State Leaders Told Big Changes Needed to Avert More Decline

OhioNewsBureau&

COLUMBUS, OHIO: State leaders, including Gov. Ted Strickland, Lt. Governor Lee Fisher and legislative leaders, were told this week at a well-attended conference in Columbus that Ohio needs an agenda for change because the current state policies, accumulated over the decades, have failed to keep pace with the changing dynamics of today’s social, environmental and economic reality, resulting in the loss of manufacturing might that under-girded the dynamism its cities once had but have lost to a great degree, resulting in a trend toward an older and poorer population unable to compete in the unforgiving global economy.

The conference, “Restoring Our Prosperity: The State Role in Revitalizing Ohio’s Core Communities,” undertaken jointly by the Metropolitan Policy Program (MPP) at the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, DC., and Greater Ohio, a policy center created to help Ohio build a vibrant economy that produces a quality of life for the common good, unveiled fresh proposals to take advantage of innovation, human capital, infrastructure and quality of place, assets found in metropolitan regions and the 32 core communities that are their hubs.

Bruce Katz, VP and Director of the MPP, and Lavea Brachman, Co-Director of Greater Ohio and a non-resident senior fellow at Brookings, laid the wood to Ohio leaders and other development administrators, education, business, neighborhood and civic leaders in attendance, calling on them to stop doing what they’ve been doing if they want to alter the state’s growth trajectory.

Reforms Katz and Brachman spoke to was not an appeal to more programs or more spending, but for policy makers to “reevaluate how existing policies, practices and administrative structures could be updated and realigned to better catalyze and encourage regional innovation and development. In simple language, they said Ohio needs to maximize the use of existing state resources in more effective ways.

The duo challenged the state to undertake an “honest assessment of what its real and potential assets are, where they exist, and ultimately, to make difficult choices about where and how to target scarce resources to best leverage them.”

One unmistakable message Katz and Brachman drove home was that state officials must relinquish commanding control over strategies, policies and programs to regional leaders, thinkers and stakeholders who need flexibility and incentives to keep their regions, supported by their core communities, growing and prospering.

Ohio’s leaders, then, need to design and implement a “competitive communities” strategy that strives to strengthen and leverage the economic potential and environmental role of core communities, their preliminary report called for.

Conference officials called on Ohio to “set forth a clear vision for the renewal of its core communities with “ambitious, transparent, and measurable

goals to guide public, private and civic sector investments, and a new way of doing business so that these goals can be accomplished.”

Strickland, who had earlier in the day announced that due to a continued decline in state revenues he was ordering his administration to cut another $540 million in spending, made his homage to the importance of cities and the role they play in the vitality of a region.

As the after lunch key note speaker, Strickland, who inherited a state already hammered by massive job losses, especially in the manufacturing sector, has been stymied in trying to turn it around, as he promised to do when running for governor in 2006. He lauded the notion that cities serve as centers of “clusters that can energize an entire region.”

Brandishing numerous awards Ohio received recently from R&D Magazine, which each year recognizes the states and their innovations, Strickland enumerated Ohio’s national and world prominence in areas like health care for children and adults, its leading role in research and manufacturing of solar panels, bio-medical advancements and the state’s new energy bill, which he said puts the Buckeye State among two other states that have mandated through law that 25 percent of all electricity produced and sold in the state by 2025 will come from renewable energy sources.

“Collaboration between cities and towns has the potential to solve problems that no town alone can possible address,” he said to a receptive audience. “In challenging times, when we need world class facilities or experts, we need not travel the world to find them, because we can rely on Ohio’s cities,” he said, adding that a city’s agenda is a regional agenda and that agenda becomes a state agenda.

In closing remarks, Strickland, the first Democratic governor in 16 years, said he and his staff would give full attention to the reports recommendations, some of which he said he agreed with and some he didn’t agree with. “A moment like this requires bold thinking, he said, “because simply repeating what’s been done before will entrench our weakness and leave to chance the fate of our strengths.”

The conference sessions focused on creating vital neighborhoods, enhancing skills and earnings, boosting business growth and job creation, investing to promote economic development, promoting regional solutions and learning from local leadership and promising practices.

Two prominent Republican leaders, Senate President Bill Harris and House Speaker Jon Husted, were also in attendance. Harris (R-Ashland) pointed to the reform of the state’s tax system, known as the Commercial Activity Tax, which he said will lead to a better business climate because it provided a 21 percent across-the-board tax in personal taxes and eliminated various business taxes that were designed decades ago when Ohio was an industrial titan but no longer needed.

Husted (R-Kettering), an advocate for charter schools, spoke about education reforms and said Ohio would need to freeze college costs for six years just to have them catch up with the national average of higher education.

In the larger scope of the debate, Republicans, who have controlled Ohio from top to bottom since 1992 when it reclaimed the office of governor and then in 1994 when it also acquired control of the state legislature, were indirectly accused of “stacking the deck” against cities in favor of suburbs and rural areas.

From a political perspective, cities are bastions of Democratic leaning voters while sprawling suburbs and “exurbia,” mainly townships, are home to fiscal and social conservatives who generally eschew the kind of progress measures Brookings and Greater Ohio are calling for.

Another major theme of the conference, although not formally addressed, was the drag on progress too much government brings. Ohio has thousands of government entities, from townships to counties to various district authorities that really work against each other. Calling for a streamlining of the superstructure of government is a daunting and likely impossible dream, given that townships and school boards are the birthing centers for aspiring politicians who seek a higher office to ascend to. Asking townships to be pared down or eliminated or for Ohio’s 88 counties to be reduced to a lesser number is indeed tilting at windmills.

No group of elected politicians will willingly cut their offices, so for any radical change to occur, the citizens of Ohio will be faced with mounting a drive to change the Ohio Constitution in ways that can undue the power and authority of all the offices that have an iron grip on the gears of government.

This is certainly not the first conference of its kind I’ve been to and I’ll wager it won’t be the last one either. Groups like Brookings and Greater Ohio, who have awesome sounding mission statements and pedigreed staff experts who make their living at producing far flung recommendations about change and how to achieve it, should understand that making a crack in the armor of the status quo is all consuming. And while some tinkering and tweaking can be achieved, the issues they talked about today could easily have been talked about 30 years ago and will likely be talked about 20 years from now.

While the tenor of the proceedings in the larger plenary sessions was collaborative and positive, the break out sessions offered stark enactments of the kind of turf warfare between state, regional or city officials and planners who battle against state domination of programs and funds.

Ohio is in a real fiscal pickle, to be sure, as demonstrated by Strickland’s orders to cut $1.2 in state spending so far this year as a result of the hard times residents and businesses are undergoing as the nation slip slides its way closer to recession, which may economists say we’re already in.

With no more rabbits to put out of its hat, state leaders like Strickland, Harris and Husted are befuddled about their inability to do much in the present to reverse the downward decline of the state, which boasts some of the poorest big cities in the nation and a rising level of poverty as jobs disappear and people wonder whether to stay or move to greener pastures.

div class="content">About the author

John Michael Spinelli is a former Ohio Statehouse government and political reporter and business columnist. He now serves as the OhioNews Bureau Chief for ePluribus Media Journal. Find ONB archives here.
Photo credits: (c) 2008 AnHarris, istockphoto

To send a tip or story idea to this correspondent, send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it