It matters when our state government can’t assure us that it can police the ethical behavior of our top politicians and bureaucrats.
It matters when local politicians seem clueless about some pretty basic rules in how you handle a county issued credit card. Or when the folks who handle public contracts continue working in office even after they have been implicated in allegations of criminal wrongdoing. It matters when school systems create an environment that suggests to teachers and administrators that it’s a good idea to manipulate test results to feign progress.
It matters when our elected officials twiddle their thumbs as a modest snowstorm paralyzes our roads and strands thousands of schoolchildren to spend the night in their school gyms and cafeterias. It matters when county commissioners seem to view police officers as cabbies.
It even matters when a local religious leader seems completely tone deaf about how his plans to move into a lavish Buckhead house would play with parishioners at a time of a near-revolution in the church’s attitude toward poverty.
These things all matter because they all weaken the already severely damaged foundation of trust people have in their governments and institutions. This isn’t some abstraction – mistrust of leadership has real consequences. It is largely to blame for the misery and waste we endure for living in a place that is helpless to confront its self-inflicted gridlock.
A key reason the benighted T-SPLOST referendum failed, you will remember, was that people doubted that leaders were capable of spending their money honestly and effectively to fix the problem. As fiscally conservative as metro voters are, they were willing to be taxed more to ease our traffic nightmare - if only they could trust their politicians and business leaders.
The good news, if you can call it that, is that we aren’t alone. Trust everywhere seems to be eroding at an alarming rate.
The new edition of a global index I wrote about last year shows that the downward trend in trust continues unabated. Things are particularly bad for politicians: The 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals the largest ever gap between trust in government and business. This is because trust in business – probably as the economy recovers – has stabilized while trust in government has fallen off the table.
Trust in government fell to an historic low, making it the least trusted institution for the third consecutive year. The drop in government trust among educated people was even more dramatic, plummeting in the United States, France and Hong Kong. Trust in government fell below 50 percent in 22 of the 27 countries surveyed, with strikingly low levels in Western Europe, particularly in Spain, Italy and France. Trust in media also fell, by the way, and we should talk about that one day.
This is Edelman’s 14th annual trust and credibility survey, which sampled 27,000 general population respondents – including an oversample of 6,000 what it calls “informed publics” — across 27 countries.
Richard Edelman, the CEO of the PR giant that bears his name, suggested that the survey results show that it now falls to business leaders to take the lead on change.
“It has typically fallen to government to create the context for change, but it is either incapable or unwilling to do it,” Edelman said. “People trust business to innovate, unite and deliver across borders in a way that government can’t. That trust comes with the expectation and responsibility to maintain it. Therefore, CEOs must become chief engagement officers in order to educate the public about the economic, societal, political and environmental context in which their business operates.”
In Atlanta, this means that even more rests on the business leaders – the same folks who seemed so helpless in campaigning for the transportation referendum. It also suggests that institutions like the Metro Chamber may even have a bigger role in taking the initiative.
But business can’t do it alone. In many ways, Atlanta seems to be at a crossroads (isn’t it always?). Our infrastructure is a mess, schools seem to be losing ground and each time a new city is formed it becomes harder to reach a consensus.
But we are crippled most by the public’s lack of trust.
Until our politicians at every level get that their biggest job is to demonstrate competency and honesty, then we will all share the misery. The biggest problem we have, it seems, is reflected in the mirrors of many of the folks we have elected to lead us.
It’s an election year, and you may want to keep that in mind.
