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BIG CITY: Learning from failure

Posted on June 14, 2012 by Staff

By Kirk Ross
One of the more infuriating characteristics of modern bureaucracies is the tendency to double down on failures even when confronted with a clear reality that something is not working.

Institutional inertia is partly to blame. So is the human response to cover one’s behind in the event of trouble.

When it comes to local government, when a policy, project or program gets approved it is often the result of months, sometimes years, of work. Naturally, the bigger the efforts are, the more time and focus required. In the case of particularly large and contentious issues, that usually means that the people working on the issue are moving other work to the back burner. Once an issue is voted on or in some way settled, the backlog of work looms large, and the last thing anyone wants to do is revisit the thing that led to it.

Most of the mistakes I’ve seen over the years in local government fall into two basic categories:
• something wasn’t done right in the first place; or
• there’s little follow-up and follow-through to make sure whatever was done was functioning as expected.

The food truck issue in Chapel Hill is a good example of bad policy in action. After all the sound and fury and compromising, the town has come up with a food truck policy that has, in effect, eliminated the possibility of food trucks. Some members of the council who voted for the plan may have intended that all along, but some probably thought it might work. Either way, there are no food trucks. No one has signed up for the program. Meanwhile, the market for them in Carrboro and Durham is thriving, and the well-attended rodeos and additional delicious lunch options are cultural amenities not found within the borders of Chapel Hill.

My guess is that as well-researched and meaningful as the effort to find a policy was, the flaw was the assumption that food service via a truck is a zero-sum game, an economic philosophy that the town does not apply to any other business – including bricks-and-mortar food service – when drafting rules.

I don’t know if the fact that the program isn’t working will lead to further patience or a revision of the policy. Given the contentious nature of the debate and what’s on the council’s plate for this summer and fall, I doubt there’s an appetite for it, but it deserves attention, and whenever they do get around to looking at it I hope they’ll look a little further beyond just the food trucks. Often times our failures are more instructive than our successes.

If you further unpack the food truck-policy failure, you find a couple of things that raise questions. First off, the town greatly miscalculated what food truck entrepreneurs were willing to pay. What does that say about the town’s understanding of the market and how small startups operate?

The food truck rules also included a very tight set of guidelines on where the trucks could locate. It’s clear from the lack of takers that the rules, designed to protect brick-and-mortar places, relegated trucks to less desirable spots. But it also points to the lack of public space in Chapel Hill’s downtown.

As many have said, the food truck failure may well be the result of an overly expensive and complicated permitting process. And that does play into the perception that this town is anti-business.

But what worries me and should frighten the heck out of anyone trying to do economic development here is that a whole bunch of innovative business people have said that gaining access to the Chapel Hill market, even downtown Chapel Hill, is not worth $718 a year. They have chosen to go elsewhere not because we’re snooty, but because they can make more money in the vibrant downtowns of Carrboro, Durham, Hillsborough and Raleigh.

That says to me we have a much bigger problem than where we’ve told people they can park a truck.

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