George Rebane
Today we have a public service post for all of you keenly interested in how our county’s leaders are making progress on economic development (ED). This Friday and Saturday will see another conclave of the county’s electeds, staff, media, non-profits, and hangers-on at the Holiday Inn Express doing their best to push the ED peanut ahead. Your humble blogger will be in attendance with pen at the ready.
Here’s how you can tell if anyone is serious about ED. Since no one yet knows what ED looks like for Nevada County, serious people will address that part first. For we all know that ED goals can take a myriad of forms. For example, one goal statement would be ‘increase retail sales taxes 15% annually for the next five years’, another might be ‘increase the property tax base by 50% over the next ten years’, and another may be ‘double the county’s private sector workforce over the next ten years’. This kind of specific goal statement then makes it clear what kind of an ED plan must be adopted to achieve the goal, and also provides a gauge by which to measure progress toward the goal. Alternative approaches to ED can then be reasonably debated by how much sense each makes in achieving the goal.
It’s easy to see that picking such an ED goal/definition is a purely subjective undertaking; there is nothing objective about saying that increasing sales taxes is ‘better’ than increasing private sector workforce. In fact, to really emphasize the subjective nature of picking an ED goal, we can put both sales tax increase and workforce increase (or any other economic performance attribute) into the same goal statement in a way that measurement is still possible. The main thing is that the goal of ED defines its nature, and that is a judgment call.
In a representative government judgment calls like this should be made by the elected representatives of the people – that’s why we elected them. But you can also see that supporting an ED goal also means that you have to stick your neck out for this rather than that. Politicians naturally shirk from this whenever they can. Now here in Nevada County we often believe that our politicians are our friends and neighbors, and therefore are made out of stiffer stuff. On Friday everyone will be able to see for themselves whether that’s true or not.
Let’s go on. Most people in public affairs have a dickens of a time telling the difference between an objective or goal and the plan to achieve such an objective or goal. I’m not exactly sure why that’s a hard problem because we all understand that a goal is something like ‘climb to the top of THAT mountain’ and a plan to do that would include selecting one of a number of routes and what to take along, when to start, etc. AFTER our elected officials select the mountain to climb, then staff or the ERC or some consultant or … can get to work putting together a plan.
In the previous rounds of ED discussions, our elected officials have not chosen to divulge whether they understand the difference between an objective and a plan to achieve the objective. Again, they may surprise us this weekend and actually make some progress. But then again ... .
Here’s how you can tell if no one cares about ED enough to stick their neck out. The conversation around the big table will then start with “some background” and for two days meander around topics like county history, balanced growth, various statistics about demographics and government revenues, which companies have left the county, preserving the environment, … you get the picture. Then someone will look at their watch and say, ‘… well we’ve covered a lot of good ground here and it’s getting late. Let’s turn all this good input over to the ERC and they’ll give us a presentation when we next meet. Oh yes, economic development is important and we need to keep pushing on this, so let’s all plan to get together again in, say, sixty days.’ As a preview, here you can get Friday's agenda and Saturday's agenda.
And by the way, pay no attention to that crowd behind the curtain claiming to be friends of GV, and prepared to put the kibosh this fall on everything that smells of ED.
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