America's Mayors Gather to Formally Declare That They Will Stop Formally Declaring Things
The city of Columbus, Ohio, welcomed 214 mayors this week for the sixteenth annual National Convening of Municipal Leadership Excellence, a three-day summit dedicated to the proposition that American cities face serious, urgent, and complex challenges that can best be addressed by flying to Columbus and talking about them in a convention center.
This year's theme — "Doing More With Less: A New Era of Streamlined Municipal Collaboration" — was displayed on a 40-foot banner in the lobby of the Greater Columbus Convention Center, beneath which delegates registered, collected lanyards, and received tote bags containing, among other items, a 48-page program guide, a branded water bottle, a QR code linking to a PDF of last year's joint declaration, and a stress ball shaped like a city hall.
By Wednesday afternoon, the summit had produced its own joint declaration. It calls for fewer joint declarations.
The Problem, Stated Formally and at Length
The summit's opening plenary session was addressed by Columbus Mayor Sandra Tillman, who welcomed delegates with a 22-minute keynote titled "The Imperative of Doing Less to Achieve More," delivered from a stage flanked by two screens displaying a slide reading "Efficiency. Clarity. Action." in a font that had clearly been the subject of extended internal debate.
Mayor Tillman outlined the central challenge facing American municipal leadership: that the nation's mayors spend, by her own estimate, a significant portion of their collaborative energy producing documents, declarations, frameworks, and communiqués that are non-binding, rarely read, and frequently indistinguishable from the previous year's documents, declarations, frameworks, and communiqués.
"We are, as a collective body, extraordinarily good at agreeing that things should happen," Mayor Tillman said, to sustained applause. "What we are perhaps somewhat less accomplished at is the subsequent stage."
The subsequent stage, in this context, means the things actually happening.
Mayor Tillman's keynote was followed by a 45-minute networking coffee break, a panel on the keynote's themes, and a breakout session to discuss what had been covered in the panel.
Day Two: The Panel on Panels
The summit's second day featured what the program guide described as its "anchor session": a three-hour panel titled "Toward a Leaner Convening Culture: Rethinking How We Gather to Talk About Gathering."
The panel featured six mayors, a facilitator from a municipal consulting group called Urban Futures Collaborative, and a PowerPoint presentation containing 34 slides, the twenty-second of which read, in its entirety: "Fewer slides."
Panelists discussed at length the proliferation of municipal summits, convenings, symposia, working groups, and listening sessions that have come to define intergovernmental collaboration in the United States. By one estimate cited during the session — drawn from a report commissioned by the summit's organizing body — American mayors collectively attend or send representatives to more than 400 named annual gatherings, producing upward of 200 joint statements, declarations, or communiqués per year, the majority of which share three characteristics: they are aspirational, they are non-binding, and they are largely identical to the ones from the year before.
"We have a framework for everything," said Mayor DeShawn Okafor of Memphis, who received the session's largest applause. "What we don't have is a framework for having fewer frameworks."
The audience responded enthusiastically. A working group was immediately proposed to develop one.
The Declaration Itself
The summit's joint declaration — the Columbus Compact on Municipal Convening Reform, as it was formally titled by Wednesday evening — runs to eleven pages and commits its 214 signatories to a set of principles designed to reduce the volume of non-binding commitments produced by gatherings of this kind.
The declaration calls for a 30 percent reduction in the number of joint declarations issued by municipal leadership bodies by 2027. It establishes a new framework — the Municipal Convening Efficiency Initiative — to monitor progress toward this goal. It creates three working groups to develop implementation guidance for the framework. It schedules a follow-up convening in 2026 to assess how the working groups are progressing. And it commits all signatories to a shared set of values around "purposeful, outcome-oriented, and temporally bounded collaboration."
The declaration is non-binding.
"That's standard," said Urban Futures Collaborative's lead facilitator, Trish Engelman, who helped draft the document and whose firm has facilitated the summit's declaration process for the past four years. "You can't mandate municipal behavior through a voluntary convening. What you can do is establish a normative framework that creates reputational incentives for alignment."
When asked whether a non-binding declaration calling for fewer non-binding declarations was structurally self-defeating, Engelman said that was "a really interesting framing" and that she would "take that back to the team."
Experts React
Observers of municipal governance described the Columbus Compact as consistent with recent trends in collaborative local leadership.
"Mayors love a summit," said Dr. Anita Forsythe of the Brookings Institution, who attended the convening as an observer and whose institution produces an annual report on municipal collaboration that is itself distributed at summits of this kind. "It's visible, it's collegial, it generates a document. The document signals commitment. The commitment signals leadership. The leadership justifies next year's summit. It's a very stable loop."
Dr. Forsythe noted that the Columbus Compact was not the first declaration to call for fewer declarations. A 2019 gathering of Midwestern mayors produced a joint statement urging "a more disciplined approach to joint statements." A 2021 virtual summit on post-pandemic governance included a session titled "Less Talk, More Action," which concluded with a 12-point action plan and a commitment to hold a follow-up session.
"The instinct is genuine," Dr. Forsythe said. "The execution tends to be structurally complicated by the fact that the people trying to solve the problem are also the people who convene to discuss problems."
Next Year's Summit
The sixteenth annual National Convening of Municipal Leadership Excellence closed Thursday morning with a plenary session titled "From Commitment to Momentum," a farewell address from Mayor Tillman, and a group photograph taken in front of the 40-foot banner.
Organizers confirmed that the seventeenth annual summit has been scheduled for next April in Denver, Colorado. The theme, already announced, is "Progress in Practice: Measuring What We've Built."
One of the three sessions confirmed for the Denver program is a panel on whether the Columbus Compact's goals are being met. The panel will be 90 minutes long. A working group will convene the following morning to discuss it.
Registration is already open. The tote bags will be different.
