Clippings

Attachment dies hard.  The Chicago Tribune now arrives by mail, four or five days late, but we still subscribe.  No such delay for the QCTimes, which magically appears on the front stoop every morning like a proper newspaper should.

Today’s editorial was well done and gets you thinking, like a good editorial should.  Its perspective on the recent economic report commissioned by the State of Iowa, available here, has some kernels to chew on.  The editorial notes the report was produced by a board and task force “notably devoid” of Quad Citians.  That’s a charitable way to phrase it.  There are 34 Iowans listed in the report as members of the IPEP Board and Project Taskforce.  Twenty live or work in the Des Moines metro region, but not one person from Scott County.  If the report, titled “Iowa’s Re-Envisioned Economic Development Roadmap” can find twenty from one city, but no one from the state’s third largest city, one wonders what the map of Iowa looks like to some.    

The editorial headline absolutely hits the nail on the head – “Regional development requires workforce”.

What will be curious to watch is how this workforce issue gets framed.  There is a small divide already between some of what “The State” is reportedly saying and what “The Region” is saying.  The editorial notes the Iowa report “suggests transportation infrastructure investments and tax incentives as a remedy”.   While adding a gas tax while costs have nosedived is smart strategy and adding revenue to address deferred maintenance would be appreciated everywhere, a focus on infrastructure and tax isn’t the whole story.  It’s not as if Interstates somehow careened around Iowa or Iowa businesses weren’t granted a significant tax reduction last year.

Meanwhile, the QC Chamber is ramping up the “Cool, Creative and Prosperous” regional visioning process with a focus on job growth through place-making.  The mantra we’re all supposed to introduce into our daily conversations is “jobs move to where people want to live”.  I’m certain the Chamber isn’t opposed to better infrastructure and lower taxes (who would be?), but the orientation to job growth is qualitatively different, recognizing 21st Century economic growth is tied more directly to quality of life and workforce quality than Eisenhower era highways.  Unless I’m missing something, making this message live and breath was why the Oklahoma City contingent was invited here to speak.   Oklahoma citians invested in their city, and more people than live in Davenport, Bettendorf, Eldridge and LeClaire combined moved there in the last twenty years.    To the middle of Oklahoma.

Iowa’s compartively lackluster population growth was recently framed through the Governor’s spokesman in the December 26 QCTimes as something the Governor is working on, in part with a quote that noted he “continues to work to bring quality jobs to the state, which will attract new individuals and help keep our best and brightest here”.  The State is bringing jobs here with infrastructure, competitive taxes and a new roadmap that may or may not end somewhere west of Scott County.  The QC Chamber is talent and investment seeking by place-making, which gets only a brief mention in a nearly throwaway sentence on “livable communities” on page 48 of the “roadmap”.  Had someone from the QC Chamber been part of the State Taskforce, perhaps there would be better alignment of the strategies.        

There’s likely not one right answer.  There seldom is for complex public policy conundrums.  Which got me thinking about another newspaper snippet I’ve been carrying around for almost two months.  Page B2 of the October 26 Chicago Tribune had an excellent summary of ten rules of innovation by Guy Kawasaki, available here: http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/originals/chi-guy-kawasaki-canva-bsi-20141022-story.html.

That I’ve carried around a Tribune clipping for more than two months is its own peculiarity, I recognize.  But if you asked me whether reading an 81 page report or a half page article was a better use of your time … I’d suggest both.

The roadmap to the future is what we create it to be.