Competition.

As a free-market enthusiast, Norquist is out to end monopolies -- including those inside city government. For example, "internal service agencies" -- the in-house departments that provide other city agencies with basic services such as printing, maintenance, and technology -- are a hotbed of bureaucratic and monopolistic practices in many cities. When Norquist asked city employees to give a "customer-satisfaction rating" to Milwaukee's internal service agencies, he heard a host of complaints about high cost, low quality, and slow response.

The answer? Competition: Let city departments shop around among private contractors. Let the fire department, for example, hire an outside bidder to paint its firehouses in the summer -- when it's least disruptive to fire services -- instead of in the fall, when it's most convenient for the city's painters. (The fire department has implemented this plan successfully.)

The upshot, says Norquist, is that the city's own agencies got the message: They not only began to provide better services, but some also became competitive enough to win outside accounts. The city's MIS department, for instance, counts a local college and a sewage district among its clients.

Choice.

The way Norquist sees things, the innate "wealth" of cities provides people with lots of choices -- where to eat, what to buy, where to work, whom to hire. The one thing most city residents have virtually no choice in is schools. For parents with kids in grades K-12, there's the public-school system and -- unless you're wealthy -- nothing else. In other words, it's another monopoly, one that Norquist is determined to end. A program called Milwaukee Parental Choice has put vouchers worth $5,400 in the hands of low-income parents, allowing them to send their children to the public or private school of their choice. This school year, about 6,000 children are participating.

Norquist's advocacy of a choice program puts him smack in the middle of a national controversy over the best way to improve public education. But he's convinced that competition will serve only to make public schools better. "In a city, when you have choice and competition, it stimulates quality and creativity," he says. "When it comes to the schools, if you give parents -- the customers -- a little power, suddenly excellence starts to pop up."

Strategy.

Norquist encourages his managers to ask such questions as, What is the purpose of this organization? The answer, he says, is simple: to add value to the lives of Milwaukee's citizens. To make it easier for department heads to reach that goal, Norquist has redesigned the budget process: Gone is the traditional line-item budget that requires managers to justify every expense. Under Norquist's system, department heads get a fixed sum of money -- and more freedom to determine how to spend it to meet their goals.

"For example, we want Milwaukee to be a safe city," says Norquist, referring to his negotiations with city council members over the police department's budget. Instead of micromanaging the police department -- asking how many cops will be assigned, and where and when -- city officials now send a simple message: Reduce crime. "We don't want to hear about community-oriented policing or other techniques," Norquist says. "The police department used to have a three-page mission statement, and nobody could remember what its mission was. Now its mission is simple: to reduce crime and to improve the quality of life." Success is measured by outcomes -- and in the case of crime, it's down from a peak of 94.6 crimes per 1,000 residents in 1990 to 76.6 crimes per 1,000 at the end of 1997.

Norquist's unorthodox style of governing has won him many admirers -- his name gets bounced around nationally as part of a new breed of "progressives" and "pragmatists" who are reforming government. It's also earned him his fair share of enemies -- the state's powerful teachers' union, for one, is angry with him over his support for school vouchers. And African-American leaders say he hasn't done enough to work with their constituents.

As a fast mayor in the slow-to-change world of politics, Norquist pays another price: For the time being, he's in political limbo, operating outside traditional party boundaries. But he isn't complaining. "I'm already at a very high level as mayor of the seventeenth-largest city in America," Norquist says. "And I have a forum where I can speak on national issues. I'm more ambitious about advancing ideas than I am about climbing up the political ladder. But I never rule anything out," he says. "Opportunity knocks -- you never know."

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