Judging from his website, mayoral candidate Ray Allen intends to make a 2004 Economic Development Commission report the centerpiece of his campaign. He is upset that the mayor and the council failed to give a two-year-old commission report the attention and devotion it so obviously deserved:

“The EDC report was published in December of 2004, and for the last 20 months it has been collecting dust on Dave Cieslewicz’s desk,� Allen pointed out. “In the meantime, the mayor has found time to work on trolleys and the Mandatory Paid Sick Leave Proposal, which the EDC rejected as an anti-business mandate.�

A search of the EDC report revealed zero instances of the words “sick”, “sick leave”, “trolley”, “trolleys”, or “transportation”, but who’s counting?

I had intended to read through the report, looking for some juicy bits (*) to make fun of, but it was slim pickings, a combination of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo (”The city should adopt a pro-business economic development mission statement and align city agencies and staff around measurable goals to fulfill the mission”) and bullet-point ideas that ranged from the good to the bad. It wasn’t, as I initially suspected, a hit-piece in the tradition of the sick-leave study. The introduction of the report read:

If national rankings and the level of local construction activity are measures of a business friendly environment, Madison is a great place for business.

Forbes Magazine (May 2004) ranked Madison #1 in the nation for business, Careers, Inc. Magazine (March 2004) gave the metro area the #2 spot for doing business in America, and Entrepreneur.com cited Madison as “the fast rising high technology star in the Midwest�. These were in addition to Entrepreneur Magazine’s October 2003 rating of Madison as the Best Midsize City in the Midwest for Entrepreneurs. [...]

Despite the accolades from outsiders and the evidence of business expansion and attraction, there is a continuing perception that Madison, in particular the city government of Madison, is antibusiness.

Hrm. Allen, in his press release, wrote “Allen has mentioned that he would aggressively work to implement the recommendations of the 2004 Economic Development Commission report on how to respond to Madison’s anti-business climate.”

It’s a magic trick! A commission issues a report to address the perception that Madison is anti-business, which perception is pretty thoroughly debunked by the report’s introduction. Shove that into a politician’s hat, though, and out pops “Madison’s anti-business climate”.

One might ask why we have a perception of being anti-business. Perhaps it’s because we have conservatives, and now apparently, mayoral candidates (I assume Mr. Allen is still a Democrat, and I would not insult him by calling him a conservative), who go around declaring us to be anti-business, despite the fact that those bastions of liberalism like Forbes magazine consider Madison to be the best place in the entire country to run a business.

(*) I particularly liked this complaint:

The city’s ordinances and policies regarding signs are overly geared to controlling the look and the aesthetics within the community rather than recognizing that signage is a legitimate and important method of providing customer information.

In other words, the city government’s job is to help make Madison a good place to live. Many of us who live here think aesthetics are an important part of civic life. Billboards are ugly. There’s tension between what’s good for an individual business (although, like stockpiling nuclear weapons, erecting garish billboards works best when you’re the only one doing it), and what’s good for the city as a whole. A city government that is accountable to its citizens is supposed to represent the interests of the community as a whole.

Posted by Ben Brothers at 12:02 pm, 29 November 2006 and filed under Madison News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.