and Harborplace; Otis Warren, a businessman; Martha Smith, president of Dundalk Community College; Sally Michel, the region's quintessential volunteer leader; and the venerable Walter Sondheim, GBC board member and a key Baltimore leader for years.
Neither government officials nor business quickly endorse "unprogrammed" convocations of citizens. But the GBC could make a critical difference. By trusting citizen leadership -- even leadership with which it might occasionally differ -- the GBC could register an act of imaginative statesmanship worthy of its own pioneering history.
In the process, it would be demonstrating the visionary leadership Baltimore and the counties today so desperately need.