State of the City address, City Council retreat, citizens’ survey forecast Columbia’s economic future

While a chill blows across Columbia’s thermometer of economic activity, perhaps there is some solace at hand from three virtually coincidental developments. How quickly we choose to forget, or maybe deliberately ignore, the cycles of business and economic activity, ensconced as we are in a somewhat xenophobic trance here in the Athens of the Midwest.

The first item was City Manager Bill Watkins’s annual State of the City address. Acknowledging that revenues from sales taxes haven’t kept pace with projections, Watkins says the city has decided to freeze about $300,000 in equipment purchases, and if revenue doesn’t eventually pick up, the city may be forced to institute a hiring freeze.

Watkins’s talk was his pro forma prelude to last weekend’s annual Columbia City Council retreat at the Lake of the Ozarks. I remember when these gatherings were minutely covered by the local media, often stirring a major headline or two as a seeming army of reporters hung by almost every breath of the assembled flock of city folk removed to that scenic lakeside setting.

Coinciding with the retreat was the release of the 2007 DirectionFinder Survey of citizen attitudes conducted earlier this year by the ETC Institute of Lenexa, Kan. With 807 completed surveys at hand representing a 45 percent response rate (ETC says this represents a 95 percent level of confidence with a precision of at least +/- 3.5 percent), I can’t say that I was terribly surprised by the results.

In summary, the 2007 survey says residents are generally pleased with the city and the functions it provides, though with several significant cautions. From a business standpoint, these are significant. A majority of responders believe that developers of residential and business property “should bear the primary financial responsibility for new growth as it occurs.”

Concurrently, a majority thought that the pace of multi-family residential development was too fast. Not surprisingly, only 29 percent of us were “either ‘very supportive’ or ‘supportive’ of [the] subsidy for…airport operations at the expense of traffic improvements.” If true, both attitudes could have a chilling effect on the future economic development of the region.

Completely predictable are complaints about the condition of the city’s streets and the need to boost law enforcement at a time when the staccato of the day’s news may include multiple reports of gunfire heard somewhere. These are matters though to discuss at another time.

Aside from the national and international business cycles over which we have no control, citizens seem most agitated about what powers a significant portion of the area’s economy. Building and construction may not seem as important to you as the obvious bulldog—the University of Missouri-Columbia—but tens of thousands of us earn our keep through building and developing and everything related to it. Concern about the pace of multi-family development is ironic, given ongoing concern about the lack of so-called affordable housing.

Worries about Columbia’s economic condition as well as its future remain somewhat muted from my perspective. Whispers from cloistered precincts of agencies both high and low, official and unofficial, bespeak both a lack of unity and forceful activity. Our city and the surrounding region are under attack, and an economic war is well under way. The University of Missouri is the obvious target, but don’t forget everything else that we covet and, for too long, have decided to take for granted.

The ETC Institute Report may be a nice dab of salve for our city, but my crystal ball for the area’s future doesn’t look very clear right now. While we’re wrapped up in the visioning project, how about holding a real town meeting? Let’s rent the Hearnes Center for an evening and invite anyone who wants to come to talk things over. It would be organized around definite areas of interest, of course, but this citywide—no, let’s make it county-wide—colloquium might be the best thing to happen in years. It’s certainly something to think about.