The Illusion Of Progress

(This post was originally posted at http://sidburgess.com)

I am not a conspirator theorist by trade, but every now and again I do raise an eyebrow at the subtle ironies of our day and attempt to articulate some sort of alignment between them.  I think we all are born with the innocent trust of a child and grow up into healthy skeptics.   I am sure you are quite grateful though that today I do not wish to speak to a conspiracy of failures but rather just to the failures themselves.  One truth about local governments is that they, for the most part, act completely independent of one another.  If one community fails to build a sustainable financing model for their roads, another city just up the road may in fact be the model of successful planning and execution of such a worthy goal.  Wide-spread regional consensus isn’t common or popular. Instead I want to dive into the factual shift of progress we have made as communities and how detrimental it has been to our towns and cities across America.  I define this “shift of progress” as the simple change in the primary focus of funds, resources, and attention from projects that are sustainable, scalable, and critical to projects that are not.  I have not found too many communities

that have broke this trend and if they did, they are sadly the exception.  There is a reasonable explanation for this but I believe it touches on a more general political shift in our country and is far too much for me to attempt to define here.  For now, I would rather focus on identifying this trend for what it is and then giving you three simple ways you can correct it in your community.

I call this the illusion of progress because it is likely that there are many things happening in your community every day.  Progress, as you leadership call it, happens all around you.   We all see it in the form of orange construction cones, vote yes signs, and the media attention it gets.  And quite frankly, it is very easy to define it as progress.  Adding a new fire station is progress, building a memorial park is progress, and expanding the golf course allowing it to be PGA certifiable is also progress.  I don’t argue that all these things are not wonderful.  It would be hard to debate that these things don’t benefit the community.  It is not difficult to see though, how the trend our cities have taken to a more non-infrastructure spending pattern, has negatively impacted them.  Infrastructure is the backbone of any community.  I have found that the issue is most often not understanding this fact, but actually the definition of what infrastructure is.  This is where the debate becomes political.  Public transit, recreation, schools, roads, water, public safety have all been labeled as critical infrastructure.  It is key that we first define what infrastructure is for our communities and then assign a simple priority scale to these needs.  It is ok to call a golf course infrastructure as long as it sits properly below water, sewer, and roads.    A good start to identifying what projects have a foundational role in your city is to simply imagine your city without that “service” as a whole.  For example, if you had no roads at all, what kind of impact would that have on your community?  A pretty drastic on I presume.  Lets look at a recreational facility.  If it was wiped of the face of the earth, would your city be able to function?  Or more importantly, would you remain in a position to be able to serve the very basic life sustaining needs of a city?  Chances are you could.

Unfortunately, city after city chooses to sell these high profile projects because they create the illusion of progress.  I am not implying that there is a cynical nature to the proposal or an intentional smoke and mirror trick.  Rather I find that city officials sell what they BELIEVE will accomplish the most good for the city AND still have a chance to be widely accepted as a project worthy of the money.  This is a common mistake by elected officials.  They incorrectly assume that the common Joe will not find value in a massive sewer project.  The next most common mistake is by Joe.  He often forgets those big sewer projects that were completed a couple years ago and wonders why there are not any orange cones out this year.  This is why I fault both city officials and citizens in this regard.  First, as citizens of our cities, we are responsible for electing officials who understand the true needs of our community.  As elected officials, we are responsible to ensure that those needs are met.  If both parties do not have a firm grasp of the TRUE needs of the community, then how are those needs expected to be met?

Enter the solution.  In my following post, I will begin to explain how we can start to look at our cities and towns differently and the role our tax dollars can and should play in ensuring our communities remain for the following generations to enjoy.  If you already have ideas, shoot me an email and I will try to include them or reply to your thoughts in the following posts.