Koelemay's Kosmos

Doug Koelemay

Getting to Yes

Some great values, respect, decisiveness and experience were on display this week.

The longtime Chairman of the House Finance Committee passed away last week after suffering from pneumonia. But the style of leadership that Parrish delivered as military pilot, businessman, mayor and delegate is something that always can be recognized as a model. Respect everyone, particularly those one disagrees with. Focus on solving a problem, not holding a position. Create new courses of action when existing ones aren’t leading anywhere. Make decisions using the numbers, not intentions.

The Parrish rules mimic those outlined in a best selling book from the 1980s, "Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In." As suggested by authors Roger Fisher and William Ury, many attempt to bargain from initial positions that are significantly different to get to one position they can agree on. This kind of "positional bargaining," the authors suggest, unfortunately encourages stubbornness and undermines relationships and trust that are necessary to get fair, workable and lasting agreements.

One need not look much further than the third budget deadlock in five years among House and Senate budget writers in the Virginia General Assembly for Exhibit A of that theory. By that measure, it’s unfortunate that Harry Parrishes haven’t been in charge of General Assembly budget negotiations. Then the habit might be the "principled negotiation" that Fisher and Ury advise instead, one that focuses on interests -- "Your position is something you have decided on. Your interests are what caused you to so decide" -- with the understanding that negotiations "produce something better than the results you can obtain without negotiating." Current budget conferees, who are still getting to their cars three weeks after the legislative session was scheduled to end, could still settle this like Harry Parrish would, knowing they can build on those negotiated successes and relationships next year.

Or state government could work more like the team that carried GMU to the Final Four. GMU rolled over Michigan State, North Carolina, Wichita State and UConn in the NCAA tournament not by grandstanding for various constituencies or engaging in a battle of wills with one another or with their coach. They used their skills, their complementary strengths, their confidence and their genuine pleasure in playing the game well to reach a high plateau. The team’s manner, not just its successes before a final barrage of three-point shots from the University of Florida, sparked the imagination of sports fans everywhere and forged a new, more confident identity for the Fairfax-based university.

Gov. Kaine certainly applied the same confidence and creativity in the decision a week ago to ink an agreement with MWAA, the regional authority that now operates Dulles and Reagan National Airports. The airports authority proposed a plan to apply the tolls paid by motorists along the Dulles Toll Road to funding to extend the Metrorail system all the way from Falls Church through Dulles Airport to Loudoun County. Precise details on project finance and supervision and the relationship of MWAA to local governments are still to be negotiated, one can hope, in a principled manner. But the Kaine administration opted decisively for a bold option to increase certainty for completion of an absolutely essential transportation improvement for Northern Virginia. Through a thousand little budget cuts, Metrorail project engineers were on the verge of designing the cheapest, most barebones extension possible even though Tysons Corner is the jobs and commercial center of the region and even though high-quality redevelopment to produce billions in new tax revenues requires high-quality links of pedestrian, transit, office and shopping spaces.

And with legislators finding it difficult to "get to yes" on a whole range of transportation questions, the MWAA-driven Metrorail extension joined by HOT lanes financed by other private-public partnerships could be the hard core of transportation improvements for the region for a while. Others who continue to define the Dulles Toll Road solution as something else, such as selling the toll road revenue stream to a for-profit entity to add vehicle lanes to the toll road, attempt to argue process against substance. Gov. Kaine and his transportation team did understand and evaluate alternative proposals. They just agreed that the MWAA proposal was the more ambitious, the more important and the more worthy. That’s the value of numbers again as a better criteria for decisions than intentions.

And finally there are those chips manufactured by Infineon in Henrico and Micron in Prince William County. The Virginia Economic Development Partnerships last week revealed that the state sent $645.6 million worth of chips to overseas customers last year, up from about $12 million worth in 1997. From 1997 to last year, exports of cigarettes fell nearly 83 percent to $439.5 million. Infineon and Micron are investing billions to modernize and expand their facilities to accommodate demand for memory cards, video game consoles, mobile phones, portable music players and digital cameras.

There is market risk, of course, in the roller coaster semiconductor industry, but a bold course of action is what the future requires. Harry Parrish understood that as the Manassas Airport and other groundwork he helped establish for the prosperity of Prince William County clearly illustrate. "Getting to yes" makes things happen.  

-- April 3, 2006