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Ohio could learn from states where metropolitan areas cooperate 2003, The Columbus Dispatch. Reprinted with Permission |
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By Brian Williams, Dispatch editorial page Does it make sense for a corporation to plan ahead where and when it will make major investments of its shareholders' money? Of course. Does it then make sense for state and local governments to plan ahead where and when they will make major investments of the taxpayers' money? The biggest investments local governments make are in the water, sewer, school and transportation systems that allow communities to thrive and grow. Yet those investments are made not so much through any grand plan as in reaction to a jumble of other plans. Nearly every state in the union faces the prospect of severe budget deficits; Ohio's shortfall for the current fiscal year is estimated at $720 million. Ohio also is considering a huge package of tax increases proposed by the governor. Likewise, Columbus and cities all over the state report budget crunches. Myron Orfield thinks the state could put itself in better fiscal shape through statewide and regional land-use planning and revenue sharing. The budget problem "creates a great opportunity,'' said Orfield, a former Minnesota state legislator who's now president of a Minneapolis-based geographic research and consulting company. "These things emerge in times of crisis,'' he said. "It comes at a time when you have to do more with less, when communities are at war with each other.'' "Ohio Metropatterns,'' Orfield's most recent of about 40 reports he has issued on states and regions around the country, traces patterns of wealth, poverty, growth and property-tax base in six metropolitan areas around the state. It concludes that competition among and within them for factories, office parks, shopping malls and subdivisions forces governments into tax-draining duplication of costly infrastructure. Taxpayers pay to close schools in one community while an adjacent community is building them. Taxpayers pay to keep buses running in their downtowns, where office-vacancy rates are high, and they pay for widened freeways that carry people to suburban office parks, where subsidies or tax breaks have lured tenants. All of this happens in a single metropolitan area that is competing with itself instead of joining the 21st-century economy and competing with more-unified metropolitan communities around the country and world. Minneapolis-St. Paul and 185 other jurisdictions in a six-county metro area have shared revenue from new business development for more than 30 years. While some sprawl has continued under the formula, Orfield maintains that the region has saved $27 billion in infrastructure costs over those years. For example, he said, cities didn't fight over the giant Mall of America a decade ago, because all the communities in the region share in the revenue it brings. Bloomington, Minn., where it is located, gets a greater share. But it also has the burden of the traffic. Orfield isn't pushing Ohio's metro regions to adopt the Twin Cities model, in which communities keep their autonomy but work through a metropolitan council on such things as sewer and water infrastructure. But, he said, Ohio lags behind other states in planning. A statewide planning effort in Ohio was aborted in the 1970s, and the 1997 Farmland Preservation Task Force report has languished since then. In Michigan a decade ago, Gov. John Engler and the Legislature responded to court-ordered school-finance reform by scrapping the reliance on local property taxes and then distributing a higher sales tax to districts around the state. Orfield also points to statewide planning efforts begun in Pennsylvania and New Jersey by then-governors Tom Ridge and Christie Whitman, respectively. Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Utah and Maryland are others among the 16 states pushing some form of statewide or regional land-use planning aimed at least in part at cutting infrastructure expenses. "What large and successful company doesn't think about its future,'' Orfield said. "Ohio ought to follow that lead and do a large-scale, business-oriented plan.'' << Back to Press Clippings |
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