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If
discussions over the last week are any indication,
half of
Virginia’s
public employees are hog-tied in a vicious game to
establish whether their favorite budget-cut number
is 7 or 11 or 15 percent. Those are the guidelines
that Governor Mark R. Warner proposed a month ago in
response to the free-fall in state revenue. The
final number depends on just how bad deficit
projections get. The tragedy is that the answer may
be, “All of the above.”
Spinning the “Wheel of Fortune” might be a simpler way
to go about it. That’s about how much sense goes
into a budget-cutting strategy unguided by
principles and priorities. As
Northern
Virginia
venture capitalist John Backus told the Virginia
2020 conference at the Richmond
Convention
Center
last week, a business can cut spending to survive,
but no business has been able to cut its way into
growth or prosperity. Those objectives still take
revenues and investments.
What are the governor’s priorities? One might expect them
to reflect the campaign rhetoric that resonated with
the majority of
Virginia
voters in the 2001 elections. But the political
calculus changes after a governor takes office and
gets a feel for the sprawling bureaucracy under his
command. So far, using his power to cut budgets,
Gov. Warner has led a strategic retreat from the
least important obligations of state government. Now
he’s receiving a wide range of recommendations for
the longer term from the study groups and citizen
advisory panels he appointed. Analysts may get a
peak at his priorities by consulting the goals
listed in Invented
Here: The 2002 Southern Innovation Index, a
publication of the Southern Growth Policies Board in
Research Triangle Park,
N.C.
The Southern Growth Policies Board is a bipartisan, public
think tank supported by 14 southern states and the Commonwealth
of Puerto
Rico.
Governor Warner, it turns out, serves as chairman of
the Southern Technology Council (STC), one of the
board’s major initiatives. The Index,
which is published online and will be updated
regularly, specifically acknowledges his advisors,
Suzette Denslow and Eugene Huang, Deputy Secretary
of Technology, for their assistance in putting it
together.
The STC’s two strategic goals are to create a culture of
learning and to support innovation and
entrepreneurship. So far, so good, for a strategy
clearly aimed at technology-driven economic
development in a knowledge economy. Following in the
Index are
ten specific objectives, such as overcoming skill
shortages in science, engineering, information
technology and math, increasing public and private
research and development, and 56 benchmarks.
Scott Doron, senior program manager at the Southern Growth
Policies Board, impressed upon attendees at Virginia
2020 that this was a serious new effort. Doron
quoted Vince Lombardi, “If you’re not keeping
score, you’re just practicing,” to kick off his
briefing. But he also suggested the Index,
whose targets are set by each state for itself,
would reflect plans, not serve as either a forecast
or a report card. “Most Southern states,” Doron
offers, “would love to have the starting points Virginia
has.”
Following a few threads among the benchmarks can give a
sense of how state leaders want the program to work.
Current data, for example, suggest
Virginia
is below the national average in the percentage of high
school math teachers (68 percent), who have a major
or minor in their assigned field. An obvious target
is not only to reach, but to surpass the national
average. Not surprisingly, Virginia
also is at or just above the national average for
proficiency of 4th and 8th grades in math
(25 percent and 26 percent, respectively), for
average SAT math scores (501) and for percentage of
workforce with recent bachelor’s degrees in
science or engineering (18.6 percent). Would
improving each of these benchmarks give Virginians
more benefits from the information, knowledge,
communications and technology future?
The benchmarks of private-sector performance would seem to
signal a resounding “Yes!” Virginia is well
above the national average in the percentage of
households with computers (58.8 percent) and
Internet access (54.9 percent) and in the percentage
of ZIP codes with broadband providers (84 percent).
These strengths both reflect and drive other
strengths such as higher-than-national average
percentages of technology-intensive employees as a
percentage of total employees (11.7 percent) and of
technology-intensive establishments as a percentage
of total establishments (7.5 percent).
In a state that claims a rich textile history that recent
economic setbacks cannot diminish, Virginians
understand that one cannot just gather threads in
hand and call them cloth. In a state that is
building a world center in information technology,
Virginians appreciate how hardware, software, the
Internet and communications technologies integrate
into systems that transform our lives.
The severe, continuing budget challenges in Virginia
undoubtedly will drive significant revisions in
policy and investment targets. The prospect of
having some of them posted and undated regularly at
a single website alongside those of other southern
states, however, is an open invitation for
interested Virginians, including policy makers, to
see how we are weaving the fabric of the future –
and whether the children born this year will be
better prepared as they leave high school in 2020.
-- September 16, 2002
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