When deadly fires tore across the island of Maui in early August, killing around 100 people and destroying thousands of homes and businesses, the public quickly learned that much of the destruction could have been prevented had local officials simply done their jobs.

As described in a devastating story by the Associated Press, public officials in multiple agencies failed utterly to perform their basic functions. Herman Andaya, the official in charge of doing so, neglected to sound an alarm that would have warned residents of imminent danger. According to CNN, “the state’s vaunted integrated outdoor siren warning system — the largest in the world, with about 400 alarms — was not activated during the fires.” As a result, people who might have had time to escape the fast-moving fire perished instead. The officials responsible for coordinating escape routes also failed to do their jobs and in some cases even erected barricades, to isolate downed power lines, that prevented people from escaping. In some areas, the only people who survived were those who defied officials and drove around the barricades.

Even the official in charge of releasing water to fight the fires was negligent. As Wilfred Reilly documented at NRO, “the Hawaiian official in charge of releasing water to fight the blaze — one M. Kaleo Manuel — neglected to do so for more than five hours as the area burning greatly increased in size,” because “Manuel, who is partly of Native Hawaiian extraction, . . . apparently consulted with local traditional farmers before releasing any of Kanaloa’s bounty for firefighting — having previously noted that water access should always follow ‘conversations about equity.’”

The Maui fires brought much-needed national attention to the failure of local emergency systems and local officials, but Hawaii is not an outlier. In ways large and small, in far too many communities across the country, public officials are proving unable or unwilling to perform the basic functions of their offices, as evidenced, for example, by failures in the wake of the Covid pandemic to combat crime or ensure decent education opportunities for children. But many other mundane functions of local government have deteriorated significantly as well.

Consider another example of emergency services. In Washington, D.C., the 911 system, part of D.C.’s Office of Unified Communications (OUC), has been dysfunctional for years. Residents call for help and are put on hold for upwards of 15 minutes or, more likely, simply hung up on by the operator. Even other emergency responders can’t get through — when D.C. firefighters called 911 recently to request help while performing CPR on a patient, they could not reach anyone. Operators at 911 also abandoned the emergency channel during a recent triple shooting, all the victims of which died.

When they aren’t ignoring calls, city employees at OUC are making serious mistakes in responding to them. This summer, after witnesses called 911 to report that a car had crashed into the Anacostia River, dispatchers sent emergency responders to the wrong location; more than seven minutes later, dispatchers realized their mistake and sent responders to the correct location, but the three people in the car were dead by the time ambulances found them. As a local news outlet reported, in July 2022, “a one-year-old girl died as her parents waited for help after the 911 dispatcher who took the call recorded the address incorrectly in the system.” A few months earlier, another resident had died while suffering a cardiac arrest after the ambulance that was meant to help her was also dispatched to the wrong address. In yet another case of a resident who died of a heart attack, operators categorized the call as a “low-level assist,” which meant the ambulance took 20 minutes to arrive. Some of these deaths were likely preventable.

Years ago, a former OUC director warned the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, of severe staffing shortages because of the extraordinarily lenient leave policies for city employees. She also documented serious cases of absenteeism among 911 operators that went unpunished and significant gaps in employees’ training. Only recently has D.C.’s progressive council seen fit to consider passing emergency legislation that would require OUC to be transparent about how it does (or doesn’t do) its job, including how long operators take to answer calls, how many calls they drop, and the errors they make in dispatching emergency responders. A local government shouldn’t require emergency legislation to force it to acknowledge and correct its own dysfunction.

Despite high tax rates in many cities and towns, citizens still experience regular failures of basic functions of local government, from picking up garbage to keeping parks and other public areas clean and safe to simply making employees available to answer questions about city services.

This past summer, despite ample funding for the city’s parks-and-recreation department, Baltimore failed to open several of its largest outdoor public pools. As a news broadcast on the local NBC station noted, pools in Cherry Hill, Patterson Park, and Clifton Park remained closed throughout the summer, even though money for their repair and restoration had been allocated years earlier. When a news helicopter filmed some local kids breaking into one of the city pools and swimming in the murky green water on one of the hottest days of the summer, local officials responded with shrugs and excuses. Baltimore mayor Brandon Scott told WYPR News that it was “political posturing” to suggest that local officials had failed to do their jobs, even though one of his “B’Lit, B’More Summer” pool parties, these being one of his much touted “holistic” solutions to the serious youth-violence crisis in Baltimore, was scheduled to take place at the closed Clifton Park Pool.

Why are so many local governments managing their responsibilities so poorly?

Some of the lackadaisical approach to local governance is likely a holdover from pandemic-era regulations and work-from-home policies. Many mayors and local administrators have spent the past year trying to get their employees back to the office. In early 2023, when New York City mayor Eric Adams announced that city workers had to work from their offices five days a week, they (and their union) balked. According to the New York Times, the job-vacancy rate in some city agencies at the time was more than 20 percent. Adams eventually relented and allowed a pilot program that permitted workers to work from home two days per week. Although some municipal jobs can be done through remote or hybrid work, others are of necessity public-facing. Yet far too many public-service agencies employ people who now prefer to spend most of their time avoiding the public they are supposed to be serving.

As well, in cities and towns dominated by one political party (particularly those governed by Democrats), there is little political pressure to make local services more competent. Democrats long ago abandoned the “reinventing government” model, popularized by President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore in the 1990s, that sought to streamline federal bureaucracies and make their procedures more transparent. The party is now beholden to the money that comes from large public-sector-employee unions. In the 2020 election cycle, for example, according to the nonprofit OpenSecrets, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees spent almost $14 million, 99.1 percent of which went to Democrats. (In 1990, by contrast, the same union had spent $1.7 million, 97.6 percent of which had gone to Democrats.)

In many towns and cities, local officials find their efforts undermined also by progressive nonprofits. Organizations such as the ACLU and the Coalition on Homelessness often fight local public officials’ efforts to clean up homeless encampments (which tend to be sites of crime and drug use) and instead equip people living on the streets with a constant supply of tents as well as syringes and other drug paraphernalia. In 2021, in San Francisco, when a city supervisor proposed legislation that would have required the homeless to stay either in shelters or “safe sleeping” sites in the city, the ACLU and others claimed he was “criminalizing” the homeless population.

The nationalization of local politics and the moral grandstanding that accompanies it have also contributed to local-government incompetence. All politics is now potentially national and often hyper-partisan. Any city-council or school-board meeting can go viral on social media. Social media also make it more effective for local officials to grandstand, as Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke explain in their book Grandstanding. For example, in 2020, D.C.’s Mayor Bowser renamed 16th Street “Black Lives Matter Plaza” and spent almost $5 million of taxpayers’ money for a “Black Lives Matter” mural there. For months the mural also included the message “Defund the Police.” Meanwhile, homicide rates in the city climbed (as they continue to do) and crucial city services deteriorated. No matter. Bowser received international media attention for her mural.

Deteriorating services by local government combined with partisan moralizing by public officials breeds cynicism in, and has a demoralizing effect on, the people these officials are supposed to govern. When citizens lose trust in their local government’s ability to do basic things, they may lose trust in their government. What we need from local officials aren’t more media-friendly murals, excuse-making, and lectures on social justice. Just do the jobs that we, as taxpayers, pay you to do: Pick up the garbage, keep the streets safe, open the swimming pools, and provide reliable emergency services. Functional municipal government might not be glamorous, but it is essential to the flourishing of healthy communities.