At last week’s Pioneer Institute panel discussion, a new working paper on "building the next urban economy" was presented and made available. Written by the institute’s executive director, James Stergios, the paper is called "Rehabbing Urban Redevelopment" (PDF). Along with the paper itself, the institute also makes available the slide presentation (PPT) that accompanied Stergios’s unveiling of the report.
One of the points raised early in the presentation approaches hard-and-fast reasons why the state leadership should care about the condition of the state’s "middle cities." Stergios said it comes down to four essential concepts: these cities easily trend toward receivership because of fiscal pressure; the state ends up spending huge amounts of money on them; there is a chronic lack of social mobility or resources for nearly 20 percent of the cities’ populations (and thus there is a "humane reason" to help); and the cities are a drag on the economy and a cost in opportunity. Beacon Hill should be looking to their potential, looking at what they could be, and strategizing to compete.
Mentioning that the state spends about $67 million annually on the middle cities, Stergios asked, "Can we use the state’s money more effectively, in a more coordinated fashion?"
He reviewed crime and education statistics, bond ratings (only Pittsfield is anywhere as bad as Springfield’s rating; just eight of the state’s cities are below the A range), and various grants to cities from the state level over the last seven years, what he called the "messy slide." (The data appears in a couple of charts in Part II of the report.) Stergios said that the middle cities have received, on average, somewhere around $45 million every year in grant development, but it’s messy and uncoordinated; the housing, transportation, public safety and environmental affairs departments don’t talk to each other.
In proposing a "blueprint for collaboration," Stergios outlined a need for measurable outputs, and cautioned against the state’s micromanagement of local affairs. He said that middle cities should be measured against their own past performance, not some abstract notion of ideal functioning; in addition, pay should be attached to performance. The state should set goals and provide growth incentives, he said, and strong local leadership should be encouraged, helping localities know what they should be focusing on. He suggested a state-regional-local investment plan because "committing to change opens the door to the aid or the investment."
Perhaps most compelling was Stergio’s proposal that the state establish a "general contractor" in the state office to coordinate with middle cities as a single point of contact. Overall, he said, Beacon Hill does not understand the needs and the conditions of the middle cities; if there were someone at the state level who could become a middle city expert and point of contact, it could ease a number of issues at the cities’ level, including the phenomenon of having to "chase down" state officials in various departments to get things done, which perhaps exhausts local resources unnecessarily.
One audience member, a UMass public policy professor, criticized this proposal as being too much of a "centralization" technique, when "decentralization" has been shown to be more open and inclusive of immigrants, for instance. Springfield Chief Development Officer David Panagore, who spoke in favor of the proposal, responded that good leadership includes openness.
Stergios went on to outline a possible matrix for measuring cities, helping the state to gauge their performance and progress, including criteria such as public order, education, fiscal management, and economic climate. "If you achieve some improvements, you will get a certain amount of local aid. Bring down dropout rates, for example, and bring in more local aid," he explained, adding, "The goal is not to assume that these measures are the right ones. This is a working paper. We are going to start engaging local leaders to see what their opinions are."
Following this presentation, a Springfield panel spoke; I’ll have more on that later.
While such state-level discussions are ongoing, with some focus on Boston and the Finance Control Board in Springfield, Robert Culver of MassDevelopment thinks Worcester will emerge as "a driver of Massachusetts’ economy" in a piece in today’s Telegram & Gazette.
