How we crowd out the best local investments

Last week it was announced that my hometown of Brainerd was chosen for the location of a new children’s museum being built in the area. Your reaction might be to congratulate me – after all, we were the ones chosen out of supposedly nine other potential locations in a five-county area – but I’m not inclined to find this something to celebrate. It has all the hallmarks of: Congratulations, you just won a new puppy!

The question I want to focus on today isn’t whether or not we should want a children’s museum – I love children, love museums, and also love puppies – but just how my city council found themselves wrestling with the notion of just what it meant to win a puppy. How did we get so lucky?

Part of answering that question is to understand that it wasn’t something we sought. Last fall, the city adopted a new comprehensive plan. I was on the steering committee for the plan, and while I’m not going to stand up and promote the document as a vision representative of the community (I didn’t vote for it), there is one thing I can say for sure: It doesn’t mention a children’s museum anywhere.

In fact, I made nearly every meeting where the plan was discussed. I reviewed the public comments from multiple listening sessions. I sat through public hearings in my role as a planning commission member. At no point through any of this was a children’s museum, or any facility remotely resembling a children’s museum, ever discussed. Not once.

So, on the way to answering the question “how did we get so lucky,” I’m going to put forth an observation: A children’s museum is not a priority for the residents, businesses, or property owners of Brainerd.

It might be a priority now that we know we can have a puppy, but before that option was dangled in front of us, as we were assessing our own challenges and the many opportunities we have, the idea of a regional amenity serving families with young children was never put forth.

That’s because we were all too busy focusing on more pressing needs. Housing is a major issue, both the quality and the ability of people to afford a home. Basic economic development, job creation, and workforce development were things investigated at length. And the often cited – but never really addressed – need for neighborhood revitalization throughout the city’s struggling neighborhoods.

Essentially, city residents want to be able to work at a job that pays enough to cover their basic needs living in a neighborhood that might not be wealthy, but is at least improving in overall prosperity. That seems reasonable, and not a very high bar, but despite nearly every council member campaigning on such a platform, action remains elusive.

We’re too busy dealing with all these free puppies we’ve won.

Who is Behind These Projects?

It’s overly simplistic to suggest that the “insiders network” or, as Chris Arnade would say, the “front row” is setting the priorities for the community, despite the needs. It’s not that such statements aren’t true, just that they don’t capture the full story of what is happened. And, more importantly, how things can be done differently.

The first time I heard of a children’s museum was in 2018 when it was floated as part of the (insider’s network / front row) River to Rails initiative. It was pitched as “something big that is a regional draw.” A kind of the final piece in a broader redevelopment puzzle. I wrote an article called Let’s Do This First that (tried to) embrace the larger redevelopment goals while giving us an incremental roadmap to both deal with urgent needs and hedge our instincts to bet big on shiny objects (with money we can’t afford to throw away).

Even I never dreamed that the cherry on top of River to Rails would become the first thing we tried to bite off. Yet, it’s obvious as to why: There is money available to do it.

And that’s the way it’s worked in recent decades. We can’t keep the streetlights on overnight. We can’t keep our fire department staffed the way we would like. We must defer maintenance, not fully fund our parks, struggle with basic upkeep on our public buildings, and experience annual tax increases that never seem to stabilize our budget. Our neighborhoods are desperate for basic maintenance – paint crosswalks, fix broken sidewalks, plant street trees – yet we continually find ourselves sucked into these kinds of “big” projects.

Brainerd recently finished a financial fiasco of a project to extend sewer and water services out to the airport on the far reaches of town. The project never needed to happen – the problem it “solved” could have been addressed with a couple hundred thousand dollars of storage capacity instead of $13+ million in utilities – but the money was there and so the project took on a life of its own. (I discuss this in my Neighborhoods First presentation.) Ultimately the city got in too deep to back out so and now rate payers spend decades paying for millions in cost overruns. Money better spent elsewhere.

Those of you that have been with us since the early days remember me obsessing over the College Drive project (which I mistakenly called our “Last Old Economy” project). Widening a shortcut around the south side of town into a fast lane to the neighboring town’s Walmart became the obsession when we found out we could get stimulus money. The ways we paid our share of that project, and continue to pay, are too numerous to cite.

Here’s a copy of a presentation given at the Minnesota legislature last year seeking money for the Brainerd Children’s Museum. The legislature has allocated money for children’s museums, and our local front row people are merely working to tap into those funds. Who could be against that?

And if there is a little local match, so be it. We’re already into this project for $20,000, plus whatever staff time and resources we’ve spent on it. That’s the ante to play this game.

Even with the best of intentions, our centralized funding approach is crowding out other, more worthy, initiatives. Despite urgent needs all around us, we’re now focusing on getting a puppy we didn’t even know we wanted.

How Do We Prioritize for a Strong Town?

I describe this situation in Chapter 5 of my book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity.

Local governments are bribed to take on unpayable long-term liabilities so that the national economy can experience growth today. In the name of efficiency, they are stripped of nearly all means of ingenuity. Our cities orient up the government food chain, allowing themselves to be positioned at the bottom, grateful for the crumbs they receive. This is backward.

To build Strong Towns, local leaders will need to take steps to opt out of these systems. This is difficult because it’s the water we all swim in, and the current gets stronger as things become more desperate. Still, if we are to truly serve the people in our communities…. we need a new path to prosperity.

To “opt out of these systems” requires an intentional reorientation of local government. Fortunately, it’s one that aligns with how nearly all local leaders view themselves best serving their constituents: by tending obsessively to their needs.

The Strong Towns approach to public investment is part of an overall strategy of shifting our local energy from chasing the next project to building wealth. From building new to making better use of what we’ve already built. From raw growth to productivity as a a more sophisticated measurement of success.

Public investment in a Strong Towns never begins with the puppy. We should never start with the state or federal program, the priorities of the consultant or developer, or the dream of the front row. It always starts with a simple four-step approach:

1. Humbly observe where people in the community struggle.

2. Ask the question: What is the next smallest thing we can do right now to address that struggle?

3. Do that thing. Do it right now.

4. Repeat.

These are the highest returning investments a city can make, the kind that pay a huge financial return-on-investment. They are also the ones that improve quality of life. I’ve written about this extensively before and, of course, gave it a lot of context in my book. This is a proven strategy for success that every city can follow, regardless of their size, wealth, or capacity.

And if you want to see how this would look like in one small neighborhood, here’s a report I wrote years ago for my hometown.

Now, I’m not suggesting there is no role for state and federal assistance for local governments, but local leaders should only engage those initiatives that move them further along a path they are already treading. Focus on the work at hand and seek only the assistance that helps with the next step in those efforts.

If we use a Strong Towns approach to build momentum in our neighborhoods, we’ll also find the confidence to say “no” to those who are trying to give us a free puppy that we know is never free.

And if you find that habitually your community can’t say no to free puppies, then stop walking past the pet shop. Direct your staff and your cadre of front row advisors to stop bringing you free puppies and instead focus on the things you have already prioritized. Better yet, direct them to go out and humbly observe where people are struggling to use the city as it has been built.

We have everything we need to build a Strong Town. Everything, that is, except focus.

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