One D leaders make case to Macomb Chamber

Source: Crain's Detroit Business
Published: March 20, 2007
By: Bill Shea

The remedy for Southeast Michigan’s various woes lies in collaboration among public and private groups and organizations.

Failure to come together will mean more of the same.

That was the message delivered Tuesday afternoon by two leaders of the One D regional collaborative to the annual meeting of the Macomb Chamber, held at Macomb Community College Cultural Center in Clinton Township.

“I believe today Michigan is at a crossroads. The manufacturing jobs we’re losing by the hundreds of thousands are not coming back,” said Dick Blouse, president and CEO of the Detroit Regional Chamber, a One D member organization. “We have to keep what we have.”

The solution?

“We have to align public policy with economic development, which we don’t do very well,” he said, and that’s the point of One D.

One D was unveiled last year and is made up of the Cultural Alliance of Southeastern Michigan, Detroit Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau, Detroit Regional Chamber, Detroit Renaissance Inc., New Detroit and United Way for Southeastern Michigan.

The collaborative intends to tackle six priorities: economic prosperity, educational preparedness, regional transit, race relations, regional cooperation and quality of life. One D is meeting every three weeks until the 2007 Mackinac Policy Conference (May 30-June 2), where it plans to release a detailed blueprint for specific projects aimed at making progress on the region’s issues.

Blouse and Michael Brennan, president of the United Way for Southeast Michigan, gave the approximately 150 people gathered a brief overview of the collaborative’s intentions and structure. A more elaborate marketing of the effort is planned for after the Mackinac conference.

“Increasingly, everyone is beginning to understand a go-it-alone theory isn’t sustainable,” Brennan said. “We have an over-developed capacity on the things that divide us.”

During a panel discussion that included Bill Crouchman, chairman of the Macomb County Board of Commissioners, regional transportation was a key topic. A variety of proposals exist for various rail and bus routes, but there is no agreement on a master plan for the entire region.

“In this region, we need to go from neighborhood to neighborhood, county to county, as much from Ann Arbor to downtown (Detroit),” Blouse said.

Brennan said other, smaller cities across the country are far ahead of Detroit in efforts to create regional mass transit, and that harms the Southeast Michigan.

“Absent this, we are not considered a tier-one region,” he said.

Crouchman agreed with the transit need, but wondered who was going to foot the bill for such a system.

“The first question that pops into anyone’s head is, ‘How do we pay for this?’ ” he said.

Also discussed was the talk in Macomb County about switching to an elected county executive form of government, similar to Oakland and Wayne counties. Currently, the county doesn’t have a central administrator. Instead, the board chairman acts in that role, and needs consensus of the 26-member Board of Commissioners.

“It’s become cumbersome, too slow to react to problems that arise,” Crouchman said. “Trying to get consensus is very difficult.”

The county government is still in the early stages of exploring a switch in how it administrates itself, he added, and will solicit help from the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, a public-policy group.