DENVER — Here is one measure of the nation’s lingering economic trouble and the political anxiety festering in state capitals over jobs and angry voters: 500.
That is the number of new laws, at a minimum, that have been passed and signed by governors since Jan. 1 that were aimed in some fashion at economic recovery, according to the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures.
But with most states struggling to balance their budgets — and with Washington planning trillions of dollars in cuts in coming years — there is also painfully little money available to dive in with ambitious job-creation programs or investing in infrastructure, for example. If anything, the debt deal struck in Washington last week, with its attendant cuts in the federal budget, will only increase the pressure on state and local governments.
The result is a scattershot of economic body-building ideas and innovations mostly on the cheap — some clever, some desperate, some unpredictable in their consequences.
Hawaii, for example, authorized an emergency transfer of money from environmental cleanup to economic development.
Indiana declared methane gas from landfills to be a “renewable energy resource,” allowing incentives to be paid from an existing development fund.
Here in Colorado, the state is trying a bottom-up approach, looking for ideas — through meetings and sessions in every county, from rural to urban — about what might work in creating jobs and what should be dumped as a hindrance.
A 44,000-word document summarizing the new laws, assembled by the Conference of State Legislatures, echoes with terms of a troubled time: “distress” appears nine times, “emergency” 14 times and “job creation,” the Big Kahuna, 43 times.
“The whole landscape is changing — it’s hard to describe where it’s going to end up,” said Mark Lange, the executive director of the Edward Lowe Foundation, a nonprofit group in Cassopolis, Mich., that works with states and communities on economic development.
The chronic news-loop image of Washington stewing in its own sauce of budgetary dysfunction is part of the backdrop to the new laws, state officials and economists say.
Equally important is that numerous state governments across the nation shifted to Republican control in last November’s elections. Republicans netted five governor’s seats, while in the legislatures, the surge was even more pronounced. Hundreds of new Republican lawmakers, in numbers not seen since the Great Depression, took control with promises to build back battered economies.
Maryland, for example, framed a major research study on the state’s economic future around the growing realization that neighboring Washington’s days as a golden goose of federal jobs might soon be gone.
“The sword of Damocles is hanging over the state’s economy,” said Anirban Basu, the chairman and chief executive of the Sage Policy Group, an economic and policy consulting firm in Baltimore that worked on Maryland’s new economic blueprint. “The state simply has too many eggs in one basket, and we know that basket is about to shrink.”
Old economic development ideas, meanwhile, like the come-hither incentive packages intended to woo a company from another state — the hallmark of economic politics in the precrash era — have quietly gone into semiretirement, development experts say.
“There’s still a lot of rhetoric, that we’re going to go after some high-cost state, such as California, and get their companies to relocate, but I don’t think you see quite as many incentive packages as you saw in the past, partly because the states can’t afford them,” said Kenneth E. Poole, the executive director of the Council for Community and Economic Research, a nonprofit membership group of economic-development experts.
Whether the scattering of corn seeds and big hopes from the state capitals will work is an open question.
Not every state, for example, can become a hub of say, renewable energy, which appears as a goal in at least seven of the new state laws. But a major theme of state economic aspiration is that times of turmoil — not to mention rapid technological change — also produce opportunity that might not have been as clear in fatter days.
“Lots of places have a vision that they won’t actually ever implement,” Mr. Poole said. “But we can’t really know the future, and sometimes pie in the sky actually comes true.”
But there is also conflict within states about how to go about creating jobs and how to balance other interests, like the environment.
Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio, a Republican, vetoed a bill last month, for example, that would have sharply increased how much water industrial users could withdraw from Lake Erie.
The bill, passed by the Republican-controlled legislature, was couched in the language of economic competitiveness, but Mr. Kasich said the plan did not have enough ways to monitor and measure the impact on other industries, like tourism.
And some states have found even budget-conscious innovation to be too costly. Florida began a pilot project several years ago based on what is called “economic gardening,” which involves helping businesses solve problems through things like virtual consultants. Other states have since embraced the idea, but this year, Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, vetoed continued financing for the program.
“It was working, but it got caught in this environment of cutting back,” said Mr. Lange, of the Edward Lowe Foundation, which is pushing the gardening concept and helping states put it into effect.
Some state officials and independent researchers say they think the bubbling ferment of new ideas itself — desperation as a mother of invention — will be its own long-term force for change.
Some states, for example, have reorganized and restaffed their economic development offices with people from the private sector rather than government — a sea change itself from plum political appointment to professionalization.
Here in Colorado, Gov. John W. Hickenlooper, a Democrat elected last year, calls the state’s economic development program “the conversation,” a bottom-up program to collect ideas and build relationships on the ground with local businesses and county leaders. Fifty meetings were held across the state with upward of 10,000 people participating in person or having submitted comments and ideas.
Dwayne Romero, who stepped down as executive director of Colorado’s Office of Economic Development and International Trade at the end of July, said he thought the conversation could ultimately become a powerful new recruiting tool for the state if it actually made things work better in the business environment.
“We can’t buy your love, we can’t buy your movement here — we don’t have the resources, the cash,” Mr. Romero said.
But if the state can build a reputation, he said, as a place that actually “has its act together,” then that message will resonate and help the state fight back at a time when the mood of economic woe is bound up with political dysfunction.
By KIRK JOHNSON
Source: www.nytimes.com
That is the number of new laws, at a minimum, that have been passed and signed by governors since Jan. 1 that were aimed in some fashion at economic recovery, according to the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures.
But with most states struggling to balance their budgets — and with Washington planning trillions of dollars in cuts in coming years — there is also painfully little money available to dive in with ambitious job-creation programs or investing in infrastructure, for example. If anything, the debt deal struck in Washington last week, with its attendant cuts in the federal budget, will only increase the pressure on state and local governments.
The result is a scattershot of economic body-building ideas and innovations mostly on the cheap — some clever, some desperate, some unpredictable in their consequences.
Hawaii, for example, authorized an emergency transfer of money from environmental cleanup to economic development.
Indiana declared methane gas from landfills to be a “renewable energy resource,” allowing incentives to be paid from an existing development fund.
Here in Colorado, the state is trying a bottom-up approach, looking for ideas — through meetings and sessions in every county, from rural to urban — about what might work in creating jobs and what should be dumped as a hindrance.
A 44,000-word document summarizing the new laws, assembled by the Conference of State Legislatures, echoes with terms of a troubled time: “distress” appears nine times, “emergency” 14 times and “job creation,” the Big Kahuna, 43 times.
“The whole landscape is changing — it’s hard to describe where it’s going to end up,” said Mark Lange, the executive director of the Edward Lowe Foundation, a nonprofit group in Cassopolis, Mich., that works with states and communities on economic development.
The chronic news-loop image of Washington stewing in its own sauce of budgetary dysfunction is part of the backdrop to the new laws, state officials and economists say.
Equally important is that numerous state governments across the nation shifted to Republican control in last November’s elections. Republicans netted five governor’s seats, while in the legislatures, the surge was even more pronounced. Hundreds of new Republican lawmakers, in numbers not seen since the Great Depression, took control with promises to build back battered economies.
Maryland, for example, framed a major research study on the state’s economic future around the growing realization that neighboring Washington’s days as a golden goose of federal jobs might soon be gone.
“The sword of Damocles is hanging over the state’s economy,” said Anirban Basu, the chairman and chief executive of the Sage Policy Group, an economic and policy consulting firm in Baltimore that worked on Maryland’s new economic blueprint. “The state simply has too many eggs in one basket, and we know that basket is about to shrink.”
Old economic development ideas, meanwhile, like the come-hither incentive packages intended to woo a company from another state — the hallmark of economic politics in the precrash era — have quietly gone into semiretirement, development experts say.
“There’s still a lot of rhetoric, that we’re going to go after some high-cost state, such as California, and get their companies to relocate, but I don’t think you see quite as many incentive packages as you saw in the past, partly because the states can’t afford them,” said Kenneth E. Poole, the executive director of the Council for Community and Economic Research, a nonprofit membership group of economic-development experts.
Whether the scattering of corn seeds and big hopes from the state capitals will work is an open question.
Not every state, for example, can become a hub of say, renewable energy, which appears as a goal in at least seven of the new state laws. But a major theme of state economic aspiration is that times of turmoil — not to mention rapid technological change — also produce opportunity that might not have been as clear in fatter days.
“Lots of places have a vision that they won’t actually ever implement,” Mr. Poole said. “But we can’t really know the future, and sometimes pie in the sky actually comes true.”
But there is also conflict within states about how to go about creating jobs and how to balance other interests, like the environment.
Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio, a Republican, vetoed a bill last month, for example, that would have sharply increased how much water industrial users could withdraw from Lake Erie.
The bill, passed by the Republican-controlled legislature, was couched in the language of economic competitiveness, but Mr. Kasich said the plan did not have enough ways to monitor and measure the impact on other industries, like tourism.
And some states have found even budget-conscious innovation to be too costly. Florida began a pilot project several years ago based on what is called “economic gardening,” which involves helping businesses solve problems through things like virtual consultants. Other states have since embraced the idea, but this year, Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, vetoed continued financing for the program.
“It was working, but it got caught in this environment of cutting back,” said Mr. Lange, of the Edward Lowe Foundation, which is pushing the gardening concept and helping states put it into effect.
Some state officials and independent researchers say they think the bubbling ferment of new ideas itself — desperation as a mother of invention — will be its own long-term force for change.
Some states, for example, have reorganized and restaffed their economic development offices with people from the private sector rather than government — a sea change itself from plum political appointment to professionalization.
Here in Colorado, Gov. John W. Hickenlooper, a Democrat elected last year, calls the state’s economic development program “the conversation,” a bottom-up program to collect ideas and build relationships on the ground with local businesses and county leaders. Fifty meetings were held across the state with upward of 10,000 people participating in person or having submitted comments and ideas.
Dwayne Romero, who stepped down as executive director of Colorado’s Office of Economic Development and International Trade at the end of July, said he thought the conversation could ultimately become a powerful new recruiting tool for the state if it actually made things work better in the business environment.
“We can’t buy your love, we can’t buy your movement here — we don’t have the resources, the cash,” Mr. Romero said.
But if the state can build a reputation, he said, as a place that actually “has its act together,” then that message will resonate and help the state fight back at a time when the mood of economic woe is bound up with political dysfunction.
By KIRK JOHNSON
Source: www.nytimes.com
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