One D talks transport, quality of life

Source: Mackinac Policy Conference Coverage blog

By: WWJ and the Great Lakes IT Report
Published: May 31, 2007

The One D regional economic development continued Thursday morning at the Detroit Regional Chamber’s Mackinac Policy Conference with a breakfast meeting of the One D leadership team.

The session covered the five initiatives of the One D effort – economic prosperity, educational preparedness, quality of life, race relations and regional transit.

Educational preparedness and regional transit received the most sharp commentary.

The educational preparedness effort includes a benchmark of getting every child in the region to read at grade level. Michael Brennan, president and CEO of the United Way for Southeastern Michigan, likened the effort that will require to the effort surrounding Super Bowl XL in 2006.

“Edsel (Ford II) said yesterday that we’re pretty good at mobilizing for events like the Super Bowl,” Brennan said. “We coordinated volunteers at the United Way. We had 8,000 volunteers, with 2,000 more on a waiting list, to stand on street corners in the rain to direct people to Ford Field that they (the volunteers) weren’t even going to get close to. Meanwhile, we have 8,000 third graders not reading at grade level. This is a changeable condition. It’s a matter of recruiting the mentors. We can do this.”

As for regional transportation, Detroit Regional Chamber president and CEO Richard E. Blouse Jr. blasted the region’s lack of a true regional transit system.

Blouse said he’s visited sophisticated, integrated air-rail-bus transit systems in cities from Amsterdam to Frankfort, Germany to Beijing to Seoul to Hyderabad, and he’s come away with the dispiriting thought that “We’re dead. These people are decades ahead of us.”

Blouse said that means that “We have to do it (regional transit) and we have to do it now. This is ridiculous. It’s time we put the things that stand in the way aside. A regional transit system has to go to all communities. This opt-out thing is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. You can’t have a regional transit system if one community in the middle can opt out of it.”

As for race relations, panelists pointed out that race is less and less an issue for the young, and that those for whom it’s still a problem need to learn to celebrate diversity.

And the group said the region needs to learn to give itself enough credit for a quality of life that includes plenty of parks, lakes, health institutions and low living costs.

“All of us have lost economic development projects to one place or another because somebody perceived the quality of life as being superior somewhere else,” Blouse said. “Quality of life needs to be elevated as a priority, to be raised in terms of understanding quality of life and its importance to economic prosperity.”