Chuck Marohn, president, Strong Towns, is a featured speaker at ICMA's 104th Annual Conference in Baltimore, Maryland. In anticipation of the conference, the September Public Management (PM) magazine included his article “Building Resilient Communities.”

He offers that in the current approach to managing local governments, “the more they grow, the poorer they become,” meaning that while growth might improve a local government’s short-term cash flow, it destroys the long-term solvency. He writes that instead of focusing on new growth, people need to obsess about making more productive use of what has already been built.

He goes on to write that communities can find themselves operating without answers to complex problems and Strong Towns responds to the challenges with this approach:

• Rely on small, incremental investments (little bets) instead of large, transformative projects.
• Emphasize resiliency of result over efficiency of execution.
• Design to adapt to feedback.
• Inspire by bottom-up action (chaotic but smart) and not top-down systems (orderly but dumb).
• Seek to conduct as much of life as possible at a personal scale.
• Obsess about accounting for revenues, expenses, assets, and long-term liabilities (do the math).

Find out more about the Strong Towns movement in the September PM.

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