April 2008

Softening the message won’t dilute its urgency

Building meaningful relationships are seldom easy.

So when The Chamber’s Legislative Action Committee opens the doors to its Fourth Annual Reception for Elected Officials on April 17 th, it will do so with some lingering level of trepidation. For all the attempts to prove otherwise, the agenda of the Blair County business community and the focus of those plotting the course for the county’s numerous and diverse governmental entities have seldom been charted on the same radar screen.

That’s unfortunate for so many reasons.

Blair County, like most of its counterparts in Western Pennsylvania, is struggling for economic survival. Who’s to blame for that is irrelevant. How the situation is remedied will be a testimony to the willingness of the people entrusted with authority to put aside rapacious pursuits and sacrifice for the common good.

Will that happen? I’m not in a good position to give a qualified answer on that one. As ridiculous as that sounds, I’m not privy to either the short or long-range intentions of most of the county’s municipal governments. I participated on the Advisory Committee that put together the current Blair County Comprehensive Plan and, in a perfect world, that Plan should be the document that provides direction to all existing governmental bodies.

But it doesn’t. In fact, the municipalities are under no obligation to follow the Plan whatsoever. Although there are some that recognize the value of borrowing certain sections for their own plans, most would prefer to plot the future their own way. And some choose not to implement a plan at all.

So that brings us back to The Chamber’s effort to gain a clearer understanding of ways that businesses can play a more decisive role in fostering municipal cooperation. Yes, we’re using the “cooperation” word now instead of the more inflammatory “consolidation” one. We learned that lesson last September when we sponsored the region’s first Summit on Municipal Consolidation.

In fairness to our Legislative Action Committee, we were operating under a flawed premise. At last year’s Reception for Elected Officials, we asked those in attendance to complete a survey created to ascertain their views on matters on inter-municipal consolidation. When we reviewed their responses the following day, committee members were flabbergasted. Not only had a strong majority expressed a willingness to at least listen to the “other side” of the consolidation issue, several even indicated that they would take leadership roles in bringing consolidation to the forefront of discussions at meetings and within focus groups.

It never happened.

The Summit actually attracted eighty-six attendees. Of that number, four were elected officials from Blair County. One was a county commissioner, one a county employee and the other two were township supervisors from the same township. And one of the supervisors was a lame-duck, having been defeated in the primary a few months before. When I confronted another township supervisor a short time after the Summit about his non-attendance, he quickly explained that the topic of the Summit was intriguing but that he couldn’t risk attending such an event during an election year. “Political suicide,” he called it. He also mentioned that the topic of municipal consolidation was not high on his priority list because, “it will never occur in my lifetime.”

Rather than continue what was heading toward a confrontational ending, the Committee decided to soften the approach by exchanging one C-word for another and is again reaching-out for that most perilous of construction projects: Building consensus. The issue remains in the top five of The Chamber’s legislative priorities and a subcommittee has been formed to explore different ways of arriving at the same conclusion.

Is it the best way to proceed? Maybe not in the short term. Yet it at least opens avenues for dialogue that closed the minute the Summit was announced. So if backtracking is what it takes, we backtrack. And we hope that the next forward movement has us jointly committed to the best interest of our county and its people.

Otherwise, we all lose.

Past Chamber Notes

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