When Williamsport received over $25 million in federal pandemic recovery funding, Council Member Adam Yoder and his colleagues publicly deliberated how to spend it.
Yoder took office just months before COVID-19 upended the world. A novice elected leader and a business administrator, he was charged with maximizing funds meant for recovering from a health and economic crisis that was then still ongoing.
During one of the spirited debates, Yoder told Talk of the Town, a frustrated colleague commented to him, “Adam, you can’t measure everything.”
“And I really didn’t have an argument for it,” Yoder said. That comment became one of the factors that led him to commit to researching unemployment recovery among Pennsylvania communities. Yoder earned a doctorate in business administration from Drexel University this spring for that research.
Talk of the Town discussed the findings with Yoder. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Talk of the Town: Can you talk about what your study was about?
Adam Yoder: When you look at the COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to the negative health effects, there were some pretty clear economic impacts. The big component of the economic fallout was unemployment. What my dissertation did was essentially modeling at the local level how unemployment recovery came back in a comparative fashion. I ended up looking at a total of 103 [Pennsylvania] municipal and county governments that were direct recipients of the State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund.
Talk of the Town: Tell us about the findings. What are the most surprising things for you?
Adam Yoder: From an unemployment recovery perspective, rural municipalities came back faster and at a greater level compared to their urban counterparts (“contrary to the common perception of urban areas outperforming rural areas economically,” he wrote).
From a governance perspective, entities that had more local autonomy in their relationship with the state government had better performance. So, home rule status was a very strong predictor. Larger board compositions actually were a predictor as well, which is a little counterintuitive.
Both these findings were very surprising — a little bit of unconventional wisdom. But we don’t understand why these are such strong predictors. What are the structural elements that enable it? How much of it is people? What about the people? Good research probably generates more questions than it answers.
Talk of the Town: You are Council president for Williamsport and a researcher on workplace and economic development. How do these roles intertwine and inform each other?
Adam Yoder: I think in today’s world, you see a lot of binary thinking. But we don’t live in a binary world. A lot of the solutions to our problems are not binary. In a binary world, a lot of the rhetoric is, well, if we want to save costs and balance our budget, we’ve gotta trim heads. It could very well be warranted but there are trade-offs.
I’ve noticed myself really being a lot more prudent in my approach to governing, so to speak. Looking back, I would actually answer my colleague — the debate might have been a little bit spirited, but we’re friends — and say, “you actually can measure more than you think.”
—Min Xian, local accountability reporter
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