Doing the Math as a City Council Member
Steven Zittergruen is a city councilor and Strong Towns member from Decorah, Iowa. In this Bottom-Up Short, he joins Norm to discuss the ways he’s making his community stronger. His efforts include revamping Decorah’s budgeting process, helping launch Decorah’s Local Conversation group, and writing about local governance.
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Norm Van Eeden Petersman 0:00
Welcome to bottom up shorts. My name is Norm, and I am excited to be able to share the stories of strong towns members that I connect with, as well as others that come into our orbit and are doing the hard work of building stronger communities where they live, not only for themselves, but also for our future generations, ensuring that our communities become more of the types of places that we want to see, so that we can all flourish and prosper in our places. And so that's really what bottom up shorts is all about. Quick introductions to regular people that are doing exciting things. And today, my guest is Steven zittergun, who is a strong towns member in Decorah, Iowa, and Decorah, has actually made it quite a ways in the strongest town contest. And we had an opportunity to have Steven on to talk not only about his community, but the things that he is doing as a strong towns member and as someone that is able to work as an elected council member, as well as doing many other projects in the community in order to help advance the ideas that are really captured in the strong towns approach. From his work on the city's budget to helping launch the course on strong towns local conversation group, Stephen is right in the mix of local efforts that reflect strong towns principles in action. And so Steven, can you describe the work that you're doing, in particular around financial transparency and openness and efforts that are being made to really help people understand the long term financial impact, impacts of decisions that are being made today. Yeah,
Steven Zittergruen 1:31
well, first, thanks so much for having me on norm. It's I've been a long time fan and supporter of strong towns and and really, really glad for all the ways that strong towns has made my work better and easier through the years. In terms of financial transparency, here in Decorah, there has been some really great work done by our staff and by my fellow colleagues on the council over the past three to four years, in particular towards ensuring better financial transparency, I would say that that happens in two major places. The first is in terms of our actual budget process. Like a lot of North American municipalities, we have a months long budget process that has to tick all these boxes that the state and the federal government require us to tick. And I would say that the easy thing, the default thing to do is simply to make sure you've ticked your boxes, to look at last year's budget, to tweak the numbers, to reflect where maybe you need to spend a little more, a little less, to pass it and to go about with your lives. Well, that wasn't good enough for Decorah, we were not satisfied with that. We didn't think it was giving our decision makers the information they needed to make the best decisions possible. It didn't give our staff the ability to give feedback in a way that would help strengthen their individual programs or their areas of responsibility. And kind of most importantly, if I were to ask a random neighbor walking down the street in Decorah, say, How much money do you think we spend a year out of your city taxes, or where do you think that your property tax payments go? Most of them wouldn't know where to begin. I know that for many people, not thinking about their city government is a feature, not a bug. But as expensive as is to run a city government, as as much money as it costs to provide the goods and services people rely on. It's it's important that if people are interested, they be able to come up with with easy answers to their questions. How much does it cost me per day to have a great Police Department? How much does it cost me per day to have a toilet that flushes? How much does it cost me per day to have clean water coming out of my tap? When you can drill down to that those granular numbers and give people really clear information, showing them what they're getting for their money, I found that people complain a lot less at tax time, and they understand a lot more that that we're working hard to steward their money as well as possible. I said there were two things that we work towards in terms of fiscal transparency. The first one is that budget process. So we went from this opaque process with a lot of insiders speak and and and a lot of meetings that went on for hours and hours where we really just made some tweaks to the budget to something that our our community and our media can follow along and really understand the conversations we've done that through, through a shared electronic budget book that's available to the community with an index where you can you know, instead of having to flip to four different pages to figure out where all the money that goes into and out of the library comes from, it's all in one place. And oftentimes is not. We try to make sure there's there's graphs and bar charts, because a lot of people need that visual information to really understand, to understand what's going on with with their budget. The second area of focus, or the major thing that that I'm proud of the work I've done in particular, but it's been, it's been a joint effort. It's been a shared load is is to embrace strong towns, core campaign of doing the math as. A city, I wouldn't say we're perfect at doing the math. I'm sure that there aren't many cities that are perfect at doing the math. But regularly in council meetings, in Planning and Zoning Commission meetings at the staff level, when there are conversations happening there with our economic development partners, with our county economic development partners, people are sitting down and saying, not just, Hey, how do we get this company to move to town? Hey, how do we get a road built? But actually, is this a smart investment, or is there a better place to use this money somewhere else? Or is this road necessary to accomplish our goals? Or can we, can we accomplish the same goals, using infrastructure that we're already on the hook to pay for and maintain that that culture, and I'm going to call it a culture, because it's not about going into a meeting and just yelling until people do the math in real you know, in regard to particular project, it's about building a culture where we all embrace The notion that if you make good, well founded decisions now, if you do the math now, then down the road, you're not going to have to have a really hard conversations that cities hate to have, who to fire, what programs to close, what road you can't afford to repair, and so I'm proud of the work we're doing with fiscal transparency and decor, and I'm really proud I've been a Part of it, yeah, and you're
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 6:21
able to also articulate what the real trade offs are, but also to identify in advance, like if we continue down this path, these are the types of trade offs that we're going to have to become accustomed to, versus the types of things that we can actually do right now to mitigate the consequences of past decision making as well as address what is going forward. And I know Stephen was one of the guests at the strong towns budget summit that took place to help strong towns team members as well Chuck Marone and Edward Erfurt, as well as a broader community of people to really grapple with these questions and ask the question, how do we educate ourselves as well as a broader audience in how to do this well? And I think maybe this is a question, because you're serving on council, you're interested in getting a local conversation going, and you're working with other people in your community. But how did you become the person that does this? Well,
Steven Zittergruen 7:10
I was elected to council in 2020 and and I've always been a bit of a, I guess, a budget nerd in my own household finances. We don't spend a penny that I don't track. I can give you, you know, bar charts going back 15 years, showing our debt level being paid down and our savings changing and, and, and, you know, we regularly have conversations like, are we getting value out of our restaurant budget line item each month? Or, you know, like, should we get should we figure out a way to get more value out of each dollar? You know, chuck, chuck often talks about the need for cities to realize that, given their lack of a printing press, they actually have to, but they have to have a budget that balances, in the end, that a city budget is a lot more like a household budget than it is a federal budget, and so there was a natural fit for me, I would say, coming in as someone who just really likes to dig into the details and and get into the numbers, I also find that in terms of achieving the aims that I bring to my work on the city council, as an elected official, it puts me in A good position, often to be able to to know the data, to know the information about where our city's spending comes from and is going to I'll give you an example. You know, I can add up in my head the the many millions of dollars that decor, which is a town of about 7500 spends on on roads each year, on building and maintaining our street system. I can also tell you that we spend about $28,000 on pedestrian infrastructure per year. That's a mismatch, because decor has the highest non car mode share for commuters in the state of Iowa. It's about 10% and so I can ask questions like, why are we spending, point 2% of our transportation budget on the form that 10% of people are choosing to use when that's the form that would save us a lot more money if more people chose to use it. I that's just an example of of why it is that I think this is important for for leaders to be conversant. And I actually think that being conversant in your city's budget and financial process is a minimum barrier to entry to be an adequate elected official. And I think that that's something that that a lot of elected officials, they're not told. They sort of think that the budget is something that staff handle or that takes care of itself. But in the end, the people that I serve Don't get angry at our city treasurer or our city administrator or our department chairs. If we go broke, they call me i. And so if the Bucks gonna stop here, I better, I better know where the bucks are going.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 10:05
And as part of your quest to know these things, but also to share your the things that you're learning, and to be able to provide more of a narrative to help folks understand, you know, the 10% of our of our roadway users are not being well served by the 2.2% of the spending that we're devoting to their needs in that sort of a context, you've actually taken a step to start a sub stack. Can you describe that and sort of what the vision for that is, and because I love that as one of the expressions of taking notice of the needs in your community and then actually beginning to address that in part through the sharing of knowledge and insight into what's going on.
Steven Zittergruen 10:39
I'm sure that, you know, everyone's really excited to hear that yet another Middle Aged urbanist has started a sub stack. You know, I cut I'm writing this for my community, and I suspect that some people might like to listen in on the conversation so listeners can can find my sub stack at dear Decorah. Dot sub stack.com. Strong towns fans will notice that I very shamelessly, with permission, I should say, stole that from, from dear Winnipeg, a beloved blog of the strong towns community. This is not a official strong towns sub stack. It's certainly going to have a lot of strong towns themes. But this is, this is my effort to to communicate, to to my community and to others who might be interested in in thinking with me and alongside of me about the issues that that that I get to wrestle with as an elected official, the trade offs that I have to balance, the decisions that that come before us. So there's going to be some local interest stuff. But honestly, there's a lot of cases where what I write, you could probably copy and paste for Decorah and insert your town's name, and it'll be just as applicable. And let me say, if you're someone who who wants to communicate with your community, send me an email, and I will happily give you permission to steal my ideas. I think that the more of us working together to generate content that pushes back against the broken status quo, the better. So, yeah, it's a dear decorah.substack.com, I'm awfully glad, as you mentioned earlier, norm a few weeks back, decor got pretty far in the strongest towns contest and and we were, we were proud to make it as far as we did. I've always been someone who said, someday I'd like to start a sub stack. Someday I'd like to start writing regularly, putting myself out there for my community to express why it is that I'm making the decisions I make. I'm awfully glad that the strongest towns contest came along and gave me the impetus and incentive to get going on this, because it's time. It's been a lot of fun writing so far, and I look forward to continuing that work. I
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 12:48
love it, and certainly that vision too. Of you know, like dear win peg, these are love letters to your city, addressing them and giving the opportunity to observe and then to give further insight into you know what it is that's happening. And I think, as you look at what's happening in Decorah, what is it that gives you hope?
Steven Zittergruen 13:08
Oh, that's that's such a great question. I have lots of answers to that. The first, well, let me think the first answer that's right out my window. I'm looking at it right now. I live across the street from from Luther College, which is a terrific liberal arts college located here and in this beautiful part of the world. And that college has recently taken lots of steps to embrace how connected it is and has to be to the community it's planted in, which is just to say that it is a truth that is mutually recognized, that we need Luther College and Luther College needs to Cora those strength and connections are good for a lot of reasons. It's a cultural watershed for us. It's a driver of jobs. It's a wonderful driver of what it means to be a vibrant community, to have this college located in our town. But Luther College, of late has started expressing a great deal of interest, not just in the sort of metaphorical connections between campus and town, but the physical connections, many of which run right through the part of the city that I represent here on the northwest side of town, and I'm excited about having Luther alongside me and many other advocates for for decor to become a stronger town. They're advocating with us for better bike connectivity, for investing more money into into multi modal infrastructure, into thinking more carefully about development patterns that that don't just enrich us economically, but enrich us culturally as well. And so I'm excited to have that partnership. I'm excited when things that I used to read on a blog, and then I started saying in meetings, I'm now hearing them said by other people. As if, you know, sometimes they thought of it themselves. That's that's just fine, right? We don't we're not in the credit taking business. We're in the leading business. I'm excited when I see good news spreading, when I see good thinking being contagious, and I see that all the times. Like, if you wanted me to point out discreet examples here in Decorah, I can talk about the cost saving departmental reorganizations we just accomplished that that aren't going to cost the city anything in terms of lost services, that are going to put us in a much better position down the road for being financially solvent. I can talk about how when I go and sit down at a development committee meeting with our economic development partner, which is an organization called Decorah jobs. It's not just me saying, hey, we need to make sure that this incentive package pays for itself in the long run. We can't just, you know, do whatever it takes to get a new factory to come to town and not worry about paying for it until down the road. We actually have to make sure this is a good investment. I'm excited to see that that that's catching on. I'm excited to see more and more of what's I know. Some people call this the sort of the there's this indicator species, an indicator species, which is the person walking downtown. You see that more and more in this community, which has always been a place a lot of people love to walk around and bike around, we have, you know, great trails and an amazing downtown and and our geography has done a wonderful job of kind of keeping us tidy and together a nice, close knit community fabric. And so we have a lot of that naturally. But I feel like now we're getting into the early stages of the virtuous cycle where, where people walking and biking downtown, where people, you know, shopping at their local store instead of, you know, jumping online or driving to the, you know, the big box that leads to more and more of that same behavior. And I think you and I both know and sort of most of the listeners here that that those things catch on and they only grow.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 17:10
That really does catch on. And I love the description too, of really the heart of a strong towns advocate is not credit taking, but leading and leading through persuasion, as well as even looking for other people to come alongside and participate in that project. So thank you so much Steven for joining us on bottom up shorts and everybody that's listening. If you haven't yet discovered the lights of Decorah, Iowa, definitely go check it out and check out Stevens blog, dear decor at sub stock, and perhaps it'll find its way onto the strong towns main Articles page in due time as well, given that Stephen is continuing to influence his community and build capacity in more and more places with that. Thank you so much for listening to the bottom up shorts. Take care and take care of your places.
ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES
Dear Decorah (Substack)
Decorah made it to the Elite Eight in this year’s Strongest Town Contest. There are many great lessons that cities of all sizes can learn from their hard work. Click here to read more about their progress.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman (LinkedIn)
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