Posts Tagged Building a Sustainable Community
Earth Day Luncheon with Mark Partridge
Last week ECC and the Clinton County Regional Planning Commission hosted the annual Earth Day luncheon with special guest Dr. Mark Partridge, Swank Chair of Rural-Urban Policy at Ohio State University. He provided a very thought provoking discussion on “Building Sustainable Communities During Economic Crisis: Think Locally”, and we’re very happy to be able to share his Power Point presentation from the event.
Here are a few ideas from his talk that we found especially compelling:
- Using tax incentives to compete with other communities for businesses doesn’t work and overlooks our regional economic connections. The way we see it, in the best case scenario its a zero-sum game of competition between neighboring regional communities, and in the worst case–as in Wilmington–it can create an unsustainable economic system with potentially devastating results. That doesn’t mean all incentives all bad, but we believe that they should be used to target investments that meet defined goals and contribute to a broader vision of community sustainability.
- Sometimes, its about quality of life: Dr. Partridge highlighted the fact that past attempts by economists to identify and predict and attract future industrial centers (the next Silicon Valley) have been complete unsuccessful. He told the story of Bill Gates, who chose to establish Microsoft in Seattle not because of tax incentives, but because he liked living there and thought his employees would too. It was about quality a life, something every community, including ours, has the potential to improve.
- Economic history suggests we’ll recover: Dr. Partridge discussed economic studies analyzing the various shocks, such as air base closings, major industrial loss, and natural disasters. What the research has broadly found is that communities often find themselves returning to their pre-shock growth trajectories, suggesting that recovery is not only possible, it is likely. This hope is only increased when considering the capitalization rate for many local assets, which arguable have been suppressed by the presence of DHL, and the potential these assets now hold to help us return to, and perhaps improve, our growth forecast.
1 comment April 29, 2009
Building a Sustainable Campus discussion with Tevis Foreman
Yesterday, ECC co-hosted a very special “Building a Sustainable Community” with four students from Wilmington College. Brooke Dance, Courtney Shoemaker, Jennifer Melvin, and Stephanie Bratton who organized and hosted the event as a project for Prof. Stephen Potthoff’s Values & Ethics course.
The discussion was led by Tevis Foreman, a 2003 graduate of Wilmington College who went on to get a masters in sustainable development from Hawaii Pacific University and now works with ALLY: Alliance for Leadership and Interconnection.
Tevis got the conversation started by proposing some questions raised by Oberlin College professor David Orr in his book Earth in Mind: Education, Environment and the Human Prospect. He asked us to think critically about the structure of formalized education, and whether or not it provides us with the framework of thinking about sustainability by providing a framework for considering the interconnections between the “natural” and “built” worlds. Tevis also discussed his work with Pleasant Ridge Montessori School which recently opened the first LEED certified school in the Cincinnati Public Schools system (and Ohio!). (more…)
Add comment April 28, 2009
