Building 10x more state capacity to address megafires and climate-proof California
With increasingly intense megafires, Michael Wara, a Stanford based fire and climate expert, has presciently called for a new state agency focused on proactive action to mitigate catastrophic fires before they happen since 2020. That's an excellent idea and I'd note we don't need a new competing center complete with competing turf battles and increased coordination headwinds. Nor do we need a specialized hyper-focused plan producing shop that results in reports that sit on shelves.
What we do need is an integrated, wholistic approach that’s additive, augments and accelerates the transformation of the existing distributed authorities across local land use agencies, emergency response and auxiliary support like water and power utilities. For example, megafire preparation intersects with distributed energy generation which enables more water system resiliency to avoid impacts to pumps that can result in hydrants being out of service.
Additional smart and sustainable city transformations like AVs can also enable fire resilience as we saw the catastrophic consequences of abandoned vehicles Tuesday. There's an urgent need for an adaptive, integrated and digitally native initiative to accelerate climate action -- on both the adaptation and mitigation side of the equation. What's needed is a quasi-governmental agency with the legal flexibility to execute impactful public private partnerships, hire and fire top talent and safeguard CA's future.
Cal Tech's relationship to NASA provides an analogue for what's needed. That model uses Cal Tech talent, free from federal bureaucratic staffing overhead, and then NASA facilities. Below is an essay I authored in 2013 thinking deeply about how to build such a quasigovernmental agency. More to come.
The Need for An A.R.G.O.
“The structure of state and local government in CALIFORNIA ONE remains essentially as in the early 1970s. The pattern of jurisdictional overlap, of agencies working at cross-purposes without any explicit system of priorities, continues in spite of the efforts of succeeding governors to group related functions into major agencies. Government grows enormously as new bureaucracies are added by the legislature in response to emerging problems.
Single-purpose action agencies and the special-interest groups who do business with them dominate the planning, budgeting, and programming of the state government.”
--The California Tomorrow Plan, edited by Alfred Heller, Los Altos 1972
California Tomorrow, a plucky band of public spirited citizens, wrote those words as a warning and to highlight the need for a government built to tackle the challenges we faced as Californians. Their organization disbanded two years ago due to lack of funds.
Yet the dream of a “just and inclusive” California has not died. And the need for a government that reflects the realities of our world to help build that society is greater than ever.
Since those words were written, computers have become ubiquitous. The internet was invented. Such technological advance has profound consequences for government, as I highlighted in my (ahem) book A New California Dream:
“The world has changed far faster than government’s ability to keep pace, creating a huge space for good government reforms to better society. In William Mulholland’s era, Los Angeles could get its water through the work of a single agency acting essentially in isolation. Today, however, not only do you need coordination between multiple agencies at multiple levels of government that simply deal with water, but our world is fundamentally more connected, with profound institutional consequences.
Operating that water infrastructure is predicated on a vast array of telecommunications and electrical systems, involving several more sets of public and private actors. Even NASA and the military are involved. Refurbished predator drones are flown over the Bay Delta to gather environmental quality data. Today a dazzling array of interlocking parts work together to ensure Californians have a clean, secure, and sustainable supply of water.
The fundamental challenge California faces – getting water from where it falls to where it’s needed – hasn’t changed. But rather than having a set of institutions designed to solve that problem, we’ve settled for a byzantine structure that only exists because that’s the way things have always been. So why not unleash the famed creativity of the California people to systematically rethink how government can address the fundamental challenges – schools, prisons, water, public safety, etc. – we face as a people?” [p. 195]
So how might we achieve that? Let’s lay out a few first principles.
First, foundings matter.
Moments of stress highlight the underlying architectural shortcomings of a given system. We are at a less fiscally urgent moment than we were in 2009, yet the deep structural roots of our problems persist and are ultimately no less exigent. What’s a deep reason why?
Note that California never had a true founding, only patchwork pieces of constitutional moments.
1849 involved a constitutional convention run by drunks and miners more interested in making their pile.
1879 saw a constitutional convention run by rampant racism and clogged our state’s fundamental document with minute statutes.
1911 created the initiative, referendum and recall, which have since become the tools of the sort of moneyed interests they were intended to counter.
1966 saw the culmination of a sort of spring cleaning effort to remove the constitution of the sort statute-esque language created by direct democracy.
More broadly, since 1879, our constitution has seen over 500 amendments. Yet we’ve never sat down and figured out at an integrated, systemic level what should constitute California’s government. The standard mechanism to tackle those questions at an integrated, holistic level is through a constitutional convention.
And getting the cultural questions right and spending sustained time reflecting about what principles to embed in a project is a worthwhile exercise here.
Just ask any entrepreneur.
Second, pioneering the new matters.
The UC system, the state water project, the state highway system – these pivotal public works transformed modern California into the global commonwealth it is today and notably each was pioneering in its own way.
What might be the equivalent today? Organizations like Code for America, a peace corps of sorts for geeks serving cities, have uncovered a frontier of possibility by applying top quality technologists to city’s information management problems. An app to allow Boston’s citizens to take responsibility for shoveling out snow covered fire hydrants may be small in the cost of the City’s broader multi-billion dollar infrastructure system. Yet creating pathways to scale citizen engagement in concert with deeper infrastructure, albeit currently small and budding, highlights nontrivial untapped potential for building more Metis-friendly institutions.
The urgent task then becomes exploring that potential through questions like:
How might we build radically more connections between schools and the community? How might we rethink the basic structures that define public school today -- grades, bells, standards, assessments -- to lay a more human centered foundation for inquiry? How might we catalyze the development of new models in government more broadly? How might we develop platforms to generate and organize the volume of analysis necessary to align California’s 7,000 tangled local jurisdictions to realities of the world we live in? How might we inculcate a logic of creative destruction so that such realignment happens organically?
A research and development action lab learning from the lessons of California Tomorrow would be ideally situated to tackle such questions.
If we’re going to go through the bother of having a founding moment, we might as well get it right. The past two decades have seen the same set of reform ideas recycled over and over again. Term limit tweaks, budget cycle adjustments, new accountability processes, and other best practices cribbed from places like Texas, Utah or Massachusetts -- such is the standard argot of reform.
Why though would we want to go through the huge mess and tangle upgrading an entire operating system just to go from MS DOS to Windows 95? Why not start playing around with Chrome or Ubuntu?
Third, dreams matter.
Proverbs 29:18 “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” And note California’s imaginative capital is perhaps our state’s most valuable asset. It’s the fuel behind Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
People didn’t pour into California during the Gold Rush – or the 90’s dotcom boom for that matter – because they did a deliberative cost-benefit analysis of the pros and cons. The possibility of the better life – vague, undefined, unclear – proved more powerful than everything they knew.
In a somewhat self-reinforcing way, the greatest threat to California’s dream of a better life – the byzantine bureaucratic structure that precludes us from effectively tackling the challenges we face – also generates California’s greatest opportunity to pioneer a new California dream.
California has the greatest agglomeration of technological talent in human history in Silicon Valley and some of the thorniest bureaucratic problems in the world plague our government. It would be hard to exaggerate the potential that disconnect creates. Code for America speaks of civic technology as a hundred and forty billion dollar space. That’s number, which is just adding up the state, federal and local IT budgets, radically undersells this potential. Revolutionizing the challenges of the bureaucracy has the potential to transform what constitutes a school and how we deliver other basic public services like water, roads, and electricity.
Consider how remarkably little we know about what's the root cause of our public problems and whether our ostensible solutions are actually working. Why is educational opportunity in Los Angeles a function of zip code? What's causing that disparity? What "solutions" actually help the situation? Which solutions scale and how might we tailor that to a specific situation? Which have unintended side effects? What else might we consider as potentially new approaches?
Too often our engagement with such questions gets buried in mammoth hundred page reports and trapped in arcane institutions like LA “Mumified” aka the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The need for radically more experimentation in government operations
Today the world is awash in data and information and sadly the conversation about data in schools gets reduced to essentially testing. Why not focus much more on how many quality community partnerships are at a school? Or why not count the number of independent projects students take on? Or why not track how many students have a glazed zombie look on their face during class? Such metrics would provide a much more accurate picture -- if not as precise -- than fancy bureaucratic reports.
Looking at government more broadly, why not create much more accessible financial data so that programs can be tracked and monitored in shorter feedback loops? And with such little speedometers firmly in place, why not create a culture of experimentation to pioneer new models of public service delivery. Human society is constantly in flux; so should government.
Yet government currently isn’t designed for such experimentation. Public institutions by and large operate on a longer time scale than technology. They’re designed to deliberate, reflect and let innovations percolate in only after considered judgement. And for good reason. Roads demand higher robustness than reddit. A crash there costs lives, rather than lolcatz.
So perhaps we might borrow a metaphor from software development. In situations where there is a deeply ingrained legacy system that needs a substantial upgrade, a testing environment is setup to develop the new architecture. Call it a Sandbox (from Wikipedia):
“A sandbox is a testing environment that isolates untested code changes and outright experimentation from the production environment or repository... Sandboxing protects "live" servers and their data, vetted source code distributions, and other collections of code, data and/or content, proprietary or public, from changes that could be damaging (regardless of the intent of the author of those changes) to a mission-critical system or which could simply be difficult to revert. Sandboxes replicate at least the minimal functionality needed to accurately test the programs or other code under development...”
That’s the role the Advanced Research into Governmental Operations, or ARGO, intends to fill. Crazy? Perhaps. Yet is it not crazier to suppose that we can continue to ignore California’s fractured jurisdictions for another 40 years and hope to tackle the challenges we face?
How new data infrastructure can routinize such experimentation
It is impossible not to be humbled by the number of talented individuals who have worked on this problem during this time. This challenge is not new, nor will a bunch of words magic it away. Yet neither will it solve itself.
We could start recognize that the challenge is to get from 0 to 1 and not pretend that copying is the answer. Neither Britain nor New York nor Texas nor Singapore or anywhere else has truly figured out what digitally rather than industrially native government operations looks like. The focus should be on building a team that works, rather than gathering big names for a blue ribbon panel. Henry Ford did not pioneer the automobile by organizing a committee composed of the leaders of the horse and buggy whip industry.
So we pioneer a new kind of institution. One with the authority and resources to develop and manage the data infrastructure necessary to measure and learn from the new pioneering spirit in government and operational experimentation. This new institution would be structured similar to a standard public utility, except rather than water or energy or gas, the ARGO would run the infrastructure necessary to deliver the measurements municipal managers need to effectively experiment.
The goal of all that is simple: transform government operations to enable the more efficient, effective and imaginative delivery of basic public services like water or schools or roads. That’s both necessary and the fundamental promise of technology. The ability to do more with less.
Many say it will take a proverbial earthquake to create the political will necessary for this change. That has already happened.
California’s opportunity deficit demands that we act. The wall of debt we have saddled the next generation with demands that we act. The students that don’t fit into the standard moulds of our factory-like schools demand that we act. California’s tangled thicket of overlapping jurisdictions, agencies and arcane bureaucracy demands that we act. The challenges climate change poses to California’s water -- the most basic building block of urban life since the dawn of civilization -- demands that we act.
Learning from the past to pioneer a better future for California
Many say that mountain is insurmountable. Yet to quote John F. Kennedy, “Our problems are man-made. Therefore they can be solved by man.”
Fundamentally we have a choice. We can choose to ignore California’s fractured governmental structure for another forty years, letting bureaucratic inertia continue to crush California’s dream of a better life. Or we can choose to pioneer a new government that actually reflects the world we live in.
Just like the Argonauts seeking gold in California over a century and a half ago, that path is far from certain. Difficulty is the only guarantee. And the fact of the matter is that California will not slide into the Pacific if we continue with the status quo. We will just be leaving substantial ability to tackle California’s opportunity deficit off the table.
Put in game theory terms, we face a Stag Hunt. We can choose the proverbial rabbit and look out for ourselves and our own. Or we can choose the Stag, putting our trust in our fellow Californians in order to build something larger than ourselves.
Stag
Rabbit
Stag
10, 10
1, 0
Rabbit
0, 1
1, 1
I believe the people of California have that in them. Our history is full of pioneers who worked together to build something better for the next generation. Why not honor that tradition?
