Borrowing a page from the New Democrat playbook, Mayor-elect Anthony A. Williams of the District of Columbia announced in late December that he will allow public workers to bid against private companies to deliver a wide variety of city services.

Williams, who was a featured speaker at the DLC's annual conference in December, announced his plan to introduce "managed competition" in the delivery of city services after meeting with Indianapolis Mayor Steve Goldsmith and representatives of that city's municipal unions. Goldsmith, a moderate Republican, has been at the forefront of the small but growing national movement to permit public workers to bid against private companies for contracts to collect trash, repair streets, maintain vehicle fleets, and the like. Managed competition programs typically do not extend to essential city services such as fire and police protection.

"Reinventing government" experts David Osborne and Peter Plastrik profiled the Indianapolis program in The New Democrat last year ("Empowerment in the Public Sector," TND, March/April 1998). They noted that from 1992 to 1996, managed competition cut that city's costs by more than $100 million. Last month, The Washington Post quoted Goldsmith as saying the savings have since risen to $400 million. Goldsmith reportedly told Williams that Indianapolis has used those savings to leverage more than $1 billion in infrastructure improvements, including neighborhood revitalization and putting more police officers on the streets.

As Osborne and Plastrik noted in their TND article, managed competition does not necessarily translate into layoffs for union members. Indianapolis, for example, has eliminated 1,150 of the 4,691 city jobs that existed when the program began in 1992. Yet as of the spring of 1997, the city had not laid off a single union worker. Most of the 1,150 ex-city workers took jobs with private contractors or found other work in the private sector, were retrained for different government positions, or took early retirement. The city did, however, cut middle management, for example eliminating 18 of the 36 supervisors who managed the 90 union workers responsible for patching potholes.

"I am fervently committed to pursuing this aggressively in a way that supports working people but gets the job done for the citizens," Williams told the Post. "This is a very, very high priority. I think if we give people the chance to compete, we could have a tremendous impact. The question is: Who can do this best?"

District of Columbia labor leaders greeted Williams' announcement with a mixture of openness and caution.

"We know that there have to be changes in D.C. government, but we want to be in on these changes at the beginning -- not at the end," Chuck Hicks, president of Labor Council 20 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, told the Post. "Certainly we'll take a look at managed competition, but we need to be on a level playing field. We need training and resources made available to labor unions to compete in a fair and equitable manner."