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Mayor’s book draws on public service experience

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By Samantha Sommer, Staff Writer 1:17 PM Thursday, July 9, 2009

SPRINGFIELD — Warren Copeland has several jobs — mayor, religion and social ethics professor, and faculty director of a civic engagement center.

So it makes sense that his latest book draws on those experiences to discuss ethics in public service.

“There wasn’t anyway I was going to be mayor and not think about it and what it meant,” Copeland said.

His book, “Doing Justice in Our Cities: Lessons in Public Policy from America’s Heartland,” will be released July 20.

It will be available this month at the Wittenberg University bookstore and online, including at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com.

Copeland, a Wittenberg professor, has written two other books and co-edited a third.

As far as he knows, Copeland is the only professor who teaches ethics and is mayor of a city larger than 50,000 people in the country.

“It struck me I had a sort of unique perspective,” he said.

Yet, Springfield isn’t unique, he said. It’s good book setting because it’s a typical city.

“Here we have, in a relatively smaller city, the same dynamics as you would see in Chicago or Detroit,” he said.

The book uses local anecdotes throughout, such as residents concerned about the closure of railroad crossings, police manning levels and the downtown hospital.

One chapter discusses four common perspectives on cities and the roles played by people who hold those views.

When making decisions, the different views have to be balanced, Copeland said.

“There is some truth in each of those four positions,” he said.

The book also looks at how to attract middle-income people to cities, looking at why they do and don’t want to live there, and what Springfield has done to address that.

The condition of cities is a justice issue, Copeland said, especially as cities have trended toward low-income cores surrounded by suburbs of various income levels.

That’s a trend that sets up a more unfair society, he said, such as in school systems.

“The city I’d like to live in is one that has a mixed population,” he said. “I don’t want to live in a city that’s only wealthy people and I don’t want to live in a city that is predominantly low-income people. Both suffer in the process.”

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