City Hall Fellows addresses the looming public sector leadership vacuum that faces every city in this country. More than 1/3 of this country’s government workforce will be eligible to retire within the decade.

These workers are not the headline-grabbing politicians, but the career civil servants who work day-in and day-out, regardless of the political party in power, on behalf of everyone who lives in, works in and visits cities. Yet, for decades not enough capable young people have been entering local government to replace them.

Cities have a difficult time competing for talent with the private, federal and nonprofit sectors due to limited budgets and restrictive civil service regulations. Compounding that, today’s college students consider local government an unappealing career choice. According to recent surveys by several organizations dedicated to effective government, more than 80% of college students express no interest in working in government. The primary reasons college students cite include:

• a prevailing and deep-seated belief that non-profits provide more beneficial services to communities than local governments do;

• a widely-held impression -- created and reinforced by political scandals and politicians’ frequent negative references to government bureaucracy, particularly in campaigns -- that government work is overly bureaucratic, mind-numbing and ineffective;

• lack of awareness of what career opportunities exist in government; and

• the intimidating bureaucracy and red tape inherent in the government job application process.

More troubling, unlike just a few decades ago, today’s best and brightest do not equate local government work with public service. Indeed, these studies found that only 6% express any confidence at all in government’s ability to serve the public good.

Cities -- whose primary responsibility is direct service -- lack the capacity to make a meaningful effort on their own to change this point of view. As a result, although many cities have local universities housing a ready pool of talent, their efforts to attract that talent into the public sector right out of school are largely ad hoc in the form of traditional, short-term, part-time internships. Cities that are not near colleges or universities are even worse off. Thus, most of America’s best and brightest college graduates are not being effectively recruited into the local public sector, and are going elsewhere.

Recruiting this talent into government service and developing a new generation of informed and skilled local government leaders is critical to cities ability to cope with the strain on  public services and infrastructure that population increases into metropolitan areas have brought and will continue to bring. With the wide-scale retirements that are projected to occur in the next few years, cities cannot afford to wait to develop their future public workforces until the recession ends. Moreover, as government agencies tighten their belts through this economic downturn, it is crucial that every public servant be skilled, trained and capable.  Yet, the public servants we rely on every day for critical services continue to leave, and our young people are not stepping up to take their place.

Municipal agencies are not the only ones that will struggle if this trend continues. Everyone who relies on or interacts with the local government for any reason – namely, all Americans – will suffer.

City Hall Fellows exists to bridge the gap, to make sure that our cities have the leaders they need and deserve for generations to come.