Reconceptualizing the Public Management and Performance of Business Improvement Districts

Abstract

Business improvement districts (BIDs) offer an increasingly popular avenue of public impact, participation, and organization for invested local private actors to revitalize business centers as well as enhance local governance, services, and management capacity. The privatization aspects of BIDs have received important attention. Little attention, however, has been dedicated to BIDs as a form of public—private partnerships (PPPs), particularly the public purpose and intention—the "publicization" aspects—of these partnerships. BIDs are distinctive but uncanny partnerships between the public and private sectors, operating at the local subgovernmental level and functioning both contractually and in a strategic collaboration. In a 2008 study of BID managers in the United States, managers overwhelmingly identified the BID as a PPP and themselves as managing a PPP and said that a key factor in determining success was how well the partnership was managed. This suggests that BID management is fundamentally more than the provision of planning and supervision of business development services, infrastructure improvement, promotions and marketing, design, or economic revitalization. BIDs also enhance governance, and this enhancement is of equal or greater importance in the sustained success of BIDs. The research suggests that the administration of BIDs, as PPPs, has a place in public management. In this paper, PPP management as a form of hybrid management is referred to as a "third door" in administration technology, one that is related to but distinct from public and business administration and, because of its accountability to public processes, appears to be closer to public administration. We cannot understand BIDs without examining the role and impact of the PPPs they represent.