In your lead editorial of May 8th, your editor’s chastised Mayor Dave Cieslewicz for not doing enough to bring the business community and the political progressives closer together, and I quote, “he needs more than just words to get the city’s feuding factions to reconcile.”
Paradoxically, the readers then are given only more words! We are again given the same old subjective clichés about the tension existing between our local government’s desire for greater social justice and the sacrosanct business community’s desire for less and less regulation.
Why is it, that in this erudite university community with all of our prestigious scientists, including economists and mathematicians, that our public conversations are almost totally absent of empirical substance which would allow an ever continuing and transformative dialogue to occur? Why can’t our dialogue be raised to the point where the reader is given some comparative indicators, some standards, and some parameters, measures that will inform and raise the level of our public discourse?
For example, in the Journal’s most recent editorial, “Replace city IZ law with a better plan” (5/22/06), I note the same use of right-wing innuendo fluff and pro-market value bias trying to substitute for otherwise hard empirical evidenced based on factual data. I quote, “…a social engineering experiment with obvious flaws. The city tried and it failed.” How so, and precisely, based on what objective indicators does the Journal base its conclusions? Journal readers should consider Doug Piper’s guest column on the adjoining page (“Evaluation part of plan to prevent obesity”) where he tells us how the people will really know whether a public program is working? We will only know when consensually agreed upon measures are put in place at the onset of the project’s initial implementation.
Perhaps we could begin by obtaining some simple but broad metrics and ratios regarding the economic health of the business community and the quality of life that most citizens of Madison expect. If indeed no such consensual measures now exist, it is high time we get to work and develop some.
Without such familiar and generally accepted measures, our public dialogue in Madison will continue to be hollow and random. And because almost all complex new projects, like IZ, require several years to produce the desired outcomes, numerous sequential benchmarks must be put in place. Only then can the public know whether a new joint initiative is really working.
For the Journal to come up with its own arbitrary and independent project evaluation measures , i.e. “number of unsubsidized buyers over a set time period,” after less than one full operational development year, is premature and has little credibility. The role of responsible journalism in this context is to be advocating that consensually negotiated program evaluation measures be put in place prior to the adoption of all public funded projects would be far more productive. This would replace the rhetorical and ideological infighting and allow for a more informative and constructive dialogue among all the special interests involved.
As a program evaluator for over thirty years I am convinced that without more consensually derived objective and quantitative measures, that are familiar and respected by both the business and political progressive communities, the goal of helping both sides see their common interests will continue to evade us.
