Our Position: Create a series of "Metropolitan Shells," responsible for organizing task forces to:

• Collect and analyze demographic and economic data (i.e., education levels of the workforce, inventory of core industries and support industries, sales tax receipt, etc.)
• Analyze economic trends.
• Jointly create a sustainability scorecard to measure the strengths and weaknesses of their regional economy.
• Measure their region’s strengths and weaknesses and report to the governor and the Legislature.
• Create regional plans to reach sustainability. The regional plans should incorporate goals, measurable objectives, implementation strategies and a work plan.

The Problem: There is currently no plan for creating an infrastructure for economic development. The need to coordinate data collection and planning, assess strengths and weaknesses within any economic region is essential to competing in our global economy. Wisconsin’s balkanized governmental system contributes to this lack of coordinated effort. Also, much data are lost in our vast state bureaucracy.

Background:

In 2001, the Wisconsin Alliance of Cities created a tax-exempt educational and research arm, Wisconsin Sustainable Cities, to receive funding for study of urban growth, social separation, economic disparities and tax equity in Wisconsin. The result was Wisconsin Metropatterns: Regional Cooperation, Economic Growth and Environmental Protection, by Myron Orfield and Thomas Luce.¹

Orfield and Luce uncovered growing poverty, declining tax base, inefficient growth and racial and social segregation in seven metropolitan areas of Wisconsin. Still, their 44-page report lauded Wisconsin’s "long and commendable tradition of reducing disparities in the fiscal condition of local governments."

But they concluded that Wisconsin’s regional economies also stand to gain from cooperative economic development strategies of the sort encouraged by tax-base sharing and regional land-use policies; that the state aid system’s ability to equalize tax burdens among rich communities and poor communities clearly declined between 1993 and 1999; and that tax-base sharing cannot replace state aid entirely, or ensure that all places are capable of providing some minimum standard level of services.

The Wisconsin Alliance of Cities, 1000 Friends of Wisconsin, the Greater Milwaukee Committee and Citizens for a Better Environment held a conference in February, 2002, to release the study and to garner input for potential solutions. The above is the recommendation of a subsequent Metropatterns work group, adopted September 20, 2002 by the Alliance. 

¹See http://www.wiscities.org/metrorpt.htm