Regional Leadership By and For Real
People
Volume 12, Number 47,
Issue 594
Regional collaboration will never work without a few strong leaders having the courage to transcend city and county boundary lines and lead the development of a true “vision” for our entire region that is based on people and not projects. Such collaborative leaders--if they could ever be found--would promote and safeguard regional unity during the periods of inevitable frustration and skepticism that will be encountered, acknowledging small successes along the way and keep us focused, as a society on investing in education and social issues and not pet projects.
Regretfully, political leaders have such ties to special interest groups and their own electorate and campaign contributors that they are afraid to take a true “line in the sand” stand about single divisive “people not projects” issues that make the quality of life less than what it could be--as a whole--in our Central Virginia community. Cooperation, negotiating and mediation all serve as incentives for collaboration and serve as catalysts for moving to new and inclusive ways of working together, but important key singular points about “intangibles” are lost through territorialism and become merged into an unfocused picture.
Great leaders could provide the means to establish formal decision-making bodies and implementing organizations that would actually do something that lasts—for a change. We love our boards and commissions and study groups, but what has actually been accomplished for our region that has truly made society safer, better and more educated? Instead of light rail, we have a convention center that is operating at only 40-50% of projected use. Instead of having schools with cutting edge technology (not to mention roofs that don’t leak), we have extensive deliberations about new baseball parks. Instead of safe and clean streets and a vibrant retail core in our central downtown, we have a largely—except for music and alcohol festivals—unused but VERY expensive “riverwalk.” Instead of making sure that a 100+ year old storm drain system doesn’t do millions of dollars of damage to dozens of small businesses, we used public money to tear down a multi-million dollar marketplace built years ago with—yet again—public money.
I believe that our lack of regional vision towards investing in people rather than capital building projects is lost because time and time again a special interest group uses its influence to negotiate with elected leaders or other implementing organizations in order to move its own agenda to action. The special interest groups understand that by their makeup and the processes they use, they have sufficient resources to work with other powerful organizations to create new partnerships that achieve real results—at least for them. Unfortunately, sometimes special interest groups do such a good job of permeating the community and disguising themselves as promoting “public good” that they become "a constituency for the whole" and think they speak credibly for the larger community or region. I have worried a lot about this when it comes to groups that supported the recent bond referendums in Chesterfield County, meals tax issues in certain localities and, admittedly, the groups that are supporting the new Regional Arts Center in Richmond.
Special interest groups are often insistent and domineering through campaign contributions. The average working-class citizen does not write checks to politicians or political parties with three numbers in front of the decimal point, but most business interests do. In most localities, it is the professional businesses and their interest groups that make compelling campaign contributions to the candidate that they feel will represent them most ably. In local elections, it is usually the candidate that got their message out through running the most thorough campaign. There is usually a direct correlation between running the best-managed campaign and the best-funded campaign.
At a local level, we all desire elected officials that are compelling but not power-hungry, credible rather than forceful (in the traditional sense), concerned with process as much as content, and are much more behind the scenes than on center stage. However, we are attracted to the campaign machines of candidates who are usually the opposite. The best elected officials would rely on their own resources and the resources of the working citizenry. The best political candidates would also be the ones who are not supported by the special interest groups with hidden agendas and large contributors with overt special interests.
I guess that I have a vision of a more deeply democratic and constructive way of making public decisions that is based on listening to the real people and not the special interest groups and THEN making tough decisions using uncluttered judgment. When minds are made up in advance and public hearings are “just through the motions,” what regional leadership has truly been accomplished?
I would hope that regional leadership would lead to tangible and sustainable results and heal divisions between competing special interests by engaging real citizens in addressing the problems that concern them to the capacity to negotiate future conflicts. There is one thing about special interests that concern me—once the special interests get what they want, they are usually gone until the need arises again. The experience of real working-class people working together creates the networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate communication and cooperation for mutual benefit; it builds relationships that promote positive change rather than destroys them.
By the way, and you will have heard it hear first, “Joe Walton for Powhatan, Virginia Supervisor in 2007.”
David B. Robinson, CPA
This issue is dedicated to my friend Christopher Shorr of Petersburg, Virginia who has great visibility and vision. Learn more at www.sycamorerouge.org
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