LEVIATHAN IN THE SUBURBS

Republicans who have caught devolution fever ought to pause long enough to cast a southward glance across the Potomac to the city of Alexandria, Virginia. There they will find that despite their best intentions big government is not disappearing; it’s merely moving to the suburbs.

In many respects, Alexandria represents the ideal of a modern suburb. Located only a silver dollar’s throw from Washington, the 16-square-mile city is tidy and prosperous. Its 116,000 residents are ethnically diverse — 64 percent white, 22 percent black, 10 percent Hispanic, 4 percent Asian — and boast a per capita income of over $ 34,000, nearly twice the national aver- age. The median home value is $ 228,000. The historic Old Town section, where I live, is one of the area’s most picturesque neighborhoods and a popular tourist destination.

“If you’re looking for a people’s republic, you won’t find it here,” Assistant City Manager Tom Brannan assured me. True, Alexandria isn’t one of those screeching left-wing cities like Berkeley or Santa Monica that enact their own foreign policies and gouge landlords with confiscatory rent control. As cities go, this one is relatively well managed, one of only 15 nationwide to boast AAA bond ratings from both of Wall Street’s major credit agencies.

And yet the city is a “liberal fiefdom,” charges columnist and Alexandria resident Cal Thomas, “one of the last bastions of liberalism in government.” The city’s government is bloated, expensive, intrusive, involved in far too many functions — and in all this, typical of local governments across America.

The premise underlying devolution — calling to mind nostalgic memories of small-town democracy — is that local government is closer to the people, more responsive, and less intrusive. But the premise is a myth, and perhaps it was ever so. Even a century and a half ago, Alexis de Tocqueville commented on the “exasperating interference in a multitude of minute details” in which local governments engage, wherein “tastes as well as actions are to be regulated.”

Tocqueville couldn’t have known it then, but he was presciently depicting the Alexandria Board of Architectural Review, whose exasperating interference in matters of personal taste is the stuff of local legend. The board has jurisdiction over all new construction and exterior renovations lhat are visible to the public in the historic district, no matter how trivial. One current controversy pits a homeowner who wants to replace a wrought-iron gate with a wooden one against activists from the Old Town Civic Association who complain they no longer will be able to peer into his front yard.

The process to secure from the Board of Architectural Review a “Certificate of Appropriateness” is tedious and oppressive. An application must be filed along with a $ 30 fee, which triggers a public hearing. The property owner mut notify neighbors of their right to object, and notice of the public hearing is posted on the property and in local newspapers. All applications are referred to the city archaeologist, the Department of Transportation and Environmental Services, Code Enforcemont, the Zoning Department, and the Offce of Historic Alexandria for conformance to their regulations.

Following the public hearing, the board may approve or deny the application or defer it for restudy. The board’s discretion is bounded only by the city council, which has the power to review denials. (Civicminded Alexandrians get to watch these festivities on the local cable channel.) The reward for most property owners who manage to secure a Certificate of Appropriateness is the chance to start yet another administrative process, this time l;or a building permit.

All this recently proved too much for a young Old Town couple who had the temerity to build a gazebo and hot tub in their backyard without obtaining permission. An alert local bureaucrat happened to notice the structure from the street and reported it to the city, which commenced proceedings against the couple. Forced to hire a lawyer and endure endless hearings, the couple ultimately was ordered to take the gazebo down. Eventually the city acknowledged it had made an error and decided to permit the gazebo, but only after the couple had sold the house and fled to Fairfax County. Former neighbor John McCaslin recalls, “They couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.”

Is the Board of Architectural Review too heavy-handed? “Sometimes it does go a little too far,” acknowledges Vice-Mayor Kerry Donley. On the other hand, he adds, “George Washington didn’t have a hot tub, when you come right down to it.”

In this hopelessly overgoverned city, the Board of Architectural Review is only one of 74 boards, commissions, committees, task forces, and authorities, ranging from the Human Rights Commission to the Commission for the Arts, the Commission for Women, and the Waterfront Committee. Not all have regulatory authority, but many do.

Hidden enclaves within the bureaucracy wield noteworthy discretion as well. Even the city arborist, with a staff of five full-time employees who tend and regulate trees, can wreak havoc with property owners. “Any development within the city must proceed according to a plan,” offers city arborist Joe Noelle. ” There are always certain requirements which must be met.”

Indeed, despite the assertion in its business license handbook, “The City of Alexandria Welcomes Your Business,” it is nearly as costly and difficult to own and operate a business as it is to own and enjoy property. William Cleveland, the only Republican on the six-member city council and architect of the city’s enterprise zone, acknowledges that “some rules do preclude small businesses from coming into Alexandria.”

That’s an understatement. Even before starting a business, the owner must register it; obtain certificates of use and occupancy (and, if the business is operated in Old Town, a certificate of appropriateness); secure a business license and pay the requisite fee; and seek some or all of 11 other permits ranging from building to electrical to hydrants to parking.

Businesses are subject to local real estate, business, personal property, utility, meal sales, and transient lodging taxes. They also must comply with the city’s human rights ordinance and its 20 pages of implementing regulations, which prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orieatation and numerous other bases and require companies contracting with the city to adopt affirmative action goals and timetables.

The business license code, which is being overhauled in conformance wi h model state legislation, is a sight to behold. It subjects literally hundreds of business activities, even plant sitting and window cleaning, to business license and fee requirements. Anyone operating a business without a license is subject to a fine of $ 500 per day. Some categories are reserved for specially harsh treatment: “Every fortuneteller, clairvoyant, phrenologist, spirit medium, chiromancer, astrologist, hypnotist or palmist operating in the city shall pay for the privilege an annual license tax of $ 1,000, and this license tax shall not be prorated.”

With all these regulations it is little surprise that businesses in Alexandria fail at an alarming rate. When Old Town’s Henry Africa restaurant closed its doors after 17 years in 1993, owner Marlene Radford posted on the vacant storefront windows a scathing bill of particulars. “Take a look at your city offcials,” the poster-sized placards proclaimed. “It has become clear to me . . . they act as dose-minded, short-sighted bureaucrats who make pooxly timed, poorly communicated and half-thought-out decisions that adversely affect the businesses and. private citizens of Old Town.”

While Alexandria is hard on private-sector businesses, it runs plenty of its own. The city operates four medical facilities, a Center for Employment Training, seven full-time recreation centers, the Torpedo Factory art center, a bus system, a 65-bed homeless shelter, and 3,681 units of subsidized and public housing.

Over all this presides City Manager Vola Lawson, a 25-year city employee who not only prepares the budget and administers city functions, but also, as president of the Alexandria Transit Company, literally makes sure the buses run on time. Not necessarily profitably: The bus system derives less than half its operating revenue from rider fares. Far more than the part-time city council, it is Lawson who runs the city.

All this government costs lots of money, $ 300 milion in fiscal year 1996 (up from $ 282 million last year). The city derives its local revenue primarily from real estate taxes, fees, and a s eep annual tax on personal property (mainly cars), 4.75 percent of assessed value. Not surprisingly, the city is always looking for new revenue, whether through real estate development exactions, property reassessnents, or parking fines.

The city likes to boast of its stable property tax rate, but appearances are deceiving. “It sounds good until you’ve found they’ve doubled your assessed value,” observes Cal Thomas. Case in point, he recently moved into a new townhouse before the surrounding development was completed. The following year, with the development finished, the city raised the valuation of his lot by $ 100,000. Given a property tax rate of $ 1.07 per $ 100 valuation, this tidy bookkeeping maneuver cost Thomas nearly $ 1,100 a year in extra taxes with no increase in services.

Thomas hired a lawyer and has challenged the assessment through two levels of appeal, so far to no avail — despite evidence that the city is assessing houses in the development $ 200,000 over true market value. The assessment scheme is an “outrageous assault on the earned income of citizens,” Thomas charges. “They need your dough, and they’ll find a way to get it.”

The focus on revenue rankles long-time resident McCaslin. Voicing concerns to city offcials over a sudden rise in crime in his Old Town neighborhood — eight armed holdups occurred in a recent one-week period — McCaslin was advised to start a Neighborhood Watch program. That’s fine, McCaslin says, but what about police priorities? “In their drive to get revenues,” he observes, “they have people ticketing cars all day, instead of having police offcers driving around.”

Like most cities, Alexandria spends the largest share of its budget on schools: in fiscal year 1996, $ 96 million, nearly one-third of its budget. This amounts to a whopping $ 10,139 per student, which is twice the national average and nearly as much as the area’s most elite private schools.

Yet the system delivers mediocre results: Children in the city’s schools rank from the 42nd to the 67th percentile in basic skills for grades 3-8 and from the 39th to the 58th percentile for high school. Not surprisingly, many of the city’s more affluent families are abandoning the public schools or moving away.

Why then the exorbitant cost? In Alexandria, more than half the school system’s employees are non-teaching persortnel, while in neighboring Arlington and Fairfax counties the share is around 40 percent. This echoes a national trend: Between 1980 and 1992, the number of public school teachers declined bl2 percent, but the number of bureaucrats climbed 17 percent, absorbing an everincreasing share of public ;chool budgets.

As in most cities, the demand in Alexandria is for more government, not less. More than most, Alexandria is a city by bureaucrats for bureaucrats. Even though Mayor Patsy Ticer insists that “local government here has not grown,” its payroll continues to balloon, rising from 3,465 in 1993 to 3,770 today, a nearly 10 percent increase over two years despite minimal population growth. Not counting school personnel, Alexandria employs 175 people per 10, 000 population, a ratio higher than the bloated bureaucracies of Chicago (148 per 10,000) and Los Angeles (140) and nearly twice as many as San Diego (93). City government is the second largest employer in Alexandria, after only the Defense Department (11,437 employees), and employs twice as many people as the city’s largest private employer.

This too follows a national pattern: State and local government is growing. Since 1980, the share of all civilian government personnel employed by state and local governments increased from 82 to 84 percent. In other words, the state and local governments are five times larger than the civilian federal government, and the gap is widening. Between 1980 and 1992, the number of federal civilian employees climbed about 3 percent, to 3 million, while the number employed by local governments grew nearly 16 percent, to 11.1 million; and local government debt nearly tripled, to $ 599 billion.

Even local offcials are wary of the challenges of devolution. “No, we’re not excited about receiving all those new functions,” concedes Ticer, an unrepentant liberal who in November cost Republicans control of the Virginia state senate by unseating an incumbent. Vice-Mayor Donley, who will become interim mayor, expands upon this point: “The notion of devolution is not merely a shift of responsibility but of tax burden financed mainly through regressive forms of taxation.” ;ince local governments possess limited tax options — mainly taxing property and businesses the cost of added functions will fall on the shoulders of homeowners and consumers.

But the far more ominous threat posed by giving state and local governments greater power is their propensity toward grassroots tyranny. “Devolution to the states?” asked Bob Woodson of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise at a recent meeting on empowerment. “The states are the problem! Most of the regulations and barriers that our activists face are at the state and local level.”

A recurrent issue is special-interest influence at the local level, whether through public-employee and teachers unions much more influential than their national counterparts — -or through cause-oriented groups. Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda understood this in the 1980s when they organized the Campaign for Economic Democracy, which turned several California cities into laboratories for wealth redistribution. In England, Margaret Thatcher relentlessly attacked local councils as bastions of socialism th at stood in the way of her campaign to restore individual sovereignty.

The point many conservatives miss in their zeal for devolution is that states and cities are just another form of big government And they touch ordinary Americans in ways far more personal and meaningful than the national government. In the sometimes mischievous, sometimes malign ways it exercises its sweeping powers over education, business, taxation, and private property, Alexandria exemplifies contemporary city government.

City Manager Vola Lawson — unelected and largely unknown to ordinary citizens — has a greater day-to-day impact on the lives of Alexandrians than does Bill Clinton.

If all the congressional Republican majority accomplishes is the transfer of power from one set of bureaucrats to another, in the end it will have effectuated little fundamental change. A real devolution revolution will empower individuals and the communities they choose to organize, not local fiefdoms. ,

Clint Bolick is litigation director for the Institute for Justice in Washington, D.C., and the author of Grassroots Tyranny.