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Rick Cole is the chief deputy controller of Los Angeles and a councilmember in Pasadena, California. He’s known for tackling challenging city budgets and has been honored for his work as a public official several times, including with a Excellence in Management Award.

Cole joins Chuck Marohn on this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast to discuss city finances and how they can be improved. Their conversation includes the following topics:

• What does it mean for budgets to be value statements?

• How do you direct city finances in a truly effective way?

• What role should the public play in a city’s financial decisions, and how can city staff and officials enable their productive participation?

• And more!

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  Chuck Marohn 0:00

  Hey, everybody. This Chuck Marohn, welcome back to the strong towns podcast. Years ago, when I was the Chicken Little writing the strong towns blog in the middle of nowhere, with a handful of people reading it, I kept coming across this guy named Rick Cole. He would write things, op eds, their editorials. There were statements and people quoting him. And I thought, Who is this guy? He seems to be the only person I know that gets it like I just utterly fascinated. I've gotten to know Rick Cole. I would call him a friend, and today he is also a guest on the strong towns podcast. Rick, welcome to the podcast,

  Rick Cole 0:47

  Chuck. I'm honored. I'm so pleased by how a strong towns movement is taking off like a wildfire throughout our country. Well,

  Chuck Marohn 0:56

  you've been a big part of of of that and of making that happen, and certainly you've been a big part of helping me understand city budgets better and city finance better. I was gonna like read a bio for you, and then I thought this kind of silly. I know you've been a mayor, you've been a city manager, you've been on a city council, you're working in the city of LA right now. Can you just give our audience a little bit of your background.

  Rick Cole 1:22

  Well, in high school, I was thrust into community leadership because Pastino was the first city West Mississippi to have court ordered desegregation of our schools, and the adults did not acquit themselves well in in that crisis. And so students who were more attuned to the value of what we now call diversity, had to step forward. And so I was thrust into, you know, showing up in print as a junior in in high school and being in the local newspaper offering a a different plan for integrating our high schools from what we were hearing from the school board, I studied to get a degree in journalism, but I was so unhappy with the direction of my hometown in Pasadena, that I managed the campaign of my high school government teacher, who got elected city council. Two years later, I followed him, joined the city council, served for 12 years and immersed myself in in the minutia of local government, and saw that the slogan, think globally, act locally has real resonance, that at the local level, you can, not only can make a significant difference, but you can Do it in the context of working with real people. It's not an abstraction. And you can talk to people who have different viewpoints from you. You have to talk to people with different viewpoints, and particularly in today's polarized world. I cherish that ability to talk across some of these divisions in our society. After I served on the council and served as mayor of my hometown, which is the greatest honor I think, pretty much anybody can have, except maybe, I don't know, winning a Super Bowl or something, and I pursued a career in city management. I was the city manager of three different, very different Southern California cities over a span of 20 years. During that time, I briefly returned to LA City Halls. My third time, I was deputy mayor, the second time, in charge of the budget, and we had to close a 260, $5 million structural deficit right out of the box, and I had to deliver a balanced budget on behalf of the mayor. Then I went back to being a city manager, and then I served, and we got to work together when I was executive director of the Congress for new urbanism, a through line for me has been the way we build has a huge impact on the way we live, our quality of life, our standard of living, and New Urbanism has been the such an inspiration to both of us, the brilliant minds that shaped that movement. And then, couple of years ago, a young man, 33 years old. He was then 30. So he's had in the ring for LA controller seven candidate pool. He put a billboard up as the first opening shot in his campaign. Of this a bar chart of the city's budget, and the headline was, is Mayor gar said his budget good for you, and it showed the tremendous amount of money we were spending on police versus some of the other priorities in the city. And no commentary, just just the facts. I was so impressed by that that I reached out to him. His campaign manager asked me to endorse him. I thought, What the hell? Right? I mean, yeah, I will. No one at City Hall will ever speak to me again. But you know, that's okay. And then he got more votes. Than any candidate for any office in the history of Los Angeles, because it turned out that people were hungry for a young man who was willing to speak truth to power. He had only set foot in City Hall twice, and both times were for protests, and so now he is the third highest elected official in the city of Los Angeles, and for the last two years, he has been sounding the alarm on a looming fiscal crisis. When we came into office in December of 2022 the city was celebrating record high reserves. The problem was that was based upon federal dollars from COVID a one time artificial stimulus. It was based upon the strong bounce back from the COVID dip that wasn't going to continue indefinitely. And it was based upon wha