Last week, a coalition of engineers released a report concluding that Florida cities needed to conduct more regular safety inspections of high-rise buildings near the coast. The report was in response to this summer’s horrific collapse of a beachfront condominium in Surfside that killed 98 people.
The recommendations should be no surprise to anyone who has followed this potentially avoidable tragedy. Years ago, experts warned that the 40-year-old building’s structural integrity was threatened by major concrete and rebar damage. But rather than sound the alarm bell, nothing was done. In fact, just weeks after that report, a Surfside town official assured Champlain Towers South residents – many now dead – that their building was “in very good shape.”
This column isn’t the place to litigate who’s responsible for that building’s fate. My point is that changing regulations gets at only part of the picture. The other piece is about attitudes. Leaders at all levels of government – especially the local level – need to embrace something we often don’t expect of those in charge: fear.
In government, you can outsource just about any service to the private sector. But the one thing you can’t outsource is giving a damn about whether your constituents live or die. So a little more pessimism about all the terrible things that can go wrong in the world is the exact quality we need from leaders who are responsible for the lives of their constituents.
I’ve spent 40 years working for, studying, and leading local governments. The single most important quality of a mayor or city manager is their concern for public safety. And I’m not just talking about preventing crime and having an A+ case clearance rate. It’s everything from drinking water to climate change, wildfires to terrorism, car crashes to natural disasters, including pandemics.
We tend to elect people who outwardly display confidence and calm. But frankly, it’s the leaders who have a little bit of paranoia – at least behind closed doors – who I’d trust to keep my family safe. That’s because almost any time a disaster happens, two things happened beforehand: someone issued a warning and someone powerful ignored it.
Before the winter blackouts that killed 700 Texans, federal officials warned state leaders their grid was vulnerable to going down in cold weather. Despite years of warnings from the federal government, pipeline operators resisted cybersecurity requirements designed to protect them from hackers. Before 9/11, the GAO and intelligence officials warned that hijackers may crash an airplane into a skyscraper. And, of course, virologists and epidemiologists had long warned the world was ill-prepared for an inevitable pandemic.
We need leaders who, rather than dismiss the doomsayers, bring them into the fold and embrace the opportunity to work with them to protect our communities. Ironically – though not surprisingly – “risk management” is never a topic of political campaigns. You can’t be elected by promising the buildings will stand tall and the lights will stay on while you’re in office. But there’s a moral imperative for lawmakers to prioritize this type of work.
Fortunately, there’s a straightforward formula to help them do this: Just multiply the likelihood something bad will happen by how serious the consequences will be if it does happen. That math makes it clear: When it comes to true catastrophes, we must prepare for them, even if it’s exceptionally unlikely they’ll come to pass.
Rick Cole, a longtime leader in Southern California who was mayor of Pasadena, then city manager in Ventura and Santa Monica, told me that too often city managers focus on managing people and resources, while the big picture work of planning for the worst gets short shrift. It’s too abstract to get much attention, particularly among chronically over-worked and under-resourced government officials.
But at the end of the day, Cole said, a leader’s job is to be a risk manager. Because there’s nobody else who can do it.
If you’re a voter, that means you should probably spend a moment thinking about which candidate you trust with your family’s safety. The mayor and his or her staff have more influence in that area than you will ever know. There’s virtually no way for an everyday citizen to understand what’s happening in the bowels of city hall. So you better elect someone who you think has the wisdom and discipline to manage your community’s safety, and stick with them when the opposition rears its ugly head.
If you’re a leader, it means you need to prod the experts constantly. Find out the worst that can go wrong and understand whether the protocols to prevent it are working. And if the people around you aren’t worried, it means you need to prod even more.
There’s no need to be alarmist. But language matters, and too often (especially in government) there’s a tendency to be mealy-mouthed in the face of real problems.
When it’s time to sound the alarm, sound it like people’s lives depend on it. Because as we saw in Surfside – sometimes it does.