1. Build stuff people want, offer products and services people want to buy
2. Attract and retain quality talent
3. Raise capital to get fledgling ideas to the point of sustainability, create a density of “investors”
4. Create a world class culture that encourages people to stick around even when times get tough

These may not be comprehensive factors, but they could be useful metrics to view your city with.

If I had to rate my own city of Richmond, Indiana, I’d say we have plenty of room to grow in each area:

1. We have a lot of great infrastructure and a variety of desirable products/services but we’re pretty scattered on how to sell them in the global marketplace
2. We think we know a lot about what kind of talent we’re looking for, but there’s often a disconnect between that knowledge and our level of investment in actual attraction efforts
3. We don’t always make efficient use of the limited capital that’s available to us, but we have a lot of generous and heavily invested people living here
4. We’re often short-sighted when it comes to building an attractive culture, but there are pockets of people who see the big picture and are working for change

How does your city do when you look at it as a start-up company?

Perhaps the most striking point for me in Bischke’s piece is the question of leadership.  He says we need more than just strong or experienced leaders, we need people who can think like entrepreneurs:

As we roll into an election year, many cities are in a state of crisis. Budgets are a mess and job growth has been minimal for a good swath of the country. Cities in need don’t just need strong leadership, they require transformational leadership. It’s no easy feat but it’s likely that the more that mayors view their cities through an entrepreneurial lens, the better they will be able to adapt to a rapidly-changing world.

Almost any city across the country could adopt the slogan “Adapt or Die” and it wouldn’t be an understatement of the predicament they’re in and the approach needed to get out of it.  Many traditional businesses are in the same boat.  The businesses/cities that will not only just survive but flourish are the ones willing to use non-traditional methods to make ground-shaking changes in the way they operate.

On one hand, you’ve got the City painting a picture of being left out of the key parts of the relationship the EDC has with its Richmond constituents, having to fork over $730,000 without appropriate representation.

You’ve got a County official noting that the City is as well represented on the EDC board as the County or other entities, and that things are working just fine as they are, while the Chamber president notes that there may be a conversation to be had, but that the current actions being taken are too poorly timed.

What’s going on here?  Everyone seems to be making reasonable statements on the matter that represents the point of view of the entities they serve, but it sounds like they’re having the conversation with each other for the first time on the pages of the newspaper. ARGH!

If indeed the “conversation” was triggered by a City Council resolution refusing to designate its usual fund contribution to the EDC budget, then that seems like a really poor way to start things off. It sets up a battle full of pressure points and high-stakes leveraging, and needlessly sensationalizes the issue. Councilman Phil Quinn noted that they’re trying to “send a statement” – why do that with a public vote, when you could do it in a meeting, e-mail message or even postal mail? I suspect we’d be a lot farther along if there’d been in-person meetings between City, County, and Chamber officials trying to hash this out before going public with it, and while I don’t know firsthand that there wasn’t one, I suspect that they skipped that part.

By the same token, County and Chamber officials should not have responded in kind for a news story, using the media for power plays. When you say things like “it doesn’t make any sense to me,” or “this is extremely untimely” for the press, it’s a kind of public disapproval and shaming, even paternalistic finger-wagging, that can only serve to inflame whatever tensions might already exist. It also makes us look like we’re a community in chaos, which is exactly what economic development efforts don’t need. Instead, officials should have either refrained from commenting in any detail while noting that conversations are ongoing, or at least framed their concerns more positively – “We’re concerned about the timing and the reasoning here, but we’re ready to work with each other to understand everyone’s needs and broker a solution that works best for our citizens.” Would that have been so hard?

Yes, I’m basing all of this unsolicited advice on a single Pal-Item news story, and there may be other pieces of the puzzle not yet reported, but I think the theme here is not a new one for our community.

I’ve discussed the kinds of power struggles that are already built into the structure of our community building organizations, and when you throw in poor (or total lack of) communication on top of that, things are only going to get worse. I think it’s fine for community leaders to act shrewdly in the fulfillment of their vision for a better Richmond and Wayne County, but this cannot involve closing the door to dialog with other stakeholders – early and often.  Too frequently, we hear about one organization or government entity “scratching its head” at the actions of another, and then we throw up our hands and wonder why there’s little public confidence in our prospects for economic revitalization. Let’s connect some dots here, folks.

Mayor Sally Hutton is quoted as saying that “The bottom line is we want to work together…We will work something out.” Let’s hope that, for everyone involved, there’s not only an intention to work together but some actual mechanisms by which that might happen. These community leaders need to get in a room together TODAY, and they shouldn’t leave until they’ve got a joint media statement prepared that lays out a much more positive path forward. Richmond and Wayne County deserve at least that level of collaboration.

Update on 1/6/09: in an article today, the Pal-Item notes that the City Council has approved their contribution to the EDC’s budget, contingent upon a future appointment to the board.  This comes in the form of a 1-year agreement instead of the usual 4-year term.  According to the article, “No time frame was set for the first meeting between representatives of the city and county.”  This also comes on the same day as an announcement about the new EDC President.

It seems like QUITE an unfortunate juxtaposition to me to have this kind of announcement in that kind of setting.

Malls like the Richmond Square Mall certainly provide great shopping opportunities, but tend to be populated by businesses that are not locally owned and that give less back to the local economy and community over the long run than businesses that are locally owned. In most “buy local” campaigns across the country, one of the primary goals is to get shoppers to expand their notion of shopping opportunities beyond “the mall” to once again consider what small business districts and downtowns have to offer.

If Richmond residents think that buying local just means going to a shop within city limits, the potential impact of the buy-local message is diluted as their dollars leave the community for corporate headquarters elsewhere.

I asked the Chamber and Mayor’s office to reconsider the venue – feel free to do the same if you’re so inclined.

I haven’t yet received my entry form for the “If I Were Mayor” essay contest to be held amongst myself and other local adult citizens, but in the greatest tradition of blogging, I shall now commence to ramble on regarding something about which no one has asked me:

If I were Mayor, I would…

1. …create and refine (with significant input from citizens) a list of concrete goals (and methods for achieving them) for my time in office. They would be ambitious and far-reaching, but achievable. While they would closely mirror other plans already in place (a City-wide comprehensive plan, for example), they would guide my personal decision making in the Mayor’s office, and provide a quantitative metric to which voters could hold me accountable.
2. …have regular public meetings with the citizens of Richmond so I could listen to their interests, concerns, needs, and hopes for the City. These meetings would be broadcast on WCTV and transcripts would be available on the City website. I would take questions submitted in advance via postal mail or e-mail from those who couldn’t attend the meetings.
3. …move my office desk into an open area where I could sit alongside the heads of the major departments in my administration as we tended to the city’s business throughout the day. My work would be done out in the open for all to see, and I would be able to stay in close touch with the quality of work being done by my fellow civic administrators.
4. …find ways for myself, my staff and other interested community members to have regular conversations about the politics of power and privilege in our community. Who has power and how are they using it? How are the dynamics of power and privilege helping our community, and how are they hurting it? Who is disempowered, and why? What segments of our population are under-served or left behind by our current systems of governing? What can we do better with this information in hand?
5. …write a weekly guest column in the local newspaper updating readers on events and items of interest for the week from the Mayor’s perspective, and perhaps responding to questions received from citizens during the week.
6. …have a regular call-in show on a local radio station, allowing citizens to again engage me about their questions and concerns and hopes for the City.
7. …hold regular workshops that would help interested citizens become more involved in their local government and local neighborhood communities. These would be facilitated by entities already expert at such things, and would eventually be turned into course material reusable by other city governments and/or future Richmond Mayoral administrations.
8. …conduct thorough and regular budgetary review sessions with experts from the City and from the public, so that systems of spending and revenue generation were scrutinized and evaluated for possible inefficiencies or errors. I would create documentation for the public that explained the City’s budget and why it is set up the way it is, and then create multiple channels for soliciting feedback for improvements
9. …see what the small business community in Richmond needs to thrive. What tools, what resources, what public exposure, what conversations need to happen? What barriers are in place and who is putting/keeping them there? What do you need from your city so that you can continue being the lifeblood of our community?
10. …create systems of knowledge documentation and learning whereby turnover in City staff (either within my administration or between my administration and the next) would have minimal impact on the important work to be done in our community. This would include financial management, information about what kinds of staffing structure and administrative processes are most efficient (and which ones don’t work at all), and just general “things to know” that would let anyone coming into an existing position take advantage of the work done before them.
11. …update my City’s website so that the list of things to do in Richmond wasn’t so narrow, and so it was much more standards compliant and search engine friendly.

Those are a few things that come to mind for me. What would you do?

When it was time for the commission to deliberate, Bruce Wissel, president of the plan commission, pointed out that the commission members hadn’t yet had a chance to get a full printed copy of the plan, and that they shouldn’t be expected to recommend something they couldn’t read in full. As the resident web geeks Mark and I could barely keep from crying out that the whole thing is online and could be read pretty much anywhere the, um, telecommunications infrastructure is built out, but I also sympathized with Bruce’s sentiment that if you’re going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on urban planning, the least you can do is give the approving civic bodies a copy of the darn thing. I’ll volunteer use of the Summersault laser printer if it would help.

And so the whole ball of wax was tabled for a future meeting, where I suspect even fewer members of the public will make a showing unless some controversy pops up. And no doubt in some future conversation about what direction our community should take, perhaps even as a part of some controversy or other tough decision, this plan or some version of it will be held up – either as a “road map” that can be tossed gently aside when other agendas take precedence, or as a firm set of guiding policies that you can’t whine about now if you didn’t help write them then. This is, at least in part, how the social, economic and environmental priorities of our community are decided.