The Honorable Earl Blumenauer

Member, United States Congress

Portland Oregon region

Portland‘s pioneering approach to regional governance, still the only popularly-elected regional government in the country, has gone from being a good idea to being an imperative.

Amid an interminable climate crisis, regional approaches to transportation, land-use, and energy have become essential for carbon reduction. This last year of the COVID-19 pandemic affirmed the need for regional cooperation, as economic turmoil prompted unmatched federal expenditures. Communities organized on a regional basis were better equipped to take advantage of the unprecedented funds flowing for healthcare, infrastructure, and the social safety net.

In every community, regional cooperation has become a necessity to address challenges of the present and future. Regional Charters looks at a new way to help community leaders and citizens make regional cooperation succeed.

Courage,

Earl

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Daniel Kemmis

author of Community and the Politics of Place and Citizens Uniting to Restore Our Democracy

MISSOULA MONTANA REGION

At a time when so many of our institutions of self-government seem to have become terminally dysfunctional, Bill Dodge draws on a lifelong career of regional community-building to map a practical, proven path out of this quagmire.

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David Warm

Executive Director

Mid-America Regional Council

Kansas City Kansas/Missouri region

Regional Charters is much more than self-described “ruminations.” It is the deeply considered and comprehensive analysis of a pre-eminent thought leader on American regions. What’s more, it is utterly useful ¬ a virtual encyclopedia of compelling concepts and practical strategies embedded in a solid organizing framework. It lays out a coherent agenda for empowering civic leaders, professionals, and activists to create new civic infrastructure to address our most pressing regional challenges.

Bill Dodge writes with experience, conviction, and convincing logic. He blends his deep practical insight into the complex dynamics of cities and regions with boundless optimism for the future of American democracy and a frank assessment of the urgency of renewing our approach as regional leaders.

Regional Charters could not have arrived at a better time. As Bill Dodge documents, pressing realities make regional approaches ever more essential: fiscal pressures in the face of increased public expectations, competitive global pressures that compel communities to build the collective capacity to compete, and practical pressures — from homelessness to environmental protection to workforce development to traffic management — that require multifaceted regional strategies.

Yet many countervailing factors combine to make regional approaches challenging, including structural fragmentation, social and economic disparities, conflicting values, and the time and patience required to craft thoughtful regional strategies. Regional Charters provides a way for leaders and activists alike to organize civic affairs that can bridge the gap between conflicting interests and forces to help American regions move forward.

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Buddy Villines

Pulaski County Judge/CEO, retired

President of County Executives of America

Past President of the National Association of Regional Councils;

Past President of the National Association of Metropolitan Planning Organizations;

Past President of Metroplan, and

Co-chair of the River of Trade Corridor Coalition

Little Rock Arkansas region

Bill Dodge has authored a book that encompasses the history of regional governance and presents the arguments and a grassroots strategy for continuing to strengthen it. This is a book that should be in every college, university, and graduate school to offer this generation of citizens and leaders and the ones to follow a roadmap of the future role of regions.

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Scott Fosler

Former Mayor, Town of Chevy Chase, Montgomery County, Maryland

Former President, County Council, Montgomery County, Maryland

Former President, Washington Metropolitan Council of Governments (WAMATA, COG)

Former President, National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA)

Former Chairman, National Civic League (NCL)

National Capital Region

Bill Dodge is probably the most knowledgeable person in the United States on the topic of regional governance. He has now assembled that knowledge and presented it in a well-organized and carefully written book that will be an enormous asset to practitioners and citizens engaged in contemporary challenges and opportunities posed by regional issues.

Regions are places where people live, work, shop, eat, worship, play, and engage in the varied activities of life which are assembled in one or a few nearby locations. Regional governance is the means by which people in regions decide on their common ends and then work on the best ways of pursuing and achieving them in comparatively orderly and efficient fashion. Regional charters are among the most important valuable instruments for achieving these means and ends.

Regional governance in the United States has been conventionally practiced through the use of familiar government structures such as villages, towns, municipalities, counties, state, and associated institutions constituted under the auspices of the U.S. Constitution and those of the various states. But such governments rarely coincide precisely with other territories and government boundaries.

This reality requires people and governments in those regions to tailor their governance structures and processes to coordinate and capture the opportunities by which they can conduct their public affairs. This is where the art and science of regional governance merge, including regional charters that will determine their success in designing and managing such highly complex and interconnected activities.

Bill Dodge’s book offers an invaluable reference and guide to fashioning the operation and management of such regional charters. I have little doubt that it will become an instant classic in the ever more complex and important field of regional governance for citizens, scholars, and practitioners alike.

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Ethan Seltzer

Emeritus Professor, Urban Studies and Planning

Portland State University, Portland, Oregon

co-editor of Regional Planning in America: Practice and Prospect

PORTLAND, OREGON REGION

Bill Dodge's Regional Charters is a timely reminder that the geography of the institutions we've created to govern ourselves rarely match the geography of the challenges they're asked to address. This mismatch grows over time, and with it can go the effectiveness of the institutions we count on to make a difference now and in the future. Perhaps more important, as governing institutions seem to be increasingly unable to respond effectively and serve, we gradually — sometimes not so gradually — lose trust and hope that anything can be done to address the most important issues before us.

Dodge's book, though, offers more than a requiem for contemporary governance. Instead, he offers a vision for a way out and forward, through the creation of citizen-led "regional charters" to reconstruct the basis for governance and collective action at the most important scales, those within which we live out our daily lives. This book is a useful primer for what rebuilding effective, trusted, forward-looking governance and its institutions might look like.

At a time when we desperately need innovative responses to the need for greater equity and social justice, climate change, homelessness, and the global pandemic, to name a few, Regional Charters offers a concrete place to start.

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Dick Fleming

CEO Community Development Ventures, Inc.

CORTEX Innovation Community

St. Louis Missouri Region

Following in the fine tradition of our highly respected civic mentors, the late John Gardner and Neal Peirce, in Regional Charters Bill Dodge uniquely and thoughtfully combines an examination of theory, underlying values, and best practices in how regional citizens and institutions can advance equity and sustainability in their communities.

In my own regional problem-solving work over the years in Atlanta, Denver, and St. Louis, I witnessed first-hand Bill Dodge’s pioneering work as what he self-describes as a “Renewable Regionalist.” His latest work here builds on his previous book, Regional Excellence, which focused on ‘“regional governance,” to his latest work, Regional Charters, which presents the multiple vehicles and platforms for “regional civic entrepreneurship.” These 500+ pages can prove invaluable to regional citizens as they craft the next chapters of collaborative problem solving in their respective communities.

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Jim Deangelis

Former Director, Urban and Regional Planning Program, University of Pittsburgh

Former Board Member, American Institute of Planners

Pittsburgh Pennsylvania Region

Bill Dodge’s Regional Charters is a masterful and encyclopedic memoir that unabashedly advocates for the rational notion that people with geographic connectivity should organize at whatever scale they can, as others have creatively done, to promote their regions’ wellbeing and bring more equity and fair treatment to the citizens, businesses, and institutions in these places than otherwise could be done.

Regional Charters’ forward pays homage to John Gardner and presents his remarks made in Monterey, California on June 14, 1999. His key point was that “The whole regional movement should identify itself with a “grassroots” philosophy. We are building the next America from the grassroots.” Gardner encouraged Dodge to write Regional Charters; it should be on every regionalist’s bookshelf for encouragement, support, and a unique collection of extraordinary information. It should also be in every syllabus whose intent is to inspire students to ameliorate or eliminate social, cultural, economic, and environmental inequities.

For academics who share Dodge’s societal aspirations and seek to understand how regionalism’s successes of the past may be adapted to today’s world, Regional Charters must be read and discussed.

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John B. Cobb, Jr.

Founder, The Cobb Institute

Los Angeles California Region

The political and economic importance of regions is so obvious that many of us do not attend to it. Clearly, when city and county lines were first drawn up this was not as true, and such regions as there were then are different from our current ones. Dodge makes clear that the recognition and empowerment of our true regions has been going on for a long time. They are no longer an “extra” added to a fixed governance system; in most cases, they have evolved into an organic community of communities. Regional Charters will enable us to renew our thinking and adapt to readjusted political and economic situations, and thus begin to deal knowledgeably with the new reality going forward.

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Patricia Atkins

Research Professor, George Washington Institute of Public Policy,

George Washington University

National Capital Region

Bill Dodge constructs in his newest book a thorough review of regional charters, forthrightly naming a regional charter as the fundamental key to successful coordination at the regional level of many local government responsibilities. Using knowledge accumulated during his lifelong commitment to regional communities, Dodge has written Regional Charters both as a step-by-step citizen guidebook to regional community coordination and as a how-to book for regional charter adoption.

Dodge sets out the types of public tasks that benefit from local cross border collaboration, be it flash flood mitigation, equitable educational resources, ready access to life-saving community medical services, or equal voting registration opportunities. The soul of the book - and its message - rests on holding up such challenging tasks to the gaze of the public and providing the approach to manage them.

The quality of millions of lives is daily more affected by what happens regionally than by what happens locally or nationally. Anyone with concerns or curiosity about public tasks that are planned or provisioned regionally - or ones that could benefit from that - will find this book to be essential reading.

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