Winning the War: A Smart State Stimulus Effort
By Peter B. Fleischer
In response to the passage of the Federal Economic Recovery and Re-investment Act the Paterson Administration has set up a "War Room" to coordinate, prioritize, and accelerate stimulus spending across state agencies and localities. This is no small task given the billions of dollars involved, the pumped up expectations statewide among the many municipal claimants, and various funding requirements including tight "use it or lose it" deadlines.
The officials from 20 state agencies charged with this task will experience many, many pressures, and not a few conflicting ones. While creating or saving New York jobs is clearly their top priority, the state warriors would do well to remember that one can win a War yet lose the Peace, which has happened before.
In an earlier Blog I urged Governor Paterson to use his high-level Smart Growth Cabinet as the filter and coordinator for the new stimulus effort, and it's disappointing that he chose otherwise. That Cabinet has been operating for a year, it includes many of the same officials and agencies named to the new group, and it's now begun to coordinate, set priorities, and make the agencies leave their silos and work together. They are therefore battle-tested to a degree, and more importantly are instilled with a Smart Growth philosophy guiding their efforts.
That philosophy was previously established by an Executive Order that calls on state agencies to advise the Governor on Smart Growth, and to make recommendations to him on how the state can adopt the most effective mechanisms to promote it. The Cabinet was charged with developing priorities to align state capital programs and grant making in ways that support Smart Growth principles in both the public and private sectors, to result in more sustainable development patterns in all regions of the state.
Proper Smart Growth principles, as applied to capital spending for infrastructure projects funded by the Federal stimulus bill and overseen by the War Cabinet, would obviously call for investments that are:
- Sustainable
- Prioritized to areas with existing infrastructure, Brownfield renewal opportunities, or infill possibilities
- Developmental of mixed use and diverse income communities
- Chosen through a process that is inclusive and transparent
- Supportive of places where residents have choices available for their transportation to work, school, shopping and recreation.
An obvious concern is that this Smart Growth philosophy may well conflict with the War Room's battlefield viewpoint -- and indeed with meeting the Governor's prior goals -- when it comes to "use it or lose it" decisions and 90-day start requirements contained in the stimulus protocols. Sometimes in the fog of war forces can die from friendly fire, expediency may trump principles, and the present can scream while the future whispers. And in this context, the wrong jobs can unfortunately be created in the wrong places doing the wrong things.
As a result, New York could potentially end up using some of its share of the stimulus funds to pay people to dig holes while paying others to fill them in. We could choose to create lots of jobs by adding a new layer of asphalt on every road in the state, a massive "shovel ready" work program that would do almost nothing for long term economic development and absolutely nothing toward meeting New York's crucial energy and climate change goals.
The War Room executives are presumably smart enough to choose more wisely than that, but if they fail to follow guidelines and principles that aim higher and guarantee better results, we can be in serious trouble. The universal qualifier must be using stimulus money only for jobs that are needed to build appropriate and sustainable projects. So here are a few suggestions for the battlefield tacticians:
In order to be selected for stimulus funding, all projects must:
- Lead to meaningful and measurable long-term economic development
- Contribute toward the states' 2015 goals for energy independence
- Directly or indirectly advance New York's climate change goals
- Create jobs first where they are most needed -- in Upstate and Downstate urban areas and town centers with high rates of unemployment
While it is understood that the state may very well choose some projects that meet only one of these criteria, it should be the goal of the War Room team to assemble a package of projects that in the aggregate substantially meets each of them.
The real war for the State of New York is one of long term economic sustainability. Our anemic population growth, loss of manufacturing employment, and hemorrhaging of high-paying Wall Street jobs has combined with the state's already high pension, Medicare, tax and debt levels to put together a future that's clearly at risk.
To win the peace for New Yorkers, the Paterson Army needs to use our stimulus money very wisely -- which means making investments with positive returns that pay real dividends. Smart Growth and the four principles I've laid out here will do just that by using capital spending synergistically, reducing future costs and expenses, and maintaining the states' engines of growth without political interference or peripheral concerns.
It is imperative that the War Room hold fast to the important objectives of the Smart Growth Executive Order if we are to avoid the modern-day equivalent of a Charge of The Light Brigade, or of Custer's Last Stand.
