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An economic strategy that puts cities first
By Michael Douglas
Beacon Journal editorial page editor
Published on Sunday, Sep 14, 2008
Barack Obama visited Riverside, near Dayton. John McCain and Sarah Palin stopped in Lebanon, the Lebanon that is a short ride from Cincinnati. Joe Biden appeared in Parma. Hillary Clinton speaks in Akron today.
And that accounts for the past week. Candidates often envision bringing additional states into play in presidential elections. Barack Obama dreams about Virginia. In the end, Ohio returns to center stage, this year proving no exception.
Ohioans bask in the attention. Yet every four years, the question hovers: What do we exactly get? Truth be told, Obama, McCain, Gore, Bush, Clinton and the rest have been here for themselves. Carry Ohio. Enter the White House.
Through the years, Ohio the battleground has watched overall personal income decline and jobs grow at an anemic rate. Which helps to frame why the more compelling visitors were in Columbus last week. Bruce Katz and others from the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., joined with Greater Ohio, a nonprofit operation, to unveil a preliminary report: ''Restoring Prosperity: The State Role in Revitalizing Ohio's Core Communities.''
Go ahead, grumble again: Great, another study. What's next? A task force? Consider that the moment attracted a cast of more than 1,000 leaders from across the state. Better? The report is a tough-minded evaluation, one that sets a necessary standard for measuring advances in Ohio, or the lack of progress.
Katz leads the metropolitan policy program at Brookings, where Ohio, fortunately, serves as one of the laboratories. Addressing this summit meeting on Wednesday, he covered some familiar ground, Ohio confronting a profound reshaping of its economy, driven by forces much larger than a single state, or country. A trade agreement isn't the sole, or primary, explanation for the state's share of manufacturing jobs declining from 22.2 percent in 1990 to 14.6 percent in 2006.
An Ohio looking to recapture its glory must be alert to ''what matters today.'' The report stresses that the prosperity of 2008 and beyond ''will not look the same as prosperity in 1950.''
Want to create higher-paying jobs? Enjoy rising incomes? Katz explained that to succeed a state must excel in innovation (developing new products and processes), human capital (education and skills), infrastructure (transportation, transmission, telecommunication) and quality places (distinctive and attractive communities).
''Where do we find these assets?'' Katz asked. They come together in Ohio cities, Brookings identifying 32 ''core communities,'' ranging in size from 11,000 people in Ironton to 750,000 in Columbus.
The seven largest metropolitan areas in the state feature 75 percent of the patenting activity (perhaps the most telling indicator of the health of a regional economy), 82 percent of the knowledge jobs and 81 percent of the college graduates. Add the elements that define quality of life, from parks to theaters to neighborhoods, and you start nodding when Katz completes his line of thinking: This is where Ohio must invest to succeed.
The trouble is, as Katz argued, ''past state policies have stacked the deck against core communities, systematically undermining their health and vitality and that of the broader areas that surround them.'' He pointed to tax policies that ''leave cities stranded with tax-exempt properties, saddled with the costs of maintaining older infrastructure and responsible for supporting a large portion of school expenses through their property taxes.''
Few policies are more revealing than the state's 215 enterprise zones, in 85 of 88 counties. Katz noted that this so-called economic development tool fuels sprawl, skews transportation investment and invites unproductive competition among communities. Too often those who benefit have no need for such help. Thus, Ohio wastes resources and penalizes cities.
No surprise that Katz fixed on the state's notoriously fragmented structure of local government, nearly 3,800 jurisdictions in all. Here, again, Ohio squanders assets at great cost.
What would Brookings do?
For starters, Ohioans should applaud recent steps in the right direction, the Third Frontier Project, the revamping of the way the state taxes businesses, the priority placed on higher education, the new strategy crafted for the Department of Development, the $1.57 billion investment in public works and key industries, even the restructuring of rules for electricity companies.
Katz wants the state to encourage and reward local governments for engaging in ''bold experimentation,'' collaborating, achieving partnerships and ideas otherwise ''bubbling up'' to address the debilitating balkanization. He suggested setting such objectives as increasing the population of downtowns 2 percent by 2015 or doubling the number of disadvantaged youth in post-secondary education by 2020.
Incentives would be targeted to enhance critical economic engines such as universities and medical institutions. This hardly exhausts the Brookings recommendations (check out www.brookings.edu/metro and www.greaterohio.org). Striking is the departure from four years ago.
Remember Don Plusquellic and the mayors of the state's other leading cities rightly trying to get the presidential candidates to discuss an urban agenda? The mayors met frustration. The message, in so many words? Ohio, you're on your own. Visiting the state last week, the candidates again were otherwise engaged. The difference?
Ohio leaders were busy noodling a strategy, looking to put the state in play in a much more promising way.
Douglas is the Beacon Journal editorial page editor. He can be reached at 330-996-3514, or emailed at mdouglas@thebeaconjournal.com.
Barack Obama visited Riverside, near Dayton. John McCain and Sarah Palin stopped in Lebanon, the Lebanon that is a short ride from Cincinnati. Joe Biden appeared in Parma. Hillary Clinton speaks in Akron today.
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