Why Blue States Can’t Have Nice Things
In the tangle of outsourcing, no one is actually in charge.
I just got back from Salt Lake, where I took my kids to Wheeler Farm in Murray, Utah. Originally homesteaded in the late 1800’s, the 75-acre property was preserved and turned over to Salt Lake County in the 1970’s.
It was jarring, in the best way, to see a public space so well-run. Admission is free. Kids walk right up to cows, goats, sheep, and chickens. They climb on old tractors, go on wagon rides, race through open fields.
After a busy morning, we bought $2 Uncrustables and $1.50 popsicles from the gift shop and sat for lunch. At one point, my 3-year-old wandered over to a chicken coop that had been converted into a playhouse. He was inside when a mom rushed over—her son was bleeding. He’d been nicked by a loose plank that had come down in the coop.
The mostly college-aged staff ushered the kids out and surveyed the damage. Coming from Los Angeles, I expected some level of generalized freaking out: yellow tape, an incident report, something. Instead, what happened was even stranger: one of the employees wandered out to find a nail gun and returned to fix the problem plank on the spot.
Sometimes, you can just do things.
A week later, back in LA., I took my kids to the city-owned L.A. Zoo. The contrast was immediate and depressing.
The zoo, to put it gently, is a boulevard of broken dreams. Admission for a family of four costs $98. Exhibits that are supposed to be open are inexplicably closed. Every fifty feet there’s another kiosk that’s boarded up, another sign for something that’s been “coming soon” for years.
The petting goats have been off-limits since COVID. “Our flock of goats and sheep have interacted with more than 2 million guests in their twelve years at Muriel’s Ranch,” a long-winded sign informs you, in both English and Spanish. “To ensure their comfort as they enter their golden years, we have made the decision to change the experience at the Ranch to viewing only” (translation: “we no longer feel like it”).
A few confused tourists wandered outside the elephant enclosure, wondering where the animals had gone (back in May, following protests by a small but determined group of activists, Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council deported the elephants to Tulsa). It would have taken a single employee less than an hour to update the signage, but why bother when no one’s in charge?
And there’s no one in charge.
The Zoo is managed by GLAZA, a nonprofit, which has subcontracted concessions to SSA Group. The city gets a percentage of concession revenue, GLAZA gets a management fee for overseeing the contract, and SSA gets to charge visitors $16 for a burger.
At least there are adequate vegan options. Back in 2020, the City Council commissioned a detailed report to ensure the zoo’s concession stands catered to those with plant-based diets. A functional management structure, however, was beyond the scope of that or any other report—the city and GLAZA are currently suing each other while two different out-of-state conglomerates handle day-to-day operations.
After spending $75 on a couple of hot dogs and hamburgers, I was pretty sure someone was benefiting from the Los Angeles Zoo. It’s just not the zoo, or the animals, or the citizens of Los Angeles.
According to Reddit, this is how you fix a broken playground slide in Los Angeles:
Go to Valley Region Headquarters, which is to the Northeast from this picture. Ask to speak with the Valley Region District Manager/Superintendent. They will speak with the General Rec & Parks Superintendent. As one redditor mentioned, Rec&Parks (RAP) is severely underfunded as they are a non-proprietary department within the City, so money is always an issue. Get your councilmember in the conversation and voice this out with both of them.
You’ll have to insist to meet with the councilman, but try and do a bait and switch to get in the meeting. Start off sweet and polite (say whatever you want, you’re a big fan, you want to get involved, whatever) to get in the door then hit them with all the shit you want fixed.
Of course, no one would accuse L.A., ancestral home of the wholly-useless La Sombrita, of good governance. This is a city that spends $28 million to renovate a pool house but can’t keep public pools open during the hottest months of the year, where the biggest budget decision is figuring out which of hundreds of nonprofit organizations dedicated to the homeless will be the biggest beneficiaries of the city’s largesse.
But L.A.’s dysfunction reveals something deeper about how we’ve come to think about government. The way we talk about public goods is fake: it’s a debate between Republicans, who believe nearly everything should be privatized, and Democrats, who also believe nearly everything should be privatized—except routed through nonprofits, quasi-public agencies, and for-profit subsidiaries of nonprofits. A city that once boldly built a 230-mile-long aqueduct to steal a river now asks itself: should zoo concessions go to SSA or Aramark?
But L.A. isn’t alone. Even nominally “public” solutions get laundered through the nonprofit/industrial complex—because nobody, not even socialists, want to actually run things. Zohran Mamdani’s much-derided proposal for city-owned grocery stores in New York City in all likelihood wouldn’t involve the city owning grocery stores. His single-paragraph “plan” links to a New York Times article summarizing similar efforts: In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson paid a nonprofit which in turn paid a consultancy to study the feasibility of city-run groceries, only to conclude absolutely nothing at all. A failing Kansas City store is operated by a for-profit subsidiary of a nonprofit that relies on constant cash infusions from the city government.
Even at their best, Blue cities only achieve competence by admitting they can’t govern. The most effective public-private partnerships—Bryant Park, the High Line, LACMA, the Hollywood Bowl—effectively cede control of the public good to private organizations.
So what’s different about places that still work? Why can Salt Lake County run a gem of a community farm? Why does Boise have a well-regarded county-run tubing operation when L.A. can’t even subcontract out a zoo?
Partly it’s the unions, it’s the Groups, it’s our degraded political culture, in some cases the sheer size of these states or metros—all the standard Abundance stuff. But I’d push back against Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. The belief that good governance can be engineered—that there’s a correct way to govern, some set of magical processes that, if followed, will achieve optimal results—is what led cities to outsource core functions to consultants and nonprofits in the first place. And replacing one bloated public-private technocracy with a slightly more efficient public-private technocracy doesn’t solve this fundamental problem.
The red tape isn’t the cause; it’s the excuse.
What’s missing is the basic expectation that public employees are directly responsible for solving public problems, and the role we as citizens play in creating a culture that makes good governance possible. Wheeler Farm works because the community expects it to work. And until Blue State governance takes joy in providing things for its citizens—until every opportunity to demonstrate competence isn’t understood primarily as something to be triaged, or outsourced—regulatory reform will be just another band-aid.
Sometimes, you just need someone with a nail gun.
Jacob Savage writes from Los Angeles.
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Great article - coming from the South, this is totally relatable. Our public services have also been outsourced, often because of a combination of budget deficits and absent tax infrastructure and a right to work/anti-union environment. Very different causes than LA but similar experience of overpriced options (or lack of options) for residents. What's interesting tho is that I've been in Colorado all summer and am having a similar experience to yours in Utah, except Colorado IS a blue state, but one with the reputation of being willing to deregulate for the sake of outcomes. so I guess I'm just wondering about the bigger story here, when the poorest and richest states can't seem to have nice things and then the places in between are really (no pun intended) nailing it.
Maybe I am an optimist, but no matter where you go in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors, you will find departments that manage seemingly against all odds to get the job done. The first thing you notice about well run organizations is that they actually know what there job is.