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Home / Washington Business - September/October 2004 / Looking Beyond Election Day: Transportation, Education, Energy and Governance are Long-Term Challenges |
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Looking Beyond Election Day: Transportation, Education, Energy and Governance are Long-Term Challenges |
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Written On: September/October 2004 |
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Written By: By Richard S. Davis - President, Washington Research Council |
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Campaigns trade on the timely — the latest employment numbers, the morning headlines, the overnight polling data. Caffeinated cyberpundits and campaign spokespeople (the bloggers and the foggers), the 24/7 news cycle, and the immediacy of communications technology accelerate the topspin.
From carpe diem to the “first mover advantage” of the dot-com heyday, the need for speed sometimes causes leaders to embrace the tactical at the expense of the strategic. Long-term thinking gets short shrift. As economist John Maynard Keynes famously declared, “In the long run, we’re all dead.”
Successful enterprises, however, plan beyond the next horizon. So this summer, the Washington Alliance for a Competitive Economy (WashACE) asked business leaders about the long run, the issues often overshadowed by the various crises du jour.
Infrastructure considerations such as transportation, energy and higher education topped the list. It’s not that no one is talking about these things. To the contrary, there’s plenty of talk, but not much more.
Business leaders laud the Priorities of Government (POG) process used to balance the current state budget without raising taxes. Continued, POG can provide the discipline necessary to confront regional and statewide infrastructure challenges. That will also require changes in the way we make decisions. Our inability to act decisively stems, in part, from the state’s governance structure.
TRANSPORTATION A few years ago, the Legislature gave governments in the metropolitan Puget Sound area the chance to adopt a regional transportation plan and ask voters to approve taxes to finance it. After months of wrangling, discussions fell apart. The region with the problem and the wealth to solve it couldn’t agree on priorities and feared voters would not pick up the tab. A Seattle executive told me, “I get tired of harping on transportation, tired of arguing about it. Now I’m just adapting.”
For those with choices, adapting means going and growing elsewhere. To retain business, roads must be built and maintained. “We’re not going to put a lot of freight on a monorail,” says a trucking firm executive. Mass transit has its place, certainly, but failure to provide adequate highway capacity dooms the state to congestion and economic decline.
ENERGY Similar short-sightedness plagues efforts to meet the state’s energy needs. Sacrificing the aluminum industry bought us time during the last energy crisis, but growth has absorbed most of the capacity gained from the smelter shut down. In a few years, we’ll again face a shortfall. Blaming Enron is not a strategy. Future shortages are not inevitable. Private investment can solve the problem, but for investors to step up government must provide streamlined permitting and protection from frivolous litigation. We cannot let parochial interests dictate our energy future. And utilities must be allowed a reasonable return on their investment. Renewable energy sources are analogous to mass transit — elements of a solution, not the answer.
HIGHER EDUCATION The state’s research universities provide the intellectual infrastructure that will support future economic growth. And, like other infrastructure investments, they will determine this state’s long-term competitiveness. Within the POG, higher education should be a high priority. The executives we interviewed cited the critical role played by post-secondary institutions in fields ranging from biotechnology to winemaking. But they also wanted to see educational spending targeted to high-demand programs and more business-like administration of the system.
GOVERNANCE Sometimes, things don’t happen for a reason. Our governance structure is one reason infrastructure problems don’t get fixed. The populist tradition has given us initiative and referendum; a weak executive branch, with authority divided among nine statewide elected officials; a web of boards and commissions; and an obsession with process that prefaces every decision with stakeholder groups, allows multiple appeals of regulatory decisions and nurtures an extraordinary number of governmental units — from counties and cities to mosquito and weed control districts.
Our populist founders so distrusted government that they did everything in their power to render it ineffective. While this has not prevented an incremental expansion of regulation and taxing authority, government has been lumbered with a system of jurisdictional and procedural hurdles that frustrate action.
The often-decried lack of leadership cannot be separated from our governmental framework, which inevitably shapes how leadership evolves. Regions must be more than confederations of local governments. Without regional platforms, we’re unlikely to see political solutions that transcend jurisdictional (and electoral) boundaries. As metropolitan population mushroomed, the governance challenges magnified. “People are behaving regionally,” says a Seattle CEO, “but governmental entities are still acting back in the days when there was space between them.”
There’s too much fragmentation, too much deference to consensus and too little consideration of the long-term consequences of inaction. The resulting inadequacies in our physical infrastructure are visible daily. Higher education faces similar challenges. University administrators contend with multiple tiers of policy-makers and planners, often with competing interests. The tension between institutional governance, statewide planning and political control creates an unacceptable stasis.
This election, like most, may turn on the challenges of the moment. But we should look for candidates who will refuse to subordinate our long-term infrastructure requirements to short-term political exigencies.
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