W'eve got some new neighbors: The West Coast Corridor Coalition
The story in today's Olympian "Group Unites Interests of I-5 States"
is right here at http://www.theolympian.com/home/news/20040721/topstories/101924.shtml
Here's an excerpt:
Chokepoints in both the rail and highway systems in Washington state are slowing the delivery of goods and putting a drag on the region's economy, according to members of a fledgling group called the West Coast Corridor Coalition. The coalition -- an outgrowth of a regional rail and highway corridor concept dubbed the Cascadia Project -- is just forming. Its participants contend a united West Coast political bloc could deliver enough clout in Congress to make significant improvements to rail and highway routes and that would mean an expanded coastal economy.
"Unless we do it to expand ... it is certain that we will lose freight mobility and trade on the West Coast," said Bruce Agnew, director of the Cascadia Center at the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based transportation-policy group that has had a big hand in creating the coalition.
It could merge the political clout of Alaska, Washington, Oregon and California into a superbloc that can heft the billions of dollars needed to pay for the work, including added highway lanes and extra rail lines.
"We envision it as a four-state coalition," said Barb Ivanov, director of the freight strategy and policy office for the Washington state Department of Transportation. "We believe we would have a much more compelling story to tell at the federal level when it comes to gaining resources we need in order to make improvements that solve the problems."
While state Senator Dan Schwecker claims later in the article he's not involved with the West Coast Corridor Coalition it's easy to see there's no small shared interest between his Commerce Corridor scheme and the West Coast Corridor Coalition. It's a basic principle of political life that when you face defeat at a particular scale, the best thing to do is scale up. If you can't tell a compelling story at the state level on why the public should either bankroll a Commerce Corridor outright or play a little russian roulette with its credit rating to entice private sector financing tell the story at the Federal level and watch the federal pork roll in. The compelling story these folks want to tell is that unless we build more highways we will lose out to the competition.
All the talk of national competitiveness tossed around by politicians, bureacrats, and corporate executives rests squarely on the idea that a corporation and a nation are really more or less the same thing. As Paul Krugman once pointed out in the March/April 1994 issue of Foreign Affairs:
Most people who use the term 'competitiveness' do so without a second thought. It seems obvious to them that the analogy between a country and a corporation is reasonable and to ask whether the United States is competitive in world markets is no different from asking whether General Motors is competitive in the North American minivan market. In fact, however, trying to define the competitiveness of a nation is much more problematic than defining that of a corporation. The bottom line for a corporation is literally its bottomline: if a corporation cannot afford to pay its workers, bondholders, and suppliers it will go out of business. So that when we say a corporation is uncompetitive we mean that its market position is unsustainable-that unless it improves its performance, it will cease to exist. Countries on the other hand do not go out of business. They may be happy or unhappy with their economic performance but they have no well-defined bottom line. As a result the concept of national competitiveness is elusive.
Not to mention highly politicized.
Barb Ivanov of WSDOT said "We believe we would have a more compelling story to tell at the federal level.." and I agree. It would be a lot easier to convince someone to pave over the South Fork Valley if they've never seen it.
Posted by: Don Shank | July 22, 2004 at 07:56 PM