Planning Decisions, Inc.

THE BOTTOM LINE FROM CHUCK LAWTON

We Need a New Definition of Economic Development

Published Saturday November 17, 2007

The single greatest contribution of the Brookings Report Charting Maine’s Future has been in changing the way we envision prosperity. For generations, economic development, tourism and environmental protection have been seen as three entirely separate and distinct entities, each with its own set of issues and its own constituencies.

Economic developers were slick talking smokestack chasers hawking the illusion of replacing shuttered mills with industrial parks baited with all manner of tax break on the edge of every town.

Tourism promoters were an entirely separate set of promoters, perpetually focused on getting more money from the legislature to put tiny pictures of every B&B in the state into confusing, Yellow Page like give away brochures scattered across the Northeast.

Environmentalists were anti-business tree huggers funded largely by have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too out of staters more interested in preserving their visions (and seasonally enjoyed views) of a pristine wilderness than the welfare of “real” Mainers.

In a public policy world dominated by such superficial but powerful stereotypes, economic development has forever been “payroll versus pickerel,” a little bit for you and a little for you and a little for you. But never enough for anyone to really accomplish very much. The Brookings assessment of Maine’s economic development is the epitome of damnation with faint praise—“no shortage of good ideas,” but we’ve “failed to sustain” these ideas by “undercapitalizing” them and “spreading resources too thinly.”

If Maine is to prosper, Brookings says, it must replace this pattern of economic development as a continuous cycle of squabbling over and then frittering away of inadequate resources with an entirely different conception of economic development. This new conception is quite simple—economic development in the 21st century depends on the presence of bright, highly energetic, entrepreneurial people who can work, live, visit and retire wherever they choose. In that world, Maine’s fundamental competitive advantage is its quality of place.

One hundred and fifty years ago, the combination of water power and a burst of investment in spinning and weaving technology created the basis for both our industrial and our Franco-American heritage as tens of thousands of people moved to mill towns all across the state. Today, we stand at an economic cross roads the likes of which we have not since those heady days at the beginning of our industrial revolution. In this era, however, the central driving factor, is not the powerful force of our rivers but the attractive pull of our way of life. For highly motivated workers whose skills reside between their ears, for visitors whose vacation choices span the globe, for retirees whose accumulated resources and remaining years provide them the freedom to sink new roots wherever they choose, Maine holds a tremendous allure. Safe, esthetically beautiful, historically and culturally rich urban downtowns and rural villages with dense networks of friendly social connections constitute an economic resource at least as important in the 21st century as was water power in the 19th.

Add to these downtowns and villages their proximity to scenic rolling hillsides annually covered with the explosion of autumn colors, to mountains rising before vast stretches of wilderness open to hiking, hunting, fishing, camping, birding and simple breathing of clean air, to beaches and islands and rocky shorelines stretching for thousands of miles that promise lifetimes of never-the-same adventures of exploration and it becomes apparent that Maine has much to put onto the menus of those with the freedom to choose.

Our central challenge, then, is to acknowledge and accept this new reality of economic development and to get on with the exciting task of bringing Maine’s message to the movers and shakers of the new global economy—be they our own high school graduates, the coming wave of retiring baby boomers, the inventors of the next cure for cancer or the visitors planning their next vacation. The point is that those people are our economic development, and we are our fundamental competitive advantage.

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