Generally speaking, the closer Midwestern cities are to each other, the more they have in common and the less likely they are to cooperate on anything. Call it Midwestern orneriness. Or call it stupidity. But it's what keeps a lot of beneficial regional collaboration from happening.
Three Michigan cities -- Saginaw, Midland and Bay City -- have epitomized this bloody-mindedness. But they may be getting over it. Like a number of other small regions around the Midwest, they're dipping their toes into the waters of collaboration. It's too early to say a new day has dawned, but the night sky is beginning to brighten a bit.
Saginaw, Midland and Bay City form a triangle of cities, each about 15 miles apart, at the base of the Michigan "thumb," where Saginaw Bay juts down from Lake Huron. They're just up I-75 from Detroit and Flint, which means that auto-related manufacturing is the traditional breadwinner. The big employers, until recently, were Dow Corning and Dow Chemical (both based in Midland), General Motors and the Delphi auto parts firm. All are under economic pressure and, increasingly, schools and hospitals have become major employers in the region.
In other words, Saginaw, Midland and Bay City are all in the same economic boat, and that boat is leaking. Unemployment in the region is 13.2% -- actually, fairly normal for Michigan these days but still no sign of economic health.
So some serious regional cooperation would seem to be in order. Except that such cooperation would reverse the usual state of affairs there. I was in the region a year ago and heard that the three towns, so dependent on each other and the same industries, were divided by history, class, race and a tradition of mutual disdain.
Saginaw, which is about half African-American, is the biggest city in the triangle and the poorest, with a median family income of less than $30,000. Midland is mostly white and the richest, with a median family income more than twice as big, about $65,000. Bay City is the smallest,mostly white, mostly blue-collar and struggling, with a median family income of about $38,000.
I spent some time at Delta Community College, which sits in the middle of this triangle and was working hard to get the three cities and their three counties to work together. In an area rife with so much distrust, Delta (like a lot of community colleges) seemed to be one of the most trusted institutions in the region. In addition, it dealt with students and clients -- workers and employers, young and old, employed and unemployed, black and white -- from the entire region. As such, it was offering itself as a neutral meeting point, a safe table where various players could park their political guns at the door and talk about mutual problems.
Whatever, something seems to be stirring in this region. The three-county area, led by local chambers of commerce, has rebranded itself as the Great Lakes Bay Region. The YWCA in Bay County has renamed itself the Great Lakes Bay YWCA. The three convention and visitors bureaus for the three counties plan to merge into the Great Lakes Bay Convention and Visitors Bureau. Some local businesses are following suit.
Two local newspapers, in Bay City and Saginaw, are putting out a weekly Great Lakes Bay Edition, to cover the broader community, including Midland. Like most newspapers, these papers once went to great lengths to ignore news in neighboring towns: readers in Council Bluffs, Iowa, told me this month that the big regional paper, the World-Herald in Omaha on the other side of the Missouri River, carries very little news from Council Bluffs. So this decision to cover news on a regional basis is nowhere near as obvious as it seems.
In the Great Lakes Bay Region itself, this new regional approach is getting some flak from locals who feel it is just a public relations ploy, or that it insults individual communities, especially Saginaw. There's probably something to this. And if the project becomes nothing more than PR, it will fail.
But once people begin to talk regionally, they begin to think regionally and, in time, to act regionally. So far, the Great Lakes Bay project seems to be mostly talk, aimed at polishing the image. But that's no reason to scorn it. Once the three cities and counties start talking about their common situation, they might actually do something about it. All progress has to start somewhere.
There is more of this going on in the Midwest than is generally known. In Wisconsin, the NewNorth project is trying to get the cities of Fond du Lac, Appleton, Oshkosh and Green Bay to work together. The eight-county area around Madison has joined into a project called Thrive, in an attempt to link the surrounding rural areas into Madison's economic vitality.
In Iowa, the Cedar Valley Alliance is overcoming traditional hostility between the twin cities of Waterloo and Cedar Falls and is working now to set up a broader region stretching down through Iowa City and the Quad Cities into Peoria in Illinois. The Chicago Council's latest Heartland Paper, "Past Silos and Smokestacks," by Mark Drabenstott, describes a 38-county regional project in southern Minnesota, anchored on Rochester, and a Riverlands project, based on Dubuque and involving 14 counties in Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin.
Counties in southeastern Michigan are working together to try to recover from the collapse of the auto industry. Other counties in northern Indiana, led by experts at Purdue University, are doing the same. Cleveland and Pittsburgh are talking about more collaboration between their two cities.
In short, there's a lot of this talk going on. So far, most of this, as in the Great Lakes Bay Region, is still talk. But this is a big change from the traditional Midwestern way of doing things, which was based on rugged individualism and neighborly hostility.
This old way doesn't work. Actually, it hasn't worked for a long time now but a number of factors, like globalization and the recession, have been the wakeup call that is preceding change.
For more information on economic development in the Midwest, visit the In the News section of the Global Midwest Web site.
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