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Citistates
Reports | Why Peirce
Reports? | Urban Land Institute
Urban Land Institute
Forum on Peirce Reports
St. Louis, May 1,
1997
Prepared Remarks
by Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson
Followed by remarks from an assembled panel from
six cities:
- St. Paul
— George Latimer, former Mayor
- Charlotte
— Mary Newsom — Associate Editor, the
Charlotte Observer
Editor, Peirce Report for Charlotte
- St. Louis
— Cole Campbell — Editor, the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
- Seattle
—Betty Jane Narver — Director, Institute
for Public Policy and Management,
University of Washington,
Seattle
Peirce Report Team Member for
Seattle
- Indianapolis
— Paula Parker-Sawyer, Director, Indiana
University Center on Philanthropy
Peirce Report Team Member for
Indianapolis
- Philadelphia
— Chris Satullo, Deputy Editorial Page Editor,
Philadelphia Inquirer
Editor, Peirce Report for Philadelphia
Moderator: Richard
Fleming, President and CEO, St. Louis Regional Commerce
and Growth Association
PEIRCE and JOHNSON
REMARKS
(Peirce introduced;
remainder back and forth between the two)
In the last years,
Curtis and I have been very clearly associated with
regionalism and its potentials, indeed with the
idea of Citistates — the name of the
book we wrote in 1993.
But the idea of metro
areas as a key to the 21st century, a global constellation
of citistates competing and cooperating, and the
strategic challenges each faces, didn’t come to
us like some revelation on a Road to Damascus.
Instead, we learned
regionalism by living it, on a journey we never
planned. And it’s a journey whose end we still don’t
know.
One August day in
1986 I received a letter from a journalist friend
who’d become the publisher of the newspapers in
Phoenix, Arizona. Everything in the Valley of the
Sun region was at sixes and seven, he wrote —
18 local governments warring among each other, 40
school districts just within the Phoenix city borders.
Would I come for a month or so, take a look at things,
then write a prescription for the Phoenix papers?
My reply was “yes”
— if I could put together an interview team
including non-journalists, and given that
it was Phoenix, wait ‘til December or so to start
interviewing. Curtis Johnson, then head of the Citizens
League of the Twin Cities, was my first pick as
a team member. We talked with several dozen of the
most knowledgeable governmental and civic leaders
we could identify.
We did bore in, talk
to dozens of people in government and civic life,
universities, neighborhoods, the broadest array
we could find. We spent time arguing through our
conclusions about the condition of the Phoenix region,
its present, its challenges, its future. A half
dozen in-depth articles were produced. The Phoenix
papers did publish the series of articles with our
findings and ideas — much to my amazement under
a big banner head, “the Peirce Report.”
Pat Murphy started
us out with a helicopter ride with a daredevil pilot
who liked deep banking maneuvers; here are a couple
of photos that Curtis, his terror notwithstanding,
managed to shoot. Indeed, practically all the slides
we’ll show are from helicopters, an industry
we’ve since done our best to keep airborne.
More seriously, what
we saw was a region of sprawling development run
amok, polluting the air, controlling the politics.
Despite he Phoenix region’s phenomenal population
growth, despite a handful of professionally managed
governments, this was essentially a raw, new place,
and its adolescence showed. Power ostensibly law
in the hands of a Phoenix Forty of top CEOs, but
if they ever thought strategically, it didn’t show.
Serious civic dissent was rarely heard; the population
was so new, contained so many “snow birds”
and other young “birds of passage,” that
hundreds of thousands of people felt they had little
long- term stake in the community. No strong independent
citizen organizations existed.
We made all sorts
of recommendations — more compact growth that
starts paying its way, dialogue and cooperation
among the governments, emphasis on education to
prepare a population for demanding new technologies,
a hard look at Phoenix’ terrible record in private
charitable giving, and creation of a citizens league.
For a while after
the Phoenix report was published, Curtis and I wondered
if that would be both beginning and end of our enterprise.
But two years later the Seattle Times wanted
a similar project. We went there, conducted scores
of interviews, and again wrote a series of articles,
this time focused on growth devouring magnificent
stretches of the Pacific Northwest, imperiling the
region’s very sustainability. We talked about a
middle course between no-growth and hell-bent-for-election
expansion, open spaces, urban villages.
Not long thereafter
came an invitation from the St. Paul Pioneer-Press,
a Knight-Ridder paper, and also the first joint
funding, as the St. Paul, McKnight, Knight and Northwest
Area Foundations contributed to pay for us coming
and also for an accompanying public television program.
St. Paul is an easy
place to fall in love with, a place of walkable
streets, lovely parks, generally well connected
government and cultural buildings, and exemplary
efforts to strengthen low-income neighborhoods.
But with the speed of suburban growth, its economic
pulse was alarmingly slow. And we found that despite
a progressive city government, municipal unions
seemed to exercising negative strength for the needs
of an era of “reinvented government.”
Build on the asset
of the center city, we suggested, explicitly linking
museums and government buildings and theaters, using
a new historic trolley run — an idea since
implemented — and try to pick up trade from
nearby phenomena like the Mall of America. The unions,
like government itself, we suggested, needed reinvention
in a latter-day “Minnesota Miracle.”
Dallas, in 1991 presented
us with our biggest city challenge to date. Here
was the Big D, the city with a multi-billion dollar
downtown created chiefly in the ‘80s, a place exuding,
in most peoples’ minds, rare energy, motion, financial
power. Yet after we finished our stunning helicopter
ride and got down to street level, we found astounding
inactivity — a place so vacant you’d have though
the neutron bomb exploded here, removing the people.
From the helicopter
we’d also glimpsed the physical evidence of Dallas’
deep race, class divisions. The Trinity River defined
it. The river’s north flank was the center city,
Highland Park, University Park, booming North Dallas,
indeed far to the north in Plano a crescendo of
megacorporate headquarters recently plopped onto
the cotton fields. To the river’s south, there was
South Dallas, a sort of pariah territory with precious
little fresh investment, 75 percent of Dallas’ vacant
land, and big segments of minorities.
Our prescriptions
were straightforward enough. The region must reach
out, with fresh investment and opportunities, to
South Dallas. It must repopulate and humanize its
downtown. One specific proposal we made was a new
downtown campus to be shared by the region’s major
universities, a concept that’s since been implemented.
We won’t have time
this afternoon to touch on our ideas for all the
places the papers have invited us in — from
Baltimore to Spokane to Raleigh-Durham to Boulder
and places in between.
It was in 1992-93
that we took time out to put our first six city
reports into a book. At first we’d planned a simple
reprint. Yet as we reflected on what we’d been learning,
from our on-the-ground observations, it suddenly
became clear to us. In the metro regions, we were
witnessing a modern-day rebirth of the city-state
— the dominant organizing form of human civilization
before nation states so rudely barged onto the world
scene some 500 years ago. Across the globe nation
states were retreating in the face of challenge
from their own provinces and metropolitan regions.
Ethnic, racial divisions were tearing apart countries
like Yugoslavia. Nations almost everywhere found
themselves mired in debt, their social safety nets
tattered.
With the end of the
Cold War, the one activity nation states were perhaps
best at — amassing huge armies and preparing
for war — was subsiding dramatically in importance.
The new global action, we noted, is economic. Measured
electronically, the globe is about half a second
wide. Messages, data, money transfers generated
in our citistate financial centers now leap national
boundaries in real time, without pausing to ask
permission. Trade barriers are crumbling, opening
distant markets, making it much more difficult to
subsidize and sustain politically favored regions.
Immigration flows across borders with increasing
ease.
The modern city-state,
we decided, is different enough from the types of
antiquity — now citistates are wired in real
time to all the globe’s centers, magnets for world
population growth — to merit at least a new
spelling. We created it in the title for our book.
It was one of those ah-ha ideas— One evening
I watched Curtis put the letters together on a piece
of paper, c-i-t-i-s-t-a-t-e-s slowly spelled out,
and I knew it was right.
Citistates, we believe,
fit the new global order perfectly. Instead of being
defined by political boundaries, they’re organic.
A citistate is what the economy does — how
wide the city’s newspapers circulate and television
signals reach, the area from which people commute
in for jobs, a labor and health services and educational
market.
In our reports, we’d
increasingly thought of the regions like corporations,
suggesting they need to define their assets and
liabilities and learn to position themselves strategically.
Now it came clear to us: citistate regions must
become masters of their own destiny. They must learn
to reduce costly, dangerous gaps between the rich
and poor. They must husband their land supply, grow
more compactly. They must find ways to resolve their
governmental differences. Because each is intricately
interdependent. Each now and increasingly in the
century to come will be obliged to function in a
harsh global economy in which the comfortable old,
protective envelopes of time and space protecting
inefficient industries have vanished.
We tried to bring
that kind of strategic thinking to our report on
America’s birthplace, Philadelphia, in 1995. Here
was a region that in two decades had made a painful
but quite successful transition from the old manufacturing
economy, was brimming with such assets as great
research universities and high technology labs.
Yet Philadelphia,
glittering star among American cities 100 years
ago, has in this century fallen into the shadows,
caught between the world financial capital of New
York and world power center of Washington. It has
a real inferiority complex — as Chris Satullo
wrote after our report came out, an “attytude.”
Adding to the image problem: Urban decay. Many splendid
and prospering old city neighborhoods notwithstanding,
there’s been massive housing abandonment and deserted
“brownfields” afflict big chunks of the
inner city and some suburbs.
Our answer? Market
the Philadelphia region’s wondrous attractions —
historic, entertainment, great parks and gardens,
the universities — through an aggressive high-technology
effort, CD-ROMs and Internet and all the rest, combined
with a consumer-friendly 800 number campaign. Hi
tech, hi touch, a new friendly Philadelphia image.
Reclaim the brownfields, stop consuming the greenfields
of physically exquisite Pennsylvania. Focus on a
grassroots-up social reconstruction of troubled
neighborhoods, focused on leadership, model-setting,
organized activities for children, by the people
who actually live in those neighborhoods.
And bypass hundreds of separate municipalities,
try a regional environmental compact, conceived
locally, then sold to the state and national EPAs.
To our utter surprise,
a couple weeks after the Philadelphia report’s publication,
a scandal erupted around a foundation which had
funded some of the Peirce Report expenses. The grant
was a small chunk of the overall fees which were
financed directly by our host paper, the Philadelphia
Inquirer. The effect, sadly, was to dishearten,
throw off some of the civic forces that had been
poised to push for rapid implementation of our recommendations.
No such accident
awaited us in Charlotte, some months later. Here
was an amazing American fast-growth city, suddenly
through its moxie a national and global banking
center. We were told by NationsBank Chairman Hugh
McColl that the close business cabal of chief banks
and corporations which had long controlled big Charlotte
decisions was dispersing — “cratered,”
as he put it. And we noted that a region first populated
by hardy, independent Scotch-Irish pioneers, had
in fact given over virtually all decisions on development
to private developers, whose cul-de-saced, strip
commercial and malled projects were weakening older
neighborhoods and making too much of the Charlotte
region into faceless suburbia U.S.A.
But Charlotte has
tremendous assets, and we recommended building on
them. First, focus on reviving older neighborhoods
and creating true region-wide citizen organization
to match an era demanding more democratized leadership.
Indeed, we said, let the development be democratized
too, by consulting citizens and neighborhoods with
computer-based simulation technology to encourage
real local choice on new residences, shops, streetscapes.
And we took the high-tech idea and applied it broadly
— to computer-based learning for youth in a
region with an inherent, hangover anti-education
mindset. And to growth of Charlotte’s Web and other
Internet services connected even into the poorest
neighborhoods. Plus technology to connect what’s
now become Central Carolina Choices, a new citizens’
league chaired by the publisher of the Charlotte
Observer and encompassing no less than 14
counties in North and South Carolina.
Our biggest project
in 1996 was Indianapolis the city famed for its
Unigov compact of the 1970s and absolutely remarkable
downtown revival centered around amateur sports
and heavy Lilly Endowment support. But we found
Unigov had broken out of it seams as heavy development
occurred out and beyond the borders of Marion County.
The educational levels in many schools, especially
inner city Indianapolis, were abysmal. With such
problems as unseparated sewer and storm runoff lines,
the environment cried out for more serious attention.
So what for solutions?
In today’s politics, an expanded Unigov wouldn’t
fly. We figured governance had to break loose of
the idea that metropolitan coherence equals annexation.
In times of short public revenues and reinvented
government, we suggested that the business and political
leadership of the region start experimenting with
revised governance based on efficiency, functional
regionalism, and economic positioning. MAGIC, a
new regional business organization with enthusiastic
Chamber of Commerce backing, is at work on that.
We recommended a regional citizens organization,
to which MAGIC helped give birth last November.
We said the right to run those schools cheating
kids the most, the schools with the most abysmal
scores, should be taken from the school board and
opened for independent charter school bidding. And
we said it was time for a lot more serious environmental
planning and investment.
Finally, St. Louis
and our report in the Post-Dispatch, printed
just last month. In this grand and historic American
city and region, we found many pluses, grand arts
institutions, famed universities, great corporations,
and a heartening recent upturn in the economy. But
also some of the deepest problems we have encountered
in any American metropolis.
Some of the illness
is clearly physical — practically nowhere on
the continent has the galaxy of a citistate exploded
so spectacularly, the inner city losing population
head over heals, even while the raw amounts of suburban
land consumed tops the national charts. But the
affliction is spiritual, too — Combined respect
and near-loathing for a tightly-held corporate control
structure that decides on all the civic projects,
plus a regional mindset hostile to innovation, unwilling
to step out, think big, take risks. And on top of
that, some of metro America’s most severe racism.
So what to do? Our
first idea was to focus on a strong comeback city,
beginning with the historic heart, continuing through
troubled suburbs and neighboring East St. Louis.
On land use, we underscored the need for much more
compact regional development. For the economy, to
use the breathing space of today’s positive conditions
to build strong regional coalitions able to strategize
for the future, building on smarter land use and
infrastructure policies. Building on today’s economic
comeback. And most important of all, turning to
the greatest, scarcely tapped asset of this region
— its universities, including Washington University
with its $1.6 billion endowment. We proposed asking
those universities to scour America and the globe
for best practices of urban development, from small-scale
enterprise development to community policing to
alternatives to sprawl development. Bring the best
back home, and start experimenting with them
vigorously, in partnership with neighborhoods, urban
governments, civic organizations. So that by 2004,
when St. Louis celebrates the grand 200th anniversary
of the Louisiana Purchase and the grand 100th birthday
of its grand 1904 Exposition, it can invite the
world to come see a citistate intensely engaged
in the most promising practices for the dawning,
global, 21st century.
Perhaps you’ve
divined a theme here: Help prepare citistates for
an increasingly challenging global environment by
encouraging them to raise their sites. To abandon
or walk around parochial and petty politics. To
think about worldwide connections and possibilities.
To use their assets, especially their land and older
cities and suburbs, more smartly. To think about
win-win strategies, wealth creation, for all communities
of a citistate. And to get there by broadening partnerships
of business, government, universities, neighborhoods,
and citizens challenged to think in new and expansive
ways.
Our friend John Gardner,
former HEW Secretary, founder of Common Cause, National
Civic League chair, likes to say that there is sufficient
leadership talent in any moderate sized American
city to run a small nation. Yet too much of it is
buried away in the ranks of the professions and
executive positions, and not available for fresh
thinking about the city. We see the future of American
citistates in unlocking that talent and fusing it
with the inherent skills of the citizenry.
Peirce Reports are
surely not all-purpose formulas. They are one-shot
affairs. They are journalistic, independent products
but they don’t substitute for fine ongoing journalism,
or any part of a citistate’s own civic life. We
do believe they may help to open minds, and to strengthen,
add credibility, to the forces of reform and civic
renewal inherent in American communities.
We are open, operationally,
to keep changing our process. We now interview youth
groups more intensively, and try to get out to more
grassroots communities as we look at regions. We’ve
experimented with joint projects with radio and
television stations, but see a lot more opportunity
there. We’d like some day to do projects linking
several urban centers in a greater citistate region,
for example the communities of California’s Central
Valley, or the communities stretched from the Keys
to Palm Beach in South Florida. And to look, concurrently,
at specific alliances of citistates for trade, scientific
research, higher education, a practice far more
advanced in Europe than North America today.
As the Citistates
Group, we’ve opened our own web page including news
on fresh trends, new publications in American and
global regionalism, and cross-links to my newspaper
column, which often treats the same topics. The
web page, incidentally, has an address easy to remember—
citistates.com.
What does it all
add up to? What Peirce Reports contribute consistently?
First, where necessary,
we raise fears — you might call it constructive
destabilization. We think the stunning realities,
requirements of the new global economy demand no
less. So we are often not friendly to the status
quo.
We say out loud what
some people in the region merely whisper to each
other — dragging some terrible community problems
out of the closet.
Next, we look to
unearth buried solutions. There are people in most
communities with good ideas on how to tackle problems.
But because they’re such well known people locally,
and not from halfway across the continent, their
solutions are not honored.
Bottom line we’re
not here to solve anything. Our role is to stir
up a fresh and we hope a long-lasting community
debate about the future.
Sometimes some places
people say we’ve just repeated things they already
know. But if you read carefully you see we’re trying
to connect the dots the way they haven’t been connected
before, to show how all the pieces relate to each
other.
Our articles typically
feature problems that people already know about.
But we try to put them into a national and global
context, you see how they can add up to a powerful
regional strategy.
Where will our reports
on citistate regions carry us in the future? To
deeper forms of community dialogue? More international
adventures? To thinking through the virtual citistate,
sustained via the Internet, presuming politics continue
to forbid a political region? Or a return to fundamental
governance issues? We frankly don’t know. The
adventure continues.
^Top
CONDENSED FROM
COMMENTS following the above presentation:
FLEMING: Constructive
destabilization! Maybe what’s one man’s
constructive destabilization may be another man’s
civic masochism.
Seriously, a whole
host of organizations throughout this community
have responded to the Peirce Report. When we had
Neal and Curt back here after the report was published,
more than 1,000 people turned out for a luncheon
to talk about, to hear from them firsthand. That
night we had another 600 people show up for a public
comment forum. The debate is continuing.
LATIMER (St. Paul):
If we didn’t have Neal and Curt to do this,
we ought to find a way to take a snapshot of every
one of our communities right now. It has to be someone
who is not a player in order for the rest of us
to pay attention to it.
The consciousness
of the connectiveness of the cultural event in St.
Paul was magnified by the Peirce Report. We do now
have a transit link connecting our cultural and
athletic and government activities in St. Paul,
which we did not have before — a visible, clear
kind of knitting together of the community, as they
had suggested. And we are developing our new $200
million science museum on the river, connecting
up with our great music hall and the rest of the
riverfront.
NEWSOM (Charlotte):
Peirce and Johnson pointed out that the way your
are growing is terribly unhealthy. You are sprawling.
The only people planning your growth are the state
road guys and developers. They said think again
about the outer belt you’re planning. They
noticed that our workers are vert poorly trained.
And that our schools are not great. What really
stung was when they said no region will stay both
dumb and rich for long. We remember that.
The public reaction
was incredible. We got several hundred phone calls,
a lot of letters, a lot of just regular folks saying
“You guys are right on target.” Sorer
people said “Aweigh re 25 years too late.”
A lot of people said “I want to help solve
this problem. What can I do?” All we could
say was “Well, you can call your city council
member or get involved in your neighborhood organization.”
It would be nice to set up some temporary infrastructure
to plug some of these people into activities going
on.
Since the Peirce
Report, there has been a dramatic increase in the
talk about trying to manage growth. Regular people
are saying this. One of our most conservative local
politicians, County Commissioner Tom Bush, now says
“Maybe that outer belt highway is a mistake.”
Indeed we have a semipublic debate about that issue.
You need to know that until recently, even to question
the outer belt was the civic equivalent of going
to a dinner party and mooning the hostess.
The Peirce Report
kind of made it okay to question those things. It
wasn’t just aging hippies from Oregon saying this
stuff. Since they were in Charlotte, we have some
five smaller towns in our region that have adopted
totally new town codes — anti-sprawl, essentially
New Urbanist, even if they don’t call it that. People
are talking about greenways and bikeways and walkability.
They were not doing that two years ago.
We had a workforce
summit last fall, sponsored by the Charlotte Chamber
of Commerce, a direct and clear result of the Peirce
Report.
Peirce and Johnson
also said, “Hey guys, you have to do something
to organize regionally.” The most specific
result has been Central Carolina Choices. It has
a two person staff and $750,000 worth of grants
getting started. The civic leadership in Charlotte
is very much being seeing that the Peirce Report
doesn’t die. ... One result has even been a Chamber
of Citizens, to try to counteract the Chamber of
Commerce. And we have a new community-wide discussion
on race and ethnic issues.
CAMPBELL (St.
Louis): At every civic function I’ve been
at since we published the Peirce Report in March
(the prior month), the Peirce Report has come up
as a touchstone for conversation. we have a Man
of the Year award. The honoree made a point of endowing
three professorships designed to strengthen the
relationships between the universities and the community
institutions of St. Louis. He made direct reference
to the Peirce Report’s call for the university
community to become directly engaged in helping
St. Louis solve its problems.
Just as the Peirce
Report was coming toward publication a new civic
initiative (was arising), St. Louis 2004, a way
to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the World’s
Fair and also the 200th anniversary of the Lewis
and Clark Expedition. Basically, the Peirce Report
decided to put these people on the spot, saying,
“If you are going to present yourself as an
organization that can help St. Louis find its future,
we have some suggestions for you.” In fact,
the Peirce Report raised the bar on St. Louis 2004
and said to be truly effective, it needs benchmarking
and public engagement. Since that time, the Post-Dispatch
has determined to pay a lot of attention to St.
Louis 2004. And we are going to keep raising the
bar to make sure that it becomes not just another
top-down initiative.
Our regions need
to see themselves not just as citistates in a sort
of economic context, but see themselves as partnerships
for better living. These partnerships will be greatly
destabilized if the urban cores are allowed to go
to blight. As Curtis Johnson said very eloquently
at the meeting briefing 1,000 community leaders,
the suburbs of St. Louis are nowhere already and
they will be especially nowhere if St. Louis becomes
nowhere. At the center of all our discussions on
the Peirce Report hence forward, we have to keep
asking ourselves, “What are our obligations
to each other?”
NARVER (Seattle):
The Peirce Report’s greatest value was that
it took issues already “out there,” but
never articulated or connected, and connected them,
suggesting how they added up to an agenda people
could follow.
The Seattle region
(in 1989) was going crazy with growth; people were
angry and upset. We have this beautiful part of
the world (the Puget Sound area) that is ours, and
Neal and Curtis were right to say “You can
lose it and you are in the process of doing it if
you don’t do certain things.” They talked about
the need to recapture paradise lost. And it wasn’t
just the Seattle Times that was anxious for
Neal and Curtis to come, it was the Chamber of Commerce
too. The report (and the authors’ personal appearances)
created a sense of urgency. We then passed a very
far-reaching Washington State Growth Management
Act in 1990-91, requiring cities and counties to
work together to set urban growth boundaries. The
Peirce Report played a role; we can see very definite
causation.
It would be very
interesting in Seattle if they came back for another
visit.
PARKER SAWYER
(Indianapolis): Indianapolis is a city of great
pride. We have had steady growth for years under
Mayors Lugar and Hudnut and Goldsmith. With that
growth, we went to sleep; we became very comfortable
with it. So that when Peirce and Johnson came, there
was a certain level of arrogance: “How dare
anyone come into our city and tell us there is anything
wrong, because we know we are right?”
Out of the report
came a kind of stark reality that we are a city
that was dressed up, but that behind the facade
we had some serious problems. While we have Unigov,
many of our supporting governmental structures are
still not unified. We have one mayor but 11 fire
departments, for example. The structure is causing
increasing difficulties; Neal and Curtis brought
that to the forefront for us.
The city was in shock
the first month (after the report), because many
of us did not believe this was the city in which
we were living. Once we came through the shock,
though, CIRCL —the new Central Indiana Regional
Civic League urged in the report — was founded.
Our suburban elected officials have now come to
the table and recognized that their growth as a
community is completely dependent on the success
and growth of Indianapolis.
There has been discussion
about issues the report raised, from transportation
and public works to human services, and not just
from people I might encounter at board meetings.
Joe Six-Pack is out there talking about sewers not
being in place and the infrastructure not support
not supporting our needs. The fact he or she is
talking about these very detailed issues says to
me they read the report, regardless of what people
think about newspapers not being read any more.
They took the issues to heart and they want some
answers.
The report also helped
spark a new coalition (to look at governance issues)
among business, advocacy, citizen groups and elected
officials— called COMPETE, a Coalition on Monitoring
Public Efficiency and Tax Expenditures. (We love
acronyms in Indianapolis).
Another direct result
is that the Lilly Endowment has issued a request
for proposal that Indiana University is responding
to, to focus on the problem of retaining students
who enter college. The Peirce Report brought the
issue (of high college dropouts) front and center.
Finally, our Legislature,
I guess, even read the report. They have just passed
regional transit authority legislation to allow
the small communities surrounding Indianapolis to
come together with the city to try to tackle our
regional transportation issue.
SATULLO (Philadelphia):
I sit before you today as a representative of the
black sheep of the Peirce Report family. I know
it’s hard to imagine an enterprise as upstanding
and optimistic and progressive as the Peirce Report
could get mired in scandal. But if that ever were
to happen, Philadelphia, the home of ABSCAM, of
Frank Rizzo, of the move bombing, of the judiciary
that at one time was a wholly owned subsidiary of
the Roofer’s Union, Philadelphia would be the
place. Yet as Neal has already mentioned, it was.
I could say the report that Neal and Curtis and
I worked on dropped like a stone to the bottom of
the pond, without a ripple.
The reason was something
called the Foundation for New Era Philanthropy.
By the absolute purest dumb luck, some money from
that foundation ended up in the pot of money that
Neal and Curtis drew for some of their project expenses.
Alas, about two weeks after the Peirce Report was
published in the Inquirer, the story hit
the front page that the New Era Foundation was a
scam, and that dozens of prominent Philadelphia
leaders and institutions had been sucked in.
This cut into the
Inquirer’s zest for follow-up work on the
Peirce Report. And the local businessman who had
been instrumental in bringing Neal and Curt to town
was also knee-deep in the New Era scandal (not criminally...
he had been the lead innocent dupe.) So he was very
dismayed and essentially withdrew from public life.
Having just reread
the report, I have to say the limited impact strikes
me as a doggone shame. The report was a blunt and
I think prescient catalogue of issues — neighborhoods,
tax reform, school-to-work, tourism promotion, etc.
— that now haunt Philadelphia as it lurches
toward the millennium. Neal and Curt anticipated
what are really the most vivid policy dialogues
going on in Philadelphia now.
But there were other
reasons for the weak response. Some people say Philadelphia
is a city of Quaker quietists. Also, Philadelphia
does not have a cohort of really effective, respected,
community-oriented business leaders. And the political
leadership is raised on a very old-fashioned form
of hard ball tribal politics. It has no taste for
fresh regional thinking. Finally, Philadelphia has
a very strong visceral, almost poisonous enmity
between the city and the suburbs. To change
that kind of attitude is missionary work —
slow work, stubborn work, hard work.
Also, I wish to had
known then what I know now about civic dialogue
— first asking people what their values and
fears are, what motivates what they believe and
do. Peirce Reports in the future should begin with
an invitation to talk.
Also, one of the
next steps that would add values to Peirce Reports
would be to deal more directly with race issues.
The problems in Philadelphia are about race. It
is kind of the elephant in the room a lot of times.
...
JOHNSON: We
were a little nervous about this little event. Orchestrating
it struck me a little but like arranging to have
all of your past girlfriends assemble to talk with
each other. But it has turned out all right.
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