ERIC ROSENGREN, FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF BOSTON: I want to welcome everybody here. I look forward to hearing from Mayor Menino later in the program. He is in his fourth term, after nine years on the City Council, and has served as president of the U.S. Conference of mayors. He and his staff have been great collaborators with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. We value his leadership in the city and his perspectives. Our panelists have some engaging and enlightening and provocative perspectives on leveraging the assets of metropolitan areas. The bank and MassINC collaborate in a number of ways and seek to use non-partisan research to address issues important to the economic well being of all of our citizens. We are in for some interesting and thought-provoking perspectives. With that, keep in mind the metro areas outside of Greater Boston. Some are making very good progress and others are struggling with a number of issues. One area of interest and concern to us has been Greater Springfield. Consider policies to rejuvenate central cities. Second, give thought to how problems in the housing sector impact economic development and vibrancy. They have affected significant economic gains. Third, consider the fiscal mismatch between the demands on cities and revenues. Cities serve commuters and daytime populations. Bank researchers examined such issues in a recent working paper. Keep in mind the role of physical and human capital in metropolitan vibrancy. How can we gauge returns on investments? Consider how best to develop actionable recommendations. These are just a few of the challenging issues. I am glad we have today’s forum to bring thinking about and discussion about these issues.
BRUCE KATZ, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION: It’s a pleasure to be here at the Fed and with MassINC as well. You have been a great partner on the gateway cities work. There is a palpable sense that something big is about to happen in this country. I am not talking about the Celtics, which to be frank, I found out about last night. We are about to have the final lap of the historic presidential race. The issues at stake in this election – gas prices soaring, housing prices declining and the stock market tumbling – the next administration and Congress are going to have its hands full. We launched a blueprint for prosperity eight months ago with a simple and urgent proposition. More than before, our nation’s ability to grow and prosper is at risk unless our metro areas are vibrant. We have gone from a union of 50 states to a network of 363 highly connected metropolitan areas. We are a metro nation and it’s high time to start acting like one. I offer a metro policy. Metro areas are the engines of national prosperity and at the cutting edge of policy reform. They can’t go it alone. They require a dependable national partner. Our federal government has gone fundamentally adrift. It’s out of step and out of sync with the dynamic changes going on. We are a metro nation economically but we don’t act like a metro nation politically or administratively. We need to remake the partnership between the federal government, states and localities to unleash unfulfilled potential and to resolve our most critical national challenges. The big challenges transcend parochial borders and require national vision. The federal government must be flexible and smart and assertive to make sure cities and suburbs work together to resolve common problems. At a time of fiscal constraints, the federal government needs to maximize performance based on evidence.
As we reported last November, the top 100 metro areas have grown and grown and now constitute two thirds of our population. Economists refer to this as agglomeration. Innovation and new products and business models and human capital and education and skills, infrastructure, transportation, telecommunication, energy distribution systems and quality places – these assets and the people and firms that leverage them are in metro areas. The top 100 metro areas account for only 12 percent of our land mass and hold two thirds of our population and generate three quarters of our gross domestic product. More importantly, they make an outsize contribution on assets that drive prosperity like patents and adults with graduate degrees or infrastructure like air cargo and public transit. They constitute a new spacial geography. In Boston, the new geography stretches from the hustle of Downtown Crossing to leafy suburbs like Newton and Sharon to the high tech corridor of Rte. 128 and economic hubs like Cambridge and satellite cities like Lowell and Dover, N.H. They are commingled as people live in one municipality and work in another and go to sporting events and shop in another and share the same natural resources. The metros are on the frontlines of dynamic change. They are responding with energy and invention. But no matter how much these places focus and innovate, they don’t have the resources and power to go it alone. The movement of talent and capital and carbon emissions takes place at the global level and transcends parochial borders. The second point is the federal government is out of sync with metro reality. The conventional wisdom of two parties in perennial conflict may be true but it is only part of the story. Equally important is the sharp disconnect between the changes and the static nature of policy. Washington in short is failing to lead where it must during a period of global transformation. It is failing to empower metros where it should and to maximize performance to ensure that scarce resources have optimal societal impact. The federal government is absent where it should be present. In prior periods it acted with confidence and purpose. It created advanced sectors for investments in health care and scientific resources and defense and extended education to millions of Americans through the GI Bill. It did Social Security and Medicare and constructed the highway system. It developed parks and open lands and ensured clean air and water. The returns are beyond calculation. Today, Washington lacks any strategic plans to tackle the big stuff to build a world-class labor force, to rethink transportation needs, to reduce the carbon footprint of the nation that is the world’s largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases. By contrast, competitor nations understand that the rules have changed and require new purpose and direction from central governance, whether South Korea’s innovation or Ireland’s and Singapore’s development of talented workers, Japan’s and Germany’s campaigns around broadband and high-speed rail, or Europe’s consistent focus on alternative energy. We remember Truman’s maxim the buck stops here. It seems at times we have a pass the buck government in Washington. Over the past 40 years the federal government has experimented with devolution, pushing large responsibilities for programs down to states and municipalities and devolution has failed to keep pace with the evolution of metros. In the real world, families know that issues like transportation and housing and education are inextricably linked. In the federal bureaucracy the issues are broken apart and kept separately. Take traffic congestion. We know it is fiscal folly to build or widen roads to mitigate congestion. More roads just equal more congestion. The real solution lies in rearranging the location of housing and jobs and building transit to give people more choices and introducing pricing schemes. Federal programs offer only transportation solutions to congestion and efforts to link transportation and housing run into countless roadblocks. The federal government has become an ossified network of specialized and balkanized agencies. Federal policies also reinforce government fragmentation. Cities and suburbs should be encouraged to collaborate to compete globally and solve common problems rapidly. Federal programs break apart metros in the way they allocate resources so that they don’t see the metro area as an economic and environmental whole. Cities and suburbs are just creatures of states. Localities don’t work or play well together often. Federal rules and resources make a huge difference.
Beyond encouraging fragmentation, the federal government is not maximizing performance. We know it hasn’t always been this way. Agencies were organized in ways that looked similar to a state-of-the-art corporation. The past 30 years have told a different story. Remember the great competitiveness threat from Japan and Germany. The best corporations retooled and restructured and gave up top-down planning for a decentralized system. Businesses emphasized bottom-up accountability and benchmarking and evaluation. We know the success of Whole Foods markets. They combine radical autonomy at stores with performance measurements and awards. The federal government barely funds the national Census, which is constitutionally mandated. It has dismantled information systems and denigrated program evaluation and assessment. With a few notable exceptions, most federal agencies have no clear quantifiable mission. This is not rocket science. Measure what matters. Track what counts. Get what you pay for. A metro nation demands a metro policy. We need a fundamental remaking of federalism. The federal government should lead where it must. Only the national government can set a strategic vision for the entire country, address issue that transcend state borders, and establish a unified framework. The federal government must empower metros where it should. Our nation of our size and diversity displays immense variation. Phoenix is not Pittsburgh. Denver is not Detroit. Our policies must allow the bending of policies for different markets. The federal government must maximize performance. It is time for Washington to get smart and become a fact-filled rather than a fact-free zone. Lead, empower, maximize – pretty simple concepts.
So what does all this look like in practice? At Brookings, we try to listen to a new class of metro innovators. We desperately need a national innovation policy. We recommend a National Innovation Foundation under one roof and modeled on successful efforts in Japan and Korea and Finland and Britain. It will create an entrepreneurial hotspot to unleash innovation. No matter how much we innovate, American workers will not be able to make ends meet without government help. The federal government must lead in supplementing wages. We recommend a metro raise, a targeted increase in the earned income tax credit. It is time to make the EITC go further in awarding workers. Beyond innovation and human capital, we propose that the federal government lead again as it did in the 1950s and set forth a national transportation vision that fits the challenges of our time and facilitates the movement of people and goods in metro corridors. It is economic and environmental suicide to expect our ports and freight hubs and rail corridors to do what it takes on their own to stay one step ahead of global forces and it is fiscally irrational and irresponsible to think that a system of congressional earmarks will do the job. So our response is to identify, map, prioritize, finance and implement those investments that will have the largest economic and environmental return to the nation – intermodal facilities and high speed passenger rail. A smart infrastructure is essential. The federal government must lead on climate change. We support a carbon tax or a national cap and trade system to lower greenhouse gases. It must recognize the carbon footprint of the built environment. The residential sector alones accounts for one fifth of the footprint. Washington should mandate energy transparency in residential home purchases and build a new network around alternative energy. Beyond leadership, the federal government must empower metros to enable them to tailor policies to their own realities. Empower metros to build on economic strengths. The Massachusetts life sciences cluster represents this phenomenon, by joining together a web of non-profits and suppliers and investors and research institutions, we recommend a new cluster effort for economic regions. Workers would benefit and firms and metros would benefit. On infrastructure and quality places, we recommend that the federal government issue a sustainability challenge. Imagine if they said to Greater Boston or Greater Cleveland, show us a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and lower your combined carbon footprint and we will provide additional resources and new powers to align programs. We think most metro areas would rise to such a challenge. They would look at mixed use facilities and housing around transit stations, or look at congestion pricing or transit and commuter rail. The efforts would give residents more choices in where they live and how they move around. Face it, with rising gas prices, sprawl is not an option for people and places. We embrace solutions that are bottom up, joined up and suited up for global competition. The other part of the compact is maximizing performance – our most basic recommendation here is simple, relatively cheap and transformative: set audacious goals, use evidence to make decisions, track performance continuously and in a phrase, get smart. Create an intricate network of data and analytic tools and measure what really matters – performance of clusters, the share of high school graduates moving on to degrees, economic and environmental returns on transportation investments and changing carbon footprints. Information moves markets and creates wealth. A relatively small federal investment in the tens of millions will mean public and private sector investments in the millions and billions. We intend to continue this year and next to offer concrete legislatable ideas. As in our current efforts, we will do this in concert with the real experts in this country who are driving change. The U.S. enters a new century with a new geography and a new face. We are no longer Jefferson’s nation of rural hamlets and small towns. We are the preeminent economic power in the world because of metropolitan areas integrated and connected with sister economies across the globe. The challenge is to get comfortable in our new metropolitan skins. Our metro nation needs a metro policy. Together let’s make it happen. Thank you very much.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: It is helpful to think about how we got here in thinking about how to get out of here. Have we learned anything about that?
KATZ: We can learn a lot. I don’t think devolution inevitably had to lead to this fiscal irresponsibility and fact-free kind of action. It’s not uniform across the federal government. We do tend to track performance with regard to low-income families in welfare to work or No Child Left Behind. In transportation and housing and environment and energy, we are a fact-free zone and have incentives to continue to do the wrong thing. This reflects an intellectual failure of the first order at the national government. Devolution was not about the federal government getting out of everything but
about sharing responsibility and powers with lower levels of government. But there is flappiness to federal thinking across both parties. I served under President Clinton and I served under Reagan and the first Bush when I was in the Senate. I concluded that neither party has a monopoly on intelligent ideas. This is really about a push coming up from the people who are real innovators.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: As a public school teacher for the last few decades, I have noticed clear patterns in the lack of parental involvement, an upper tier that stays the same and goes on to high-powered universities, a shrinking middle tier that does their homework every night and is not excited about education and goes out and plays with their friends, and a highly expanded lower tier that does everything they can to have other people fail along with them. It is very discouraging that our interventions have not been successful and have undermined public education. How does that affect the future of our workers and international competitiveness?
KATZ: The president and Congressional leaders have not used the bully pulpit in this country as they have in other countries to basically be frank with the citizenry. The rules have changed. There is an iron law of wages – you earn what you learn and it’s brutal. Many Americans working quite hard don’t have the income and wages to make ends meet because they see prices on an upward trajectory. The housing decline is a difficult bump. In the rental sector, prices are still beyond the means of workers. We have done a lot of work in Europe and national leaders have a fairly frank conversation there with their populace about how you need to get educated and get skilled and the jobs of yesteryear are not coming back. They’re not. We have to have alternatives to traditional schools as the norm rather than the exception. I am looking for a level of leadership at the aspirational level to have a franker conversation with the American citizenry and then to offer programs and policies to give students in that last tier a greater sense of possibilities and options. I am not talking charter versus public. City Year is the kind of focus we should be having in this next administration, Democrat or Republican, giving young people options. The payoff for this would be enormous. What we lack the true L word, which is leadership. We have not had it for some period of time. So your job has become near impossible to perform.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: You talked a lot about the federal government. I know you are outspoken about this. Tell us what’s going on at the local and state level.
KATZ: I sort of group states with the federal government. The states represent the federal government in their drift and failure to focus on the needs and challenges of metro areas. They sort of focus on political horse trading particularly in areas of economic development and infrastructure and other areas of domestic policy. Look at a map of where funding goes and it looks like a Jackson Pollock painting. Just throw it all out there and hit every district and then say they made the political deal well, but no one is looking at the bottom line, the return on investment. A few states have managed to depart from the pack and are making seismic structural investments in a way that might have an impact. The life sciences initiative might count as one of those as long as it is administered without political interference. States are part of the problem right now. State bureaucracies to a large extent represent federal bureaucracies. That can be changed. The states and the federal governments can be partners in this big move and they have to encourage cities and suburbs to play well together. What I see in Chicago and Denver and Louisville are people understanding cities and suburbs must work together to sustain growth and deal with large issues. The Northeast is the land of parochialism. We all know that. This is the part of the country, across state lines, where it may be the toughest to basically sell this kind of message about collaborating to compete on broad economic, social and environmental issues. Inevitably we are going to move this way, the federal government probably first and then the states as their likely partners. We have to put together some enticements and challenges and awards to work well together. This is like the schoolyard with three-year-olds. At some point we have to reward their behavior and ultimately punish folks who are not collaborating. It’s a tough message but one that in the Northeast and New England needs to be understood. There is too much government at too small a level and it makes absolutely no sense.
AUDIENCE REQUEST: Talk a little about the post-election Congressional calendar and what is likely to come through as vehicles for reform.
KATZ: When the next president is elected there are a few things on his plate – the war, the mortgage crisis, and we are still responding to Katrina in New Orleans – I was just down there three weeks ago. We have a long way to go to recover New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. There are crises – gas prices – but there is a legislative clock in Washington. For those of us around the federal government for some time, what we see coming down the pike is there will be a tax bill in 2010 because the president’s tax cuts expire. I think what is going to happen irrespective of who is elected president is tax cuts on people making more than $250,000 a year will not be extended. There will be many different kinds of progressive tax vehicles – the earned income tax credit or increasing the child’s health insurance piece. There will be an infrastructure bill because of laws expiring in 2009. The national highway trust fund is broke. The system is broken. It will take until 2010 to figure out the politics of transportation policy. There is a real chance for significant reform. There will be climate and energy legislation, including new investments in alternative energy. It’s been teed up. It will be ugly. There will be huge regional disparities but we will move on that. Then pick your favorite: workforce, reauthorization of No Child Left Behind or immigration of some kind, more progressive housing policy after subprime. We are going to go through a burst of energy in Washington that we have not seen in decades. The question is whether it will be smart, remotely smart or stupid. I think it will be smart if metropolitan innovators inform it and help advance it.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: I liked the statement you earn what you learn. We have over 570,000 adults over 25 in Massachusetts who have not graduated from high school. They have been left out of the Readiness Project. They are left out of the picture everywhere and yet they are important parts of society and the parents of children in schools. What can be done?
KATZ: It’s a great question. I don’t start with programs or policies as the first order of business. The next group of leaders at the national level – executive or in Congress – need to have this frank conversation about what globalization and technological innovation have meant for American workers. Education and skills are fundamental for individuals and for the nation to compete. If we don’t close the gap on racial and ethnic disparities in education – only 13 percent of Hispanics have bachelor’s degrees and only 18 percent of African Americans and about 34 percent of whites and 59 percent of Asians – if we don’t close that gap when the workforce is trending toward 40 percent African-American and Hispanic, then we are cooked economically. That’s the kind of frank discussion that must be had. It has to say investments today will yield productivity tomorrow. We are stuck in a crazy box of fiscal irresponsibility in Washington. This has to be fundamentally changed and the next president has to start with some very stark conversations with the public because we are off course and I don’t think this election yet on either side of the aisle has described how off course we are.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Metro Boston does quite well under the current system. A few points trouble me. You seem eager to shred the constitution that was built on Jeffersonian hamlets. We do quite well here despite the lack of natural resources. We have decent infrastructure and the basics and we are competing internationally. I don’t see how can you be so glib about forcing this on the American public. The Irish and the French and the Dutch are rejecting this kind of top-down thinking. People don’t want to be governed in this way.
KATZ: I disagree with the premise. I am not talking about a return to top-down command-and-control, but leadership and setting the environment and climate and giving more flexibility to local levels and requiring more accountability. I am not talking about going back to where we were in the 60s and 70s, but a different kind of federal partnership. My rhetoric is if we think over several generations we can sustain our standard of living, we are kidding ourselves if we think cities and suburbs are going to do it by themselves. They don’t have the powers or resources or the history of doing that with forces that are way beyond their control. I am talking about a focus and a vision and we are off course, way off course across both parties at a time when I see our competitors having a level of discipline that is absent in this country. It’s not about going back but going forward to a different kind of partnership. If we leave it up to Washington we may drift back to a top-down and that would be a huge mistake.
GREG TORRES, MASSINC PRESIDENT: A big thank you to all the folks at Brookings for that thoughtful and provocative presentation. Mayor Menino is more qualified than just about anyone around to comment on the needs of cities and metro areas. He has been on the front lines of these challenges for 24 years as a member of the council and mayor since 1993. The issues have been on his schedule every day, sometimes in neighborhoods or board rooms or in Congress.
BOSTON MAYOR THOMAS MENINO: Thank you very much. I wish I could have been here earlier. We had our monthly department heads meeting. This was their morning. They discussed the issues that face Boston. I talked about this whole issue with Bruce Katz in Washington, about talking about American cities and the federal government has just abandoned us all. The focus is on a national agenda and vital issues. The best thing about being mayor of Boston is I get to work on national issues and neighborhood priorities. The success of the former increasingly depends on the strength of the latter. As cities go, so goes the nation. Now more than ever, it’s clear that cities are the American story. The federal government and local government must work together to ensure innovations, partnerships and inclusion. Boston is writing its own compelling story right now. Our growing population is as talented as our championship sports teams and our diverse neighborhoods are as vibrant as our leading institutions and businesses. Our development pipeline is bustling. The first quarter of this year we had 14 new development packages come to the Boston Redevelopment Authority; at the same time last year we had four. The federal government has partnered with us to achieve some success stories. In other areas, we have succeeded despite their lack of leadership. I won’t focus on the 23 percent reduction in community development block grants the city has experienced since 2001 or the funding the cops program has lost. There is too much at stake to waste time looking back. It’s not just a lack of funding that worries me but a lack of will to engage urban areas. They seem to be saying many urban challenges belong entirely in local government. It’s time to put the united back in the United States of America. My administration has stepped up to fill the gap. Many issues demand greater leadership from the federal government like skyrocketing oil and gas prices that affect everything we do. I worry about what that means for home heating oil this winter. I know families still struggling to pay last year’s bills. The federal government needs to commit funds for low-income families now instead of waiting until next winter. People have to make decisions between heating oil, paying rent and having food on the table, a huge problem we all face. Transportation, health care and housing are also important issues. I won’t talk about transportation. We still need to invest in our roads and bridges and more modern public transportation. I won’t talk about health care but we still need to eliminate racial and ethnic health disparities and emphasize prevention. In housing we still need to invest in more workforce affordable housing. Instead I want to focus on creating real and meaningful opportunities for everyone by investing in our people. It’s in all our interests to make sure all our people contribute to America’s promise. The best way to do that is offering a quality education from early childhood through college and quality job training programs, especially for under-skilled workers and ex-offenders. We can create a new pool of talent. We have to make sure kids get off to a good start and have the health care they need to grow and learn and it means helping families connect with resources and services. We have created a ten-year plan to achieve universal school readiness to ensure that we are not just closing the achievement gap but preventing it. Imagine if the federal government supported our efforts and similar plans in other cities across the country. The K through 12 system must match strong testing standards with a strong network of support for kids. If we demand more of students, we should provide them with tools they need to succeed. We need to incorporate sports and arts and cultural activities that have been cut due to budget challenges. They are nearly as important as the work children do in classrooms. We are working to align programming and personnel at schools and libraries with our community centers. Our students’ need don’t end with final exams. The federal government needs to be the biggest advocate for summer jobs, especially for kids who made a mistake and come out of incarceration have CORIs. A lot of these kids want to get a job and it’s very difficult. A lot of folks won’t hire them. All you people in this room who never made a mistake in your life raise your hand. We all make mistakes. It’s important to make sure these kids have second opportunities. They come out of incarceration with great dreams of a new life and they can’t get a job and no one will take the risk of hiring them. We need to give incentives to businesses to hire these kids, who are some of the best employees businesses can have. They get more help while incarcerated than when they leave incarceration. It’s so dysfunctional. There are a lot of programs out there and nobody even speaks to themselves. People have their own programs and they don’t work together. Career skills should be the hallmark of community colleges. They should be to business what AAA ball clubs are to the major leagues. We have a community college with a graduation rate of 23 percent. They think that’s successful. One has a 5 percent graduation rate. Think about that. And they say they are doing a good job. We need to make higher education more accessible by expanding student loans and grants and expanding the GI bill. The kids coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq – we need to give them some help; they have no help when they come back. They need a new GI bill, a new one. I am not saying we have all the answers but federal policies can benefit from local knowledge. I have been mayor for 15 years and have seen how the federal commitment to Boston has decreased everywhere. Mayors of cities are responsible. We are like CEO’s of corporations and we have to make sure our corporations work. It’s more difficult than several years ago. Proposition 2 ½ overrides are not working. Communities are laying off teachers. That’s the future of our kids. If your finances work, your city works. We don’t spend money we don’t have. Pulling back on education, is that a smart move? I doubt it. We have got some real issues. We have got to redirect the resources in America back to the economic engines, the cities. Boston gets NHS grants. We are number one in the country in the jobs it creates. Things like that. No matter what happens in November, it’s not going to happen overnight folks. It’s going to take about a year to start seeing some real change. That’s another year when cities are not going to see resources. This report should be music to our country’s ears because it provides a clear blueprint for sustained prosperity. We know what we have to do. We’ve talked the talk. Let’s go walk the walk and get folks engaged in what we are trying to do. I just say we are so complacent in America today. We are sitting back and letting it happen. I always say it’s all about people and how we improve their lives. Let’s force folks to think about improving people’s lives through education, job training and housing. Ten percent of our population is in public housing. These meetings are great but our challenge is, what is our next step? The business community better be aware that as our cities go, so goes our nation. I ask you all, please get involved. Eric has energized the Federal Reserve Bank. We all have to be out there energizing. It can’t be just reports. Thanks a million.
JOHN SCHNEIDER, MASSINC: Thanks for your terrific leadership. Walk from City Hall to the Federal Reserve Bank and you see the kind of change that has take place. Boston is truly well positioned to be a leading city well into the 21st Century. MassINC as a tenant on Tremont Street has a prime view of the rolling rallies. Let’s keep those going too. It’s been a lot of fun. They break up the work days. We have two leaders here who we have asked to comment on the report. What is your reaction to Bruce’s presentation?
JON ARAM, NEXT STREET FINANCIAL: Next Street Financial has been involved in the blueprint from the early stages. The business community and the financial sector have a critical role in this collaboration. Simply put, we are a merchant bank based in Boston. We serve high performance, high potential small business primarily in urban markets. We provide access to capital and intellectual capital. Those two factors can drive and support small business growth and prosperity. The business case is compelling as the market is large and growing and attractive. Companies in the markets have many competitive advantages and strategic assets and need to grow to the next level.
DONNA CUPELO, VERIZON COMMUNICATION: Bruce talked a lot about metro areas and their potential to achieve success and he mentioned technology and quality of urban life. Boston possesses so many of these qualities. The mayor talked about 14 new projects since the beginning of this year. You can’t walk far without seeing activity and economic development in the making. This city is an exciting place to live and work and learn. The public and private educational institutions are really the best in the world. We all feel that way. We feel like we are the incubator for some of the world’s innovations, greatest thinkers and business leaders, and educators and we need to keep that talent here. He talked about information moving markets. The exhibit outside the auditorium highlighting the information economy I found fascinating. It reinforces what matters here. Verizon is a communications company. We look at infrastructure as a fabric within the technology component of infrastructure. Last year we invested $800 million upgrading and maintaining the networks just in Massachusetts, a lot of it in the Greater Boston area. Eric talked about not forgetting areas outside of Greater Boston. It’s a comment we agree with strongly. Verizon is building its fiberoptic network in nearly 100 communities and offering FIOS TV and Internet and fiberoptic capacity to bring broadband to its citizens. We find this kind of infrastructure enables people to work in homes outside of Boston and to learn in education, both K through 12, pre-K and higher education, and this high tech innovation is what spurs the economy here. This Greater Boston area is comprised of rich diversity. Boston is a city with different cultures and languages and skill sets. We feel we have to embrace our differences. When the mayor spoke of his focus on education, that’s music to companies like ours’ ears. We are great supporters and partners in the movement from early education through higher education and we work on school to career. Partnerships and learning and internships are essential. I want to congratulate the mayor and his team for the work they have done in plugging the hole that has been created by the federal government with workforce development. Corporations really need to play a larger role. Our colleagues from Bank of America do a wonderful job in workforce development. Many of the comments and remarks from this morning, we support wholeheartedly. Another area I would like to talk about is protecting assets and strengths. He talked about maximizing performance and partnerships between many different areas. One thing we sometimes lose sight of when the economy is troubling many of us is what kinds of public policies should be in place to maintain strength and put in enablers to grow it. How do you put in public policy that supports growth? In our industry, you want to support investments that companies like ours make. I want to make sure the point about collaborating to compete is so essential.
SCHNEIDER: We all know being from New England and Massachusetts the collaborative gene is difficult for us to tap into. To address some of these issues, we have to figure out how to have a more effective, broader focus on regional governance. How do you bring municipalities together to address issues?
CUPELO: A lot of those proposals are very controversial. We are very parochial. I am Massachusetts born and have lived here for close to 50-odd plus years. We have wonderful dedicated people, some full time and some volunteers, who would really benefit from a more regional perspective. The sharing of resources would seem to be just rational and reasonable. We have not been able to get beyond that but discussion next week after the governor rolls out his Readness Project for pre-k through higher education, some of the public safety work that is done around the state and emergency services and in areas we are involved with like video franchising, is there a better way to do it? The MMA is doing a lot of work on what are the regional approaches while still giving cities and towns some decision-making tools. It’s a huge challenge.
ARAM: From a perspective of small business owners who we work with the combination of top-down leadership and bottom-up innovation – markets transcend parochial boundaries and don’t fit neatly into boundaries – some combination of top-down and bottom-up can contribute to that.
SCHNEIDER: The other thing that strikes me about the challenge here – our per capita income, our productivity, we are one of the wealthier states, we are inventing things – and yet there are many citizens left behind. How do we build capacity in those places or are we just going to tolerate this kind of discrepancy?
ARAM: It takes leadership and a focused commitment to invest and measure returns. There is a level of subjectivity to that.
CUPELO: It goes back to education. Many educators asked questions about those left behind. Some work we have to do as a nation and within the state is really focused on children before they enter what has traditionally has been the school age and then still care for our kids that are in the middle to give them some focus. It does not necessarily have to be going to college, although education in some form – vocational or on the job or otherwise – is critical to success. But it is making connections to folks early on. That is a critical element. There is no debate. That is what has to happen. In the meantime we have to address some of the obvious things like transportation and infrastructure, technology included, which has made our state a great state. We just have to keep that flow going.
ARAM: The mayor remarked that some of his colleagues and friend who hired employees with CORIs and they turn out to be some of their best employees. That takes a leadership decision to believe that, that there is a business case for that and that that investment will bring about a positive return in retention and productivity rates. There’s a combination there of top-down leadership and bottoms-up commitment.
