The Public's Business

Not many books can be described as being the most comprehensive and thorough studies of their subjects available, and at the same time as being written in so lively a fashion that they easily hold the reader's attention from beginning to end. The Public's Businessis one such exceptional work. And its subject fully warrants the scholarly research and writer's skill that was invested in it—the public authorities in the United States wield enormous political and financial power and...
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Not many books can be described as being the most comprehensive and thorough studies of their subjects available, and at the same time as being written in so lively a fashion that they easily hold the reader's attention from beginning to end. The Public's Businessis one such exceptional work. And its subject fully warrants the scholarly research and writer's skill that was invested in it—the public authorities in the United States wield enormous political and financial power and are proliferating faster than any other type of governmental entity. The public authority is a peculiarly American institution—it is a hybrid corporation, depending on the private money markets of investment banking for capital, yet impacting directly on the public sector and indirectly subsidized by the public through the tax-exempt status of municipal bonds. Over 7000 such authorities currently spend more than 21 million dollars a year on operations and new capital facilities. The Public's Businesstraces the growth of these governmental corporations and makes recommendations for their future development based on the author's balanced assessment of their present strengths and weaknesses. The author writes that "Since the births of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in 1921 and the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933, the most common form of government enterprise has been the public authority.... [They] build and run public works of monumental proportions: bridges, tunnels, parkways, great dams, ports, airports, public buildings, industrial and recreational parks. They provide essential services: water, gas, electric power, transportation, training, insurance, and mortgage finance. They have functioned with technical competence, with relative speed, and until recently with little obvious burden on taxpayers. They have rarely been sullied by open scandal or serious mismanagement...." However, the author also probes the flaws in the foundation on which these strengths and successes rest. She calls for reforms that will increase the public accountability of authorities, open up their operations to closer public scrutiny, make their governing structures more democratic, and realign their goals more closely in accordance with public policy. The book's approach is both wide-ranging and integrative. It is first of all a comparative study based on a large number and variety of actual cases (including among others several Pennsylvania municipal corporations, the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, the Lower Colorado River Authority of Texas, the authorities supervised by the Metropolitan Council of Minneapolis-St. Paul, and the U.S. Postal Service). The author and her research collaborators conducted a series of interviews with authority management to supplement the data found in the documentary record. At the same time, the book offers a synthesizing treatment that allows insights from the fields of public administration, political science, economics and finance, and the sociology of organizations to be fitted into a systematic general framework. And the reader need not be a specialist in any of these discipline to profit from this work. The book is further enlivened with accounts of the activities of some of the colorful and powerful managers of public authorities, such as Robert Moses and Austin J. Tobin.