| Common causes
State’s largest cities use series of
forums as vehicle for catching lawmakers’
attention
By Mike McInally
For Dan Kemmis, the pieces started to
fall together about a year ago as he was speaking to a
Rotary Club in Billings.
Kemmis, the director of the University
of Montana’s O’Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West
and a former Democratic legislator from Missoula, was
speaking to the club. It was near the end of the 2003
legislative session, and he was sensing among club
members the usual frustration with the Legislature and
with state government – but there was something else
beyond the usual on this day.
And then, the “a-ha” moment: “At that
point,” he said, “I started formulating that people are
not only tired of it not working, they’re tired of being
tired.”
Kemmis kept turning that over in his
mind, and considering it in the light of work done by
his Center for the Rocky Mountain West colleague Larry
Swanson, who has been probing the economic role played
by the state’s more urban areas.
A year later, Kemmis’ musings have
turned into a series of economic forums, “Montana on the
Move,” that is being carried out or planned in five of
Montana’s seven largest cities. Missoula is heavily
involved and already has held a pair of economic forums,
hosted by Missoula Mayor Mike Kadas. “Montana on the
Move” efforts also are under way in Billings, Great
Falls, Kalispell and Helena.
In Missoula, the economic forums that
already have been held have focused on emerging trends
in this area’s economy and have drawn heavily on
Swanson’s work. At the most recent session, participants
identified some actions that could be taken to help
boost the Missoula-area economy in the next 18 months or
so. About 90 people – business and civic leaders alike –
have attended each session.
Kemmis’ hope is that as the cities move
ahead with their forums, common themes will emerge from
each one and will bubble up to catch the attention of
legislators and other state leaders. One of the goals,
he said, is to “identify two or three legislative
priorities that would have strong bipartisan support.
... The real challenge is to agree up front that
whatever we agree to pursue has to be done in a
bipartisan way.”
Kadas said he found the idea of the
economic forums appealing, in large part because of the
opportunity it offered to Montana cities to recognize
some common goals. As Montana’s economy changed, he
said, it became “really apparent that the role of cities
had changed,” that they had become much more powerful
engines of economic development.
But traditionally, Kadas said, Montana’s
urban areas haven’t had much success in uniting and
pursuing a common agenda in Helena. Part of the reason
why, he theorizes, is that unlike most other states,
Montana has no single dominant urban area. For that
reason, he said, a common agenda for Montana cities “has
had a very difficult time getting off the ground in the
first place.”
Part of the reason for that difficulty
may simply be that the time just wasn’t right for
Montana cities: Kemmis notes that Swanson has argued
that “until recently, Montana hasn’t had cities of a
certain size that could serve as that economic
engine.”
Swanson’s work requires a new way of
thinking about a Montana economy that doesn’t completely
hinge on agriculture or natural resources. That’s part
of the reason why a presentation from Swanson kicked off
the first economic forum in Missoula. Kadas said the
decision to tap Swanson for the keynote was an easy
call: “It’s really critical to change the mindset about
how things work, to really appreciate the role of
cities.”
“In today’s economy, cities are the new
natural resource,” Kadas said. “That’s a simplification,
because they’re a pretty complicated resource. But
that’s the new place wealth is being
created.”
Kemmis cautioned, however, that
natural-resource and extractive industries always will
be an important part of Montana’s economy: “If we drove
all of them out of business, we would undermine the need
to diversify the economy.”
It’s easy, Kadas said, to focus on
industries that have played a big role in Montana’s past
– but such a focus may blind people to the economic
trends developing in the state now. “We can try to turn
around and swim against the current,” he said, “or we
can try to figure out where the local and global
economies are going and swim with the
current.”
Kadas hopes that the Missoula forums
give participants “a broader understanding of what’s
really going on with the economy and growth” – and also
help to engage businesspeople in local and community
issues.
For his part, Kemmis hopes that the
common themes articulated in the forums across the state
will catch the ears of legislative and other state
candidates this fall – but he’s willing to give the
process some breathing room to see what
emerges.
“We’re mostly playing this by ear,” he
said. “We don’t have a grand plan.”
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