by Neil Munro
October 1, 2009

We’re not as well off as we used to be here in Michigan. Overall, we don’t earn nearly as much as we used to.

What’s worse, this new constraint is very likely to be with us for years, not months, the experts say.

One result is that our lawmakers and local elected officials at every level have fewer tax dollars to spend. That’s mainly because of the near-collapse of the Big Three U.S. automakers in the wake of the sudden and severe recession in our national economy.

It rained nationally, but it’s still pouring here.

Almost overnight, it seems, we’ve gone from among the most prosperous states to worst in the nation in terms of declining payrolls and pay levels.

While Governor Jennifer Granholm has proposed a 12-percent cut in state government spending, she also would increase taxes.

That’s in the context of the current annual state budget of about $29 billion raised in the state and $15 billion from the federal government. Overall, the tax shortfall caused by the economic slump is $2.7 billion.

The obvious question before lawmakers, and ultimately the voters, is whether to tax the citizens more heavily to make up for the decline in revenue, or to offset that shortfall by reducing spending.

We most likely will get some of both. But it is in your best interest, and the state’s, to do the latter.

Look at it this way: the members of the United Auto Workers union have long since agreed to accept lower pay and reduced benefits on the basis that the companies they work for no longer can afford business as usual.

And it was the UAW pay and benefits package that had been the gold standard, so to speak, for other unionized occupations, such as teaching. But do you suppose the average Michigan teacher at a UAW-inspired $58,482 a year turns out a better scholar than a teacher in Indiana at $49,569?

When the Big Three automakers no longer can afford business as usual, neither can the state they made so overwhelmingly prosperous for so long.

That party is over for Michigan. No foreseeable number of movies churned out on the Pontiac site of the former General Motors truck and bus manufacturing complex ever will generate greater tax income for various levels of government than those factories did.

Granholm’s decision that her job now pay $129,000 a year rather than the previous $177,000 reflects the new reality in a way current teacher pay does not. She sensibly has ordered comparable reductions of other elected officials at the state level.

Let’s face it. When a governor has to take a pay “haircut,” everybody living on taxpayer dollars should. It will be a matter for negotiation, of course, in the case of public employees such as teachers who are represented by unions. So one might think “lots of luck.” But 60 percent of the UAW members in the auto industry voted for reductions in their own compensation. Would teachers be less able than factory workers to understand there’s been a seismic economic decline in Michigan and that some employee indulgences just aren’t affordable now? Not likely, one would hope.

Personal income in this state has fallen more than 10 percent below the national average; an historic and shocking reversal. And as many as 500,000 jobs reportedly have been lost here in recent years, because of both routine reasons and the economic tailspin.

The overall economic turmoil in the state also affects local governments, of course. So normally booming Oakland County’s employees, too, face a pay cut, which must be negotiated in some cases. That is to avoid layoffs and reductions in basic services.

It should be obvious, but too often isn’t, that when shrinking tax income forces government spending cuts they should come from lower salaries, not workforce reduction. The latter inevitably reduces the public services the citizens not only are entitled to but are paying as much as ever for, and still need.

The Citizens Research Council of Michigan says as much as 60 percent of school employee costs are benefits, not salaries; surely there is room for cutbacks there.

And instead of reducing financial assistance to college students, as the state has proposed, the money should be found elsewhere, perhaps from the college payrolls themselves. The last thing we should be doing is making it harder for our citizens to make themselves qualified for higher-paying jobs, which, in turn, help bolster the state’s own budget.

It has been apparent, however, that the first impulse of too many of our public officeholders is to increase the tax rate on an already shrinking economy or reduce services, or both.

But we call people on the public payroll “public servants” for a reason. They’re to function for our convenience, not we for theirs.

Neil Munro is the retired editor of the Oakland Press in Pontiac.

by Susan J. Demas
September 30, 2009

Why, it seems like only yesterday that I was watching a couple senators ready to throw down just after state government had shut down.

That was back in 2007, when the state was drowning in $1.8 billion of red ink and tension was literally exploding on the floor of the state’s most deliberative body. There had been 10 long months of naïve leaders botching deals and holding lawmakers captive in the Capitol for a slew of fruitless all-night sessions.

Surely things aren’t that bad this time around.

Actually, for those of you keeping score at home, it’s worse. We’re now $2.8 billion in the hole. One day before the start of the 2010 fiscal year, we don’t have a budget — again. There’s less drama this time around without the threat of a big tax increase (shh … don’t tell the Tea Party folks who like any excuse to protest with comically misspelled signs). There’s also the sad fact that we’ve become accustomed to our dysfunctional government.

You, dear reader, know what I don’t as I write this prior to “tonight’s” midnight budget deadline — if lawmakers resorted to a marathon session, if we have a budget, if we have a continuation budget, if the governor vetoed any pieces of the budget, etc. What I can guess from past experience is that the process was messy and I had to invest in a few espresso shots to pull me through.

Days after the ‘07 shutdown, I wrote a column titled, “Readers deserve better government reporting,” bemoaning the lack of Capitol coverage. That wasn’t true during the final act — Lansing’s streets were littered with satellite trucks from across the state and country. No one can resist a train wreck, and back then, Michigan was a trendsetter for state budget woes. Thanks to the global recession, almost every state is now slashing programs and many are hiking taxes. California is the new queen of budget chaos after thrashing through a $39-billion deficit this summer.

But I argued that the media needed to do a better job in covering policy throughout the year — not just when government grinds to a halt:

“You deserve to read how budget cuts and higher taxes affect your life — how much you pay, how much you gain. … You deserve to read about bills when they’re introduced, not after they’re law — from HPV vaccinations to pop-up tax reforms — so you know what your lawmakers are up to in Lansing and can be involved in the process.”

Doing so, however, requires newspapers and TV and radio stations to actually have reporters covering the Capitol. So how’s that going? Well, in the two years since I wrote that, Booth Newspapers liquidated its Lansing bureau aside from Peter Luke (and adding my columns and blogs on mlive.com), The Detroit News fired bureau chief Charlie Cain and his three decades of experience, and the Associated Press decided against filling a Lansing vacancy. The two local papers for which I periodically covered the Capitol in years past — the Jackson Citizen Patriot and the Battle Creek Enquirer — have barely bothered with state government since I left.

It’s rare to see anyone besides the political newsletters — Gongwer and MIRS (for which I work) — covering any legislative committee meetings or even House and Senate sessions.

Little wonder, then, that polls demonstrate Michiganders have a fundamental misunderstanding of how state government functions. When asked what we should cut to close the $2.8-billion deficit, there was one clear answer in a July EPIC-MRA poll: slash the legislature! The pollsters gently reminded voters that the entire legislative budget was only $116 million and essentially asked them to try again. In that survey, as in a subsequent one in September, respondents showed little appetite for cuts anywhere, especially to education, police and local governments.

Still, more than half of respondents to a Market Resource Group (MRG) poll last month would rather see the government shut down than endure a tax increase. Why not, when most people have no idea what it takes to run the government and balance a budget.

A more robust and policy-focused media would, hopefully, educate a disconnected public. Requiring civics in school also would get my vote.

But there is a fundamental problem here for reporters. Informing the public of this budget process has been a daunting task because 99.5 percent of the debate has taken place behind closed doors. Gov. Jennifer Granholm has been the biggest proponent of that idea, with her staff repeatedly declaring that the governor “will not negotiate the budget in public.”

Well, pardon me, but why the hell not? Y’all are public officials drawing very nice salaries. The citizens who provide for them, as well as the tax revenue that fuels our $43-billion budget, deserve to know how you’ve decided to spend that money.

Right now, we reporters do our best to ferret out any information at these top-secret sessions, like revealing Granholm’s list of $1.1 billion in tax hikes and loophole closures a month before she finally went public. But to a large degree, we’re stuck covering the public meetings after everything’s been decided privately. And this year, those are taking place just days — and even hours — before the budget deadline.

That doesn’t give the public much time to digest such complex actions.

Four years ago when I was covering local government up in Saginaw, one of my beats was the inner suburb of Carrollton Township — home of the four-hour, biweekly township board meeting. Everything was on the agenda — and I mean everything, down to the malfunctioning office copier. Eager residents were always on the lookout for violations of the Open Meetings Act, like if a majority of the board went to the john without posting public notice.

But with our state government, leaders decide how to spend billions of dollars far away from the public eye and glint of Michigan Government Television cameras, with only the occasional lobbyist there to advise.

There’s a lot of prattle from both parties about transparency nowadays. Sad that when it comes to the core constitutional function of the legislature, that’s a cruel joke.

Susan J. Demas is a 2006 Knight Foundation Fellow in nonprofits journalism and a political analyst for Michigan Information & Research Service.

by Annie Scott
September 16, 2009

Here’s what’s going on in a land far away but not so far apart from the Mitten …

It’s a tough time to be a governor. Trying to find new ways to cut overstretched spending and come up with solutions to epic challenges is inspiring some rather creative state leadership throughout the country.

How creative? A few recent examples come to mind, which range from well intentioned to extremely tacky.

Whether it’s a good idea or not, offering to lease space in your recently emptied prisons to house another troubled state’s inmates gets points for creativity. The same could be said for fighting to position your state as the new leader in advanced battery production.

Moving down the policy scale, there’s the more subtle choice to abandon one’s office well before the term is up in order to protect the state from a lame-duck governor (and her ongoing ethics probes). Or trying to boost “revenue” by selling a high-profile Senate seat to the highest bidder. Then there’s teaching your state the importance of practicing what you preach by abruptly ending a distinguished career prosecuting corruption by getting caught in a prostitution ring. Just as classless is the move of distracting a state from its woes by visiting an Argentinean mistress while leaving behind a swiss-cheese alibi and no one in charge. Now that’s creativity.

My current favorite, though, is hyping a grand-scale garage sale to pawn off all of the Golden State’s superfluous stuff. The Governator himself talked up The Great California Garage Sale (destined to become a bold-faced term in future social studies textbooks) as a clever partial fix to the state’s mammoth budget crisis and a way to make good on his “promise to eliminate waste in state government.”

Calling it a “win-win for the state and shoppers,” Gov. Schwarzenegger called on all state agencies to rout through storage closets, round up any and all surplus and seized property and get it to the state’s 180,000-square-foot warehouse in Sacramento. The event was to be the largest such sale since, well, the one Ahnold called in 2004 after being elected.

When I first heard about it from a coworker, I assumed it was a bad political joke. After all, apart from the fact that the money they hoped to raise would amount to only a drop in the state’s enormous collection bucket, the governor’s overdone enthusiasm in online and other promotions seemed something more akin to a Saturday Night Live sketch or YouTube sensation than a solution to the serious $26-billion budget crisis.

Then I heard the NPR story. This was real.

It’s never a bad idea to clear out junk that’s taking up valuable space. But if you’re trying to make a serious effort to score political points and raise significant cash, you should at least try to get the promotion right. Meaning, make it abundantly clear that it’s not a joke.

The Great Sale took place on August 28 and 29. On the big opening day, a leather-jacket-clad Schwarzenegger himself greeted bargain shoppers inside the gigantic warehouse. More than 6,000 items went up for sale, including office supplies, furniture, equipment, bicycles, BlackBerries, extra inmate uniforms, police motorcycles, computers, kayaks and more than 600 vehicles from the state fleet (mostly Chevy Cavaliers with at least 100,000 miles on them).

The governor made an extra strong push to encourage shoppers to bid on the vehicles, to help the state meet his own mandate for a 15-percent reduction to the 40,000-strong fleet. Finally, a role that suits Schwarzenegger perfectly: used car salesman.

I guess one state’s trash could be considered someone else’s treasure, but some of these items were pushing it. Case in point: not one but two sets of souvenir bobblehead dolls of 2003 Sacramento Kings, reportedly confiscated by the California Highway Patrol. And seven extra dental chairs from the state’s overcrowded prisons. But the big winner of the bizarro award may have been the vintage fortune-telling scales (yes, you read that right) the DMV had been hoarding for some mysterious reason.

But back to the vehicles, which held the greatest money-raising potential. Yet again, Ahnold sought to leverage the power of his celebrity by autographing some of the cars and motorcycles. Suggested as a “value-add” by his Twitter followers, that signature came attached to a substantial cost. Unfortunately for the state, some would-be buyers actually argued with officials to avoid paying the extra $800 on top of the original $2,200 price tag for a signed motorcycle. One dismissed the autograph as graffiti. Ouch.

The event generated an impressive amount of publicity…but much of it was critical. One popular target was the photo gallery previewing sale merchandise. As Eric Gazin, president of celebrity auction house Auction Cause, told the Los Angeles Times, “A 12-year-old could have taken better pictures of jewelry and cars.” He also dismissed the poor quality of the ads promoting the sale as so bad “they are leaving a lot of money on the table.”

Others complained about where the proceeds were directed — into California’s general fund. Some thought the money should go to furloughed state workers or other service providers whose funding has been decimated by budget cuts.

All told, the great sale raised $1.6 million — $1.2 million from the auctioned vehicles. Far better than proceeds from your average yard sale, but still a pittance relative to the $10.5 billion the state still needs to raise. The road ahead remains frighteningly long and tough to read (especially without the fortune-telling scales).

Personally, I am all for creativity in leadership — within reason. Yes, every little bit of revenue helps. But when your state is still facing an epic budget shortfall after cutting billions from vital services, it’s not the best idea to hype an after-the-fact garage sale as a promised end to state waste. One hopes a governor would have cut the inanimate junk well before cutting the programs, salaries and human services.

Who knows, maybe Schwarzenegger’s creative streak will lead next to the Great California Lemonade Stand or the Mighty Golden State Car Wash and our budget troubles will be yesterday’s news. But I’m holding out hope that there will be more ideas forthcoming, like the governor’s newly signed executive order to boost California’s Renewable Energy Portfolio standard to 33 percent by 2020 – the most aggressive in the nation.

While its short-term economic impact will undoubtedly be debated and it likely won’t help the current budget woes, I am much more encouraged by this type of bold creativity.

That’s one signature that is actually worth a lot.

Annie Scott lives and works in San Diego and sends dispatches back to her beloved Michigan.

by Tom Shields
September 16, 2009

Frustrated like all of Michigan by a seven-year recession and a clear lack of leadership in Lansing, a new group is ready to weigh in on public policy issues.

In a town filled with biz-group acronyms MMA, NFIB, MIC, DADA, MDA, SBAM, MSMS, and MHA, most insiders see the new kids as just another voice for business. Taking a slightly different tack than organizations that tout their membership numbers or profiles, the newcomer distinguishes itself by the names on its letterhead.

This assemblage of 70 CEOs will probably be better known as the business group formerly known as Detroit Renaissance until they can brand themselves as Business Leaders for Michigan.

Detroit Renaissance leaders apparently felt their work in Detroit was done, or at least in the good hands of the new, all-business mayor who’ll not likely be in need of bail money.

With its elite membership of CEOs over the past 40 years, it’s tough to imagine a more prestigious business organization than Detroit Renaissance. No VPs. No public affairs directors. Just CEOs making decisions and putting their money behind projects in Detroit. Their business leadership has certainly benefited Detroit and the region over the years.

The new statewide organization appears born of frustration with the current leadership in Lansing. While no names are mentioned, it’s safe to say that this probably wouldn’t happen under the previous governor — unless he wanted it to.

BLM’s goals are laudable: make Michigan competitive with other states; take a more innovative approach to job creation and economic development; and differentiate Michigan by promoting its unique assets.

Of course, the devil is in the details.

And right there’s where being Detroit Renaissance ends, and entering the new world of politics as Business Leaders of Michigan begins.

Unlike being the 900-pound gorilla of economic development in Detroit, BLM now finds itself in an arena with dozens of organizations that have their own agendas and supporters in the legislature and administration. Frankly, the Lansing mainstays have just as much clout, sway, and prominence as BLM, but built over years of involvement, and through the persistent work of advocacy, relationship nurturing, and the daily grind of the oft-difficult legislative process.

Give the BLM credit for not pulling too many punches as they introduce their agenda of a smaller, more efficient and lower paid government workforce, cuts in Medicaid, two-year budgeting cycles, limits on business regulations, expansion of charter schools, and a $1 billion tax cut for businesses — with increased consumer taxes by adding a sales tax on services.

I trust BLM was not surprised when their plan was met with a bombastic rant from Mark Brewer in MIRS calling them “greedy CEOs,” accusing them of “calling for sacrifice from the working people and the unemployed while the wealthy CEOs feel no pain.”

Welcome, BLM, to our world.

Under the Dome, everyone is fair game. Sometimes what you say is as important as who says it. A group of CEOs calling for shifting business taxes to consumers is like leading with a glass jaw. Expect to be attacked even harder than most.

BLM is focused on the “big agenda,” aiming to change the way Michigan government does business. They are taking an almost academic approach to developing broad-based solutions with extensive comparative studies and economic research.

Chair David Brandon says he wants to work with other business groups to ensure a united business voice. And since it’s estimated BLM’s agenda would take hundreds of bills to implement, they’re going to need the others. They are going to need the truly heavyweight and trusted organizations like the Michigan Chamber, Michigan Manufacturers, NFIB and others fighting it out in the trenches to get things passed in Lansing.

We can always use another voice of reason, another voice for business. Just don’t expect a command performance on day one. Just because you are the group formally known as Detroit Renaissance, it doesn’t guarantee you anything under the Dome.

Tom Shields is founder and president of Marketing Resource Group (MRG), a Lansing-based political marketing and public relations firm.

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of six monthly columns in which Craig Ruff proposes five far-reaching proposals to revamp state government if voters in November 2010 choose to convene a constitutional convention. Find the previous columns at http://domemagazine.com/blogs/.

by Craig Ruff
September 16, 2009

Can you handle two people representing you in the state legislature?

Picture that voters in each district send to a single legislative body the two highest vote getters in the general election. Each gets a percentage of a single vote on the state Assembly’s floor equal to the percentage of the vote s/he received in the last election.

For example, Assemblyperson Judith, a Democrat, garners 55 percent of the vote against her Republican challenger, John, who receives 45 percent. Judith gets 0.55 percent of one vote on the Assembly floor; Raymond gets 0.45.

What’s the point of this? Parties, if rational, would nominate candidates who can maximize the general election vote; presumably, nominees would appeal to independents and folks who tilt toward the other party. We would get more moderate, less sharply partisan people in the legislature. Currently, in so many safely Democratic or Republican areas, rabid partisans nominate the most extreme candidates.

All political parties would strive to mount strong challenges in all districts. There is little point, today, for a Republican to run in a Detroit district or a Democrat to run in Ottawa County. They are sacrificial lambs. If, however, the two leading vote-getters get seated, Republicans shrewdly would contest Detroit districts (and Democrats, Ottawa County seats) because even a small percentage of the vote would give the loser some clout in Lansing.

With two legislators of different parties, residents in each district get two constituent services representatives. They can test which delivers faster and better responses, competition being a driving force behind improving products and services. Two-member districts would enhance bipartisanship on the legislative floor. The Democratic and Republican representatives of the same district likely would join forces to bring home more state aid to their constituents.

With the current winner-take-all system, those voters backing a loser have little or no sway over policy. If you are a Democratic voter and your candidate for the state legislature gets 49 percent, you are stuck with a Republican legislator. You and other voters who voted for a second-place candidate — no matter how close your candidate came to winning — are not apt to have your voice heard in Lansing. Republicans in Detroit and Democrats in Ottawa County deserve representation. In the two-member plan, if your candidate held 49 percent of one vote on the legislature’s floor, you would have clout — in fact, almost as much power as your fellow citizens who voted for the winner.

Perhaps the greatest advantage of this scheme, hatched 20 years ago with the late Bernard Apol (longtime state elections director) and Zolton Ferency (state Democratic chair and gubernatorial candidate), would be to negate the bad properties of districting and gerrymandering. Who cares how district lines are drawn when two winners, rather than one winner taking all, are seated and receive a legislative vote equal to popular support? I defy anyone arithmetically inclined to draw boundaries favoring one party over the other under the two-member, proportionate-share scheme. No matter how you slice and dice district boundaries, if Democratic candidates win 52 percent of the total vote for all legislative seats, they will receive 52 percent of the floor’s votes in the legislature. The current system not only offers no such guarantee but frequently defies it.

The two-member scheme poses questions. Should and how will we count proportionate shares in committee meetings? Would not the majority party in a district try to place two candidates in a general election, one camouflaging as a member of the minority party?

A hundred years before the invention of football and basketball, molders of American representative democracy embraced the view that if someone wins, somebody has to lose and only one candidate gets seated and is given a voice in policy setting. It quenches the gladiatorial thirst. It does little to make policy-making temperate, collegial, and truly representational.

Next month: A Parliamentary System.

Craig Ruff is, among many things, a senior policy fellow and former president of Lansing-based Public Sector Consultants.

Mid-Michigan readers can hear Rick Cole every Wednesday at approximately 6:35 a.m. on Lansing radio station WILS 1320’s “am Lansing” program hosted by Walt Sorg.

by Richard Cole
September 16, 2009

Stan Stein has some special magic. The veteran PR counselor is EVP and global accounts director of one of the world’s largest PR firms, Weber Shandwick. He’s been a major player on the General Motors account for more than 25 years in at least two different firms and, for a while, as an independent consultant.

I asked him to come to Lansing to talk to the 150 or so advertising, PR, and retailing students who attend the John Aldinger endowed-lecture series I call “Promotions Commons.”

I like to kid Stan. Dave Hayhow and I first met Stan a few months after we opened our public policy oriented PR firm in Lansing in 1978. We called the firm Publicom Inc. I didn’t like the name that much at first. It was a made-up name in which Dave combined public and communications, I think. It was our firm, but it was his name.

I was OK with that. I was OK that is until I picked up the Detroit Free Press one morning to see that a guy in Detroit, a J-school graduate from MSU by the name of Stan Stein, had announced his new PR firm in Metro Detroit. He called his new firm Publicom. He did, at least, until Dave Hayhow got through threatening to send Jack Davis to Detroit to peel a layer of skin off him.

I actually thought it was quite funny, and I was intrigued that some young kid a) just came up with the name himself and didn’t bother to check and see if it was taken, or b) had been given the name to use by his former employer, Tony Franco, who somehow had seen our upstart firm in Lansing as a competitor and thought it would be funny to screw with us, or c) thought it would be a little like picking up somebody else’s errant golf ball on the course — an interesting way to strike up a conversation with new people.

And a conversation we did strike up. Dave and I liked Stan so much that we gave him some kind of a contract and let him open a Publicom office for us in the Detroit area. It’s a long time ago, but it was something like that.

Anyhow, Stan and I became good friends and have stayed in touch over the years. He’s a high flyer in PR, and has been for a long time now, and I have always been proud to know him. So I asked him a couple of months ago if he would be so kind as to take a September afternoon off from the grind and come to Lansing to share some insights with our students.

“What should I talk about?” Stan asked me in that initial conversation. “Why not tell the kids how it is that a consultant — an outsider in an organization as locked down and stressed out as GM — can make his relationships so tight as to survive all the ups and downs he must have experienced along the way. Give them your best tips on how you can make a “Client for Life,” I told Stan. And that’s exactly what he did on September 8, 2009, in East Lansing.

So as a tribute to a guy who could commandeer the name of a small-town issues management firm and ride it all the way to the Big Show, I am going to commandeer Stan Stein’s 15 Tips to MSU students, followed by my observations (it is my column, after all). It strikes me that much of what Stan told my students might constitute the kind of universal truths — axioms, almost — that are just as relevant to a lobbyist, a trade association executive, a political consultant or pollster, or any other “PR guy” who eats what he kills.

Stan’s Tip #1: Find clients with real budgets
RC: There is no easier way to look like a fool than to start a business or accept a client that is undercapitalized. Just like in medicine, consulting requires having a patient who can afford to buy the medicine, and is willing and able to take the full dose. Half a dose usually doesn’t work, and often does more harm than good by building a resistance to the medicine in the naïve patient, so that the next time medicine is needed it won’t work at all.

Stan’s Tip #2: Create a positive reputation
RC: Dave Hayhow once told an employee with an attitude that her personality is really nothing more or less than how she chooses to act today. Reputation is similar. Reputation is how you choose to be known. It’s what you want, in this case, your client to know you for. You can’t make that up. You have to choose it and use it, and when you use it enough, you have it. And when you have it, you have to remember how easy it is to lose it.

Stan’s Tip #3: Hitch your wagon to a rising star
RC: What I have been saying for a lot of years is that just about the most important thing you can do, at any age and in any business, is to pick a good mentor, and choose to build a reputation with him or her as having been her best mentee of all time. You want your mentor to say your name when someone asks: “Who is the smartest, most hard working, most loyal mentee you ever had?” If you read my column on any kind of a regular basis, you probably know who my favorite mentor is. I won’t mention his name again, because I’m not sure that he likes the attention (or the implication). But my mentor used to tell me, “You can’t make a friend when you need a friend.” That’s as true in life as it is in lobbying. Don’t wait until you’re in hot water to ask for a lifeline. There’s no reason why you can’t be a mentee to more than one person, and there’s no better formula for good client relations than picking the right mentor in the organization you work for or the client group for whom you are consulting. While you are at it, you might pick a young employee of your client organization to mentor.

Stan’s Tip #4: Entertain, or at least be entertaining
RC: Life is hard enough without having to go through it with a prune face. The shortest time I ever spent in a real job — after I left college the first time — was working for a boss who was incensed that I would suggest in one of her staff meetings that I thought it was “about time we started having a little fun around here.”

“This is a job,” she snapped. “We’re not supposed to be having fun.” That afternoon I went shopping for a new job, and by the next week I had signed on to a great, fun-loving boss, and that relationship lasted 13 years. A good boss enjoys a little comic relief in his or her life. The same is true with a client. Find clients with whom you can share a good laugh, and don’t hesitate to be the one who lightens up the conversation, especially when everyone else is freaking out.

Stan’s Tip #5: Never make the same mistake twice
RC: I would have said, “learn from your mistakes.” We all make them, and sometimes we make them more than once. I have made some serious mistakes. And what I have found is that people don’t hate people who make mistakes. They hate people who do not admit them. I think the reason Dick Nixon got thrown out of office was because when he was given what turned out to be his last chance at public redemption, he said: “Mistakes were made,” instead of “I made a mistake.”

Stan’s Tip #6: Learn how to manage people
RC: Stan’s take is to learn how to delegate. Golf taught me that. Not that you do much delegating in golf, unless it makes you feel important to let a 14-year old kid read a green that you have been making putts on for 20 years. Golf taught me that if I wanted to play golf during the week, I better learn how to get other people to do my work.

My take is a bit different than Stan’s on this one. You can Google “leadership training” and you’ll probably read about 1,000 leadership-training programs before you read any reference to “followship training.” Everyone wants to teach you how to lead or manage (and even these are two different things). No one wants to learn how to follow. You get brought in to a meeting as a high-priced consultant, and it’s natural that you want to give orders rather than show that you can take them. The hardest part of leadership, I think, is also the most rewarding. It’s creating a team to get a job done, and giving yourself a job on the team that you can do well, and letting one of your “subordinates” (perhaps a mentee of yours) in the client’s shop lead the team.

Stan’s Tip #7: Don’t fall in love with “what is”
RC: Here’s the dirty little secret. Nobody really knows “what is” anyway. People just know what they believe what is, and they believe that because they believe it is what is. Work for clients who are truly interested not in what is, but in what is possible. Help them take the blinders off others in their organization who believe that their self worth derives from “the fact” that they know what is and nobody else knows what is. I worked with a woman for a long time with an interesting way of flipping you off in a meeting with a back-of-her-hand gesture anytime you would suggest that her data-rich assessment of what is may be an interesting opinion, but it may not be the truth. I learned then to use Stan’s rule #4 — entertain, or at least be entertaining, especially under that kind of circumstance.

Stan’s Tip #8: Don’t mirror what your client is already doing
RC: Stan says “agency work is all about adding value.” I tell my students that all work is about adding value. Don’t get angry or disappointed when you expect a compliment for what you did yesterday, and the only thing the client says is: “So, what will you do for me tomorrow?” That’s exactly what you want her to say. That means you are expected to add value. You need to be able to show your client some tricks she won’t see at the water cooler.

Stan’s Tip #9: You owe your clients your outside perspective
RC: This has always been a problem of mine. No, the problem isn’t that I don’t feel I owe the client my perspective. I do that freely. That’s the part that turns me on. I’ve often been called an idea guy, so people expect ideas from me. They expect my perspective. What I am terrible at is not backing off when they ain’t buying my point of view. You have to learn to live to fight another day no matter how right you may think your perspective is.

Stan’s Tip #10: Be ethical in everything you do
RC: I meant EVERYTHING! There are no ifs about it. Peddle a bogus story to get publicity for your client and if it works your client will think, appropriately, “If he’ll steal for me, he’ll steal from me.” You’ll be gone. “The best stories,” Billy Fitz used to tell me, “are the ones that have the added benefit of truth.” He used to joke like that, but I pity the guy who thought truth was just an added benefit when he was dealing with Senator Fitzgerald. And I pity the consultant who thinks he or she will ever gain client respect that leads to lifetime loyalty for being anything less than perfectly ethical.

Stan’s Tip #11: Respond, Respond, Respond
RC: Here’s Billy Fitz again. I can hear his voice rising to an Irish crescendo: “The gun goes up, get into the blocks. The gun goes off, get out of the blocks. Get out of the blocks. GET OUT OF THE G.D. BLOCKS.”

Stan’s Tip #12: Hire and keep really good people
RC: I say never be afraid to go after the very best. You never know when the A player out there discovers that he is working for a C player and wants more for himself. Go after the best possible candidates for your agency. Tell him you love him to get him. Show him you love him every day he comes to work.

Stan’s Tip #13: Don’t be afraid to admit a mistake
RC: I already turned Stan’s advice about how not to make the same mistake twice into my simple desultory philippic about not being afraid to admit a mistake. Now I want to go one step further. Don’t be afraid to make a mistake. Good clients realize that besides gravity, the most important universal law beyond “Shit Happens” is the law of trial and error. In the military we called it bracketing.

Here’s what bracketing is not. You meet an occasional artilleryman who, it turns out, was a perfectionist. Here’s a case where perfect is the enemy of completion. The perfectionist would never fire off a round without being completely sure that the round would hit the target the first time. Get him into the field of battle, and you find he has paralysis by analysis. You meet these artillerymen at Arlington. The survivor is the one who fires high the first time, takes two clicks back and fires low the second time, and then takes one click up and hits the target — bullseye, “mission accomplished,” as Karl Rove might say. That’s called trial and error, and bracketing is the only way, sometimes, you can get anything important done. You have to make mistakes from which you can learn.

Stan’s Tip #14: Get rid of crappy clients (before they get rid of you)
RC: I just had this exact conversation with a chief executive who asked me to advise him on an agency selection process, but I looked at it from the other side of the coin. What does a client have to be to not be a crappy client? You must be ready, I told him, to fall in love with the agency you pick. Agencies always work hardest for the clients they love, and they love the clients who treat them like they love them. So do that. Conversely, if you are a consultant with an agency and you can’t love your client, don’t be satisfied with having them leave cash on your nightstand. Those things never last anyway. You’ll never have a lasting relationship with a client if you are a conSLUTant. End it yourself, and save your integrity.

Stan’s Tip #15: Be quick, but don’t hurry
RC: Stan quotes legendary basketball coach John Wooden on this one — and it makes sense when you think about it. Here’s the way I put it. Being patient in a golf tournament doesn’t mean slowing down your swing. Show your client that you are leaving no stone unturned in getting him your best advice, and you will do it as quickly as you can without creating a bigger problem than you have been asked to solve. Explain to him that “we may have to do some bracketing, and we should be prepared to make adjustments in our strategy and approach.” But don’t do something stupid because you feel pressured. If a client screams, “Do something, anything, dammit,” pull a piece of limp rope out of your pocket and tell him what he should try to do up it. You might lose a client, but you’ll retain your integrity.

Well, that’s it — my best summary of the advice of a very smart man who is considered by peers and competitors alike to be among the greatest working PR guys anywhere, Stan Stein.

And oh, by the way, I just sent all of the students in my John Aldinger endowed-lecture series “Promotions Commons” a subscription to DomeMagazine.com, just to make sure they read this and that they know I was listening to Stan Stein just as hard as they were. That could have been Stan’s rule #16. Never ask a client — or a student — to do anything you wouldn’t be willing to do yourself.

Richard Cole is professor and chairperson of the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Retailing at Michigan State University. The opinions expressed reflect his individual viewpoint and not that of the university.

by Susan J. Demas
September 1, 2009

There comes a time in every reporter’s life when he will have to grapple with how to cover bullshit.

It may be “death panels” in health care reform, conspiracy theories about the president’s birth certificate, scientific research spawning “cow people” or a silly spat between two senators being cast as the biggest hate crime since the assassination of Medgar Evers.

Didn’t hear about that last one? Well, here in Michigan, there’s something about solving a budget deficit that brings out the worst in our leaders. Two years ago during the state government shutdown, there were near-fisticuffs on the Senate floor between Tupac Hunter (D-Detroit) and John Pappageorge (R-Troy). Two months ago, Sens. Irma Clark-Coleman (D-Detroit) and Roger Kahn (R-Saginaw) had a tiff in a 22-second elevator ride following a contentious Appropriations Committee meeting.

Basically, Detroit didn’t fare well in community health funding, which peeved Clark-Coleman. Kahn didn’t like being told he was being “discriminatory” against Motown. I’ve seen worse antics on a playground (as well as more maturity), but the incident soon escalated when Clark-Coleman called the Michigan State Police and demanded for Kahn to be stripped of his committee chairmanship.

There was an investigation by the secretary of the Senate and plenty of colorful offerings from the Detroit senator, who claimed Kahn “charged me like a bull” and he “looked like a blowfish.” None of the witnesses, however, backed up her claim that Kahn was physically threatening or the heavy-handed implication that this was a major racial incident.

Still, that’s the story the Democrats wanted the media to tell, as they kept harping on the plight of a poor, 72-year-old grandmother. Luckily, we all could read the secretary’s report and let the facts speak for themselves. Not even the liberal blogs wanted to touch that one. So this looks to be the end of that story — until the Dems start running their “angry Kahn” ads next summer when he’s up for re-election, of course.

Slicing through spin and non-stories is one thing. But more and more, journalists today are expected to report on everything — every burp, sigh and tweet of those on their beats because readers supposedly care (snort) — which often includes total bunk.

The problem is that even if there’s no fundamental truth in a claim, reporters are assigned to cover it just the same. Why? Well, as we’re cheerfully told by teevee pundits: health care reform is boorrrring. But a board empowered to kill Grandma? Well, wake me up!

Those forced to cover those pitiful shoutfests laughably labeled “town halls” have it worst of all. Just fact checking all the misinformation being screeched at those migraine-inducing events would take a day. Fortunately, there are a number of excellent websites that may have already plowed this ground, like Factcheck.org and Politifact.com. Reporters can also take advantage of other newfangled technology, like linking to the exact section of the health care bill on end-of-life decisions, so that readers can see in black and white if faceless bureaucrats are angling to strangle the elderly.

The responsible journalist won’t merely transcribe a quote (no matter how good it is), but make sure it’s accurate. If it’s not, he has two choices: take it out or leave it in along with a sentence explaining what the facts are. I’ve done this a number of times while covering candidate debates, analyzing campaign ads and writing on controversial issues like abortion.

But there is a valid argument that doing any story at all on folks like the birthers — the few, the proud, the insane who have invented an intricate mythology as to how Barack Obama can’t be president — legitimizes their cause. (My personal favorite is the oh-so-clever, gee-whiz story about how all the other sleazy media are covering the extremists de jour).

However, there is an interesting dance in American politics in which the more you tend to ignore the big-splash crazypants theories — the Clintons killed Vince Foster; George W. Bush knew about 9/11 — the more they mushroom. And in this day and age of media meltdown, no one wants to get beaten on a story, like how the National Enquirer broke the John Edwards affair. So outlets end up covering everything, feigning disgust at the tawdry, the sensational. Sadly, it’s true that you never have trouble finding an audience.

Of course, as an opinion columnist I have the advantage of being able to call bullshit when I see it without fear of compromising any “objectivity.” That can still get me in trouble, like with a pro-life reader who convinced a newspaper to stop running my column after I had the nerve to criticize the patently false campaign against Proposal 2 that legalized embryonic stem cell research in Michigan. (The gutlessness and fecklessness of newspaper management will have to wait for another column.)

But as much as I disagree with the anti-2 Michigan Catholic Conference, the group is nothing if not persistent. Last year, the conference dumped millions (which must have come from tithings although MCC officials won’t say) into sinister ads warning the research would lead to cow-people hybrids straight out of a bad science fiction flick. Even though the group lost in November, an MCC spokesman just last week spent five hours trying to debate me via e-mail over outrageous claims like that, which he insists are “facts.”

The No. 1 political strategy, of course, is to muddy the waters enough that no one knows the difference between fact and fiction. During a recent Senate Education Committee meeting, Chair Wayne Kuipers (R-Holland) heard conflicting testimony on the efficacy of charter schools.

“Can’t there just be one study we all agree on?” he asked in exasperation.

As a reporter, that’s a sentiment I’ve shared for years. But the answer is: of course not, senator. That would be too easy — and mean some PR flack was falling down on the job.

Susan J. Demas is a 2006 Knight Foundation Fellow in nonprofits journalism and a political analyst for Michigan Information & Research Service.

Stephen A. Jones
September 1, 2009

Some years ago, when I was a newspaper reporter covering higher education in Michigan, I happened to visit Hillsdale College, where I met with a group of fresh-faced, bright and earnest young students who were eager to make a difference in the world.

They were energetic and committed to change — and they were confident of where the work needed to begin.

“The government does this,” they declared with great disapproval. “The government does that!” And they rattled off a litany of the government’s most egregious faults.

I listened while they made a number of substantial and valid points, all the while railing at “the government.” Then I asked them: “So who is the government?”

They were momentarily nonplussed by the question. When they regained their rhetorical stride, they made pro forma acknowledgements that in a representative democracy the government is, ultimately, the people — the voters who elect the public officials. But they struggled to resist the notion that the voters bore any real responsibility for the governmental mess they perceived.

I recalled that exchange recently as I pondered the impending Detroit city elections that will select a mayor to serve for the next four years and also select nine members for a special commission to rewrite the city’s charter.

There is no question that Detroit is in disastrous condition — physically, economically and politically. Unemployment in the city is well north of 20 percent, mortgage foreclosures have skyrocketed, and the infrastructure — roads, water lines, streetlights — is in serious disrepair. The collapse of the auto industry has devastated the city’s already bleak financial condition, forcing deep cutbacks in city services and pay cuts for city workers.

But even worse, in some ways, is the demoralizing saga of political corruption that has played out in courtrooms and in the media over the last two years.

Former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and former City Council Member Monica Conyers have resigned in disgrace after pleading guilty to felonies related to their official actions, and former Council Member Alonzo Bates is still in prison following his corruption conviction in 2007. It is unlikely that the last shoe has dropped in all of this.

Those of us who live in the city have clearly been ill served by the officials we elected. But those officials’ criminal behavior does not absolve the city’s voters of our responsibility for putting them in office in the first place and keeping them there, in some cases long after they deserved to be sent packing.

Kilpatrick’s escapades during his first term should have been enough to deny him a second term in office, but they were excused or overlooked by a majority of Detroit’s voters. And Bates displayed such arrogance and questionable judgment as a member of the Detroit School Board that he should never have been trusted with a seat on the city council.

There are signs that voters are stepping up to the plate. Mayor Dave Bing, who was elected in May to complete the final months of Kilpatrick’s unfinished second term far outdistanced his challengers for a full term in the August primary. Bing received about 74 percent of the primary vote, compared to about 11 percent for his top challenger, Tom Barrow, who ran unsuccessfully against former Mayor Coleman Young in 1985 and 1989.

Bing’s election in May over interim Mayor Ken Cockrel Jr. was seen by many observers as evidence that voters were looking for a mature leader, untainted by the city’s political intrigues, to clean up the mess that Kilpatrick left behind. The primary returns suggest that the voters have confidence in Bing and continue to be committed to the course of change.

The voters in May also approved creation of a commission that will rewrite the city’s charter. Ambiguities in the charter’s provisions for removing officials from office complicated and frustrated the council’s efforts to remove Kilpatrick.

Hopefully, the charter commission will make changes that hold the city’s elected officials to higher ethical standards and make it easier to remove them when they don’t meet those standards. But even more than the mayoral election, the selection of charter commission members will test how willing Detroit voters are to pay attention and take an active role in getting the city’s government under control.

The 18 remaining candidates for the nine commission seats include some experienced and respected people. Freman Hendrix was former Mayor Dennis Archer’s top deputy, and Teola P. Hunter served a decade in the state House of Representatives and another decade as Wayne County Clerk.

But the field also includes candidates with less sterling credentials. John Johnson, for example, is the city’s former corporation counsel, but was charged in May with professional misconduct by the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission because of his actions during the scandal over Mayor Kilpatrick’s text messages.

Sorting the wheat from the chaff in the charter commission election will be essential if the quality of Detroit’s government is to improve. But that will also require a sincere and persistent effort by the voters to figure out who should be trusted with the job.

We will get the quality of government we demand — and commit ourselves to producing.

Stephen A. Jones is a Detroit resident and assistant professor of History at Central Michigan University. He is co-editor with Eric Freedman of African Americans in Congress: A Documentary History (Congressional Quarterly Press).

by Ross H. Yednock
August 16, 2009

The federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) injects more than a billion dollars directly into the pockets of Michigan’s working families every year. Clearly, this is a good thing and an invaluable work support for the hundreds of thousands of eligible Michigan workers.

But as a new report shows, the EITC is also a tremendous economic stimulant to the local communities of Michigan.

The EITC is a federally funded, refundable tax credit available to low-income workers that is designed to offset the burden of payroll taxes. Michigan also has a state EITC, which was 10 percent of the federal credit in 2008 and will be 20 percent this year. In 2006 more than 677,000 Michigan households (approximately 18 percent of all households) claimed a total of $1.3 billion in EITC returns. While final numbers are not available beyond 2006, initial estimates show both these numbers increased and likely will continue to rise.

Despite this positive impact, roughly 20 percent of eligible taxpayers still fail to claim the EITC every year, leaving approximately $190 million in federal money on the table.

The Community Economic Development Association of Michigan (CEDAM) and the Michigan Association of United Ways have released a report detailing the positive impact of the EITC on Michigan communities. The report, Economic Benefits of the Earned Income Tax Credit in Michigan, was done by the Anderson Economic Group (AEG) and is the third in a series of AEG reports on the EITC. AEG’s previous reports focused on how the EITC encourages work and the true cost of a state EITC (which is about 43 percent of its appropriated cost). The new report examined the value the EITC provides toward economic stimulus.

Highlights of the report showed that in 2006, the $1.3 billion of EITC received in the state generated $2.2 billion in new economic activity, and for every dollar of EITC received, $1.67 is generated in new economic output in Michigan. The report also estimated that if all eligible workers had claimed the EITC in 2006, the additional economic impact would have been $365 million. Put another way, increasing the EITC participation rate by 1 percent would generate $3.3 million in new economic activity.

These results are backed by reports done in other states. The city of San Antonio estimates that each additional $37,000 in EITC returns results in one additional permanent job. Cuyahoga County, Ohio, found that in the first three months of 2003, EITC returns equaled all wages and salaries earned in the local hotel industry during that quarter, and the city of Baltimore determined that EITC dollars generate nearly $600,000 in local income and property tax revenues.

This economic stimulus occurs because, as the Brookings Institution states, the EITC “creates important ripple effects as dollars move among consumers, firms, and their employees.” Typically, EITC recipients use the funds to meet short- to medium-term needs: buying clothes for their children, replacing old furniture and appliances, repairing a vehicle, going on a trip, or catching up on past-due rent and utility bills.

According to the Michigan Department of Treasury, the average EITC recipient spends 37.9 percent of the credit on taxable items. This means that for every additional $25 million in EITC that is brought into Michigan, there is $9.5 million in new sales to Michigan brick-and-mortar businesses and $586,500 in new tax revenue to the state. This is on top of the “ripple effect” mentioned by Brookings and examined in the AEG report.

In Michigan, the fact remains that despite the outreach and educational efforts by nonprofit groups and some local governments to inform people about the EITC, 20 percent of eligible workers still fail to claim the EITC. While it is true that Michigan does spend $500,000 a year in General Fund/General Purpose appropriations to support Volunteer Income Tax Assistant (VITA) sites that are certified by the IRS to provide free tax assistance to low-income individuals, this amount is nowhere near adequate enough to meet the need.

In 2006, of the roughly 677,000 EITC returns filed in the state, less than 19,000 were completed at VITA sites. This is unfortunate because in addition to providing free tax assistance to low-income workers, thus enabling them to keep more money in their pockets, VITA sites are a point of entry to connect workers with other work supports like the federally funded food stamp program (it is estimated that Michigan families fail to claim upwards of $700 million in food stamp dollars every year). Additionally, VITA sites provide financial coaching and do not steer their clients toward costly, and often unnecessary, financial products like Refund Anticipation Loans.

Without question, all of Michigan benefits when people claim the EITC. It helps working families, the businesses they frequent, and the communities they call home. This is why, as policymakers look to find solutions to fix the structural revenue deficit in the state budget and spur economic growth in Michigan, they should increase support for programs with proven high rates of return.

Specifically, they should seek to increase the federal EITC take-up rate in Michigan by investing in EITC outreach and appropriating adequate funding for VITA sites. Otherwise, Michigan will continue to leave hundreds of millions of federal work support dollars on the table every year.

Ross H. Yednock is the director of the Asset Building Policy Project (ABPP) at CEDAM. For more information, go to www.cedam.info/ABC.htm. More information on EITC policy in Michigan may be found on the Michigan Statewide Earned Income Tax Credit Coalition website. To read the AEG report, click here.

by Annie Scott
August 16, 2009

Here’s what’s going on in a parched land far away from the Mitten …

“If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

It’s funny how many people and policymakers tend to forget that little cliché during desperate times.

Here in California, in the midst of a serious statewide drought, enforced water rationing and an ever-growing population, while part of the state is on fire (again) and governments and taxpayers are pretty much broke, many people and elected officials are more enthusiastic than ever about desalination plants as a means of increasing the drinking water supply.

As the name implies, desalination removes the salt from seawater and turns it into freshwater suitable for human use. How? Commonly, the seawater is forced through a semi-permeable membrane (water gets through; salt and various other things do not). A great deal of energy is needed to power the process, and, as we’re all learning, energy doesn’t come cheap or without its own set of problems.

Though it’s a very pricey means of getting one’s drinking water, the “desal” concept is catching on worldwide as populations grow and freshwater resources become more and more strained. More than 21,000 desalination plants are now operating worldwide, producing 3.5 billion gallons per day of potable water.

Of course, desalination’s appeal is easy to appreciate: turning seawater into freshwater is as lucrative as turning common metal into gold. Practical alchemy. The potential payoff is huge: tapping the “infinite” ocean to increase supply of a precious resource rather than worrying about trying to curb growing demand. After all, it’s always more fun (and easier to sell politically) to “get more” than to try to “use less,” right?

Plus, I do understand the desire to have more local supply. I was alarmed to read that roughly 90 percent of San Diego County’s water is imported from the Sacramento Bay Delta and the ridiculously over-allocated Colorado River (both hundreds of miles to the north). “But that’s crazy!” I shared with a friend who’s lived here all his life. His response? “Yeah. It’s a desert.”

Oh, right. Sometimes I forget I’m no longer living in the Great Lakes wonderland that is Michigan. I no longer am surrounded by the largest freshwater system on the planet. It was tough to grasp the true scarcity of accessible freshwater until I moved out west and realized things work a little differently when you don’t have 20 percent of the world’s and 90 percent of the country’s surface freshwater supply at your fingertips. It’s helped me understand what the professor of my “Global Water” course meant when he tried to impress upon us that future international relations will hinge on the allocation of water — the New Oil or “blue gold.”

No stranger to gold rush fever, California is definitely on the hunt to get more water. There are nearly 20 desalination plants proposed throughout the state. One is in my very own little north coastal corner of San Diego County, in Carlsbad. After being stuck in permitting-purgatory and fighting off legal challenges from environmental groups since 2003, champions of the $300-million Carlsbad Desalination Project now say they will break ground later this year and have the facility operational by 2012.

If all goes as planned, the Carlsbad plant will produce 50 million gallons of fresh drinking water per day. That’s enough for 300,000 people, about 8 percent of the county’s drinking water use. It’s billed as the largest seawater desalination plant in the western hemisphere.

Poseidon Resources is the developer and operator. An attractive part of its pitch is that private investors will assume “the majority of the risks associated with the project,” so tax- and ratepayers won’t have to.

All in all, the company has done a masterful job of selling the project as a perfect solution to a growing problem that cannot wait a moment longer. It’s the ultimate drought-proof water supply! It’s a locally controlled source — better than importing! We’ll pay for everything (asterisk) — no added expense for taxpayers or ratepayers! We’ll use “green” technology and create jobs! It will mean improved water quality and reliability!

And so on. Appropriately, the company’s initials are “P.R.”

The Carlsbad project is a landmark case being watched closely throughout California and the nation. The results of the permitting process itself carry huge implications in setting precedent for the future of desalination in the U.S. It’s a notable step forward for public-private partnerships, but it also has folks worrying about the potential for abuse when corporations are in control of such a fundamental resource. Think rate-gouging or selling to the highest bidders.

Desalination may be the only solution in poor, arid parts of the world (read: places that don’t have enough water to waste). In California, says renowned all-things-water guru Dr. Peter Gleick, it makes more sense to look first at less expensive options such as maximizing efficiency for using the water we already have and investing in more water recycling. Gleick’s Oakland, California-based Pacific Institute has published heavily referenced desalination studies that also emphasize the superior cost-effectiveness and necessity of investing in water recycling and efficiency.

But those are never exciting, buzzworthy, dollar-sign-invoking ideas.

When asked for her thoughts on the Carlsbad project, one of my neighbors’ honest response was, “If it means my lawn will finally be green again, my tap water won’t taste any worse and I don’t have to pay extra, then it sounds like a good deal to me.” I asked if she had concerns about potential environmental impacts. “Yeah, but drought isn’t good, either. It seems like there’s always some bad impact no matter what you do.”

On the other hand, an eco-minded coworker expressed concern about how many fish would be killed and how much energy it would use. She doesn’t like that it would contribute significantly to climate change.

Dr. Gleick recommends requiring any U.S. desal proposal to include new, non-carbon emitting energy. As he points out, “It may be more costly at first, but it may also be the cost of doing business right.”

Unfortunately, it seems up-front cost and immediate results are most policymakers’ and taxpayers’ primary concerns. And while it seems like a foregone conclusion that a desalination plant soon will be part of my local coastline, I hold on to hope that any future desal plants are just one part of a diverse water supply portfolio in this unquenchable state.

Yes, it sounds like Poseidon Resources’ Carlsbad Desalination Project probably is too good to be true — and maybe we all know it is. But six years of hearings and lawsuits haven’t lessened the thirst for a good photo-op and more local water.

Annie Scott lives and works in San Diego and sends dispatches back to her beloved Michigan.