Growth & Justice Blog

Top priority for transitway development should be employers and jobs

You are a policy-maker and you have a tough choice between  two major development proposals for the same site on a major light-rail line or transitway.   All things being equal, which do you choose:  a major employer or a large housing complex?

If overall accessibility improvement and employer access to labor is the goal, take the employer, says new research presented this week at the 23rd Annual Transportation Research Conference in St. Paul this week.   

The research by University of Minnesota Humphrey School Assistant Professor Yingling Fan was complex and aimed at planning professionals.   But the bottom-line key finding was straightforward:  "Locating new jobs near transitways produces larger increases in accessibility than locating new housing near transitways.''   Getting these fundamentals right are important because by 2030 we likely will have an integrated network of 14 transitways up and running in the Twin Cities, ranging from light-rail to commuter rail to express bus lines.   Few public investments are more important for business growth than transporation infractructure.   Equally important is better access for a workforce that is increasingly comprised of low- and middle-income communities of color, and who need much better connectivity to jobs in the new economy. 

Fan's research was sponsored by the McKnight Foundation, the Jay & Rose Phillips Foundation and the Surdna Foundation.   Abstracts from the conference provide rich state-of-the-art thinking on a wide array of transportation investment issues.

 

Dane Smith

 

St. Paul resident and son inspecting Central Corridor construction in downtown St. Paul (Metropolitan Council photo)

Rothschild book offers business sense for all social justice enterprises

There are limitations to the truism that "government ought to run more like a business," or that everything ought to be run like a business, but there's a new book out with a lot of wisdom and practical tips on how every enterprise focused on social justice can learn from business principles. The book is "The Non Nonprofit" and the author is Steve Rothschild, a prominent Twin Citian who was a successful vice president at General Mills and the even more celebrated founder of Twin Cities RISE!, a program that's shown real results in reducing poverty. Steve's a clear and convincing writer and the book is full of real world examples that will resonate with Minnesotans. He offers seven principles on which nonprofits and those of us interested in expanding prosperity should focus, focus, focus:

1. Have a Clear and Appropriate Purpose, 2. Measure What Counts, 3. Be Market Driven, 4. Create Mutual Accountability, 5. Support Personal Empowerment, 6. Create Economic Value from Social Benefit, and 7. Be Learning Driven. And there's a great section at the back of the book with advice on what policymakers and government officials can do to instill these principles. Social justice has its own righteous purpose but linkage to business growth and business principles makes it all the more compelling.

Dane Smith   

Lessons from Cincinnati: Total community effort begins to show results

Lynda Jackson is a southern lady with a sweet disarming drawl, but she's a steel magnolia when it comes to school improvement and demanding real results. Jackson is the superintendent of the school district in Covington, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, and she's steering this very poor school district toward individualized learning plans for every student. She also is transforming Holmes High School into an "early college high school," with a goal of every student earning at least 15 college credits before graduation.

Meanwhile, over in Cincinnati and on both sides of the river, the Ascend Performance Institute is developing high-performing teams of principals and teacher leaders through intensive, accelerated sessions featuring best practices and case studies and taught by topnotch leaders in education, business and medicine. The template for this instruction was drawn from the Mayo Clinic model of integrated expertise and "putting the patient (students) first."

A pivotal catalyst for these efforts and countless others in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky is the Strive Partnership, described as a "backbone organization" of truly comprehensive community sweep, dedicated to improving student success. Strive has more than 300 partners, including the region's leading corporations, regional business associations, the Catholic schools, lots of foundations and nonprofits, early childhood advocates, and of course, the school districts and higher education systems.

I'm privileged this week to be part of a "Student Success Core Team" from Grand Rapids with the support of the Blandin Foundation, taking an immersion course on the Strive model and other education reform efforts in the region. The Strive example also is being studied by a working group of Twin Cities’ advocates for improving school outcomes.

As we sat down to hear their story, we were warned at once by Strive leader Jeff Edmondson (see his TED lecture here) not to get too worshipful of the Strive model. Although groups of school and nonprofit leaders are descending on Cincinnati regularly to learn about the six-year-old partnership, Edmondson said progress has been painful, slow, uneven and even "ugly." Lots of mistakes have been made, he said, and he encourages each region that tries to replicate Strive to build its own set of standards and goals and prescriptions, from the ground up.

But there is some truly impressive progress to consider. On 40 out of 53 benchmarks for educational success set by the partnership, mainly basic test scores in 4th and 8th grade and measures of college retention and graduation, schools in Cincinnati and northern Kentucky have improved since the baseline year of 2005-2006. And that's despite a severe recession and worsening poverty rates in a region that's been struggling for decades with a decline in its industrial economic base. In Covington, the percentage of students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch, a standard benchmark of income status, is a staggering 90 percent.

Of all the many ways this Strive animal was described, I thought "Building a Cradle-to-Career Civic Infrastructure'' might have been the best. As developed here, the model consists of five goals: every child prepared for school, every child supported in and out of school, every child succeeding academically, every student enrolled in post-secondary study (college or instruction for a workforce credential) and every student graduating and entering a career.

"Strive gives air to good ideas and then helps implement them faster than they would be otherwise," said Leslie Maloney, a senior vice-president of a major foundation tied to a banking family, and a member of the Strive executive committee.

Almost everybody involved agrees that Strive's strength and its effectiveness so far has been drawn from good-faith buy-in and persistence by just about everybody with any kind of stake at all in the community, in every sector. The partners include corporate giants, the chambers of commerce and business moguls -- particularly Procter & Gamble, and nonprofits and funders such as the United Way and KnowledgeWorks, an operating foundation with a mission of school success and a sponsor of the Strive Partnership.

These partners are elites within the community. Grassroots support and commitment from more ordinary folks would be helpful to this "everybody in" philosophy, and we had the great fortune of listening to a guru on the theme of community vitality and how neighborhoods can be energized and empowered to improve themselves. Peter Block, a Cincinnatian and author of the book "The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods,'' spoke to our group to start the day. Block said that big system reforms can be an elusive mirage and while they "can deliver some things, the schools can't raise a child. ... I spent decades on school reform (before realizing) that the question is, `How do we raise a child?'" I'd highly recommend checking out his book or the website linked above for elaboration.

More tomorrow, in the third and final installment from Cincinnati. 

--Dane Smith 

 

No sector can do "it" unless we all do something

Dane Smith was engaged all last week with Peter Nelson of the Center of the American Experiment in an MPR Insight Now online debate and broadcast on the proper roles of government and the private sector. MPR asked, "If the private sector can do it, should the government get out of it?"

Meanwhile, I was doing what I do every Thursday — volunteering in the preschool run by People Serving People — the largest and most comprehensive, family-focused shelter in Minnesota. It brings together public dollars, private philanthropy and other community resources to help homeless families get back into stable housing. Its Early Childhood Development Center provided provided childcare and learning experiences for 698 children in 2010.

[You can read more about my adventures at PSP and the Catholic Outreach Day Center in Colorado here, in The Shelter Report feature of my personal blog. This work is a great antidote to getting too abstract and policy-wonky when it comes to issues.]

We took kids from the pre-school out to the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. I wrote about a boy I met on my trip there a year ago. This time was different because we had a smaller group of children and more volunteers.

Our field trip was mostly uneventful and unstructured — spent walking around the grounds, looking at flowers, splashing hands in fountains, climbing structures, watching koi swim around and keeping kids away from several batches of goslings — so I'm not certain how much the kids got out of it. Or the adults, for that matter.

It's hard for both the adults and the kids to adjust to each other for the first time. The adults leave their corporate headquarters, come into a busy urban homeless shelter and get matched up with a small child, usually of a different race. The kids have enough turmoil in their lives that they aren't in a hurry to bond with yet another stranger who shows up out of nowhere.

But I shouldn't be jaded just because green plants and garden follies aren't on my personal must-see list.

There isn't any grass where these children are living now. There are no ponds or flowers or squirrels and geese. Their shade comes from tall buildings and a lone tree in the playground. So it's not surprising when a new discovery would evoke a child's heartfelt "Bee-YOU-tee-ful!"

The field trip was sponsored by a major corporation in the news for its political contributions, and lately, its union-blocking efforts in New York. The volunteers were all from the company's legal department. In my regular life, I'd want to talk to insiders about those issues, but this wasn't the place. Nor did I get a chance to ask them about their motivations for and quality of their volunteer experience.

Still, it got me thinking.

The Arboretum has the University of Minnesota attached to its name. It receives 12 percent of its budget from the U, and the University Foundation manages its $23-million endowment. A walk through its grounds will turn up familiar names of private benefactors who provide most of its support — MacMillan, Cargill and Wurtele, Xcel Energy, Comcast and Best Buy — but there are also smaller, four-figure donors, including Seward Co-op, and lots of people who send in $25. 

If you allocated a portion of all the contributions that enabled these kids to see this Bee-YOU-tee-ful place, the line items in the spreadsheet would have to list state and local governments, corporations, wealthy people, small donors, volunteers, nonprofits and celebrities. If this were funded entirely by the state, a governor facing a budget shutdown would likely have to declare this place a "non-essential service."

Thanks to the small government orthodoxy sweeping our state houses, we get hung up on an unbridgeable dichotomy between what the government should do and what the private sector should do.

The beautiful reality in this community is we are working alongside each other all the time, in ever-changing combinations of public and private, with funding by taxpayers, customers, supporting members, individual givers, foundations, church congregants, kids and adult volunteers.

We should all take a deep breath once in a while to give each other credit, while recognizing the limitations of any one sector going it alone.

— Charlie Quimby

WWHD: Humphrey's Greatness Examined and Celebrated

Lots of good stuff out there, and hopefully more will be coming throughout the year, on the legacy of Hubert H. Humphrey, who arguably has had more impact on the world, the nation and our state than any other individual in Minnesota's history. At a celebration on the centennial of his birth last Friday, I heard a speaker say that no white man in 20th Century America accomplished more for civil rights and human rights. I think that's true. And it was spine-tingling to hear former press aide Norman Sherman talk about being in the room when Humphrey laid out before Martin Luther King Jr. his plans for passage of civil rights legislation. An outstanding series of articles on Humphrey's legacy was produced last week by MinnPost's Iric Nathanson and Eric Black, including some hard-nosed analysis of his mistakes and shortcomings. I summarized Humphrey's legacy in a MinnPost commentary a few weeks earlier. And the New York Times came through with an outstanding op-ed Friday on "America's Forgotten Liberal," by Rick Perlstein. The author of a fine book on Nixon, Perlstein observes that Humphrey was far ahead of his time on civil rights, which most everybody knows. But Perlstein also offers the intriguing opinion that Humphrey now deserves vindication as the optimistic and practical progressive voice, who was foolishly dismissed by the "hip" radical left revolution of the 1960s, and then also dissed by the New Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s, who turned their backs on the working class and became "enamored with the alleged magic of the market.'' I had the privilege of moderating a panel discussion on Friday focusing on how Humphrey's progressive internationalist foreign policy could be renewed for the United States. And I think there's a lot to learn in these fractious days by asking "WWHD'' or "What Would Humphrey Do?'' Perlstein quotes Humphrey as saying that liberal policy must stress "common denomintors -- mutual needs, mutual wants, common hopes, the same fears,'' and that Humphrey had a conviction that pro-business and pro-labor policies were complementary.

- Dane Smith        

A religious observance of Statehood Day, and the constitutional obligation to tax and invest for public good

Mainstream religious leaders today are hosting a vigil by the statue of populist champion and former Gov. Floyd B. Olson, in honor of Statehood Day.  On the 153rd anniversary of the North Star State, our state's most respected faith leaders will be drawing attention to the absolutely vital role of our state government in providing for  the "security, benefit and protection of the people.''   

Those words - "security, benefit and protection of the people'' - are not just some modern liberal interpretation of the role of state government.  The phrase looms large in the first sentence of Article I of our state constitution (in which there is no mention of protecting wealth and property and privilege, or keeping taxes and labor costs low.)  And those inspiring and inclusive words in Article I about the essential "Object of Government'' are being emphasized by the Joint Religious Legislative Coalition in "calling the public and our elected officials to a more just and compassionate public stewardship."

The JRLC is an alliance our state's largest denominations (Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Islamic) and they are a member of the Invest in Minnesota coalition, which advocates for a balanced approach to the budget crisis, opposes an all-cuts strategy, and supports restoration of the higher income tax rates of a decade ago on high-income Minnesotans.

These leaders of faith are producing a strong counterpunch to the weekend's anti-tax, anti-government rally, which ironically coincided with recent news stories documenting that federal and state effective tax rates have fallen to historic lows, even as the economic condition of low- and moderate-income families decline.  Public investments in health, education and human services help ameliorate this growing inequality and public investments in human capital and physical infrastructure also are good for business in the long run.  Church leaders, who often are called upon by conservatives to apply their meager financial resources to plug the holes left by cuts in government budgets, know these realities better than most.

 

-Dane Smith 

What if Ayn Rand had to dig her own two-holer?

(Note: We hereby introduce Chuck Brown - a former business manager, a former city council member for the southern Minnesota town of Olivia, and a novelist – as a guest blogger for Growth & Justice.)

Conservative columnist Jason Lewis’ professed love for Ayn Rand and her novel, Atlas Shrugged, (Star Tribune, Apr. 17) struck a chord with me, but probably not one he intended.

Rand has long been deified by those who use the worship of individualism and capitalism (see this NY Times summary of her influence on right-wing business leaders) to deny the notion of common good and the enormous value of that which we do collectively, i.e. through our good governments. But Lewis, like Rand, goes even further to suggest that anything done collectively or altruistically results in a loss of freedom. In Lewis’ world “productive thinkers” are to be valued to the extent that we dare not ask any sacrifice of them or seek to limit the windfalls from their achievements. “Productive thinkers” sounds a bit like today’s sainted “job creators” who, we are told, will take their bat and go home, or somewhere else, if the game isn’t played exactly by their rules.

I’m not against productive thought any more than I’m against job creation, though it occurs to me that we can also have productive thoughts and create jobs when we work together, Rand and Lewis notwithstanding. But my chief aim here is to dispute the notion that all collective acts result in a loss of freedom. I’ll begin with some very basic and personal observations.

The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is turn on the lights. The second thing I do…well, I won’t go into detail on the second thing, other than to say that it concludes with a flush. The third thing I do is turn on the water and brush my teeth. Now my point here is that the first three things I do each day involve a good or service that I purchase from government. Most folks may not buy electricity from a municipal utility, as I do, but many of us in rural Minnesota do, and our basic power supply throughout this nation is properly regulated by public agencies. And most of us now are hooked up to clean and efficient "government-run'' water and sewer systems. These are things we have chosen to do collectively, not because we are knee-jerk collectivists, but because it simply made the most sense. It was the best way to get that particular job done in a way that produced value for the largest number of people. Ayn Rand may have found digging her own well and having a two-holer in the backyard to be more to her philosophical liking, but I can’t see how she could claim that I’ve lost freedom by enjoying public works. I might even argue that the convenience of these systems adds freedom, granting me time for things I want to do rather than, say, dig my own two-holer.

Public safety and common good requires that we obey the law and pay taxes, but only criminals risk serious loss of freedom in our democracy. The rest of us enjoy the freedom of an orderly society ensured in large part by taxes and governments and public works. National defense, one of our largest collective "government-run'' endeavors, has as its primary focus the defense of our freedom. Then of course there’s public education, which accounts for about half our state-local tax dollars, and it’s hard to imagine how we might be freer without it. In fact, the sages tell us, education sets us free.

We Americans are exceptionally individualistic, and so Ayn Rand and rugged pioneers and cowboys will always be part of our thinking. But many of our greatest national achievements have been collective efforts, and that’s not likely to change, even in the land of the free.

-Chuck Brown

 

Business-backed early childhood quality-rating proposal must be resurrected

We all make mistakes and the Minnesota House made a big one last week.  It can and must somehow perform a do-over on an early childhood measure that was defeated, in large part through the behind-the-scenes influence of social and religious conservatives in the Republican Party base.

The legislation would take advantage of private donations to establish a statewide rating system that would help parents assess and find high-quality early childhood care and education offerings for their children.  This initiative will be of great and lasting benefit to disadvantaged and middle-income parents who are most in need of this cost-effective investment in human development.  And the proposal actually puts a premium on parental choice, a favorite mechanism for free-market conservatives.

Moreover, the Quality Rating proposal, and the Parent Aware system it would help expand and develop, enjoys strong business leadership backing and a truly rare breadth of consensus in these polarized times.  As education reporter Beth Hawkins of MinnPost assessed it, "the bill was revenue-neutral, meaning its implementation would not cost a cent, and it enjoyed the backing of (DFL Gov. Mark) Dayton, the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce and pretty much everyone on the political continuum between them."  The author of the proposal was Rep. Jenifer Loon, an Eden Prairie Republican and a leading critic of the GOP vote to strip it was Duane Benson, executive director of the Minnesota Early Learning Foundation, a former executive director of the Minnesota Business Partnership and a former Republican Senate minority leader.

Leading the effort to undermine and defeat the proposal were social and religious conservatives, represented by the Minnesota Family Council and the Education Liberty Watch.  With all due respect to both, on this issue these groups simply do not reflect the mainstream views of the state's business community, our  leading economists, and a vast array of education experts on this issue.  The Minnesota Family Council puts a high priority on "Biblical Worldview" education and generally favors all things private in education, seldom voicing general support for our public institutions or governments in general.  And the Liberty Watch, in a 10-point statement of principles, does not offer a single word of support for public education or schools, positing instead that "nonpublic education without government interference is essential to a healthy education system."

In Minnesota, a clear moderate and progressive majority, joined by many conservatives, essentially agrees that early childhood education is a growing public responsibility, and that the growing percentage of children showing up not ready for kindergarten represents a real threat to our long-term prosperity.

Mainstream business owners and leaders agree that higher-quality early childhood education is essential for the long-term quality of Minnesota's workforce.  And it just doesn't make policital or policy sense for the House majority caucus to continue defying that wisdom and consensus.

Dane Smith

Letters from the edge: State leaders warn of precipice ahead

Call them “Letters from the Edge," a flurry of messages last week from state government agency heads and business leaders, summarizing the view from the precipice created by an anti-government, all-cuts response to a $5 billion revenue shortfall. The view is of a shabbier and less fair Minnesota, and also not good for business in the long run.

The letters were professional in tone and yet dire and almost frantic, detailing exactly what would have to happen to bus service, nursing homes, services for disabled Minnesotans, protection for abused and neglected children, and tax compliance.

The letter from Human Services Commissioner Lucinda Jesson and Minnesota Management and Budget Commissioner James Schowalter was typical, laying out the damage that would be done to our growing elderly population from more than a billion dollars in reduced funding for Human Services, including institutionalization of many who rely on less costly interventions than nursing homes. Bottom line in Human Services, as elsewhere, is that costs for both governments and ordinary citizens actually would increase long-term from some of the proposed cuts.  A similarly stark picture was painted by Metropolitan Council Chair Susan Haigh in a letter that spelled out alternatives ranging from $7 bus fares to 40 percent cuts in transit route service.

The Minneapolis Regional Chamber of Commerce sent a letter expressing alarm about the severity of the proposed cuts and advised that "business supports investments in transit because it's good business."  Business leaders in Greater Minnesota, particularly, have been highly critical of proposed cuts to or elimination of state aids to local government.

The Department of Natural Resources, suggesting mass closures of state parks, and the Revenue Department, predicting net revenue losses from cuts in compliance and enforcement, also have responded with messages that begin to paint a picture of a cuts-only Minnesota on the brink, and looking a lot more like Pottersville (from the movie, It's a Wonderful Life) than the Bedford Falls we've enjoyed for decades.

We all know that the cuts-only budget bills are destined for veto by Gov. Mark Dayton and that the authors in the legislative majorities are not entirely serious about their proposals, some of which appear to be written to appeal to the conservative geo-political base.  And some key legislators were basically saying that the cuts are an opening round in negotiations with the governor, whose opening proposals for income tax increases are unlikely to gain final passage.

But the facts are that both Dayton's proposal and the budget strategy outlined by Independence Party gubernatorial candidate Tom Horner in last fall's election are more humane and realistic from the get-go, calling for both painful cuts and reasonable revenue increases. Those two candidates got 56 percent of the vote and that's a reflection of the Minnesota mainstream's wisdom about the value of the public sector.

The final agreement, which might not come until we are on the brink of a total government shutdown, simply must be a lot closer to the Dayton-Horner formula than the all-cuts precipice.

Dane Smith 

Check out "Soul of the Community,'' to see how Minnesotans love their amenities and aesthetics and public stuff

It's sometimes hard to get top business executives to locate to Minnesota -- what with the cold weather and progressive income taxes -- but once they've lived here awhile, it's even harder to get them to leave.  I've heard some version of that story many times in business quarters, most recently at a BioBusiness event in Rochester.

Those of us who have lived elsewhere have theories about this.  And my own conviction is that our attractiveness and our affection for this place is built on a stronger sense of community, inclusiveness and economic fairness than exists in other places.  We simply have had better public stuff, better schools, better parks and trails, better infrastructure overall, more publicly supported arts and cultural amenities, which all adds up to a state and cities that are classier and cooler than other places, not just colder (but I like that bracing climate too).  And in the end, it makes for a better business climate too, owing to a more productive and creative workforce.  More clues as to how this is true can be found in the Knight Foundation's lastest study, The Soul of the Community, which measures 26 U.S. cities from this refreshingtly distinct perspective:  how attached citizens are to their place, and why.  News articles on the study were published in the Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the two papers offer interesting variations on the essential findings of the study.  Here's the bottom line of the report summary itself, as to why people become attached to their community:

While the economy is obviously the subject of much attention, the study has found that perceptions of the local economy do not have a very strong relationship to resident attachment.  Instead, attachment is most closely related to how accepting a community is of diversity, its wealth of social offerings, and its aesthetics.

And this excerpt from Chris Havens' STrib story adds a little texture to the analysis. 

St. Paul is a city that has welcomed poetry stamped into its sidewalks, a photography exhibit along bustling University Avenue and various music and ethnic festivals.  "It's a cool place to live," (Mayor Chris) Coleman said. "It's a unique place to live."  Sue Buchholz walked her Yorkie, Pandy, in downtown St. Paul's Rice Park on Monday. She moved into a downtown condo within the last year. "I knew this is where I wanted to be," she said. "There's always something to do."  She made a sweeping motion with her arm, pointing to the Central Library, Ordway Center for Performing Arts and Landmark Center.  A few blocks away runs the Mississippi River, which attracts joggers, bicyclists and others interested in the nature along the banks. There are more bike lanes and trails than ever before in the Twin Cities and suburbs.

We've known about this comparative advantage from our better public stuff  for some time.  We hope our new leaders in the governor's office and the Legislature do not lose sight of this bedrock economic asset when they begin to balance the budget shortfall next year.  (And by the way, the Knight report suggests that we are not that high in our regard for our leaders).

Dane Smith