Norm Van Eeden Petersman  0:18  

Hello. Welcome to Upzoned. I'm Norm with Strong Towns, and I'm guest hosting for Abby Newsham today. Upzoned is a podcast where we take things that are happening in the news and we upzone them: We talk about them from a Strong Towns perspective. With me today is Edward Erfurt, the chief technical advisor for Strong Towns and a regular contributor to Upzoned. Today we'll discuss article on the CBS News website, the local page for Los Angeles, that says "Mayor Bass -- so that's Mayor Karen Bass -- says layoffs averted after labor negotiations, creative solutions for next year city budget." So this was published on the 23rd of September, or recently updated, and it is part of an ongoing challenge the city of Los Angeles faces as they prepare to host the World Cup, as they prepare to host the upcoming Summer Olympics, as they continue to roll out all sorts of new projects and approaches to trying to build lasting prosperity, all against this backdrop of very serious budget challenges. In the article, it says that they were able to announce a plan to avert layoffs after labor negotiations and secured a fiscal agreement for the upcoming year for the city budget. At first it had been described as a $1 billion shortfall, and so various creative solutions have been identified. Initially, it was proposed that 1600 positions would be eliminated through budget cuts in order to make up the deficit that was projected. But they said on Tuesday of last week that they had found a way to not lay off anybody, and instead, to balance the budget. As part of the plan, departments are shifting employees within their budgets into funded positions in some of the other agencies that are affiliated with the city. So the Port of Los Angeles, the airport, the water and power departments doing all of those different types of things. In the article, it's very focused on the work of negotiating with labor in order to save positions, or to make sure that those positions come off of the books of different entities within the city structure, instead of from the main city. There's a quote here: "Together, we're saving critical frontline positions, boosting revenues through joint efforts with city leadership, and strengthening the vital services that Angelenos depend on," said the president of their union. Edward, this is actually not so uncommon. It just has larger dollars because it's attached to a much larger city than many of the other similar instances that we see around us. What were some of your impressions as you heard and read through this article?

Edward Erfurt  3:00  

This is so interesting to me, because this is a discussion that every city hall has. Whenever the fiscal year shows up, several months prior, the elected leadership gets a report from the finance officer and they say, "Okay, we're projecting next year we're going to have this much revenue. Everybody has submitted all of their their wish lists of the projects we want to do. So we're going to increase our salaries. We have health benefits that are going to go up. Anything we didn't do last year, we're going to roll over this year." Every city I go to, they're in one or two paths. The first one is "We've had so many transactions this year, and we're projecting our growth to such a way that we're gonna have more money next year than this year, so we need to do big things." I meet a lot of newly elected officials that come in on the other fiscal approach. They want to be sure that taxes are low, services are high, everything's taken care of, and they show up at their first meeting with a giant red sharpie marker. "We're going to cut all the fat and we're going to dive into all these things." Both these paths lead us to a lot of really bad decisions. When I read this article, I saw that, okay, we can celebrate, "Hurrah, LA has solved the budget." All that they have done is address the budget for next year on paper, based off of lots and lots of assumptions. They haven't actually gone and become a more resilient community. They haven't actually gone and looked at the net financial position of the city to see where they're actually at. This is the work that, at Strong Towns, we've been working on for some time. I think a lot of folks are familiar with the Strong Towns articles about the Growth Ponzi Scheme. I think you've seen all the math projects. You and I chat about these all the time. We go places, and we see some big ribbon cutting, some new wide road, and we sit there say, "Oh my gosh. This is beautiful now, but what about next year?" We describe it as a Growth Ponzi Scheme, but I think the last time we faced something like this was when you and I were working in Norman, Oklahoma. The Community Action Lab. You did the credible little community speech. I think it was the last public speech in their library before it closed. Remember that beautiful building?

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  5:58  

Oh yeah. Yep.

Edward Erfurt  6:00  

It was a beautiful building and well loved. The library was something really well loved in Norman. They made a lot of budget decisions to go and build that beautiful library. It's down the street from the old library. It has all the whistles and bells and really a beautiful civic structure. They got a bond for it, they got some extra tax dollars for it, and built it. Then shortly after your lecture there Norm, they announced that there was a roof leak that had been going on for years, and then it resulted in mold, not only in the library building but also in the books. The struggle Norman had, is "We have this beautiful asset, but we have no capital to maintain or fix this problem." This is what we're seeing in LA. They've solved it based off of the accounting practices for next year on paper. But think about how fragile the system is. What happens if there's another disaster? What happens if there's a higher increase of breakdowns of vehicles that they have to repair? Or what happens if interest rates increase so money is more expensive to borrow? This is the work we've been trying to point out with the Finance Decoder. Looking at audited budgets over time to say, "Okay, you moved everything around." When you think about this, one of the things that's there -- I don't think it is like the fix-all -- is this idea of moving staff from one department to another. So "We're not going to do layoffs, but that job you had in the Public Works Department, we're now going to have you report over to the port. You're going to do kind of what you were doing in public works, but now you're going to do it over in the job that we couldn't hire anybody for over in the port. Moving that around means that, at some point in the budget, those are open positions that the city budgeted but never spent money on. They never paid payroll or benefits to. Again, you can only do that so many times. That actually doesn't help the net financial of the city. That kind of stood out to me. I think there was something in there about the mayor, there were some pay cuts. When you're talking about a budget in the billions of dollars, that's not even a recognizable decimal point anywhere in the budget. Let's say the mayor took 100% pay cut. That's like-

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  8:56  

Yeah, it's token.

Edward Erfurt  8:57  

It's not going to show up anywhere. It's great political but it doesn't actually balance their budget.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  9:02  

I did a simple calculation of, if you're retaining 1500 staff for the sake of a good relationship with the union and to prevent people from picketing, that's only two and a half percent of the workforce that is currently employed by the city of Los Angeles. That means that you are still having to grapple with a massive outlay every single year. So there is two challenges that the city has. They have a revenue shortage. Their revenues are not as strong or as vibrant as they need to be. And we have a ton of ways at Strong Towns of saying "This is what you can do with your existing neighborhoods, those lands within your control, to unleash greater economic activity." Yes, a core part of that is going to be capturing more property tax, even if you are hampered in how much property tax you can take in in a California city by things like prop 13 and other measures. While at the same time being ever so careful with things like sales tax revenue that you can lean on, but shouldn't become wholly dependent on, in terms of always expecting that number to grow. This is something that stood out when I was just up in Chicago last Saturday and taking into account the Finance Decoder's picture of how the city of Chicago has done. It was interesting to see that the 2020 era was when, all of a sudden, their revenues just plummeted. The way in which that city revenue could not generate the amount that was needed in order to meet core costs left them in a massive financial hole. Chuck's often said that he will talk to business leaders, and they say, "We have our core business operations." Say we make widgets. "If we are going through a time where we really have to tighten up our budget, we are trimming staff. We're saying, 'Hey, we're you're going to have to do the work of two admin people. You're going to have to do the work of four of our sales reps, or we're going to consolidate down to one.'" You keep your core service, and you make sure that is still as vital and as strong as it can be, and you just make do by then eliminating positions that, in some way, you can figure out a way to manage without. In contrast, cities are so quick to cut service, cut service hours, cut transit frequency, cut all of these layers, but retain all the positions. Doing that is completely at odds with what it takes to build the lasting sort of value that that people come to depend upon. So if you were in a relationship with a bad contractor, you might cut ties. The struggle is -- and I'm not anti-union at all, but I do think that unions have definitely contributed to their own problems here -- now they're in a situation where it is "save jobs at all costs." I'll share a story that is perhaps, anti-union in just telling it. When I worked in the mayor's office in Surrey, I went into the coffee area to go grab a cup of coffee, kind of oblivious to some of the things that were going on. But the head of the union was there with a young guy, and he was going into his disciplinary meeting in the city manager's office, and she said, "Whatever you do, just don't say anything, and you'll keep your job." I think I can disclose this. It's been long enough out that I won't be in violation of anything. The reason he was in a disciplinary meeting is because he had been taking young women's personal contact info from the front desk at the rec centers and then following up with them in harassing way after doing this. Her promise was, "You're part of us. We will help you stay in." It appalled me at a personal level that somebody who is clearly guilty of all kinds of misconduct, who could even have potentially been charged with with harassment, was being protected, but it actually is part of a bigger ethos. "We're all in this together. We take a maximalist position. 1500 or 1600 jobs, you better have a replacement for them. They have to still fit within the funding envelope that's available to the city." The trouble will be if the city of Los Angeles just continues down this path. Rick Cole, who's a Strong Towns member and a passionate employee in the finance controller's office up until just recently, said, "We have a huge systems problem, and it's not going to be solved by the mayor reducing the pay that she receives on an annual basis from the city." So that stands out to me. I was gone all of last week, otherwise I would have done the Finance Decoder for the city of Los Angeles. But I will say, we fly blind when we don't see the longer term trends, and the Finance Decoder would actually be a great tool for this. I was just at the regional gathering of the Strong Towns Illinois, all of the Local Conversation groups sent reps up to this gathering. It was awesome. They did a comparison of Batavia, which is a suburb of Chicago; Bloomington, which is bit further south; and then the city of Chicago itself. Being able to see where the weakness, the vulnerabilities of each of these cities were, and some of the enduring ability of a place like Chicago to endure. It was a little less affected by big fluctuations compared to the smaller communities, but still, the overall trend was definitely trending in a downward way, and that is going to require them to make some very important decisions about what they do.

Edward Erfurt  14:25  

That's the thing. We can look at this the way. It took me a long time to really understand what was happening in municipal finance. I'm somebody that spent a lot of time in local government, and every year the finance director would come and give me the speech that got repeated, I've heard it from more than one finance officer, talking about how the municipal budget is like our checking account, and whatever money we have in is what we're allowed to spend, and we've got to think about all these different pieces. Sitting in the development department, the department that sees the growth, we could kind of project where the property taxes in all the communities that we're in were going based off of the market. So go to Zillow, or any of those sorts of sites, and you could see that your property values in the city over a certain amount of time, maybe, if you're lucky, are increasing 1% to 2%. That tax base is going to grow less than inflation, so it's always lagging behind, and it's based off of numbers that are lagging behind. But we could see the real growth actually when we got into transactions and building permits. I could see year over year, based off of how many building permits -- and not only the number of permits, but the quantified investment on those. So when somebody would submit a building permit, we were collecting how much the valuation was for the permit. So we could trend that. If this year we're up 5% on building permits, or 6% on our investment, where people are doing private investment in the city, we could then go back and look at that and know that, within the next two years, we would see that we were on that trend. So I could project that out. But that's not the projection that I saw on the finances. I also saw all of these crazy things, these decisions that were being made that impacted the staffing and resources that I needed for my department. We couldn't hire people because we weren't sure how much revenue would be in the future. So if there aren't new building permits, we can't afford to bring on a building inspector, because we expect that would fill that space. Or economic development, if we didn't know what our future was, we didn't know how to invest that stuff. We could feel good about it, but I had to battle through all those. Then I would see where we really had some critical component in our budget. We really needed another police officer. We knew somebody was going to retire, so we had to have overlap. We needed to have certain promotions within the city with people that we wanted to reward and keep them on. We've trained them, and they needed to move up from an admin to some sort of senior position or climbing the ranks. And we would do weird things in the budget. I didn't understand what we were doing, because we would go and slide things out. We'd push out when we were going to repair something or pay for something, or we'd hold open positions in the city. Or we would manipulate what we thought the revenue coming in was going to be. This didn't make sense to me, and I'm not a math person. I think that's why I went into architecture, because I didn't want to have to do that math. But looking at it from that Strong Towns approach, what is actually occurring? Well, what's occurring is that, in our municipal budgeting process, in the process that everybody's agreed to, all the best practices, and even under all of our state statutes and laws, it says that our municipal budget needs to Balance. So we look at our budget. Whatever is coming in, and projection for this year, all of that needs to go out the door in transactions. Now our cushion in that are things like rollovers and transfers to capital improvement projects or putting it into the rainy day fund, all of those sorts of pieces. So I see in this article, they're actually increasing the amount of revenue projected to go in the rainy day fund. THat's where you squirrel money away in municipal budgets. That's also the first place you steal from. So I could see in this budget that one of the tricks that they have in there is they're upping what's going into that emergency fund, that rainy day fund for LA, they're adding an extra 1% to it. That gives you flexibility across the budget to weather the storm. But when I looked at that, I realized that we were spending whatever money was left that year. You've probably heard this. It's true this happens. You're told this from your finance officers: you either spend it or lose it. So in a lot of governments, you've budgeted so much for paper, you budgeted so much for vehicles and equipment, and at the end of the year, if you were responsible with that money and you didn't spend it all, then whatever you didn't spend goes back to the general fund and fills a gap where somebody overspent. So there's lots of departments that will go and do a huge buying frenzy at the beginning or the end of the fiscal year to spend all the money in their budget. These are the things I saw that just didn't make sense to me, because I couldn't string together year per year where we were going. It wasn't until I started to realize that what we're looking at is a cash accounting process. What makes it worse is it's not just cash accounting. It's cash accounting based off of a projection that we hope we achieve. So in this article, it says that they're hoping that they're going to boost revenue. I don't know how you do that. I don't know, in what was presented here, how stabilizing your workforce and providing more city services boosts revenue. Those are all liabilities and expenses. It was so frustrating to me going through the Finance Decoder because everything I had been taught working in local government, everything I thought that I knew about municipal budgets -- and I sat through all the budget meetings, I was in all the rooms ahead of time trying to figure this stuff out, talking through all of our demands of what we needed for departments and how we were going to balance which project and when -- I realized that we were really told all the wrong things. Through the Finance Decoder, we've taken the opportunity at Strong Towns to say, "Let's look at all of our financial health of our city." We've got lots and lots of cities that have lots and lots of strong citizens. I'm not going to credit them all to be within city hall. Many of them are, but we've identified in here by taking your audited budgets. This is the shorter version of the budget. This is the award winning part of everybody's budget. If you follow certain criteria of the accounting practices, you can receive this award. In that, through the Finance Decoder, we've been able to extract out, I think it's 16 line items, and we go through to help you look at the sustainability indicators, the flexibility indicators and the vulnerability indicators of your city over time. You can actually look at this over time. What we've seen in every single city -- and I would encourage anybody that's listening to this that's out in LA or has an interest in that to do the analysis. I know we have San Francisco and San Diego. Those are up on our sites where people have done those. What we found is, year over year, the decisions we're making are leading to less sustainable factors. They're making our cities more fragile. As we start to look at our net financial positions, yes, this year we're on a budget. But if we think about ,like, our checking account. If we pulled each of our bank accounts out, Norm, and we did this type of accounting, we would probably be in jail, because that's not the way that we do these budgets. There's certain years that the washing machine breaks, or we have to get new tires in the car, and those are things that are not in our budget, and we have to borrow for that, or we have to tap into our savings accounts. We make those investments in those items that may be a loss this year, but then next year, we hope we save up a little bit more, we do a little bit better our jobs, and we are able to balance that out. Cities can't do that in this fashion.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  24:11  

But if you were a landscaper, you would say, "All right, every single tool that I have needs to earn its keep." So if I've got a ditcher, and I've got a couple of other specialized tools, I'm like, "Either I need to sell this thing or remove it. Which, for cities, you can't just get rid of parts of your land -- unless you de-annex it, but that's, that's a whole other process. So each pipe, each street, has to earn its keep. In our context, we've actually shown that doesn't mean just having big, wealthy neighborhoods. In fact, some of those are the areas that are the least financially productive in our communities. But what we can do is ask the question, "Have we done everything that we can in our power to allow neighborhood investment to occur, for backyard cottage just to pop up. And LA, to its credit, has actually taken the lead as one of the cities that has made it quite easy to see accessory dwelling units pop up. The consequence of this is that these backyard cottages are now not quite doubling but certainly increasing the amount of revenue from that particular parcel. Then you stack together a bunch of those different parcels on the street, and next thing you know, you've got a lot more productive street. Build out from there. You say, "If we can add in retail within existing neighborhoods that is at virtually no additional cost to the city, next thing you know, you can now tax at a commercial rate and a residential rate on the same property. So now, all of a sudden, that street and that pipe are servicing something that has doubled in value, if not more in terms of its contributions to the city coffer. When I worked in landscaping for my brother, my brother made sure that all of his tools were put to work. That might look like renting them out at times, that might look like taking on extra work so he could send a guy with a specialized tool. Just make something happen with that thing, or else he had to get rid of it. This always comes to mind whenever I drive by construction sites and I see dozens of dozers and dozens of cranes all sitting there. Every single one of them is a cost either of misspent potential, or is actually a lease payment that is just ticking along day by day. When we become obsessive about these types of things, Strong Towns would say it doesn't drive us to then do the big, crazy speculative thing. It actually drive sus to figure out the little stuff. Let's identify how we get progress to occur within existing neighborhoods to really double down on the investments that we have. Each parcel is a tool for building prosperity, as well as happiness and human flourishing. At its core, we can do so much more with this. Yet, the restraints that are there, the regulations that you have to go through, the make work projects for some of these 1600 people, all of that is going to continue to just drain the capacity of the city. The other thing is, if you save 1600 positions, that's say, generously, $100,000 on average for each of these positions. If you factor in all of the city costs, or pension and benefits and things like that, together with what you actually pay as your take home pay, that's only $160 million. That still leaves a hole of $840 million that they need to still cover. When we see this each year, when cities are reaching in order to balance their budget, it's sort of like a marathon runner that never recharges. They basically run a marathon, turn around, run the next one, and don't allow the body to actually recharge. The adrenal systems begin to be extremely fatigued. You will quickly find yourself on a death spiral if you're not careful. You can then say, "Well, the federal government will bail us out, or the state government will bail us out," but they're tapped as well. This is one of the things that stood out to me in San Antonio. I did the numbers in San Antonio. Their net financial position in 2009 was $1 billion. Through a series of just every year having and posting a balanced budget, they've always posted balanced budgets, and yet today, their net financial position is negative $4 billion. Over that time, one of the things that stood out is that their reliance on federal funding continued to increase. In the state of Texas, the city of San Antonio was just recently at 25% of its annual revenues coming from government transfers. That's astounding, and in a state where you might expect the opposite narrative of self-sufficiency and "doing it ourselves" to really be at the forefront. It might be that California cities rely more on higher levels of government, but actually, we were seeing that Chicago relies a lot less on higher level levels of government than San Antonio. Yet, they're both struggling, and they're both in a position where they face this need. One quick thought is, I wish that our reporting on these things was improved. I will say, with respect to the writer, this reads like a press release that has just been turned over. It was, "Wow, creative solutions have been identified! Wow, the problem has gone away almost!" It just reads as like, "Hey, we got a quote from the union president. We got a quote from the mayor's office. Dust your hands, LA is going to be fine." And as we dig a little deeper, we say, "No, you're far from fine. You're going to really struggle." Even the second closing line: "Bass attributed other work her office has been doing since she was sworn in to build, quote, unquote, successful strategies." What are those? Can we talk about that? I think this is what residents are asking for.

Edward Erfurt  29:47  

Well, you read through it and you do a little bit more research out there. To go on your marathon example, Norm, it's not back to back marathons. It's back to back marathons but instead of doing 26.2 miles of marathon, we're doing 28 and we're only using one shoe. The union, says that they're super excited because they're saving frontline positions and boosting revenue. Staff positions don't generate revenue. That is a liability. How do we make that correlation? If we look at some of the things, like I know recently in LA, there have been some executive orders that will expedite infrastructure programs. They're scaling back capital projects. Well, I've been in these budget crunches. We're going to scale back the capital projects that probably have the higher match, that probably use more general funds, but we're going to target the capital projects that have the least amount of local match. These are the projects that are going to increase our long term liability, but they're going to look good this year on the books. In more plain terms, we need to repair this neighborhood street. There's no federal or state funding to repair this neighborhood street. We're going to delay that project. But there is another neighborhood street that has a state highway designation on it that is proposed to be widened. It only needs a 10% or 20% match to do that work. That means we're going to put our 10% into a large, million-dollar project, which will report on the bottom line as a revenue source coming into the city, because it's going to show up on our budget. So we're going to have this illusion of wealth in this process. Those are the types of things where we start moving back and forth, because the projects that will be delayed in the capital budget to balance this are the things where there are existing residents today that investments have already been made and promises have already been made to upkeep that, and we're going to delay that. When I say that we're running more than 26.2 miles in a marathon, if we're picking projects only to balance our budget, not looking at the long term health and liability of the city, we will wear ourselves out. Now, unlike you or I, cities are super human organisms. They will continue to drove on when many of us will have passed. Cities have this enormous resiliency to remain in zombie mode and to go on. We can look at Detroit. Cities that go bankrupt continue to go on. They just go on poorly. They can't fulfill all those obligations.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  33:03  

Until they start to turn a corner, which is a bit of the Detroit story starting now.

Edward Erfurt  33:08  

It's starting now, but it's only starting now because they've accepted not to fulfill their obligations of certain maintenance throughout areas. But when I, when I look at LA, this is something we all should look at. It's a major city. The numbers are super big. It's easy to pick on a big city. This is the same discussions that are happening in the smallest of towns all across North America. My word of advice to the mayor of any city, to the finance officer of any city, is actually go and do the Strong Towns Finance Decoder. Run the numbers in there, look at the graphics, look at what it's showing you on that projection and timeline. It's going to decode everything in your financial documents that you can't see today. It's going to be a very harsh red pill for many cities. I can't point you to a city and say, "Oh, wow. This city is completely resilient. They figured it out." We've all fallen the same trap of what we represent and do in our budget documents. It doesn't matter if you have the 1200 page budget book, or a lot of cities will have the user guide or citizen guide, which will be the 60 page book. That's not what you need. You need to be looking at the audited budgets, you need to look at the actual expenses and liabilities. When you dive into those, you begin to see where downward decline occurred. That downward decline didn't start this budget cycle. It didn't start with this council. It didn't start five years ago. Much of this is happening 10, 15 years out. We just now are able to have enough trends to see where we're on. So I would do that. The next piece to it is I would tell every city to stop digging. I would tell LA to stop digging. I would cancel all your capital projects that involve anything other than basic maintenance. Every street that you have that you need to repave, I would repave with the minimum amount of lane. I would think about every project, and I would challenge my departments to go and, not value engineer, but do addition by subtraction in every project. I want us to figure out what we can do to make a road safer and, secondly, to save us money on that project. What are the innovative things we can do with stormwater, repaving, construction, phasing, coordination with utilities? Let's not go just grab some special taxing district funding or some taxing refinancing. Let's go figure out what we can do to stabilize that. All the efforts that we're thinking about for LA -- and I'm going to touch on something I know is an uncomfortable thing to talk about, the fires in LA -- I would shift all my staff to the building department and get every single one of those building permits out as soon as possible. I would use all the technical skill that I have -- and a major city like LA has some of the top thinkers in City Hall working -- to figure out how to maximize the potential on all of those different properties. So when homeowners want to make that investment, they can not only do their home, maybe they can do the accessory cottage in the back or up single unit to a duplex. I would try to streamline that and get that out as fast as possible, to get those transactions occurring, because that would generate long-term wealth without the liability to the city. Unlike widening a highway that adds long term liability, thickening up a neighborhood and providing that critical housing addresses those pieces. So do the math. Figure out exactly what's going on. Look at those trends, stop digging, and then look at everywhere you possibly can where you can increase productivity. This is stuff you can map. I always got great mapping tools. Urban3 can show you how to do it. We've done those sorts of things. You'd be able to measure in a short order to find out what the most productive development patterns are in the city, the most productive neighborhoods. And you would tell your city staff, "I want you to focus on those. I want to do everything we can to emulate that pattern throughout the city with the resources we have available today."

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  38:04  

Yeah.Wwhen I applied in a previous life to be the Director of Communications for our city, my pitch to them was that we need to not just do pictures of ribbon cuttings and like, "Isn't this awesome," but actually say, "Hey, today we're having a tough talk with Tom." Like, here's the situation we find ourselves in. What's the state of infrastructure in this neighborhood? What does it mean when we say it gets a poor grade on the infrastructure card? Like, lots of pictures of broken pipes, broken streets, broken infrastructure. To really underscore why we can't have special privilege status for everybody in every single neighborhood, and leave everything as it is just only better when the reality that we face is pretty significant. Needless to say, I didn't get the job. It didn't square with their vision of what any elected leader wants to be able to do, which is issue the press release, which says, "with creative solutions, we have figured out a way that makes everybody satisfied." I think this will be the challenge. We're gonna about to go into the downzone, because that's why everybody listens to this podcast, after all. But I would say we put together a tutorial on how to fill out the Finance Decoder. I will say, because I was super daunted by it, if at all you are tentatively ready to step forward, just walk your way through your ACFRs in the US or the equivalent in Canada. Walk through that, watch the tutorial as you do it, and you will find all of a sudden that sense of empowerment when you're like, "Whoa." In about 50 minutes, you could have done 10 years worth of tracking of your city's finances. All of a sudden people look at you're like, "Who are you? You're a wizard." I'll tell you, you don't have to be named Harry Potter to be a wizard with these things. It's actually not rocket science at all. It's not super difficult, but it has always felt to be so distant from us because our processes are so opaque. The Finance Decoder makes that possible. It's free. Go to strongtowns.org/decoder and just input your email, because we want to stay in touch with you, and that's the best way for you to be able to receive that tool and to start using it. The tutorial is linked there or in the Strong Towns YouTube Library as well.

Edward Erfurt  40:13  

And if you get stuck on that stuff, let me tell you a secret out there. All of our Strong Towns members, we get together for an Ask Strong Towns Anything every week for an hour. It is the Hogwarts School of the dark arts of Strong Towns. So if you're going through and you're looking at a budget decoder, and you're not a Strong Towns member, and you want to learn more, become a member and come and join us on one of these Wednesdays and bring your questions. I assure you, we get lots of questions about "Where do I find this? I ran the numbers, can you double check it?" The incredible thing about Ask Strong Towns Anything is that it's not just Norm and I sitting there talking to you. It's a whole group of other Strong Towns members that really understand this and care passionately about their community. When we talk about any of these programs and we go through any of those tools, there's a whole virtual room of folks that can provide insight. Through some of this, we found that there are regions that are now getting together because they figured out how to do the budget in one town, they're teaching the next town, and they want to show, as a region, that's it's not just a one-off city with a problem. That everybody has a problem. Every city has a slightly different problem, other than the financial piece, and we can start to look from that. So it's a really good excuse if you're not already a Strong Towns member, we would love for you to become a member and come join us for one of those sessions and hang out and really tackle this. People see these numbers and they think that you're some sort of wizard of math, and all you're saying is, "No, I just went back and looked at the 10 years of budget documents, and I'm just presenting the material in a way that we can all understand." You don't have to be an accountant to do it. You don't have to be a great orator to do it. It's a matter of starting that conversation, because now we start asking different questions.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  42:15  

Yeah, yeah. I love it, and I love the imagery of being all at Hogwarts. It doesn't just have to be Ravenclaws, the folks that are leaning into that stuff. It's actually the whole crew that gets involved, not just in Ask Strong Towns Anything, but doing the math, doing that work. Tthere's a sense of empowerment that comes with that. But we're going to move into the downzone. Edward, what do you got for us?

Edward Erfurt  42:43  

Well, I have been reading a book that somebody recommended to me. It has been on my list for a long time. Remember, I'm a geeky urbanist zoning person. I've been reading "Key to the city: How zoning shapes our world," by Sarah Bronin. Incredible read. I've got so many thoughts off of that, but if you're curious about what zoning is doing in your community, I would definitely take the time and read through it. I think the opening of the book is really great. She really sums up the struggles that we have with zoning. I'm trying to reconcile everything in the book to my personal experiences and our Strong Towns approach. I'll put it out there, because I think I like a little controversy and like the debates, I have a lot of pushback on chapters of the book because it is leading up to all of the benefits of zoning and how zoning could lead our cities to our beautiful and prosperous place. My pushback is that I don't think that's true, and I'll leave that cliffhanger because I more thoughts to share on that, but I don't think zoning is the way. I think for me, I have a different approach to zoning reform, and it's not better zoning.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  44:02  

Well, folks, if you want book talk with Ed, let's definitely figure out a way in which we make that a fourth podcast for Strong Towns, because I'd listen, and I think that'd be fantastic. I'll do something a little bit different, which is, I will say, if you are at all on LinkedIn, definitely follow and engage with Eric Kronberg's stuff. Eric is a real estate property developer as well as architect, and does a whole ton of great projects working with communities, especially in the Atlanta area. Eric posts amazing graphics that he says, "Use them, make them available," highlighting the benefits of things like backyard cottages. What happens when there are more participants at the street to be able to help an area to really thrive? So I would definitely recommend that. The other thing I've actually dropped into a previous Upzoned recording that I did with Abby, but I'm reading the book "Shade" by Sam Bloch, B, L, O, C, H, it's a Penguin Random House title, and it is fantastic. On, what is the effect of direct sunlight on the human body? What is it that we can learn from traditional development patterns through age old societies, how did they adapt to the sun? Even like, what does it take to live in a desert? We just did a podcast with Judith Rohnly in St George, Utah, about how you live in such a dry and arid community. And I just think that is something that now I just can't unsee as well, just the way in which we either do not make shade available, or the ways in which it just pops up. I was just in Pensacola, Florida, where their traditional pattern meant that they would have all of these balconies or overhangs over the street, and it was amazing. And yet, so many of our communities, I know in mine, you have to apply for special permits and all of these things that aren't going to be granted for encroachments. I'm like, That ain't an encroachment. That's a genuine improvement. Let's get shade to be much more of a prominent feature within our community. With that, thank you for listening to Upzoned today. I'm so glad that we have this continued audience of folks that want to take ideas and stories that are in the news and think about them from a Strong Towns perspective. You too can think like a Strong Towns advocate, and you too can take up the Strong Towns Finance Decoder and become part of what we're doing. And finally, you too can become a Strong Towns member, if you aren't already. We make all of those things easy and available to you, and we're so grateful for your support. So with that, thanks for listening to this episode of Upzoned. Thanks, Edward.

Edward Erfurt  46:41  

Thanks, Norm. Have a great one.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  46:42  

Yeah, you too. Cheers.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  46:45  

This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.