Wisconsin Metropatterns

Myron Orfield and Thomas Luce uncovered growing poverty, declining tax base, inefficient growth and racial and social segregation in seven metropolitan areas of Wisconsin in their February, 2002 study, Wisconsin Metropatterns: Regional Cooperation , Economic Growth and Environmental Protection.

Economic development, planning, governmental service delivery and taxation on a regional level can remedy the situation that Orfield and Luce found, grow Wisconsin's economy, improve the environment, conserve threatened farmland  and save taxpayers huge sums in the process,  participants in Wisconsin Metropatterns working groups concluded after meeting in Wauwatosa in May and June.

As Wisconsin seeks a better way of doing the business of government, participants in the Wisconsin Metropatterns process envision the evolution of a system of regional government that does not displace local government, but rather enables citizens to perform their economic, social and governmental tasks as members of the regions to which they belong.

 Published by

Wisconsin Sustainable Cities

June, 2002

When Myron Orfield approached the Wisconsin Alliance of Cities in early 2000, we didn’t know what we were getting into.

Orfield had found, after studying more than two dozen metropolitan areas across the country, that metropolitan areas often face the same, hard-to-solve problems: the concentration of poverty in central cities, increases in crime and segregation; declining older suburbs and vulnerable developing suburbs; and costly development sprawl.

Working though a nonprofit group, Metropolitan Area Research Corp., Orfield found that government at all levels often exacerbates the situation, the federal government having largely abandoned urban policy while state and local governments often actually subsidize sprawl.

Orfield, who already had studied the situation in the Milwaukee area, wanted to update that work and study other metropolitan areas in Wisconsin as well. He was told the Alliance of Cities spends much of its energies seeking regional solutions to the problems of Wisconsin communities. A Wisconsin Metropatterns study seemed a natural fit.

But studies of the kind Orfield conducts don’t come cheaply. On the theory that a picture is worth a thousand words, Orfield uses the computer wizardry of geographic information system (GIS) technology to map social and economic trends. Orfield’s services would far exceed the Alliance of Cities’ meager budget for research and analysis.

So we contacted the Joyce Foundation. Based in Chicago, the Joyce Foundation supports efforts to strengthen public policies in ways that improve the quality of life in the Great Lakes region. We created Wisconsin Sustainable Cities Inc., a nonprofit research and educational subsidiary. We partnered with the Intergovernmental Cooperation Council of Milwaukee County, Citizens for a Better Environment, the Greater Milwaukee Committee and 1000 Friends of Wisconsin. We applied for and received a grant. The project was off and running.

The Governor’s Blue-Ribbon Commission on the State-Local Partnership for the 21st Century, chaired by UW political scientist Don Kettl, was also in business. The commission began its ambitious task in the spring of 2000, about the same time we signed our contract with Orfield to undertake an equally ambitious task.

Gov. Tommy G. Thompson told the Kettl Commission, as it came to be called, to be bold. I was afraid in the spring and summer of 2000 that the Kettl Commission would find an answer to the problems of state and local governments before Orfield could complete his report. Many of my colleagues were not so optimistic about the prospects of change emerging from the Kettl Commission, or pessimistic about the timing of our report. They were right. Orfield also knew from his previous studies that officials, educators and citizens are often at a loss to create workable solutions to the destructive trends that beset our communities and our environment. The Kettl Commission fell short of Gov. Thompson’s adjuration that it be bold. And state government fumbled the handoff. So the problems that prompted the Kettl Commission — and Wisconsin Metropatterns — remain.

The study couldn’t have been issued at a better time. Just two weeks after Gov. Scott McCallum called for an end to the state shared revenue program, Orfield and co-author Thomas Luce’s 44-page report lauded Wisconsin’s "long and commendable tradition of reducing disparities in the fiscal condition of local governments."

Among their key findings:

• Wisconsin’s regional economies stand to gain from cooperative economic development strategies of the sort encouraged by tax-base sharing and regional land-use policies.
• Land currently is being converted to urban uses much more quickly than population is growing in nearly all the regions studied, heaping economic and environmental costs on residents.
• The state aid system’s ability to equalize tax burdens among rich communities and poor communities clearly declined between 1993 and 1999.
• Regional tax-base sharing provides a viable option for local areas left to their own devices by budget decisions made by the state.
• Tax-base sharing cannot replace state aid entirely. It cannot ensure that all places are capable of providing some minimum standard level of services.
• Housing is an essential component of smart growth planning because it helps to reduce the stress on core communities and the consequences of concentrated poverty.
• Overall, the current system of regional governance in Wisconsin is fragmented, with powers divided among different actors who have no incentive to provide strong oversight.

The Wisconsin Metropatterns report was the beginning of our work, not the end. Participants in a Feb. 8 conference in Milwaukee and follow-up sessions in Wauwatosa in May and June wrote Wisconsin-specific recommendations.

The working sessions were a thing to behold. Participants passionately rejected the concept throw-away communities that is institutionalized in existing policy. They discarded concerns about turf and unhesitatingly embraced the idea that, "We’re all in it together."

Myron Orfield and Thomas Luce were merely the catalyst for the recommendations that follow. The ideas are the volunteer participants’ — not Orfield or Luce’s or mine.

Wisconsin Metropatterns

Participants in the Wisconsin Metropatterns conference Feb. 8 had suggestions for change that ranged from campaign finance reform to establishing "cooperative mandates" on local government. They asserted that planning at the state level should be subservient to regional planning, that government at all levels should end subsidies to sprawl and that state legislators should represent regional interests rather than parochial interests. They expressed a strong preference for using carrots rather than sticks to realize regional goals, and pleaded for more regional tools to foster economic development.

All the participants in the Metropatterns conference who expressed a desire to remain involved in the process were invited to Wauwatosa in May and June to distill the suggestions that came out of the conference.

A METROPATTERNS BLUEPRINT

Participants recommend that:

I. state government use the regions created in s. 66.0315, Stats., to build and support regional economies through a partnership between state and local government.

A. state government mandate that each region create a Regional Economic Task Force. (RETF) to:

1. collect and analyze demographic and economic data (i.e., education levels of the workforce, inventory of core industries and support industries, sales tax receipts, etc.).
2. analyze economic trends.

B. RETFs jointly create a sustainability scorecard to measure the strengths and weaknesses of each regional economy.

1. State government approves the sustainability scorecard.
2. Each regional task force measures its economy's strengths and weaknesses based on the sustainability scoring system.

C. Each Region creates an economic development plan to reach sustainability that incorporates:

1. goals
2. measurable objectives
3. implementation strategies, and
4. a work plan

D. State government approve regional plans, and incorporate them in its planning.

E.. State government must make regional planning commissions creatures of and co-terminus with the Sec. 66.0315 regions.

1. Regional planning commissions should:

1. collect data.
2. coordinate Smart Growth planning.
3. draft transportation plans that include:

i. streets and highways.
ii. harbors and airports.
iii. passenger and freight     railroads, including light rail.

d) plan for water quality and water resource management

2. Neither state government nor any of its agencies, nor local government, should subsidize development that occurs outside a plan.

3. The overriding goal of regional planning should be to establish and foster a sustainable economy and a sound environment. Toward that end, regional planning commissions should:

1. study the carrying capacity of the region’s land and other natural resources;
2. emphasize redevelopment as opposed to new development;
3. eliminate wasteful spending on infrastructure;
4. create disincentives for growth contrary to their plans; and
5. reduce the number of automobile trips within their regions.

II. The Metropatterns work groups further recommended that state agencies and local governments, along with the private sector, pool resources to assist the implementation of the regional plans.

A. State government should provide incentives to bring regions up to sustainability levels identified in areas including:

1. housing.
2. employment.
3. infrastructure.

B. Local governments, through planning and zoning, and metropolitan planning organizations, through earmarking of federal transportation funds, and state agencies through intergovernmental transfers, must develop the partnerships to support the regional economic vision.

III. In addition, the Metropatterns work groups recommended that:

1. Regions be large enough to capture "exurbs" as well as suburbs and be structured to allow state government to achieve the following statewide goals:

1. Equalization of tax capacity.
2. Preservation of local government.
3. Efficient government on all levels — state, local and regional.

B. The state undertake comprehensive reform — including constitutional reform — to enable regions to cooperate, pool their resources and provide services to citizens as regional governments.

C. The state, by law, should enable regions to evolve as regional governments and financing their functions through mechanisms that may include:

1. Payroll tax.
2. Sales tax.
3. Gas tax dedicated to regional transportation needs.
4. Fees for services offered.

IV. However, the Metropatterns working groups emphasized that the structure for regional government that evolves from their work must reserve local functions for local government, including zoning and other local quality-of-life issues.

V. Conversely, the Metropatterns working groups recommended, the state should encourage — but not force — regions to assume duties that are best performed regionally, or most equitably performed regionally:

A. These duties include :

1. solid waste and recycling;
2. 9-1-1 dispatching;
3. Fire and police protection when a regional approach provides better service and/or lower cost.
4. K-12 education.
5. Courts.
6. Transportation.

B. State planning in these and other areas of regional concern should incorporate and conform with regional plans.

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Myron Orfield and Thomas Luce concluded that regional problems require regional solutions, and identified a coordinated regional economic development strategy, accountable metropolitan governance, smarter land-use planning and greater fiscal equity among needed reforms.

Wisconsin Metropatterns work groups recommended that the following be performed on a regional basis in keeping with Orfield and Luce’s vision: 

1. Economic development;
2. planning;
3. selected governmental service delivery; and
4. taxation

Doing these things on a regional basis can grow Wisconsin's economy, improve the environment, conserve threatened farmland and save taxpayers huge sums in the process,   working group participants concluded in May and June.

What are the prospects of that actually happening?

In Wisconsin at the dawn of the 21st century, it seems that the most powerful force in government is entropy. Webster's Third defines entropy, in thermodynamics, as a measure of the amount of energy in a system not available for doing work. Whether entropy applies to the politics of tomorrow is for the current generation of policymakers to determine.

State government has studied urban problems at least since the Interim Urban Problems Committee took on the task under Gov. Vernon Thomson in 1957. Among its recommendations: regional planning.

The Wallace Commission, the Barry Commission, the SAVE Commission and the Kettl Commission all assumed center stage for a brief time in the ensuing years.

Now the Governor’s Task Force on State & Local Government, chaired by the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce’s Tim Sheehy, is about to meet. And the Sheehy Task Force, as it inevitably will become known, will assume its place in history.

With the blueprint provided by Myron Orfield, Thomas Luce, Robert Puentes and more than 100 Wisconsin citizens, the Sheehy Task Force has the potential to eclipse all of its antecedents.

Wisconsin Sustainable Cities gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of The Joyce Foundation for funding the Wisconsin Metropatterns study; the Intergovernmental Cooperation Council of Milwaukee County for helping finance the Marquette University conference; 1000 Friends of Wisconsin for helping organize the conference; and the Greater Milwaukee Committee and Citizens for a Better Environment for the advice they gave on how to make the conference a success.

We further wish to acknowledge the contribution of The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., and Robert Puentes, senior research manager for Brookings’ Metropolitan Initiative, who previewed his and Orfield’s report,. Valuing America’s First Suburbs, A Policy Agenda for Older Suburbs in the Midwest, for the conference at Marquette.

But most of all, we wish to acknowledge the participation of the following individuals, who collectively rolled up their sleeves and undertook the transmutation of government as usual into government as it can be at its best:

Jeannette Bell, West Allis;* Bill Biersach, Hartland; Gary W. Boden, Whitewater; Jeremiah Boyle, Chicago;* Shirley Brabender Mattox, Oshkosh; Jeffrey C. Browne, Milwaukee; Robert C. Brunner, River Hills; Mary Kay Buratto, Brown Deer;* Larry Burazin, St. Francis;* David Cieslewicz, Madison;* Karen Cornwell, Madison; Steve Crandell, Waukesha; Kevin Crawford, Manitowoc; Patrick T. Curley, Milwaukee; Angela Curtes, West Bend;

*working group participant