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PRIVATIZATION:
Trends, evidence, and alternatives

An EPI conference

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Jane Ahlstrom, Consultant, AFSCME's Wisconsin Legislative Council 11, studies privatization efforts in Wisconsin, particularly in the areas of economic support, health care, and child welfare. Over the past decade, Ms. Ahlstrom has also conducted a number of evaluation and planning projects with local human service agencies.

Eugene Bardach, Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, most recently authored Getting Agencies to Work Together (Brookings 1998) and A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis (Chatham 2000).

Peter Benjamin, Chief Financial Officer, Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.

Steve Chand, Secretary and Treasurer, Beser Chand, Inc., is also administrator of the Corrections and Criminal Justice Coalition, a national coalition of correctional officers' organizations and unions. He is a founding member of Beser Chand, Inc., and has brought with him more than 25 years of experience working in law enforcement, union management, organizing, and lobbying on the local, state, and federal levels.

Before joining Beser Chand, Inc., Chand served as Legislative Director and Director of Federal Affairs for the Law Enforcement Alliance of America, the nation's largest coalition of law enforcement professionals and concerned citizens. He also coordinated an LEAA network of over three thousand activists.

Mr. Chand's extensive background also includes a 20-year tenure as a law enforcement officer. Mr. Chand has served on various boards and committees dealing with law enforcement and criminal justice.

Donald Cohen, President and Co-Founder, Center on Policy Initiatives. CPI was established to promote higher living standards for poor and moderate-income families through research, policy development, and public education. CPI's research agenda focuses on structural factors and issues to promote a fair economy.

Mr. Cohen serves as the Political Director of the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council, AFL-CIO. He developed the Labor to Neighbor program that educates rank-and-file union members and involves them in workplace and neighborhood-based issue advocacy programs. He has over 18 years of experience as an organizer and trainer in strategy, policy, and organization.

Mr. Cohen also serves on the Work Force Investment Board, the Legislative Committee of the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, and the City of San Diego Strategic Framework Committee.

John D. Donahue, Raymond Vernon Lecturer in Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, has taught, written, and conducted research about public sector reform and the allocation of responsibilities across levels of government and between the public and private sectors. Dr. Donahue is executive director of the Visions of Governance in the Twenty-First Century research project, and faculty chair of the David T. Kearns Program in Business, Government, and Education, both at Harvard.

Dr. Donahue served in the first Clinton Administration, first as an Assistant Secretary of Labor, then as Counselor to the Secretary of Labor, where he helped to frame Administration positions on job training reform and education tax preferences. Dr. Donahue has also been a consultant to the World Bank, the National Economic Council, and several other business and governmental organizations.

His most recent books are Governance in a Globalizing World (co-edited with Joseph Nye, Jr.) and Making Washington Work: Tales of Innovation in the Federal Government. Dr. Donahue is also the author of Hazardous Crosscurrents: Confronting Inequality as Government Shifts Toward the States (1999), Disunited States (1997), and The Privatization Decision (1989), and the co-author (with Robert B. Reich) of New Deals: The Chrysler Revival and the American System (1985).

Cameron Duncan is Regional Secretary for North and South America for Public Services International (PSI), a federation of over 500 public sector unions worldwide, with headquarters in Geneva.

PSI's principle work in the hemisphere is to represent the interests of public employees before international organizations such as the ILO; to provide worker education training to its affiliates in Latin America and the Caribbean; to campaign against violations of worker rights; and to build networks of unions in the health, municipal, energy, water, and civil service sectors, especially unions representing those who work for the same multinational corporation.

PSI affiliates in the United States include AFSCME, the Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of Government Employees, the American Federation of Teachers, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

Before working for PSI, Dr. Duncan served as an economist and campaigner for Greenpeace International. He has taught economics at American University and at universities in Argentina, Uruguay, Costa Rica, and Puerto Rico.

Steven Fantauzzo, Central Region Director, AFSCME, oversees 19 states for the 1.4 million-member international union. His office is charged with increasing AFSCME's membership while transforming the union into a more powerful voice for working Americans. In February of 1999, following a restructuring of the union, Mr. Fantauzzo assumed his current position. He previously served as AFSCME's International Vice President and Director of its Indiana Council 62.

While with Council 62, he negotiated the landmark agreement with the city of Indianapolis that brought unprecedented employee involvement in the city's operations. The empowerment of the workers expanded their share of city work and brought greater efficiency to services, while increasing employees' pay and job security. After working in the Ann Arbor city administration, Mr. Fantauzzo began his career with AFSCME in 1978 as a Senior Labor Economist.

Jeff Faux, President, Economic Policy Institute, co-founded EPI, along with several other prominent economists, in 1986. He has researched, written, and published studies on a wide variety of subjects, from the global economy to neighborhood community development, from monetary policy to political strategy. He has been a consultant to governments at all levels, business, labor unions, and community and citizen organizations. He sits on the boards of directors of several national organizations and two national magazines, and received a Presidential appointment to the National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity.

Mr. Faux has worked as an economist with the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity and the U.S. Departments of State, Commerce, and Labor. He has management experience in the finance industry. He has been a small businessman, a blueberry farmer, and a member of a municipal planning board in the state of Maine.

Mr. Faux's publications include Reclaiming Prosperity: A Blueprint for Progressive Economic Reform (co-editor; 1996) and The Party's Not Over: A New Vision for the Democrats (1996).

Judith Greene, a criminal justice policy analyst with Justice Strategies, currently serves as a research consultant for both the RAND Corporation and Human Rights Watch. She was a 1999 recipient of a Soros Justice Fellowship, and has also served as Senior Fellow at the Institute on Criminal Justice of the University of Minnesota Law School. From 1985 to 1993 she was Director of Court Programs at the Vera Institute of Justice.

Ms. Greene's professional interests encompass sentencing and correctional policy, community policing, and alternatives to incarceration. Her articles on these topics have appeared in numerous academic journals, including Crime and Delinquency, The Wake Forest Law Review, The Rutgers Law Journal, The Justice Systems Journal, Judicature, and Overcrowded Times. She has presented papers and addresses to scores of organizations and conferences, including the German Society of Criminology, the National Institute of Justice, the Open Society Institute's Center on Crime, Communities and Culture, the Freidrich Ebert Stiftung's International Conference on Police Policy, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, the Minnesota Sentencing Commission, the Maryland Commission on Criminal Sentencing Policy, and the Youth Law Center.

Linda Kaboolian, Lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, chairs the Public Sector Labor-Management Program at the school's A. Alfred Taubman Center. Her research, teaching, and consulting focuses on the design and implementation of multi-party collaborations. She has helped establish city-wide labor-management programs in the City of Philadelphia and several public school districts, and provides neutral facilitation and training to support those efforts as well as evaluation research to assess their effect. She has served as an elected executive officer and chief bargainer of a public employee union and as a senior-level public manager.

Robert Kuttner, founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, has taught at Brandeis University, Boston University, the University of Massachusetts, and Harvard University's Institute of Politics. He has been a John F. Kennedy Fellow at Harvard, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Radcliffe Public Policy Fellow. He has been chief investigator for the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, served as executive director of President Carter's National Commission on Neighborhoods, and was a co-founder of the Economic Policy Institute.

Mr. Kuttner is a contributing columnist to Business Week's "Economic Viewpoint" and author of a weekly editorial column originating in The Boston Globe and syndicated nationally to 20 major daily papers. He contributes articles to The New England Journal of Medicine as a national policy correspondent, and his work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Harvard Business Review, and Dissent. His occasional commentaries are heard on National Public Radio, and he also appears frequently on Firing Line, Crossfire, Nightline and the PBS NewsHour program.

Among Mr. Kuttner's recent books are Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets (1997); The End of Laissez-Faire (1991); The Life of the Party (1987); The Economic Illusion (1984); and Revolt of the Haves (1980). He is currently completing a book begun by his late wife, psychologist and author Sharland Trotter, on how grown children and parents renegotiate relationships over the life course.

Helen F. Ladd, Professor of Public Policy Studies and Economics at Duke University, also directs the University's Graduate Studies in Public Policy. Before arriving at Duke, she taught at Dartmouth College, Wellesley College, and at Harvard University, first in the City and Regional Planning Program and later in the Kennedy School of Government.

From 1996 to 1999, Professor Ladd co-chaired a National Academy of Sciences Committee on Education Finance. In that capacity she is the co-editor of two books: a set of background papers, Equity and Adequacy in Education Finance, and the final report, Making Money Matter: Financing America's Schools. She spent the spring term of 1998 in New Zealand on a Fulbright grant studying that country's education system.

Much of Professor Ladd's current research focuses on education policy. She is the editor of Holding Schools Accountable: Performance-Based Reform in Education (Brookings Institution, 1996) and coauthor (with Edward Fiske) of When Schools Compete: A Cautionary Tale (Brookings Institution, 2000), which draws lessons for the U.S from New Zealand's experience with self-governing schools, parental choice, and competition.

An expert on state and local public finance and education policy, Professor Ladd has also written extensively on the fiscal implications of growth, property taxation, education finance, tax and expenditure limitations, intergovernmental aid, state economic development, and the fiscal problems of U.S cities.

Paul C. Light, Vice President and Director of Governmental Services at the Brookings Institution, started his work there in 1999 as Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow and founding Director of the Center for Public Service. He has taught at George Washington and Georgetown Universities, as well as at the Universities of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota, and is currently teaching at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

After years of working as a staff person in the U.S. Senate, Dr. Light served as Senior Adviser to the National Commission on the Public Service, chaired by former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker, in 1988. He served in an identical role under the National Commission on the State and Local Public Service, chaired by former Mississippi Governor William Winter, in 1992. He drafted each commission's final report.

Dr. Light has written twelve books, most recently The True Size of Government (2000) and The New Public Service (1999), as well as The President's Agenda; Vice Presidential Power; the award-winning Artful Work: The Politics of Social Security Reform; Thickening Government: Federal Hierarchy and the Diffusion of Accountability; and The Tides of Reform: Making Government Work, 1945-1995. His last two books on government reform won the National Academy of Public Administration's Louis Brownlow book award.

Richard C. Loeb, Executive Secretary, Office of Federal Procurement Policy, Office of Management and Budget, is responsible for advising the Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy on a wide variety of federal contracting matters, most notably those involving legal issues arising in the formation and administration of government contracts, and issues relating to contract cost allowability/allocability and pricing.

Mr. Loeb has written extensively on the federal contracting process. He serves as a lecturer in the Government Contracts Program at the School of Law at George Washington University. He is admitted to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals and the Maryland Court of Appeals.

Jason Mahler, Vice President and General Counsel, Computer & Communications Industry Association, served as Legislative Assistant and Counsel in the office of Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren of California and as Legislative Assistant in the office of Senator Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey before joining CCIA. Mr. Mahler also worked on the staff of the North Carolina Law Review.

Ann Markusen, Professor of Planning and Public Affairs at the Hubert Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota, also directs the Institute's Urban and Regional Planning Program. She is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, New York; President of the North American Regional Science Association; and a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of the Economic Policy Institute.

Professor Markusen's books include America's Peace Dividend (2000), Second Tier Cities (1999), Arming the Future (1999), Trading Industries, Trading Regions (1993), Dismantling the Cold War Economy (1992), and The Rise of the Gunbelt (1991).

Gary Miron, Principal Research Associate at Western Michigan University's Evaluation Center, has completed or is working on a variety of school reform studies, including evaluations of charter schools in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Illinois, and Cleveland. In Connecticut and Cleveland, he has been involved in providing training and technical assistance to charter schools. He has also conducted a secondary analysis of student achievement gains in schools operated by Edison Schools, Inc.

Before joining The Evaluation Center, Dr. Miron worked at Stockholm University, where he conducted a study of Sweden's national voucher reform, as well as a four-country study that examined the factors behind school restructuring.

Robert Molofsky, General Counsel at the Amalgamated Transit Union, has served in that capacity since 1996. ATU represents 170,000 employees in the public mass transit, intercity bus, school bus, paratransit, and van service operations, nationwide and throughout Canada. Currently, Mr. Molofsky directs and oversees the International Union's legal and government affairs departments, providing assistance and advice to the International President. In addition, he oversees the activities of ATU staff lobbyists carrying out federal and state legislative, regulatory, and political activities.

From 1981 through 1995, Mr. Molofsky served as the ATU's Legislative Director, with responsibilities for developing and implementing the ATU's federal and state legislative and political programs. During that time, he participated in numerous campaigns involving federal and state legislative and regulatory initiatives concerning transit privatization in several states and in Canada.

Mr. Molofsky has appeared on numerous panels and programs addressing various aspects of transit privatization. He is admitted to the D.C., New York, and U.S. Supreme Court Bars. He has been selected as a member of the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers; he serves on the steering committee of the Surface Transportation Policy Project; and he is a member of the executive committee of the National Transit Institute.

Demetra Smith Nightingale, Principal Research Associate in the Labor and Social Policy Center at the Urban Institute, also directs the Institute's Welfare and Training Research Program. She is an expert in social policy, and for over twenty years she has focused her research on issues related to employment, poverty, and the alleviation of poverty. She has directed several evaluations of welfare and other social programs and demonstrations, including many studies that assess program implementation and management.

Dr. Nightingale is co-editor with Robert Haveman of the 1996 book The Work Alternative: Welfare Reform and the Realities of the Job Market, and co-author with Eugene Steuerle, Edward Gramlich, and Hugh Heclo of the 1998 book The Government We Deserve: Responsive Democracy and Changing Expectations.

Peter R. Orszag, President, Sebago Associates, Inc., served as Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy at the White House (where his portfolio included Social Security, climate change, and a variety of other economic policy issues) before founding Sebago Associates, a public policy consulting firm. He has also served as an economic adviser to the Russian Government, and as Senior Economist and Senior Adviser on the President's Council of Economic Advisers.

In addition to serving as President of Sebago Associates, Dr. Orszag is an adjunct member of the economics faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a Research Associate at the Center for Retirement Research, Boston College.

Travis Pratt, Assistant Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, counts among his primary areas of research aggregate-level correlates of crime and institutional and community corrections. He also continues to conduct research in the area of correctional privatization.

Richard Rothstein, Research Associate, Economic Policy Institute, is also an Adjunct Professor of Public Policy at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and a senior correspondent for the American Prospect. He writes a weekly column on education for The New York Times.

Mr. Rothstein's publications include "Enabling 'Adequacy' to Achieve Reality" (with James W. Guthrie), in Equity and Adequacy in School Finance (National Academy Press, 1999); The Way We Were? Myths and Realities of America's Student Achievement (Century Foundation Press, 1998); Can Public Schools Learn from Private Schools? (with Martin Carnoy and Luis Benveniste) (Economic Policy Institute, 1999); and Where's the Money Gone? Changes in the Level and Composition of Education Spending (Economic Policy Institute, revised edition, 2001).

Max B. Sawicky, Senior Economist, Economic Policy Institute, has previously worked in the Office of State and Local Finance of the U.S. Treasury Department and the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. He also serves on the at-large national board of Americans for Democratic Action.

Dr. Sawicky's publications include The End of Welfare: Consequences of Federal Devolution for the Nation (2000) and Risky Business: Private Management of Public Schools (co-author, 1996).

Elliott Sclar, Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy at Columbia University, is an economist with appointments in both the School of International and Public Affairs and the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia. He directs the graduate programs in urban planning. His most recent book is You Don't Always Get What You Pay For: The Economics of Privatization (Cornell, 2000).

Barry Van Lare, Co-Executive Director of The Finance Project, is also Executive Director of the Welfare Information Network in Washington, D.C., a new non-profit organization created to help states and communities secure the information and technical assistance needed for effective and efficient reforms of their welfare systems.

Mr. Van Lare has spent 15 years with the National Governors' Association, where he served as Deputy Executive Director, Director of the State Services, and Director for Human Services. He has extensive experience in the administration of welfare, having headed the federal welfare program during the Carter Administration and having served as Executive Deputy and Acting Commissioner for the New York State Department of Social Services, Director of Community Services for the state of Washington, and Director of Social Service for Erie County, New York. In New York, Mr. Van Lare also served as Deputy Chief of Staff to Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Director of Health Planning, Deputy Commissioner of Human Rights, and Staff Director of the Senate Task Force on Critical Problems.

Bruce A. Wallin, Associate Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University, has served on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and as a Senior Research Analyst at the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. He has conducted research on privatization for the Economic Policy Institute, and has published on the subject in the Public Administration Review. Professor Wallin has also conduced research on state fiscal issues for the Ford Foundation and Century Fund. He was recently appointed a Fulbright Fellow, and will be lecturing at Charles University in the Czech Republic from February to June 2001.

Professor Wallin's most recent book, From Revenue Sharing to Deficit Sharing, won the American Political Science Association's 1999 award for best book published on urban politics. He serves on two of the APSA's organized section councils: Urban Politics, and Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations.

Mildred Warner, Assistant Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University, focuses her work primarily on the role of local government in community development.

Her research on the financial effects of federal and state devolution on local governments' capacity for investment is complemented by research on local government service delivery restructuring. National survey and case study methods are employed to study privatization, inter-municipal cooperation, and new forms of labor-management cooperation at the local level. Professor Warner works closely with public sector unions and associations of local elected officials at the state and national levels to identify collaborative approaches to service delivery improvements. She also conducts research on the nature of decentralization, devolution, and privatization among the emerging local governments in Eastern and Central Europe.

Previously, Professor Warner founded and served for nine years as the Associate Director of the Community and Rural Development Institute at Cornell. In this capacity, she worked closely with associations of local governments across New York State to organize satellite teleconferences and annual workshops on policy and management issues facing local government. Before arriving at Cornell, Professor Warner served as a program officer with the Rural Poverty and Resources Program of the Ford Foundation.

John F. Williams, Senior Vice President and Managing Director of Management Consulting at HDR, Inc., has spent 22 years in professional service as an advocate for the public interest. For the past 14 years he has worked with communities seeking to enter into larger-scale infrastructure development or service agreements with private companies in more than a dozen states. His objective has always been to secure the best possible contractual arrangement, through which the interests of both public and private participants are evenly balanced.

Mr. Williams has been responsible for HDR's specialty teams, which have successfully completed nearly $25 billion in public-private ventures (more than any other consulting organization in the country). Over the past four years, Mr. Williams has directed the professionals in HDR's Management Consulting group as they have advised communities on more than 200 assignments aimed at improving performance efficiencies, saving money, and reducing cost of service to ratepayers. He is known as a pioneer in guiding public employees through processes where they adopt the best techniques from both the public and private sectors.

PRIVATIZATION:
Trends, evidence, and alternatives
An EPI conference

Agenda and audio recordings

Conference materials

view photos

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