Utah is hovering at just over 4% unemployment. It seems the economic crisis skipped over their state and landed in Nevada, Arizona and California. How did they do it? Here’s a hint; it took leadership and years of planning. Utah leaders embarked on a multi year project, Envision Utah. The Southern Arizona Leadership Council brought in organizers of the Envision Utah program about a year ago. A crowd of about 500 heard how Utah navigated through the wide variety of interests to come out with a comprehensive plan that would set their state on the path to prosperity for the next generations.

A project mirrored after “The Envision Utah” is well underway here in Tucson. The local effort, coined “Imagine Greater Tucson”, is  lead by local land use attorney Keri Silvyan. I was in the audience and impressed with the concepts and the plan Utah embarked on. What Utah did, and what Silvyn is mirroring locally, is Utah leaders called together a large number of stake holders from varied backgrounds to build relationships and discuss their common future. T

The Envision Utah process put business, politicos and community activists together, discussed each groups particular needs and then used computer models to show what would happen over 20 years if certain paths were taken by the community.  For example, if the community wants more open space then the land values would increase, dense population and infill would have to occur and mass public transportation would be required. If the community wanted more growth related industries (housing and sprawl) then the cost of supporting the infrastructure and finding water would have a cost to the entire community.

What’s important is that if Arizona as a state or Pima County as a region starts moving towards a Utah model, their must be voices from all sides being heard and respected. In southern Arizona the environmental voice is organized and focused and the business voice is unorganized and somewhat scattered.

What Happens If That Happens?

Environmentalists ability to influence our community is well documented. We are right in the middle of one of the largest movements in our history to combine water and waste water delivery. In the desert, the people that control water have the power. A large part of the comprehensive water plan included riparian re-establishment of the Santa Cruz. The plan calls for a whopping 25% of reclaimed waste water being sent to the Santa Cruz for creating a river that hasn’t flowed in a generation. The committee that has worked on the process for the past 20 months isn’t exactly ‘fair and balanced’. The business community had one seat on the board and isn’t happy with the results. This debate is the classic growth, no growth debate Tucson has been waging for 60 years.  The no growthers are winning and that might not be that bad.

From this weekends Arizona Republic:

Faced with high population growth in the 1990s, Utah civic leaders became concerned about how to accommodate so many new residents without disrupting the state’s high quality of life.

Traditionally, elected officials would have taken the lead to manage growth. But residents of the libertarian-leaning state resisted that kind of top-down control.

So reformers in Utah instead started from the bottom up, building a grass-roots movement that led to the voluntary adoption of measures that observers say improved the state’s economy and helped it weather the current recession.

Compare that approach to Arizona’s, where reform organizers have so far limited public involvement to surveys and a few public forums.

To align the visions of elected leaders with the people they serve, Arizona may have to become more like Utah.

 

The Utah model

 

Although managing growth, not government reform, was the Utah initiative’s goal, the process did lead to change in how elected leaders work. In fact, the approach has become a model for problem-solving throughout the U.S. and even in some foreign countries.

Envision Utah was created in 1997, and together with state government, it developed tools to help communities plan. It educated the public on how to accommodate growth through higher-density zoning, the expanded use of mass transit and other strategies.

That education led residents to support proposals they might have once rejected.

The key to reform efforts that work, organizers said, is a bottom-up approach that makes citizens champions of the process. The core of Envision Utah’s model is to ask residents to reflect on their values and hopes for the future and then translate their thinking into action through interactive workshops. In its early days, Envision Utah would hold 50 public meetings for each step of the process.

Large-scale public participation is a catalyst for action, participants say. Tom Jensen, an architect from Logan, Utah, says political candidates in his region now compete with one another over who better supports the vision developed by residents for the Cache Valley.

“This has a greater chance to be implemented because it’s a grass-roots vision,” said Jensen, who also has an office in Tempe. “It gives political leaders cover.”

One example: Grass-roots support led elected officials in nine different communities around the Great Salt Lake to adopt a plan limiting development on the lakeshore.

While focused on growth issues, Envision Utah also has used its model of public engagement to create disaster-preparedness plans for the state and address issues related to higher education.

“We think that this is a process that can be used to address a number of issues in a community,” said Alan Matheson, a Tempe native and attorney who now serves as Envision Utah’s executive director.

Jeff Edwards, president and CEO of the Economic Development Corporation of Utah, said the state’s reputation for collaboration has helped officials lure businesses.

“Envision Utah has been a great tool for us in communicating to companies that this is a community that works together,” Edwards said. “We kind of take it for granted. They say, ‘Trust us, this is not the way it happens in other states.’ ”

While no group can take sole credit for a state’s economy, lately Utah has had plenty for Arizonans to envy. The state’s unemployment rate is 6.7 percent, compared with 9.1 percent in Arizona.

The key to success, Matheson said, is not only involving the public from the beginning but also keeping it involved until the end. Persistence, he said, also is critical.

“We’ve all seen examples of good plans that sit on the shelf,” Matheson said. “But nothing happens in the public realm without public support. The way you get public support is by giving people ownership in that plan.”

 

Arizona’s effort

 

In Arizona, would-be reformers have made some efforts to involve the public.

The Arizona We Want, an initiative of the Center for the Future of Arizona, aims to take the results of the October Gallup poll and translate Arizonans’ goals into concrete steps to achieve them. The extensive poll of 3,606 Arizonans was designed to produce “actionable insights” into residents’ thinking. Using questions tested in dozens of other communities, Gallup found Arizonans are highly engaged in civic life compared with residents in other states.

Despite that engagement, polls regularly find dissatisfaction with elected leaders.

“The endgame is still the endgame: to get citizens and leaders working on the same things, to start pulling together on the things that we need to do,” said Pat Beaty, director of the initiative and a senior fellow at the Center for the Future of Arizona, the group led by former ASU President Coor.

Beaty said the institute needs to move beyond abstract goals to engage citizens about issues affecting their communities.

“You can talk about the Arizona we want,” Beaty said. “But it has to become embedded in the Flagstaff we want, the Yuma we want, the school we want.”

Coor has toured the state for the past three months, meeting with elected officials and civic leaders and soliciting their ideas and support. And the center plans to send questionnaires to candidates for elected office so citizens can see where they stand on those topics.

O’Connor House Project participants have taken their ideas for reform straight to the Legislature. A spinoff group, Government for Arizona’s 2nd Century, is working with lawmakers to support bills that will ask voters to create a lieutenant governor’s position, eliminate term limits and end taxpayer funding of candidates.

To date, the group’s efforts at public involvement have been limited to an invitation-only town-hall meeting for business and civic leaders. The approach has raised questions about how the group will develop the support necessary to succeed.

The bills cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee and are scheduled to be heard in the Rules Committee this week.

Michael Bidwill, president of the Arizona Cardinals and chairman of the government-reform effort, said the time is ripe for change. “We have a unique chance to improve the way our government works,” he said. “When you look at any public-opinion poll, a lot of people are looking for government to work better.”

Organizers acknowledge reform in Arizona has had a spotty history. Many efforts lose steam before any real change is accomplished. Still, the state’s current crisis has brought a rare opportunity for real change.

“I see this groundswell starting to build,” said Sue Clark-Johnson, executive director of the Morrison Institute of Public Policy at Arizona State University and the former chairman and CEO of The Arizona Republic. “In the decades I’ve lived here, I have seldom seen such a compassion and a caring and a concern for the future of this state.”

But concern alone won’t be enough to reform state government.

“You can’t just do a vision and walk away,” said Brenda Scheer, dean of the University of Utah’s College of Architecture and Planning and an Envision Utah board member. “People have to own it, and they have to be champions of it.”