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ABSTRACT
Special districts now constitute about 42% of all U.S. jurisdictions, yet little is known about them. Some critics are concerned that special districts and their staffs have insufficient community commitment. This study, based on a national survey of senior managers in large special districts, examines activities and programs of special district managers that foster community building and engagement, including correlates of these. Study results reveal that special districts are committed to their communities and several strategies and conditions are associated with increased community commitment, such as jobs that focus on community interactions, service type, and ethics management, as well as, to a lesser extent, graduate degree qualifications and charters that specify the role of managers in promoting the public interest and in relation to the board.
Notes
Specifically, there are 37,203 special districts and 35,886 municipalities and townships according to the latest decennial Census of 2012. This represents about 42% of all governmental units, up from 20% of governmental units in the 1970s, and 10% in the 1950s (12,340 in 1952). In 2002, the number of special districts and cities were about the same (35,356 and 35,937; U.S. Census 2012; 2002).
Also Burns 1994; Hamilton 1988; Hankerson 1956; Manson 1987; McDowell and Ugone 1982.
Other systematic research on special districts, while growing, deals with other matters such as job satisfaction, local boundary change, governing arrangements, district incorporation and dissolution (Bauroth 2009; Beitsch 2005; Feiock and Carr 2001; West and Berman 2009).
The Census definition excludes school districts. Most special-purpose districts perform services in a single function, but some are authorized by their enabling legislation to provide services in several different functions. According to a 2002 Census, about 91% perform a single function (U.S. Census 2002). The classification of an entity as a special district requires judgment of the criteria mentioned in the text.
Relevant examples of literature in community development and policy studies include Conroy and Berke 2004; Beebe et al. 2001; Shepherd and Rothenbuhler 2001; Hunter and Staggenborg 1986. Within public administration, “community commitment” is also part of such broader constructs as public service motivation and “publicness.” This study, and its measures, focus on specific activities mentioned in the text.
The phrase “positions whose primary purpose is active engagement with communities” should not be confused with job titles of positions such as “community relations” which, in practice, do not necessarily involve much active engagement (e.g., only media releases). The survey items use the term “job” and clearly refer to people in organizations whose main work activity is foremost active engagement with their community.
“Large” refers to the organization, such as by number of employees or budget, rather than the geographic size of service area.
Hospitals are excluded because individual patient health care may not be foremost affected by community values explored here. Even though some public hospitals also have broad, community-based public health roles, these are but a fraction of total operations. This study does include organizations whose primary focus is public health. Also, as defined by the census, the term “special district governments” excludes school district governments (U.S. Census 2002).
A reason for studying operating organizations is that our interests and survey items include organizations having jobs whose main purpose is coordinating with other public agencies or working with citizens and community leaders. Large operating organizations are more likely to have such jobs on account of direct contacts with citizens and task specialization, than smaller organizations that lack resources, staff, or specialization (Carver 1973; Christenson and Sachs 1980; DeHoog, Lowery, and Lyons 1990; Lyons and Lowery 1989). However, none of this should be taken to imply that smaller organizations or those with less staff could not have such jobs; indeed, it is conceivable that a special district which contracts for its service delivery chooses to have such positions in support of its management/policy functions. The extent of such possibilities is both beyond knowledge and our study population. Our study conclusions are limited to the study population, and we hope that future studies might examine such issues in other study populations.
As so little has been systematically researched about special districts, it seems reasonable to us to study top managers who are customarily assumed to have a broad overview of their organizations’ activities. This is analogous to why many studies of local government survey city managers. Also, some questions concern interactions with the board about which they are assumed to be knowledgeable based on their responsibilities.
We follow Whitehead, Groothuis, and Blomquist's (1993) analysis for non-response bias. Non-respondents were contacted by phone. For example, respondents and non-respondents do not vary much by how many years they have worked in their organization (16.9 vs. 15.1 years, p > .05), nor do they vary in perceptions of the importance of accountability to the governing board (very important or important: 77.6% vs. 80.0%, p > .05), or helping the board to assess the impact of program and policies and segment of the community (strongly agree or agree: 91.0% vs. 94.3%, p > .05).
This is supported by Goodman et al. (1998), discussed in the text earlier.
Botes and Van Rensburg (2000, 53) note “selective participatory practices can be avoided when development workers seek out various sets of interest rather than listening only to a few community leaders and prominent figures.”
A smooth interaction between board and executive directors is a key factor of board effectiveness (Herman and Renz 2004). Board practices should include whether executive officers provide suggestions or reactions regarding missions and community interests in nonprofit board governance.
Contemporary community development literature covers community-development orientation items selected in the current study. Botes and Van Rensburg (2000), for example, suggest that those who want to get involved in community development should respect the community's indigenous contribution as manifested in their knowledge and guard against the domination of some interest groups. In addition, they should also serve as good facilitators and catalysts of development that assist and stimulate the community to move forward.
We use EFA on our 10 items, and find that four factors are present. One item, “Senior Managers reach out to elected officials in the community,” loads moderately, at 0.40, on the construct community involvement, and all other items load at 0.72 or greater on each of the constructs. We support our EFA by testing the discriminant validity of the four constructs identified. We use average variance extracted analysis (AVE), as found in Fornell and Larcker (1981), which tests to see if the square root of every AVE value belonging to each latent construct is much larger than any correlation among any pair of latent constructs. We find that the square root of the AVE for community research is .78, community involvement in decision making is .80, community-focused board interactions is .87, and community development orientation is .80. All the square roots of the AVEs for our constructs are substantially larger than any of the correlations between any of the constructs which range from .24 to .46. This test for discriminant validity supports the validity of our EFA. We choose to use index variables (sum-up items) instead of saved factor scores due to the following reasons. First, variables designed to measure these four dimensions are well grounded in existing literature. Since they are conceptually distinctive, Cronbach's alpha and sum-up indices are as appropriate as factor scores. Second, it is easier to interpret index variables than factor scores (for example, it is sensible to state “having a job handling community interaction increases 0.22 of community commitment,” but not “having a job handling community interaction increases 0.13 of factor score.” Third, we investigate how independent variables used in this study predict “general community commitment,” which sums up all 10 dependent variable items. Finally, scholars often use index variables when distinctive factors as determined by EFA are available, such as those who study public service motivation (e.g., Moynihan and Pandey 2007).
Other types of special district governments include the following functions: utility, housing, water preservation, river, fire protection, civic center, parking, jail, and road sanitation.
The items of “We have a code of ethics” and “We have a code of conduct” have been widely used in the studies of organizational ethics (e.g., Laouris, Laouri, and Christakis 2008). We also consider whether an organization promotes professional norms to the extent that “a profession's code of ethics is perhaps its most visible and explicit enunciation of its professional norms” (Frankel 1989). In studying codes of ethics, Palidauskaite (2006) asserts that transparency and openness are the core principles of public service, so we consider whether organizations “have extensive practices to provide openness and transparency in all our administrative decisions and practices.” Finally, “We have an active program to enforce ethics standards” and “Unethical conducts are dealt with harshly” concern whether dynamic practices of ethics management exist in an organization. Koh and Boo (2001) employed conceptually similar items such as “Top management in my organization has clearly conveyed that unethical behavior will not be tolerated” and “If a manager in my organization is discovered to have engaged in unethical behavior, he will be promptly reprimanded even if the behavior results primarily in corporate gain” to capture the essence of ethical behaviors.
The Kuder-Richardson Formula 20 (KR-20) is a measure of internal consistency reliability for measures with dichotomous choices, first published in 1937. It is analogous to Cronbach's α.
Multiple imputation (MI) is an alternative method. MI generates at least five different estimates to provide pooled results for regression. However, this method cannot generate R 2 for regression. In addition, variable coefficients in the regression models with EM imputation and MI imputation are very similar and do not affect study conclusions. Due to these reasons, we choose EM as the imputation method in the present study.
OLS regression with robust standard errors cannot generate adjusted R 2. Adjusted R 2 in the model with community-focused staff interactions with the governing board as the DV was obtained before we employed robust standard errors.
A debatable issue notwithstanding, we treat items on the 1 ∼ 7 Likert scale (e.g., qualification increasing and qualification MA) as continuous variables, allowing us to use Pearson's correlation. Phi correlation values are applied to correlations between special district area, a dichotomous variable, and other variables.
We compare the variable coefficients in the correlation matrix as well as regression models before and after imputation. The coefficients are quite similar, not affecting study conclusions, but the standard errors are generally larger in the regression models before imputation. Descriptive statistics before and after imputation are almost identical.
The fact that many survey items are stated as observable actions, policies, and strategies (see Data and Methods) does not mean that these are “hard” objective data, of course; they are survey items.
Very few of the special districts are multi-purpose; over 90% are single purpose. Another caveat is that this article focuses broadly on community commitment, district functions, human resource management, and organizational performance, rather than focusing in-depth on any one of these areas. This study is grounded in public administration and does not address typical concerns of political science such as voting, community politics, and so on.