Entrada, Paso y Salida de las Estaciones de Paso Intermedias

STRESSFUL, T I M E - C O N S U M I N G , L A B O R I O U S WORK. A s W e S a w i n

chapter 4, designing and running an effective ICC is not easy. The sys- tem has many moving parts, and they are hard to align and to keep aligned. George Bernard Shaw is said to have remarked that the trouble with socialism was that it required too many Wednesday nights, and the same is true of ICC development. It is a process laden with meet- ings, negotiations, memorandums, reports, diplomacy, and ever more meetings, not just across the partner agencies and the various profes- sions associated with them but across hierarchical levels within any single agency. Furthermore, because community members are often involved, some of the meetings take place in the evenings ana on week- ends. In communities such as Oakland, where "collaboratives are all the rage," said one staff person for a youth agency, "it is terribly difficult getting the agencies to collaborate, and then you've got to go another level and get the collaboratives to collaborate. There are a dozen people in the city who do nothing but go to meetings."

FEAR OF FUTILITY. Like any innovation, interagency collaboration runs the risk of failure, embarrassment, criticism, and perhaps damage to one's career. "Failure" has a particular meaning in the case of ICC— namely, that many people, including oneself, put in a lot of time and effort, create expectations of change for themselves and for outsiders, and then have the whole venture stall, decline, and disintegrate. Why take the risk—nay, for many veteran bureaucrats who have seen enthu- siasms wax and wane, why accept the virtual certainty—of experienc- ing such futility?

One problem with such an outlook is that once it becomes pervasive it is also a self-fulfilling prophecy. As with many collective action prob- lems, if the parties convince themselves that the prospects of joint action are poor, the prospects become poor. I will discuss this dynamic in more detail, and some smart practices to deal with it, in chapter 8.

Bureaucratic Purposes

ICC development raises the unpleasant prospect of competition for an agency's resources of budget, turf, and autonomy, both from the partner agencies and from the emerging ICC itself. It also makes man- agers worry about becoming entangled with partner agencies whose

incompetence or indifference might cause criticism and blame to fall on themselves.

MONEY. The contributions of public agencies to collaborative ven-

tures take the form of persohnel (dispatched to work in interagency teams, usually), facilities, information, or equipment but almost never money, which could in some subsequent budgetary cycle become per- manently dislodged from the budget of the contributing agency. This is largely because such resources are so constrained to begin with. Council on Children and Families staff working on The Door master contract said, "The agency people view it as 'our money' and 'What do we give up?' and 'What do we get?'" Legislative and finance department over- seers do not approve of agencies having access to flexible funds, how- ever desirable that might sometimes be from the point of view of improving agency effectiveness and efficiency.

Even when such funds are available, agencies do not like to give their ICC partners any more claims over them than they absolutely must. This implies not just withholding the money, which is easy enough, but also withholding information about the existence of potentially useable funds or about the degree of flexibility with which they might be used for ICC-related purposes. Many an informant has told me, in effect, "Relations were good until it came to money." As one participant in Coordinated Youth Services Council case reviews said, "You ought to see what happens when we begin to discuss who will pick up the costs for a client. Everybody's antennae shake." At the council level, one informant said, "What we have now [mid-1997] are people very reluc- tant to push. We have public sector very reluctant to tell the agencies what they really think about them as partners in the planning. We have private agencies afraid to push the public sector: 'Come on. You're not dealing with this. You're not playing with us.'"

A particularly dramatic case of budgetary sensitivity is evident in the East Bay vegetation management plan. The two-volume plan covers almost everything from the physics of ignition and flame spread to the desired treatment of each five-acre polygon in the East Bay hills. Even the tasks to be performed by each agency or jurisdiction are delineated in some detail. What is missing is how much money they would each have to budget to get the job done.

T U R F . Turf is probably the most fundamental of all elements of bureaucratic infrastructure. It is even more important than budget

because turf can be used to justify budgetary claims, whereas budgets cannot be used to justify turf claims. Its boundaries are guarded with proportionate zeal. It is a reasonable hypothesis that the more agencies find themselves competing for the same resource niche, be it funding or problem domain or clientele group, the more they will distrust each others' motivations, fear each others' enhanced visibility, hide infor- mation about their own resource caches, and thus experience more dif- ficulty in collaborating. Some of the most notorious examples of non- collaborative, even life-threatening, conduct come from the military services." Conversely, one is not surprised to find that a Minnesota recycling program that had county mental health clients employed sorting batteries for a local environmental agency was not very hard to set up.12 The environmental agency simply responded to one of the routine advertisements placed by mental health in the county newslet- ter about their clients' availability for employment. There was hardly even any negotiating over the amount of reimbursement to be paid to the mental health agency. Most of the reimbursement paid went to the clients, though a little was retained for overhead by the mental health agency.

As with budget, the potential competitors for an agency's turf are both the ICC itself and the partner agencies. Consider, for instance, a welfare-to-work program. The job development and placement func- tions can be performed by a variety of agencies. The Job Training Partnership Act agencies and the state employment departments can and do perform them. Although it is-more of a stretch for them, com- munity colleges and welfare agencies sometimes do the same. So do some job training contractors. Ownership of the job development and placement turf can be u p for grabs.13

Agencies can try to protect their turf by fashioning distinctive com- petencies. After surviving merger and abolition threats from the gover- nor's office, the conservation education unit of the California Integrated Waste Management Board and its counterpart in the Department of Conservation found a way to stay separate. The former concentrates on

11. See Hadley (1986, esp. pp. 3-22) on the failure of the hostage rescue mission in Iran