Transparent Local Language: Why City Officials Need To Ditch the Jargon

I remember the first time I heard the word “rationalize” in the context of municipal infrastructure. I was reading the Winnipeg Recreation Strategy, a framework that lays out a 25-year plan for pools, arenas, community centers, etc. within my city. As I was scanning the document, I kept coming across this word. It popped up throughout the document in such mouthfuls as "rationalization prioritization factors," "candidates for rationalization," and "investment and rationalization decisions."

I knew the word rationalize as a synonym for "explain," "justify" or "make a case for." But that meaning didn’t make sense here. Well, it turns out that, in the context of infrastructure, rationalize kind of means the opposite. It means "shut down." "Take out of operation." "Close the doors on."

One of Strong Towns’ goals is to increase transparency in the ways that towns and cities share information about the state of their finances. Most municipal governments do a truly terrible job of communicating this information in a way that is clear and understandable to a lay audience.

This isn’t necessarily deliberate; it’s just the way things have always been done. And elected officials and staffers themselves often don’t truly grasp what the numbers they’re looking at actually mean. Whatever the reason, the result is that everyday folks have no idea whether their town or city is in good financial shape.

Even though a key focus of the Transparent Local Accounting core campaign is to make finance more accessible to a nonprofessional audience, I often think that the mere mention of finance and budgets causes people to lose interest and disengage. I mean, I’m really interested in all this stuff, but my eyes will start to glaze over after a few mentions of capital assets, short-term liabilities and own-source revenues.

And that’s a challenge because, at the end of the day, a municipality has to be able to provide many critical, life-sustaining services to its citizens — which it can’t do if its finances are in peril. And if folks don’t understand the scope of this financial crisis, they won’t understand what’s at stake.

In addition to Transparent Local Accounting, we need much more transparency in general. A big part of that is in the language we use within our plans, policies and communications. Transparent Local Language, if you will.

Here are a few examples of very commonly used terms that downplay, minimize or obscure the severity of a situation. Think of these as a few entries you’ll find in a dictionary of a place in decline:

Rationalize

As discussed above, most everyday people in North America know the word rationalize to mean "justify," not "get rid of."

This term might be okay for a technical audience that’s well-versed in business jargon. But for the general public, we need to stop using opaque terms like rationalize and start using unambiguous ones that leave no question about what’s being proposed.

If rationalize is going to mean "shut down," "permanently close" or "demolish," say so.

Vacancy Management

"Vacancy management" is a piece of jargon from the business and HR world that doesn’t really have a strict or universally agreed-upon meaning. But in practice, vacancy management is about being strategic with staffing to create cost savings in the budget. For instance, holding off on filling a vacancy for a little longer than necessary or divvying up the tasks of a retiring employee as overtime work for the remaining staff.

Journalist Dan Lett put it perfectly: “It’s what allows government to operate on a day-to-day basis with far fewer actual employees than they claim to employ. This is not only financially important. It has political benefits as well, allowing a government to claim it is avoiding layoffs and austerity, even when that is exactly what it is doing. … The city obviously saves way more money from vacancy management than it pays out in overtime. However, that only makes sense if the quantity and quality of civic service are being maintained. And it’s pretty obvious they aren’t.”

Any way you slice it, an organization that is in good financial shape doesn’t have to depend on the lucky timing of employee retirements or the creative redistribution of tasks. Vacancy management is a glossy term for a practice that can have harmful impacts on municipal services, and citizens deserve to understand what is really happening with staffing and budgets.

Deferred Maintenance

“Deferred” is such a soft term. Deferred maintenance sounds like something you could just catch up on next year. But that’s the problem — maintenance isn’t often deferred for just a year or two.

When municipalities don’t account for the true cost of maintaining and eventually replacing infrastructure, maintenance is the first thing to go. We often “defer” maintenance so long that, eventually, we’re well past the point of being able to repair. Then, the narrative shifts to the idea that it makes more sense to decommission than to do a major rehabilitation or rebuild.

Let’s call a spade a spade: "deferring maintenance" is actually "neglecting our assets."

Consolidation

Whether we’re talking about consolidating municipalities, schools or community centers, "consolidation" carries a connotation of simply bringing services and facilities together to a single, more convenient location or more efficient system. But consolidation never quite works out as well as we’re promised, does it?

At best, consolidation can be seen as a way of reducing duplication of services, maybe making better use of staff and space. The real result of consolidation is usually less service and access overall, and it rarely works out in favor of the neighborhoods that need the amenities the most.

Here’s an example. In the St. Boniface area of Winnipeg, over the past few years, three outdoor pools have been permanently shut down or slated to shut down, mostly justified by too-big repair bills due to — you guessed it — deferred maintenance. Distraught residents were told that the loss would be short-lived because the city would build one big, better, new pool facility.  Small pain for bigger gain: shiny new recreation facilities for everyone!

But this new aquatic park will now serve a much larger radius of people, whereas the old sites were scattered throughout the neighborhood and walkable for large numbers of residents. And since more people will have to travel further distances to the new aquatic park, more space will be devoted to parking.

As Chuck put it, “Consolidation is a response to the notion that our problem is essentially one of efficiency.” In this example, the thinking is that one big, modern facility is somehow equal to and maybe even better than the sum of its previous smaller parts. But when you factor in the time and tax costs to users, increased staffing requirements, and transportation and land use implications, it’s clear that one big regional facility is not necessarily equal to many smaller, neighborhood-based ones.

Keep It Plain and Simple!

Whether they’re used intentionally to soften news or lazily as jargon, the effect of terms like rationalize, vacancy management, deferred maintenance and consolidation is the same: They prevent the public, local media and even council members from fully understanding the gravity of the financial situation their town or city is in.

We need to get away from this type of minimizing language in order to build stronger towns.

There is a movement towards plain language within government communications, and these are just a few illustrations of why that can’t happen quickly enough.

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