change - John Norquist

Title: Mayor
Company: The City of Milwaukee
Location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Age: 49

He certainly doesn't sound like a politician - least of all, like a Democrat. When John Norquist talks, he sounds exactly like a change agent: a man committed to cutting costs, improving productivity, adding value, and getting bureaucracy out of the way.

In fact, Norquist is a change agent who also happens to be both a Democrat and a politician -- and a popular one at that. Now in his third four-year term as mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Norquist has made a career out of overturning conventional political thinking: For 10 years, he's been forging a new way to run his city -- faster, cheaper, and better. "You want to raise quality, not just spend money," says Norquist, sitting behind his desk, a huge, drawerless library table in his second-floor office at City Hall. ("Things get lost in drawers," he says.) "The goal is the success of the people of Milwaukee," he says, "not the growth of government. The idea is for people to thrive. We organize our efforts to add value to people's lives."

Success, says Norquist, should be measured by outcomes. So by his own standard, how does Norquist measure up? Every year that he's been in office, Norquist has cut the city's tax rates -- leaving more than $31 million in the hands of Milwaukee residents and local businesses. Over the last eight years, Norquist has reduced city spending by more than 20% in real dollars -- with the city spending money at a rate at or below the rate of inflation (a budgetary tool dubbed "Norquist's Law" by an admiring Michael Barone, formerly an editor at U.S. News and World Report). And since he took office, he's cut the city payroll by 730 positions, a 10% reduction.

At the same time, the city's unemployment rate has dropped to about 4.5%. Property values have risen citywide -- including in low-income neighborhoods -- by 7.5%. Crime is down to its lowest levels since the mid-1980s. And workers' wages, measured in real terms, have increased at a rate that is three times as high as the national average.

The city itself has a certain buzz. Not the roar of Manhattan, to be sure, but a healthy midwestern hum. In the Third Ward, a historic warehouse district that's home to a thriving arts community, eager buyers are snapping up loft spaces before renovation can even begin. Along the once-neglected shores of the Milwaukee River, which runs through the city's downtown, a just-completed two-mile-long RiverWalk has drawn a mix of restaurants, businesses, and housing developments. "I believe that cities add value to civilization," says Norquist, whose recent book, "The Wealth of Cities: Revitalizing the Centers of American Life" (Addison Wesley, 1998), outlines a blueprint for revitalizing America's urban centers. "I look at my job as being that of a facilitator. I try to put together the kind of vision that people want to have for the city."

Norquist's strategies require thinking outside the box -- way outside the box. To start with, he's broken with a 50-year tradition among U.S. mayors, who have tended to pin the health of their cities on the largesse of the federal government. For example, when the U.S. Conference of Mayors met in an emergency session after the 1992 Los Angeles riots over the Rodney King trial -- and decided to use the occasion to press the federal government for more aid -- Norquist didn't agree. "For cities to associate themselves with that calamity was counterproductive," he says. "Imagine that you're a private-sector corporation, and you say, 'We're about to go out of business. It's dangerous to be near us. We could explode into riots at any moment. Now send us money.' We should reject this strategy of trying to build a city on fear and pity."

But Norquist is not a big fan of federal money in the first place. From his perspective, federally funded highways and housing policies have led only to the decline of big cities -- encouraging suburban sprawl at the expense of healthy urban centers. "If you look at the ways the federal government has tried to 'help,' " he says, "you'll almost always find that things get screwed up."

Norquist's key to success means doing more with less, trying to unlock the wealth of a city rather than to redistribute it. Unlike states and nations, he says, cities are "creations of a marketplace." They spring up at crossroads of commerce -- at places like a good port or the intersection of rail lines. And they thrive as the market thrives, with a ready supply of labor, a strong demand for goods, and a constant stream of creativity.

It's a view of city government that means less bureaucracy and more enterprise. It also includes a mind-set that sees citizens as customers, "as people you want to please." Some of his solutions may seem surprisingly simple. But at City Hall, Norquist's ideas amount to a revolution. Here are some of his innovations.