Success Stories: Government Workers

While Congress was busy last week cutting down government, a small ceremony honored those who are trying - under difficult circumstances - to improve it.

The Ford Foundation awards for Innovations in American Government have been given annually since 1986 - but never before in an atmosphere in which they were more gratefully received or urgently needed.

The juxtaposition of events was on everyone’s mind. On Capitol Hill, the House was about to pass a budget reconciliation bill abolishing the Department of Commerce and reducing or eliminating scores of other programs. Meanwhile, in a crowded hotel ballroom not far away were a couple hundred people who had shown - and desperately wanted the nation to know - that government can indeed work.

“We salute you,” said Ford Foundation President Franklin A. Thomas, “for your examples of excellence in a time of great public cynicism.”

The Clinton administration did its best to show that the achievements were being noticed. Vice President Al Gore showed up at the midday awards announcement and later was host of a black-tie dinner for the winners. The next day, he took all of them to the White House for a brief visit with the president.

This year, for the first time, the Ford Foundation and Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, which supervises the selection process, included federal agencies as well as state and local governments in the competition. Almost 1,500 programs vied for one of the 15 awards, and each of the winners has what honestly can be called an inspiring story to tell.

Hillsborough County, Fla., for example, decided not to wait for health care reform to emerge from the Washington political jungle. Faced with the threatened shutdown of its public hospital and runaway costs of caring for its uninsured population, the county got permission from the Florida Legislature for a half-cent sales tax to pay for a program of managed health care and social services for 24,000 uninsured residents. It has cut emergency room use and reduced hospital stays.

What Hillsborough County has done in health, Boulder County, Colo., has done with teen pregnancy - teaching expectant and recent young mothers the importance of prenatal and infant care and encouraging them to complete their education. A distinctive feature of the Genesis program is its use of “resource parents” - women who themselves were teen parents - as mentors. Their counsel has reduced drastically the number of teens having a second child within two years of the first.

Shreveport, La., is the site of the Hamilton Terrace Learning Center, a second-chance high school that takes on two high-risk groups - welfare mothers and chronic truants and troublemakers in local schools - and mixes them with adult students seeking to make up for past educational deficiencies. Somehow, it achieves remarkable results.

John Baldwin, the bearded, soft-spoken young man who has been its only principal, was an object of awe, even to other award winners, when he told of sending 70 percent of his graduates on to college and another 20 percent into jobs.

A Massachusetts official told of using the state’s housing bond authority to induce private developers of assisted-living facilities to set aside one-fifth of the units for indigent elderly, thus sparing healthy but feeble senior citizens from the indignities of nursing homes and saving taxpayers the cost of nursing-home care.

Mayors of Indianapolis and Louisville, Ky., spoke of developing partnerships with city employees that reduced costs and improved the quality of city services.

But the most remarkable story - considering the abuse the agency takes and the budget cuts it faces - was told by the Maine office of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Faced with a growing backlog of uninspected workplaces, the agency offered employers in the 200 firms with the largest number of injury claims the option of setting up a voluntary inspection program with their own managers and workers and correcting their own problems.

In the first two years, the program identified almost five times as many hazards as OSHA had found in all its inspections in the previous eight years - and corrected two-thirds of them. Injuries, illnesses and lost work time all are down, said William Freeman III, OSHA’s Maine director, “because we decided to trust people to act in their own interests.”

Government trusting people and people learning to trust government. What a novel idea these Innovations awards are trying to spread.