CURT JOHNSON: In Boston last week, I ran into David Luberoff, who’s just been named to succeed Charles Euchner at Harvard’s Rappaport Center. Luberoff handed me a working paper entitled Civic Leadership and the Big Dig (PDF). My oxymoron meter must have flashed because he quickly said, “No, this is really worth looking at. It’s a niche approach for business, organizing around a particular project.” Luberoff was describing something called the Artery Business Committee (ABC) — a group of 60 business types who rode herd for 15 years on the project to put the I-93 interstate underground and release 27 acres of prime downtown land.
A day later I listened to Steve Adams, who in his role as head of the Boston’s Pioneer Institute, was sure to have a contrarian view of this. He did. “Does it occur to anyone that this is the last vestige of the old business civic model, mostly designed to keep the public from seeing the problems too closely?”
Ric Dimino heads the ABC . So I asked him, which is it? Is the ABC a leading edge of a new form of business in public affairs or a vestigial reminder of how things were once done? His answer: “It’s both.”
Dimino makes a tough case that $14.6 billion project might have cost even more without tough-minded business oversight. He’ll argue that, as a niche-organization, this business committee performed a civic service, and one so effective that maybe it should now turn its attention to another single mega proposal: whether to build the “Urban Ring,” an $8 billion idea to connect the radial spokes of Boston’s transit system with circumferential links. He says the committee thinks its role is really “city building.”
But what intrigued me was whether business, which mostly retreated from civic leadership over the past 15 years or so, is back. And if so, in what forms?
In Houston, the big business group, the Greater Houston Partnership, has spun off something called the Center for Houston’s Future. This center, headed by a former business executive, is expected to take on the longer-term, more strategic issues. Just the sort of thing not likely to be in the core portfolio of big business organization.
The rough equivalent emerged over the past year in the Twin Cities. Forty CEOs, most of whom are also members of the Minnesota Business Partnership, formed the Itasca Project (July 2004 Business Journal article) to take on key strategic issues affecting the future of the region.
In Seattle, I hear that business is “insourcing” more work on strategic public issues to the Discovery Institute, a respected mainstream public affairs research organization.
So what’s going on here? Is this the leading edge of a major trend?