From the Roundtable: Economic recovery will require realistic cooperation from all sides

Peering into 2009 leaves me uncertain about local economic conditions given the huge financial upheaval that’s been going on the past few months.

While this swoon in the traditional pattern of business cycles appears to be the most serious dip since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the City of Columbia so far seems to have held up fairly well considering and compared with other communities. The clouds may darken, however, once substantial state funding reductions are in place, particularly at the University of Missouri.

While the city’s management team continues to delicately manage and balance the municipal corporation’s financial affairs, these servants should be concerned about the viability and progress of our seven core economic engines: education, health care and medicine, research, insurance, manufacturing, retail and development and contracting. In concert with economic development officials, the city knows it needs to continue to focus its efforts on what’s already here and to foster further growth and expansion.

We’ve already been forewarned about some of the hits education at various levels can be expected to receive. The reduction in state revenue is going to spank the University of  Missouri just as the institution’s ability to increase tuition has been legislated away and in the face of an increased demand for its services. Research is a core and growing component of the university. Therefore, there’s hope such fields as nuclear medicine and the life sciences will continue to grow and become the institution’s trump cards in the face of this downturn.

Lower receipts from taxes-sales, use, income and others-will equally threaten the constitutionally guaranteed funding of Missouri’s system of public education. Administrators of grades K-12 are faced with rising costs and brick-and-mortar issues in a state that traditionally has been parsimonious toward education in general.

Reports of personnel cuts and reduced client usage among local health care facilities have been trickling in, although construction continues apace on a variety of new structures. Thus far, it seems a case of “all quiet on the western front” at our two major insurance companies-State Farm and Shelter-as to the size and status of their Columbia workforce, meaning they’re doing OK.

So far, the announced cutbacks in the local manufacturing sector have been relatively modest compared with the upheavals some communities have undergone, with abrupt plant closings tossing hundreds or thousands of people out of work. This reminds me of a tale from the past, which I hope is still true today, of a city official who regularly visited various local employers asking, “Are you happy here?” and “What can we do to help you so you remain that way?””

The downturn in retail is of course the reflection of the nation’s overall economic malaise shown by various indices of consumer confidence, one corollary to how deeply in debt many of us are. As in the past, we’ve always managed to work out our personal financial affairs and so time will end up being the cure in this case.

More generally speaking, the key to turning the area’s economy around must come through the maintenance and expansion of the riches we already have and getting Columbia’s economic vehicle moving on all seven cylinders.

That leads me to the tender subject of the sector that has supplanted the factory as the traditional employer of people-development and construction. This is the bête noire to a substantial group of people on the local political scene who otherwise describe themselves as “progressive.”

These “progressives” surface from time to time as legitimate development proposals wind up getting close to being tossed under their rolling bus of opposition at various meetings of the  Columbia City Council and the advisory Planning and Zoning Commission. “Progressive” to them means denying entrepreneurs the opportunity to invest, employ and hopefully profit from their experience here. The irony here is that the things they consider progressive – and we all know what these luxuries are – are typically cut back or eliminated at the first sign of a swoon in sales tax receipts.

For 2009, progress for Columbia as well as the 13 surrounding counties, the core city stimulates will come through cooperation among all constituencies so we can whip the present economic downturn. The so-called “progressives” need to realize that construction and development are key components of our economic engine.