Would you kindly remove your thick, stubby hands from my beautiful state?

C’mon—don’t try to look all Midwestern and innocent. You know exactly what I’m talking about. For years Chicago has been grabbing signature California institutions and screwing them up.

I get a reminder of your mismanagement every night when I turn on the television to watch my local baseball team, the L.A. Dodgers. Of course, the Dodgers aren’t on—they aren’t even available on televisions in nearly 70 percent of the Los Angeles market. The reason? Mark Walter of Chicago.

Specifically, Walter’s firm Guggenheim Partners, a financial services company with headquarters in Chicago and New York, paid too much for the Dodgers—more than $2 billion a few years ago. And to cover that price, the Guggenheim-owned Dodgers greedily sold TV rights to Time Warner Cable for a sum so high that other cable providers, understandably, refused to pay to carry Dodger games. So the majority of Southern Californians who don’t get Time Warner have been unable to watch Dodger games for more than two years.

Walter, the Chicagoan at the head of this toxic deal, couldn’t even manage to get the games on the air for this, the final season in the career of esteemed announcer Vin Scully, thus separating L.A. from its favorite voice. And there’s this irony; since this deal also blocks internet transmission of games to anyone in Southern California, people in Chicago can watch Dodger games even while people in Los Angeles can’t.

Then, in the morning, when I go out to my driveway to find out who won the game Chicago wouldn’t let me see, I encounter another local voice badly damaged by you Chicagoans: my latest copy of the Los Angeles Times.

Since Tribune Company bought the Times in 2000, California’s biggest newspaper has suffered under waves of Chicago executives who made big promises while cutting the number of reporters and pages. What’s your secret, Chicago—how exactly do you produce so many corporate mediocrities? Full disclosure: I worked at the Times for the first eight years of this ongoing Chicago occupation, before quitting after meeting Sam Zell, a Chicago real estate billionaire who is simply the most profane and dishonest person I have ever encountered in a professional setting.

More bad media news: Chicago now also owns the San Diego Union-Tribune; the latest Tribune chairman, Michael Ferro has been boasting that he has some virtual reality machine that will magically transform local newspapers into profitable global concerns. Reportedly, it achieves perpetual motion too. (How did our engineers in Silicon Valley miss this?)

Northern California has also seen a disturbance in the force emanating from your town, Chicago. Two years ago, Chicago lured away the great California filmmaker George Lucas, promising lakefront land for a museum housing his art and Hollywood memorabilia. This choice was inexplicable on many levels, including the meteorological—as the author Nelson Algren put it, “Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.”

Fortunately for us, Chicago’s leaders are flubbing the whole deal—the project has been held up—and San Francisco seems likely to lure back Lucas’ museum by offering prime land on Treasure Island. (So shed no tears for the billionaire filmmaker.)

Why do Chicago-California marriages go wrong? The short answer: clashing cultures. California burst on the scene quickly, with a premium on speed, while Chicago, in the words of novelist Neil Gaiman, “happened slowly, like a migraine.”

Also consider that the defining poem of Chicago, Carl Sandburg’s 1914 masterpiece about the “City of Big Shoulders,” actually boasts that your city is “wicked” and “crooked” and “brutal.” California, requiring finesse, can’t compare to your city of butchers in these regards. (Just look at how Boeing, which moved its headquarters from Seattle to Chicago in 2001, has cut jobs in what’s left of California’s aerospace industry.)

Chicago’s inability to handle delicate work is perhaps most evident in the surprisingly difficult relationship between California and that Chicagoan in the White House. What should have been a natural alignment between a liberal president and a liberal state has been undermined by the deep-dish stubbornness of Obama.

The president and his Chicago education secretary Arne Duncan should have been natural partners for California Democrats eager to do more for schools after years of cuts. Instead, California and Chicago fought bitterly, often because of Duncan’s inflexible insistence on imposing the same uniform policies on a state with so many wildly different regions.

Obama also managed to alienate Silicon Valley, which supported his campaigns, by demanding that tech firms behave like appendages of his intelligence apparatus. And, for much of Obama’s presidency, his administration devoted more energy to deporting our undocumented friends and neighbors than to delivering on his promise of legalizing their status, so they can contribute even more to California’s success as an economy and society.

Forgive me for also mentioning how Obama infuriated millions of California commuters who voted for him—including yours truly—with his knack for blocking rush-hour traffic during his endless political fundraising trips here. It’s as if he didn’t understand that our big cities don’t have an “L” elevated train like you do in Chicago to get around Secret Service roadblocks. These visits were almost always more about him taking from California (campaign dollars and Hollywood-tech cachet) than about giving anything, even his attention, to us. Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto and Republican governors seeking to lure our companies to their states have had more public conversations with real Californians than Obama.

To be fair, in other contexts Chicago pig-headedness has obscured California’s own failings. No one really talks about our state budget problems anymore given the length and bitterness of the struggles over public finances in your city and state. Yes, we did elect an Austrian action star as governor, but he—unlike a couple of your recent governors—never went to prison. And our pension problems and a recent spike in crime don’t look nearly so daunting compared to the size of those problems in Illinois.

All of this begs the question: Why do you keep meddling in our state’s challenges when you have so many giant problems of your own?

Please, for our good and yours, butt out of California, and get back to doing the things you do best.

Like screwing up our connecting flights.

Sincerely,
Joe Mathews

The post Stay Out of California, Chicago! appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

So why doesn’t my state make things easier for me? In this internet age, shouldn’t there be a one-stop shop where I can go to renew my driver’s license and vehicle registration, register to vote, research state records, pay all my state and local taxes, and buy passes to take the family to a state park?

Mine is not a new notion. To the contrary, the one-stop shop for government services is one of the oldest and most repeated ideas in California governance—a staple of candidate position papers, chamber of commerce white papers, and commission reports. In the last year, California worthies have suggested one-stop online shops for poor people to sign up for multiple public assistance programs at once, for businesses to handle all their permitting and licensing, and for California parents signing up for child care.

“Imagine if Californians had one personalized log-in account to manage all their business with the state, from updating address information and voter registration to paying taxes and applying for and managing benefits, ” the Little Hoover Commission, the state’s independent oversight agency, suggested dreamily last fall. “And they could do it all from a mobile device while taking the bus to soccer practice or at home after putting their children to bed for the night.”

These are sweet dreams, kids. And they are only dreams. Because, like the Holy Grail, the effective California one-stop shop exists only in the realm of myth.

Why?

Here’s my one-stop answer: California has too many governments—literally thousands of them—and nearly every single one sees compliance with its separate standards and rules as a way to protect its very existence.

Indeed, our state government seems designed with the opposite of one-stop shopping as its guiding principle. California has more permitting agencies than most other states, all sorts of strange regional bodies, huge incentives for endless litigation, a divide between local governments that oversee land use and state agencies that regulate what you can do on the land, and the California Environmental Quality Act, which can kill almost any worthwhile project.

Hence, the paradox of the one-stop shop: Californians need one-stop shops to deal with the government because of the very inefficiencies that make creating one-stop shops nearly impossible here.

This paradox is also why the idea of the one-stop shop (though not the reality) is so very useful. It’s an essential dodge for politicians and governments that have no real interest in doing the hard work of consolidating agencies and making things clearer and more efficient for us taxpayers. So they instead invoke the magical notion that they will somehow put all the different layers of government and regulation together in one place.

Given the dysfunction these one-stop shops are proposed to mask, it’s hardly surprising that they ever make it very far off the ground. That’s why you’re constantly reading about the abandonment of state government technology projects—from payroll to the courts—that were supposed to upgrade and combine different systems. While such abandonments can waste hundreds of millions of dollars, they can be preferable to those rare moments when our governments actually open things that purport to be a one-stop shop.

If you must visit such places, you’ll sometimes wish you hadn’t. The best-known example is the Covered California exchange, which is supposed to be a one-stop shop for health insurance. Its main virtue is that it produces so many errors, unexpected cancellations, and unexplained switches into the Medi-Cal morass that it has inspired the creation of whole industries of consultants and fixers to help those who must navigate it.

Then there’s the much-touted California Business Portal, launched last year by the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz) with the goal of helping people start businesses. The site skillfully lays out all the things you need to do, but it doesn’t provide what you need to get it done then and there: one form that could be filled out and sent to all the governments that must approve your enterprise. And once you’ve seen the sea of requirements on the portal, any business owner with any sense and dollars would hire lawyers and consultants to manage the process.

It’s true that the private sector has developed what are effectively one-stop shops—but those are rare and require a corporate dictator, like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos or Uber’s Travis Kalanick, crazed enough to destroy old industries. The few governments around the world able to pull off the one-stop shop don’t have America’s system of divided government and competing jurisdictions. Check out Great Britain’s miraculous GOV.UK, and dream of a California parliament.

For now, the best option available to those who want customer-friendly service in California is to hire consultants and lobbyists. The absence of a one-stop shop has been a boon to such influence peddlers; the numbers of lobbyists and other fixers keeps growing, a trend visible when you visit Sacramento and see the newer offices and restaurants around the Capitol.

Which gives me an idea. If California governments won’t give us a one-stop shop for the state, the least they can do is provide Californians with their own fixers. That’s right—concierges for all! With a ballot measure, we could make concierge service a constitutional right.

California government has experimented with concierge-style service before. Veterans of Pete Wilson’s administration like to talk about the “Red Teams”—essentially, concierges for companies—it organized in the 1990s. But concierges-for-all would be much costlier, with most of the approximately 100,000 (my best estimate) concierges being private contractors rather than government employees (we couldn’t afford the pensions).

These concierges wouldn’t have to wear uniforms or those golden-key badges like real hotel concierges—unless they were into that sort of thing. But each California adult would be assigned a concierge; we’d receive our concierge’s email and cell phone, and we could put them on speed dial like we do with the plumber or the dentist. These concierges would have to respond to our requests in 48 hours, and state and local officials would have to respond to their requests in 24 hours. Our concierges would have the power to secure permits and licenses, make appointments for us with any government official, or even schedule visits to our relatives who might be doing time in state prisons.

Call it a dream if you like, but it’s no less dreamy than a one-stop shop. Really, I want nothing from California government, except somebody whose job it is to get me whatever I need right now.

The post Can California Bundle Its Bureaucracy Into a Single Handy Website? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.