Discussion – sorry, no time for that!
Last night, the following alders attended the “discussion” on the City’s Economic Development Plan: Satya Rhodes-Conway, Tim Gruber, Julia Kerr, Judy Compton, Mark Clear, Joe Clausius, Michael Schumacher, Marsha Rummel, Mike Verveer and myself. The “discussion” lasted a little over 2 hours but consisted primarily of a presentation. Alders, in typical fashion, had much to comment on, but were cut off and instead encouraged to send emails with our comments.
DO WE AGREE ON THE GOALS/STRATEGY OF THE PLAN?
After listening to the comments of some of the alders, I think the major issue is that most of us don’t buy into the “goals” or as Alder Mark Clear put it the “strategy” of the plan. This was most apparent by the questions of two of my colleagues.
Alder Judy Compton used the Grandview Commons example where we wanted commercial development in the new neighborhood. She wanted the plan to help address how the City could help get small neighborhood businesses, coffee shops, etc into the neighborhood. Unfortunately, the plan doesn’t address that issue, because it focuses on “basic sector” jobs, not “non-basic sector” jobs.
Alder Mark Clear wanted to know, “what about small businesses”? The plan, if you look closely, does a little better here. It suggests that staff know where to refer small businesses when they have issues (don’t they?) and that we support entrepreneurial efforts. However, all the talk about public/private partnerships clearly focused on large businesses/major players. This prompted Alder Rummel to ask about the Chamber of Commerce and their role and she reminded us all that they had to be forced to create a small business advisory council to keep small businesses involved in the group. The consultant said that he considered the Chamber of Commerce interests to be represented by THRIVE.
ARE WE TARGETING THE RIGHT JOBS TO RAISE OUR MEDIAN INCOME AND BECOME MORE AFFLUENT?
For me, I think several comments during the presentation concern me. First of all, our community, in many aspects, is doing well. One of the “problems” the consultant identified is that we are “not an affluent city”. Our Madison median family income is “only slightly above average”. Even “worse” is that the median income in Dane County but outside the City of Madison is 34% higher than in the City of Madison. To address this issue, we are going to focus on the “middle and upper points of the job base”.
To me, this is all wrong. If our median family income is not high enough, why not work on raising the lowest incomes instead of the highest incomes? Instead, our “best opportunities” that we are focusing on in the plan are to focus on employers we already have here in the areas of
- Higher Education
- Technology
- Health Care
- Financial Services
- Advanced Manufacturing
- State Government
as well as focusing on
- New entrepreneurial “gazelles”
- Modest business attraction (if it fits with UW or key companies)
I’m not inspired. In a City where the data shows increases in kids who need “free and reduced lunch”, I think we might be focusing on the wrong thing. And we can’t dismiss those numbers simply because the federal government redefined the poverty levels so we have less families in poverty. The fact remains, our lower median income is likely because of the numbers of poor people we have in the City of Madison as compared to those who live in Dane County outside the City of Madison and this “plan” doesn’t address that.
GOVERNMENT SHOULD BE COZIER WITH BUSINESS?
Another concerns of mine is the “public/private” partnerships that are expected. I had a nice little chuckle when the consultant explained that the business community, through THRIVE does not consider the City a partner, in fact, they push us away and his separate comment that perhaps the business community shouldn’t beat the City up so much. And conversely, the City is doing alot and we should communicate that better. But, it’s serious. How can you work with a group of people who don’t want to work with you and just publicly criticize the government instead? Or, will only participate if they have a special venue?
Additionally, the push to create more “informal” connections in the business community and to consult with them more made me a little queasy. We don’t have a good track record of honoring the open meetings laws that we are required to follow when it comes to dealings with businesses and we’ve gutted our lobbying laws. While I think we generally need more transparency in local government and less favoritism, it seems that this plan pushes us in the opposite direction.
HOW ARE WE GOING TO FUND/ACCOMPLISH ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT?
Lastly, at least for now, the meat of the recommendations is in the set of recommendations that are as follows:
5. Make the City ED Toolkit More Aggressive and Strategic
- Develop tools to measure fiscal impact, benefit/cost
- TIF/TID priority to basic sector development creating quality jobs
- Reexamine development assessment policies
- Community Development Authority (in public/private partnership) for economic development
- Encourage neighborhood Business Improvement Districtsa major fatal flaw. It relies on TIF money to fund much of the plan.
- Create special project development fund ($2.5 mil/yr by 2010)
This is likely a fatal flaw in the plan.
- TIF
- We already know that the city isn’t willing to create priorities for TIF. Try as I might, a clear set of priorities doesn’t seem likely. That would require us to say we aren’t going to fund high end condos and I don’t think the council has the political will to do that.
- Even less likely is that the politicos will limit the “flexibility” of the TIF program by taking those clear goals and asking for applications that meet those goals through a competitive process.
- Even if we can do the above, we still have to show that there is a gap/need for funding these projects and can’t just give TIF money away without that fiscal analysis. We are limited by what we can do TIF by state laws that people tend to forget about.
- We haven’t figured out how to make sure that if we give money to build a building to create jobs how to make sure that the business that moves in actually creates the jobs that were promised and/or how to get our money back if the goals are not met.
- CDA
- They don’t have the expertise (or any staff) to jump into the economic development game.
- They don’t have any money or even a budget that they can share with us.
- They don’t have a clearly stated set of goals that the Council has agreed to.
- Reexamine development assessment policies? What does that mean?
- Where are we going to get $2.5 million per year to put into a slush fund for Economic Development when we couldn’t fund so many things like staff in the clerk’s office?
MISCELLANEOUS/OTHER COMMENTS
I have many more comments that I don’t have time to comment on or don’t rise to the level of key observations after last night, but here’s a list of some other issues:
- Apparently, we are supposed to embark on a journey to revise the City’s mission statement. That sounds like a nightmare.
- I stand by my criticisms/concerns that this plan just lists what we are doing and then says communicate more and better and increase staff capabilities.
- It sounds like we need to add at least two (?) staff people to accomplish the small business and recruitment activities.
- The draft of the plan that EDC saw has additional items in it that concerned me that were not included in the presentation to the Council
- Pssst – staff, wake up! At least try to keep your eyes open during the presentation. It’s embarrassing.
More to come, I’m sure. If I had this much to say, I wonder what would have happened if the 10 of us who showed up actually got to discuss our concerns.
