Center for Regional Leadership Prepares for September Civic Entrepreneur Summit

Nick, the California Center for Regional Leadership (CCRL), of which you are the CEO and President, supports a network civic and public leaders throughout the State who are working at the regional level to solve problems that are oblivious to municipal boundaries. Give us a status report on CCRL's work and success.

CCRL partners with a network of 20 business and civic organizations in regions all over the state, and I can report that these civic leaders are alive and well and making a big difference in their regions. For example, the Fresno Area Collaborative Regional Initiative is working with the Fresno Business Council and a host of other organizations in a project they call the Regional Jobs Initiative. Their commitment is to create 25.000 to 30,000 net new jobs over the next five years, jobs paying a wage sufficient to support a family. They have literally hundreds of people involved in this effort. In Sacramento, our partner Valley Vision participated with the Sacramento Area Council of Governments in conducting one of the most successful growth visioning projects in the entire state. They involved thousands of people from all walks of life in exploring what land use patterns would accommodate growth over the next twenty years and still provide a livable communities, reduced traffic and protection of open space and agricultural lands. The project is the basis for a new state initiative named after the Sacramento project, the "Blueprint Regional Planning Project." Our partner in San Diego, the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation, led the fight to pass a transportation sales tax extension that will provide $14 billion over the next forty years, largely for transportation projects, but also for habitat protection. I could go on and on, but you see my point. Nobody elected these people to get involved, but they do so because they care about the future of their communities. And the key to their success is collaboration between the civic and public sector. We are also beginning to see this work manifested in state policy and programs.

Elaborate. What state policies and programs benefit from this regional work and perspective?

For many of us in this field of civic regionalism, the baseline is the report of the Speaker's Commission on Regionalism in 2002. When Bob Hertzberg was Speaker, he appointed a commission to look at state policy and programs and determine how they could better support regions. Many of the ideas and recommendations that were subsequently included in that commission's report are now beginning to come to fruition. For example, the Governor has embraced the role and function of the California Economic Strategy Panel, a public private partnership created to have the state support our regional economies.

One of the areas of focus for the Panel, thanks to Jerry Newman and some members from Southern California, will be how the state can help support the logistics and manufacturing industry, and ensure efficient goods movement from our ports and airports to customers in our regions and across the country. Goods movement is not only a transportation issue, but potentially a new area of economic activity. Instead of simply receiving imported raw materials or parts from abroad and passing them through to other places, why can't we add value to them, through assembly or other interventions, and thereby create family-wage jobs for our own workers?

There is a growing sense in Southern California that our ports, an economic engine critical to our well being, are inordinantly adding to congestion on our freeways and negatively affecting the health and quality of life of adjacent San Pedro, Wilmington, and Long Beach neighborhoods. Many have said that regionalism or a regional solution is needed to deal with goods movement growth through the ports. Is the California Center for Regional Leadership and its membership organizations involved in crafting a regional solution?

Our civic partner, the Gateway Cities Partnership in the Long Beach and Gateway Cities region, has been working at this issue for a number of years. They are very clear that the problem of truck traffic on the 710 Freeway is going to require a solution that will share the cost burden across the whole region, because the whole region benefits from the ports. Also, we need to have a 24-hour port, and there are ways of doing that that won't have a detrimental affect on the quality of life of people in the Gateway region. They are also clear that even with creative transportation solutions to move goods efficiently by truck or rail, ultimately we will reach the limits of growth. That means we will have to have collaborative partnerships with other ports up and down the coast, to distribute the incoming load in a manner that is equitable for all regions.

Airports, like our harbors, have been the subject of regional attention in San Diego, Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Have these regional efforts been successful and what what support has CCRL offered?

Many of our partner organizations are looking at these issues. The San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation has been very involved with the airport question in San Diego. The Bay Area Council is taking a fresh look at airport capacity questions there. None of us pretends there is a simple solution, but all agree that there has to be an integrated regional solution in order to achieve the best results. Again, this is not about trampling on local interests, or asking one part of the region to bear an unfair burden. This is about sharing the burden across the region with broader, more integrated and comprehensive planning, and then sticking to it with the kind of investment that is required to make sure that we don't create unfair burdens for neighbors and others adjacent to the airports.

The founding fathers of America recognized federal, state and local government. They were silent about regional governance. How, then, do we form governance structures to address regional solutions? Do we need to amend our federal and state constitutions, if we expect to have regional reponses to infrastructure, economic and environmental challenges?

The approach that we have taken, which began with the Speaker's Commission on Regionalism, is not to suggest that we create large new government entities that would take power and authority away from state or local governments. Rather, we support the idea of collaborative regional governance, and creating incentives for local governments and the state government to work together at the regional level, and to do so without having to change any jurisdiction or powers, except on a voluntary, collaborative basis. Even so, because this makes sense in dealing with regional issues, wanting to do so may not be enough. We need to create incentives and rewards for this kind of collaborative regional action.

San Diego has discovered that the collaborative approach has its limits. It's airport authority, tasked with finding a new location for the airport, has found that collaboration is difficult when everyone thinks the airport should be in someone else's neighborhood. At some point, don't we need institutional arrangements that will give decision makers the power and authority to make the tough decision? Can we really deal with these issues on a collaborative, ad hoc basis?

No. Under certain circumstances, ad hoc, voluntary collaboration is simply not enough. We have to find new governmental solutions and sometimes that will require courageous leadership from the state government, to create "forcing mechanisms" that make it necessary to find regional solutions. But we don't need a new layer of multipurpose government at the regional level that takes the decisions away from other governments or makes them on behalf of communities. I think San Diego is a good example of how one really has to think through the benefits that will be provided to those parts of the community that do bear the burden in terms of traffic, noise or other or other effects related to airport expansion or capacity. We have to take into account their needs, and we have to provide them with just rewards for having taken some of that burden for the whole region. Because large infrastructure projects take so long from planning through construction, however, in some instances we are starting so far behind the curve that it is pretty hard to catch up. In areas that are already built, creating this major new infrastructure is clearly a challenge.

In the Speaker's Commission on Regionalism, representatives of the Central Valley suggested that too much focus and attention is given to the coastal plain from San Diego up to the Bay Area, and too little to the central spine of California, in terms of needs. Is there a regional strategy/agenda for the Central Valley that has come from CCRL's work?

I'm glad you asked. At our Civic Entrepreneur Summit, which we're holding in September in Long Beach, we're going to feature a brand new California Partnership for the San Joaquin Valley. The Governor just created the Partnership through executive order. It is composed of eight Cabinet Secretaries and an equal number of local government and private sector representatives, and its job is to bring the full capacities of state government to bear on addressing the economic social and environmental challenges of the eight-county San Joaquin Valley Region. This idea was a dream of one of our Speaker's Commission members, Kern County Supervisor Pete Parra. He was concerned that the Valley is treated as a step-child in comparison to the favored coastal regions, and unless there was an institution, an entity, that caused state government, the private sector, and others to focus continuously on the needs of the Central Valley, it would continue to be treated as second-class. We are hoping that this new Partnership is a model of how the state government, local government, and the private sector can work together on targeted economic strategies in every region of the state.

Can you tell our readers more about CCRL's Civic Entrepreneur Summit?

The Summit will be held in Long Beach September 19th and 20th. It will bring together teams of people-business, civic, local government leaders-from each of the 20 regional civic and business organizations that are part of our network. These teams use the Summit as an opportunity to learn from each other about economic development, infrastructure planning and investment, education reform, and other issues they're working on in their own regions. It's also an opportunity for them to meet and work with some of the leaders in state government and statewide organizations. All of our regional leaders understand they can't do this work without the cooperation and support from state government, so at the Summit we'll have members of the Governor's Cabinet, with whom we have been working very closely on a number of programs over the last 18 months. They will share lessons they have learned about how the state government can more effectively support regions.

Let's conclude, Nick, with your observations on need for regional collaboration and governance solutions. For 200 years the US has been organized politically at the federal, state, and local levels. Our constitutions include no mention of regions. But 21st century global competition has forced us to reconsider our arrangments. Increasingly, we need to organize at the global, regional, and neighborhood levels. How do we practially adjust our historic public arrangements to meet our present policy and management challenges?

Well, you start with vision, and you start by understanding the reality of how we organize our interests, whether we are families in communities, communities in regions, or economies in the global marketplace. We have to move from that level of understanding and civic engagement to new ways in which government can operate effectively, and we need all hands on deck. Increasingly, local government leaders have understood and been willing to collaborate with others to solve regional problems. As I said, we think that state government is also moving in the right direction. Hopefully, the federal government can't be too far behind. If there is commitment based on vision - and understanding drawn from the reality of how our economy operates-we simply have to develop and apply regional solutions.