Goldsmith concludes that cities must stop asking for federal handouts, reduce the size of government, break up government monopolies, push authority down to the grassroots, and nurture value-promoting institutions.

He ominously warns that devolution may not necessarily work in the best interests of cities, that welfare reform has not gone nearly far enough, that the criminal justice system is not prepared for the coming increase in violent juvenile crime, and that education reform remains the biggest challenge to improving the quality of life in cities.

When Goldsmith took office in Indianapolis in 1992, the city faced many of the same problems as other cities, including an inefficient unionized work force and competition from the suburbs.

His vision was to inject competitive forces into almost every part of government to better serve the public, gleaning from experience that competition is not necessarily the same as privatization.

Conceding that raising taxes would force more people into the suburbs, Goldsmith decided that his best option was to lower costs. He determined, for example, that analyzing the costs of a service, such as filling a pothole, could lead to changes that cut or eliminated wastes of time and money.

That initial venture proved an immediate success. The city had previously been paying $425 a ton filling potholes with asphalt. A new proposal brought the city's cost down to $307 a ton, a 25 percent reduction.

Confronted with privatization, union workers in several departments ended up bidding on their own jobs and keeping them, with significant efficiency gains.

Wastewater treatment was bid out to a private company at a savings of $65 million in five years, with cleaner water leaving the plant.

Before the Goldsmith era, the city operated three print shops at a cost of $1.4 million annually. After the work was contracted out, Pitney-Bowes was able to do all the tasks the city had done plus more, for only $1 million a year.

Under Goldsmith, Indianapolis applied this lesson over the next eight years to 70 areas of service.

In the first years of his administration alone, he claimed a cumulative $230 million in savings, allowing him to cut the city's budget while adding police officers and expanding infrastructure spending.

“Competition, not privatization, made the difference,” he says.

By the end of his second term he had orchestrated more than $1.5 billion in new or rehabilitated parks, streets, sidewalks and sewers. He reduced the tax rate four times.

“More cops and lower taxes - I think that struck a chord,” he explains.

Goldsmith stirred controversy once by proclaiming that a city could effectively be run with “just a mayor, a police chief, a planning director, a purchasing agent and a handful of contract monitors.”

That’s tough talk from a tough mayor, who never conceded his principles. In the end the voters took notice of results and not the rhetoric.

Bret Schundler: Empowerment

At age 33, Bret Schundler became the first Republican to be elected mayor in Jersey City since World War I. In 1993, he was re-elected with 69 percent of the vote, the largest margin of victory for a mayor in that community’s history. In 1997, he was re-elected in another landslide to become Jersey City’s longest-serving mayor in 50 years – all this in a community that is 65 percent minority, largely working-class, and only marginally Republican.

“When I talk about empowerment I don’t just talk about the philosophy. I talk about it in practical terms, like lowering taxes and empowering people with more disposable income,” Schundler says. “There’s nothing abstract about that.”

In the years prior to Schundler’s initial mayoral election, property taxes in Jersey City were soaring, and the city was leading the state in job losses. Unemployment and crime were on the rise, and Jersey City was facing bankruptcy, as taxpayers increasingly walked away from depreciating properties. The city’s tax collection rate fell to 82 percent.

Worse, the city was locked down by the infamous Democrat machine founded by Frank Hague. For 75 years the machine controlled the two-thirds minority vote in the crime-ridden city of 230,000 people across the Hudson River from Manhattan.

“The first city into an abyss is the first city to realize that it has to get out of the abyss,” Schundler told the people in his standard stumping speeches. “People were looking for a new direction.”

Schundler astounded New Jersey Democrats by narrowly winning a special election, then earning a full term six months later.

He immediately set out to head Jersey City in a new direction, hallmarked by deregulation, privatization, school vouchers, enterprise zones and fiscal restraint.

Early on, he took a big bite out of city spending, lowered taxes, improved Jersey City’s investment bond rating, put more police on the Streets and brought in new jobs.

At his swearing-in to his first full term, Jack Kemp, longtime U.S. representative from New York and a secretary of Housing and Urban Development, noted that the reforms the new mayor was backing would have an effect not only in Jersey City, but also in “every city in the nation.”

Schundler pioneered the securitization of property tax liens, an initiative that was named by financial trade journals as one of the top innovations of the year in 1993. He orchestrated the successful fight to pass charter school legislation in New Jersey, and led Jersey City to becoming the first governmental entity in the U.S. to institute medical savings accounts.

Furthermore, Schundler introduced business and neighborhood improvement districts to Jersey City and helped to coordinate a successful effort to de-monopolize garbage disposal in New Jersey. He then implemented a public-private water utility partnership honored by the United States Conference of Mayors as the best public-private partnership in the country that year.

Over time, he led Jersey City to becoming the second city in the United States to privatize the management of its library, and opened one of New Jersey’s largest charter schools.

All this from a guy with a privileged Harvard background and conservative ideology, who rolled his sleeves up to campaign in Jersey City’s heavily ethnic working-class neighborhoods.

A devout Christian, Schundler struck a chord with his hallmark quotes from Scriptures: “He who does not work does not eat.”

“We shortchange our kids when we don’t teach them that you don’t find happiness only through self gratification. We need to empower people with the values that enable them to make contributions, and we need to provide rewards for successful contributions,” Schundler explains.

Eschewing traditional politics in Jersey City, where for years many homeowners skipped paying their property taxes, Schundler sold $45 million in tax liens to a bank trust and applied the proceeds to the city budget as part of his plan to reduce property taxes by a third over four years.

His policing policies reduced crime by almost 40 percent.

As a legacy of his administration, Jersey City’s property values have skyrocketed, and its tax collection rate stands at more than 99 percent.

Norman Coleman: 'Get Things Done'

In 1993, Norm Coleman, a prosecutor and attorney, was elected mayor of St. Paul as a conservative Democrat. In 1996, however, he joined the Republican Party and was re-elected in 1997 as the city's first Republican mayor in more than 25 years, receiving almost 60 percent of the vote.

He made a try for the Governor’s Mansion in 1998 and narrowly lost to Jesse Ventura.

Like Goldsmith and Schundler, Coleman set out to use the private sector to improve downtown.

Under his stewardship, taxes were reduced and business was brought to the table to provide jobs and other forms of economic development, including $1.7 billion worth of riverfront development.

During his successful senatorial campaign, now Sen. Coleman, R-Minn., often reminded the voters of his successes as mayor of St. Paul:

“I ask the people of Minnesota to look at my record, look at the things I did as the mayor of your capital city in which we didn’t raise taxes in eight years, in which we grew 18,000 jobs, and we had $3.5 billion worth of investment, in which we had the first AAA bond rating in the history of the city…”

What Coleman doesn’t mention in that quote is that there was a zero percent increase in the property tax levy for the eight years of his administration, a doubling of the value of taxable property in the core downtown, and increases in property value in every neighborhood.

Add to that his feat of securing a National Hockey League franchise and a $175 million arena.

Along the way, he helped create a new $90 million Science Museum of Minnesota, and brought Minnesota’s largest software company to downtown St. Paul.

Always on the move, an indefatigable Coleman helped in planting 35,000 trees and shrubs along the urban corridor of the Mississippi River and was instrumental in recapturing brown fields and creating new uses for discarded land.

Not known for standing strictly on party lines, he had as his motto: “I just like to get things done.”

And get things done, he did.

In eight years as mayor, Coleman expanded community-based policing, forged exemplary models of choice and parental involvement through traditional government school programs, as well as innovative charter schools - bringing 20 new charter schools to Saint Paul.

He created a national model for building public/private partnerships, bringing together the top 20 CEOs of the region to create the Capital City Partnership, which is committed to promoting, marketing and developing St. Paul.

Like Goldsmith and Schundler, Coleman forged a national reputation for lifting a city up by its bootstraps.

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