For what ails Columbia: “bubble-up” growth

When local business leader Dave Griggs watches the Hominy Branch Creek flow past The Links, he may be seeing an apt metaphor for what’s happening to Columbia’s once-vaunted economy.

Erosion.

Last year, an Arkansas developer started The Links: 768 apartments and a nine-hole golf course on 118 acres that today leaches sediment into the creek. Griggs, a stormwater task force member, has complained that the water, once clear, is now murky.

Our sometimes-blind pursuit of sweet-talking, out-of-area suitors like that Arkansas developer is one reason our economy is following the same clouded course.

Recent suitors have left us on the altar (MOHELA); married us and embarrassed us (Paige/Quin); or filed for divorce after a few short but trying years (Elson).

Add the Bio-Terror Lab, the Sasaki Plan and all the out-of-town consultants local government loves to hire, and you have the drips and drops of a trickle-down mindset stuck on the notion that good things flow from big things that got big somewhere else.

On the human-resources side, our university pays millions to lure coaches, presidents and managers from—somewhere else.

For fear she might go somewhere else, our school board insists on paying our Springfield-recruited superintendent an annual salary that tops the national average by nearly $70,000.

Disgust with Ashland’s “Bauhaus Barn” library design helped cost the library board its recent levy. Instead of Peckham and Wright, the board hires Soho and Wrong—New Yorkers with New York-style overhead whose buildings and artwork have never gelled with legions of locals.

Economic development has hitched its wagon to the same fleeting-star mentality. With everything from oddball rezonings to transportation development districts, we’ve encouraged low-wage jobs, low-quality construction and eroding landscapes.

We’ve compromised on a basic issue—“location, location, location”—to lure a government laboratory that, even if it is safe, will never feel safe.

Over time, we’ve jeopardized our standing in national economic polls and harmed our commitment to social and environmental justice.

How do we turn our economy around in a manner everyone can agree upon? Perhaps we fret less about the lure and more about the cure by nurturing smaller businesses in our own back yard.

“Columbia needs to get away from ‘trickle-down’ economics and start encouraging ‘bubble up’ economics,” MU business professor Joel Poor recently told me. “You grow innovation,” he said. “Apple Computer and Google started with two guys, two garages and no TDDs.”

Poor’s point is well taken. Homegrown firms have a history of economic contribution and community satisfaction.

Dave Griggs, Tom Atkins and John Ott, for example, share community-driven passion and locally grown business acumen that have paid massive dividends to Columbia and Boone County over several decades.

Local developers Roy Finley, Don Ginsburg and Doug Muzzy used aesthetic planning and mixed-use design to comfortably situate the Village at Cherry Hill—several blocks of retail space—in the middle of a well-established residential neighborhood.

Miller’s Professional Imaging President Richard Miller brought his family’s business to the home of his alma mater, MU, building a handsome 39,000-square-foot photo lab that allocates 20 percent of pre-tax profits to employee profit-sharing while “polishing,” as the Columbia Daily Tribune reported, “Columbia’s high-tech image.”

Gordon Burnam virtually created the self-storage business, passing his entrepreneurial zeal down the family tree—now a tree of life for the once-forlorn Parkade Plaza Mall.

The latest example of local ingenuity at work: MU-grown startup Green Mobile. Selling refurbished cell phones, Green Mobile’s 20-something entrepreneurs reduce waste and make a profit—a decidedly Columbian enterprise.

As successful businesspeople in many cities know, mighty enterprises from little startups grow.

With the wisdom to realize that solid, lasting growth takes patience and time, Columbia can develop an economy more in keeping with the character, charm and culture everyone—from the developer to the activist—wants to cherish and preserve.

A Columbia resident for 10 years, science journalist Mike Martin earned a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Washington, with a concentration in entrepreneurship and innovation. He can be reached at [email protected].