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#3 – Longer term
• Medium-to-long-term leases: Asset managers need to know that they have a lease for a sufficiently long
period to allow them to plan. St. Paul City Council signs a charter agreement with each of the non-profits
that run the city-owned rec centers. Ten years is seen as a good length of time in order to encourage
investment in the facilities by the “service partner”’;
• Network service partners: Service partners can network themselves, whether informally by a shared
email distribution list, or through occasional meetings, for example, around negotiating rent with the
City Council, collective purchasing of certain items, sharing of spare capacity and referral of business
opportunities.
• Evaluate: There are two ways to judge success. First, are the measures a success when gauged against
the fact that the alternative to partnership, in quite a few cases, was closure of the asset? The question “is
an open asset better than a closed one” is not particularly difficult. Second, are the measures a success
when compared to the situation before the cuts were made? The answer to the second is inevitably more
complicated and would require assessment of:
• accessibility — both physically but also in terms of different groups;
• service quality;
• quality of local authority support;
• community involvement;
• workers’ pay and conditions; and
• building maintenance and investment.
This evaluation could be done within cities (including between asset types) and between cities — for example,
there might be a State of the Assets report to accompany State of the City reports that many U.S. cities now
produce annually.
Pay non-profits to manage and program their assets
Whilst PPPs sees non-profits taking on management and/or programming functions without any payment
from the city government that owns the asset, there are also a few cases of non-profits actually being paid to do
these. For example, the city of Detroit now pays the non-profit Greening of Detroit to plant trees in public parks.
Similarly, the Y (YMCA) of Central Maryland is contracted to run all of Baltimore County’s Rec Centers. Unlike
the bodies that run the rec centers in St. Paul and Baltimore, the Y actually gets paid by the county government
for its rec center management work. The Y in question is an attractive contractor in that it is:
• a charity with specialties in recreation and youth programs;
• able to attract foundation grants and donations;
• able to raise bank loans on the basis of their revenue streams;
• run by a CEO with a business background;
• overseen by a board with strong business representation; and
• part of an excellent national brand overseen by the national Y umbrella body that can withdraw franchises
for any poorly performing operators.
91 | The New Barn-Raising