By Matthew Kredell
USC Price School of Public Policy professors Shui-Yan Tang and Mark Pisano were named winners of the Louis Brownlow Award by the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) for their research paper “Using Common-Pool Resource Principles to Design Local Government Fiscal Sustainability.”
The award recognizes the outstanding article for 2014 authored or co-authored by a practitioner in Public Administration Review, a leading scholarly journal in the field. It was presented March 10 in Chicago at ASPA’s 2015 Annual Conference.
Tang and Pisano co-authored the paper along with colleague Richard Callahan from the University of San Francisco.
“It’s recognition for the work of our team, that I think we did some interesting research that provides a promising way to think about and act on the issue of fiscal standards and jurisdiction in the current political environment,” said Pisano, who previously served as director of the Southern California Association of Governments for three decades.
“I’m really thankful to USC and the Price School for giving me the opportunity to participate with this team of researchers and co-authors,” he added.
Supported by three years of grants from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, they conducted case-study research on a dozen Southern California cities and counties, to see how local governments faced fiscal challenges. The paper focused specifically on three: Los Angeles County, San Bernardino County and the City of San Bernardino.
The critical element of the project was applying to local budgets the Nobel Prize-winning research of political economist Elinor Ostrom on common-pool resource, which seeks to protect and nurture a core resource to allow for its continuous exploitation.
“How to face the challenges of fiscal sustainability is more than a straight-forward budgetary question,” Tang said. “The great recession since 2009 has put a lot of local governments under extraordinary financial stresses, making this a good window to look at examples of what some cities and counties are doing better than others to try to summarize key lessons for government leaders.”
Among the article’s recommendations for improved fiscal sustainability were: extended tenures to encourage supervisors to consider the long-term impact of annual budget decisions; entry and exit capabilities for professional staff; and agreed-upon sanctioning capabilities for department heads who submit inflated budgetary requests.
Pisano indicated that he applied concepts of the research when helping to craft the Enhanced Infrastructure Financing Districts legislation signed into law last year by California Gov. Jerry Brown.
In addition, Mark won’t be the only Pisano receiving an award at the ASPA Conference. His wife, Jane, who served as dean of what is now USC Price for nearly seven years in the 1990s, is being honored with the Nesta Gallas Award for Exemplary Professionalism in Public Service.