Traditionally, local governments existed to serve discrete functions. Cities took care of public safety and the roads, school and community-college districts handled education, and transit agencies ran the buses and trains. But local-government leaders often face increasing demands — both internally and externally — to stray beyond their core competences, sometimes with adverse results for those who rely on those leaders’ primary services.

With the rise of the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) framework and the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) trend, government organizations and corporations are facing additional pressure to address extraneous priorities.

In a previous National Review Capital Matters piece, I discussed municipal-sustainability initiatives. Since no single U.S. city produces even 1 percent of worldwide greenhouse-gas emissions (and most emit a tiny fraction of this portion), no local initiative can have a meaningful impact on climate change. Yet groups such as 350 Bay Area demand that cities recruit full-time sustainability specialists. Such hires divert funds from the local government’s core functions and consume time the city manager and city council could be devoting to overseeing these functions.

While most cities were in good financial shape coming out of the pandemic, some are now facing challenges because of out-migration and the collapse of commercial-real-estate valuations (which depresses property-tax revenues). Cities such as San Francisco will increasingly be forced to choose between such basics as police protection and nontraditional services such as looking after the burgeoning homeless population.

Municipal-finance expert Mark Moses recommends that city leaders “take inventory of what they have taken on“ and that they “shed, not double or triple down on, ineffective policies.” “For each municipal activity,” he says, “city staff should ask the following questions: Why has the organization taken this on? Do these reasons constitute a legitimate current justification for continuing the activity?”

But taking this advice is challenging when activist constituents use public-comment opportunities at governing-board meetings to demand action on diversity, equity, and inclusion or on climate change and other allegedly existential threats.

Public colleges are also afflicted by mission creep. One trend is for higher-education institutions to address what they define as “basic student needs.” The University of Hawaii defines these as including “food and housing, childcare, mental health, financial resources and transportation, among others.” The university has created a committee of staff and faculty members to decide how to best meet these needs, presumably while displacing some of their educational responsibilities.

But perhaps the most concerning cases of public-agency mission creep today involve transit agencies. These entities lost much of their ridership during the Covid-19 pandemic and now face fiscal cliffs as they use up emergency funding provided by the federal government in 2020 and 2021. Under the circumstances, transit agencies would best be served by focusing narrowly on the task of moving commuters from their place of origin to their place of destination. Instead, they continue to branch out into areas outside this core function.

One preoccupation of these agencies is transit-oriented development (TOD), the idea of building dense housing complexes near train stations and bus stops. This might have been fine if it entailed a transit agency simply selling land to a private developer and letting the buyer take it from there. But, often, the agency remains involved in TOD projects, consuming management time and potentially creating unforeseen liabilities.

For example, in Oakland, Calif., the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) district leased land near Coliseum Station to an unqualified developer. When apartments in the project flooded during last winter’s rainy season, residents took over a BART board of directors meeting to demand relief. At last report, tenants were expecting to be displaced for six months. BART has given them free passes for their trouble, thus far avoiding more-expensive compensation.

The Bay Area transit agency is also heavily invested in DEI. It has a permanent Office of Civil Rights, which is responsible for BART’s “social justice strategy” and for ensuring that riders have “fair and equal access” to the system. The latter was obviously a serious concern before the civil-rights era, when bus segregation prevailed in the South, but contemporary San Francisco is far away from that — in terms of both time and distance. As BART plans to build an unnecessary second tunnel between Oakland and San Francisco, it has prioritized the task of standing up an 18-member Equity Advisory Council. One of the EAC’s roles is to “participate in synthesizing findings from community engagement by taking part in facilitated exercises to identify themes using the lens of their lived experience,” which seems to be quite far afield from digging a tunnel and running tracks through it. Meanwhile, BART has found itself unable to execute its core mission (transporting passengers on its existing track) without a large taxpayer bailout.

In rare cases, mission creep can lead to the elimination of a special-purpose government. One such case is that of the Kent County Land Bank, whose original purpose was to “transform vacant, abandoned and tax-foreclosed property back to productive use” in and around Grand Rapids, Mich. The Land Bank ultimately transformed itself into a developer of modular housing across the state, which led to complaints from private developers who did not appreciate competition from a governmental entity operating outside its territory. After nine years of operation, KCLB was dissolved by the county commission that had created it.

While KCLB’s closure is atypical and not the result of fiscal distress, it may nonetheless serve as a warning to other agencies that exist at the pleasure of an overlying state or county. Should they veer too far from their original missions, they could rightly fall within the local government’s legislative crosshairs — especially if they also require a taxpayer bailout.