The legislature and the governor battled for a year over the income tax, and achieved little more than a Christmas truce. The Convention Center Authority has fought for two years and spent a fortune and still hasn’t decided where to put the thing.
Have politicians finally reached a state of catatonic paralysis? Or are they doing something wrong?
This gets us to what Wick Sloane, an Aetna executive, was thinking about this last summer, as the tax debate raged. He had an idea.
Aetna, like many large companies, spends thousands of dollars and hours on training people to run meetings, reach consensus and — ta-dah — make decisions. That’s why you hardly ever see Group Pensions picketing Personal Lines, and hanging the boss in effigy.
Sloane wondered if some of this knowledge might be helpful in the public sector.
He roughed out a process, using ideas developed by experts such as famed Harvard negotiator Roger Fisher, author of “Getting to Yes,” and others. Sloane wrote an op-ed piece in August that got the attention of Harry Merrow, then head of the Hartford chapter of the American Leadership Forum.
Merrow and Sloane met with state Rep. Tom Ritter of Hartford. Ritter too was frustrated by the tax fight: “Ninety-five percent of the legislators are smart and well-intentioned. Why can’t we get things done?”
Ritter was intrigued by Sloane’s idea. Merrow asked if there were an issue on which to try it.
That there was. Thanks to a recent federal law, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, we now know that suburban whites are approved for mortgages in vastly higher numbers than urban minorities in the same income levels.
This has touched off a very nasty debate in Massachusetts, a mess that Ritter, House chairman of the banking committee, would love to cut off at the pass in Connecticut.
To start, they gathered a group of almost two dozen people, bankers, city and state officials and neighborhood activists, who are interested in solving the problem (if you can stand jargon, the books call these people “stakeholders” or “constituents”).
Then they hired someone else, an outsider, to run the meetings (a “facilitator”). This is important. A traditional, quasi-judicial public hearing is run by either a Republican or a Democratic committee chairman, who is invariably associated with one position or another. An outsider isn’t. Ritter and Sloane got one of the best, Michael Rion, a business ethicist and former head of the Hartford Seminary.
The group has met for four to five hours every Tuesday since late December.
Instead of trying to jump to solutions, Rion has taken them through the process. First, they had a training session on how to solve problems.
Rion emphasized such things as separating an interest (e.g. a sound budget), from a position (pro-tax!), and then focusing on the interest.
He stressed separating the people from the problem. When Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. was being hung in effigy last fall, this clearly was a problem in the budget debate. Finally, they would try to put a number of options on the table. Speaking of tables, Rion insisted on a meeting room that could be arranged so people spoke with, rather than at, one another.
Then there was an information phase, where all the relevant facts were presented. It’s easier to reach consensus if everybody’s working with the same information. This was another failure in the budget debate; each side battered each other with different facts.
Then comes the goals. What are we trying to do? This seems to have been a problem with the Convention Center Authority. Some think the main goal is to open development in the North End, others to put conventions close to the entertainment district, to use cheap land, etc.
Finally, solutions. Ritter hoped for three solid, useful recommendations, none of which involved doing another study. After last Tuesday’s meeting, they had 29 recommendations, including credit education programs, state guarantees and partnerships with community groups. These will be whittled to 10 proposals, and then implemented.
Ritter is expected to be elected speaker of the House next year. If he is and the process works, he’ll use it on other issues. “The process will drive a solution,” he said, “and usually, everybody can get at least 90 percent of what they want.”