Local Governments Suffering from Systemic Incentives Illness EcoDevo is a symptom

Hey Folks,

The following is a good article on how local governments are taking too much public money to incentivize businesses to produce jobs in a local economy.  However, these schemes have become intellectually and politically to easy of a way to make it look like they are creating jobs.  The cartoon is perfect fit for government Economic Development, becasue they are all sick with SII.....Rob T. 

Systemic Incentives Illness by Della Rucker, AICP, CEcD

http://plannersweb.com/2014/09/systemic-incentives-illness/

So what’s the source of the systemic incentives illness? And how does anyone solve this?

Here’s the deep problem: incentives are easy. They are an intellectually and (until recently) politically easy way to make it look like we are doing something good.

Here’s the deep problem: incentives are easy. They are an intellectually and (until recently) politically easy way to make it look like we are doing something good — something that justifies our existence.

Company says they want incentives? You give them incentives, it makes them happy, you get a nice ribbon cutting and picture in the paper. Easy cheesy lemon squeezy.

Until people wise up to the fact that the golden ring they thought you had grabbed for them turns out to be painted plastic. Until they notice that the new retail center was followed by vacant storefronts in their neighborhood, or the cool tech company we all pinned our hopes on never lived up to its promises, or we got that great new office building that is supposed to lessen our tax burden, but we’re still being asked to pass a huge school levy and the park district is turning off the lights.

Or they don’t notice, but these things are happening, and then they cut your department to balance the budget.

Here’s the deeper problem: we haven’t been able to stop chasing those golden rings because we can’t (or don’t) figure out whether the ring is worth what it costs, or not.

Part of that has to do with the analytical problem that many writers, including Louise Story of The New York Times have identified 1 — the pervasive lack of postmortems, of doing the simple kind of look-backs that we know you have to do if you’re going to learn from your failures — or your successes.

But the bigger part of that deeper problem is that we have defined the cost of the ring too narrowly. One of the writers on the LinkedIn Economic Development 2.0 group said it clearly in describing his community’s residents:

“The impression is that we aren’t serving the public and second we aren’t held accountable.”

Does that make you cringe?

It made me cringe.

Read the rest of the article: http://plannersweb.com/2014/09/systemic-incentives-illness/

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