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SUSTAINABILITY, EQUITY, DEVELOPMENT SOMETHING ELSE: Survival Is Not An Option CHAPTER ONE - Recipe For a Fiasco
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RECIPE FOR A FIASCO We now
accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of
change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn. A fool and
his money are soon elected. The
country cannot afford amateur hour in the White House. A. We Need A Workforce In the late 90s, many businesses were experiencing difficulty finding qualified workers to fill skilled jobs. Few places experienced the shortage more than Southern Arizona. Tucson businesses including Raytheon, Honeywell, Universal Avionics, DataForth, Lasertel, Spectra-Physics, Breault Research, Texas Instruments, and many others voiced the need for qualified employees. Many spoke of the need for skilled electronics test technicians and assemblers for their manufacturing operations. They expressed the possibility of hiring significant numbers of individuals who had these skills. In June
2000, DT Vanguard Technical Solutions announced that it was desperate
to fill dozens of positions, claiming it needed to double in
size. The company's director of finance and administration, Glenn
Fenstermacher, stated that they paid high salaries. The firm's chief
technical officer, Bill Orinski, said, "We just can't hire people fast enough." The skilled worker shortage applied to most of the country. The U.S. Senate passed H1B on 10/3/2000. Congressman Jim Kolbe sponsored the House version. H1B granted import skilled foreign workers visas to work in the United States. The fees the government charged to issue the permits funded training for U.S. employees willing to learn these skills. Many companies used H1B to secure training for their workers. As passed, the bill had caps on funding and numbers of work visas, prompting Modular Mining CEO Jim White to voice the opinion that it should be expanded. Michael McGrath, President of local 7026 Communication Workers of America, noted that the need for H1B pointed to the unwillingness of corporations to invest in the development of their own employees for highly skilled positions.
Despite its best intentions, the program had significant issues. Increasing frustration led to the idea of a training institute that could operate with greater flexibility and faster response than the community college. One story frequently told involved the donation of an expensive circuit card assembly machine worth nearly a million dollars. It would have been a valuable resource for the Tucson community, and it was Tucson's for the taking. The community college bureaucracy did not respond quickly enough (months) to the donor's offer, and the machine was sent elsewhere, infuriating local manufacturing firms. A training institute free of the community college paradigm and bureaucracy could accept the machine with a phone call. The institute could create customized programs in days and efficiently handle the administration of the High Tech High Wage Program. Such an institute could also target training activities into high technology areas such as the exploding information technology sector and the dot com expansion. Local elected officials and various community leaders spoke of the need for high-tech, high-wage jobs and a means to develop people to fill them. WIB Chair Steve Juliver, Mayor Bob Walkup, Pima County Supervisor Sharon Bronson, and Pima Community College Chancellor Robert Jensen came up with a solution they called the Southern Arizona Institute of Advanced Technology, or SAIAT. At first, they called it "an expansion of Pima Community College's High Tech High Wage Program" and suggested the place could "ramp up" to a premier training center graduating 1,000 students per year. University of Arizona Eller business school graduate students wrote a business plan projecting strong demand for customized training in Tucson, Arizona. Chancellor Jensen offered the use of land and trailers on PCC's Community Campus to house the institute. The meetings began in earnest and a funny happened quickly as details developed. Although the institute was to operate outside of the community college paradigm, free of the restrictions of community college concepts and thinking, PCC Vice Chancellor Carol Gorsuch, in addition to seeing herself as the natural heir apparent to Chancellor Jensen, saw herself as the one to run the institute. Little enthusiasm outside of the college existed for the idea. After hours of heated meetings, it became clear the college was not going to be in charge. Well, in that case, PCC told them they could forget about using the trailers on the community campus and find their own building. They also needed to find an executive director. The announcement directed interested individuals to contact Laura DeNinno, the executive director of ITASA, and both the city and the county committed to funding the organization with the understanding that, based on the business plan written by the Eller students, would generate enough revenue to sustain its operations without public assistance within five years. Juliver stated that all programs would be fast track and result in certification within six months.
B. The November 2000 Election By the time of the November 2000 election, Arizona voters were upset about a disastrous alternative fuel program that cost more than 100 times anticipated budget. The fiasco humiliated supporters, and several elected officials lost their seats, in particular GOP House Speaker Jeff Groscost. Closer to home, Democrat Byron Howard faced Republican Senator Ann Day (sister of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Conner) to replace District One County Supervisor Mike Boyd. Incumbent Raul Grijalva would have to face Jim Click backed Republican Rosalie Lopez. Now, District 5 was a Democratic district, but this didn't mean Grijalva had a cakewalk. As the general election approached, Grijalva said, "We expect some ugly stuff." One could
speculate that Jim Click and Raul Grijalva were not exactly the best of pals. Shifting to the State Legislature, in District 9, political newcomer Tim Bee showed signs of being one of the guys to watch. He defeated Bill McGibbon despite being heavily outspent, instead campaigning the old fashioned way. His brother's name recognition did not hurt. He would face Democrat Kathy Ramage-White, but LD 9 was pretty pink turf (leans Republican). In District 10, blue turf, Ramon Valadez, solid ally of Supervisor Dan Eckstrom and fully endorsed by the South Tucson machine, had a cakewalk. LD 11, also blue terrain, would choose Deborah Norris and Carmine Cardamone. LD 12, red turf, chose Toni Hellon, former aide of Mike Boyd, for the Senate, and nobody could mess with Huffman or Hershberger in that district. LD 13 provided the interesting race. The district offered pink turf, not red, and a sharp Democrat could win. The race for the two house seats made a show worth watching. On the red side, Carol Somers and Jonathon Paton got the green lights for November, and the blue side served up Ted Downing and newcomer Gabrielle Giffords. For the LD13 senate, Andy Nichols got the blue nod and Kathleen Dunbar got the red. On the national scale, the true GOP powers had Karl Rove crucify Arizona's John McCain for not realizing that George W. Bush was their choice. George W. faced Al Gore for President of the United States. Both Tim Bee and Gabrielle Giffords were young, new to the game, and showed serious potential. Bee had generations in the community and a brother. Giffords had generations in the community and a grandfather. She was known for her "buck stretcher" commercials for El Campo Tire Company, and more so, from the television antics of Giff Giffords, himself worthy of a full-blown biography. The son of a Lithuanian rabbi, Akiba Hornstein changed his name to Giff Giffords to escape anti-Semitism and moved from New York to Tucson, Arizona, starting El Campo Tire in 1949. Giff was an interesting character, and many remembered the late night equivalent of infomercials which featured his escapades throughout the world. Each Giff program concluded with an invitation to visit El Campo Tire and buy some retreads. When Giff's son Spencer married Gloria, a tire formed the base of the wedding cake. Giff's adventuresome lifestyle and guest list exposed the two granddaughters, Melissa and Gabrielle, to a wide variety of foreign cultures and peoples. November 2000 election victories: School
Superintendent - Linda Arzoumanian (R)
Pima County elected Al Gore, but the vote was dwarfed by Maricopa County, and Arizona went to Bush. The United States also elected Al Gore. He received more votes than George W. Bush. Unfortunately, Al had to do more than get the most votes. What a fiasco. An insane set of circumstances led to one man's selecting the next president, Chief Justice William Renquist. He chose W. George W. Bush became President of the United States. For the first time in the history of the country, the United States had a president with a double digit IQ, estimated at 92, eight points below the average number of 100. In an unprecedented situation, the leader of the nation was less intelligent than what statistics predicted for an average Joe selected completely at random off the street. On many levels, we were brewing a recipe for a fiasco. C. Flashback - An Economic Development Decade at a Glance 1990 - 2000 The U.S. economy struggled at the birth of the 90s and became the central issue of the 1992 election, "It's the Economy, Stupid." Southern Arizona and Tucson also struggled in 1990 and 1991, but reaped rewards from the explosion of the cost of operating in California. Businesses operating on the West Coast, fed up with aggressive California regulation (in particular, environmental laws), spiraling real estate costs and tax increases, looked eastward. Arizona offered the attractive features of virtually no union representation (outside of the mining companies), low unemployment insurance costs, and cheap real estate. The state's unemployment insurance ranked almost dead last in the country. The state offered cheap labor, but unfortunately its workforce had skills equal to the compensation. Arizona understood its workforce issue, and job training legislation ranked high on the list of the economic development organizations throughout the state. Tucson's economic development agency, the Greater Tucson Economic Development Council (GTEC), established in 1989, chaired by William Clements (president of Golden Eagle Distributors) and headed by president Andy Flores, worked to recruit top quality employers into the region.
On June 20, 1991, Tucson had a town hall to address economic development. Over 150 local leaders attended the event and broke into groups to discuss the pertinent issues. The town hall identified the improvement of the primary and secondary education system as the top priority. They also called for a better transportation infrastructure and higher caliber elected officials. Arizona was one of only four states that had no public programs to support incumbent (already employed) workers. They noted that a skilled workforce played a critical role in economic development, and that the region needed to improve its education and training capabilities. University of Arizona President Henry Koffler spoke at the town hall. He addressed the need for quality schools and noted the issue that the growth of jobs in southern Arizona offered low wages. GTEC's annual $1.2 million budget came from three sources at $400,000 each, the city, the county, and private industry. For FY 1992 starting July 1, 1991, the city promised another $400,000, but the county started to choke, suggesting a cut to $320,000. Related or not, three of the fifteen on GTEC's staff resigned in July. Board chair Clements also announced his resignation that summer.
The marketing and outreach budget for recruitment leapt from just under $100,000 to $174,500.GTEC looked to raid southern California for businesses to move to Tucson, establishing an office in Los Angeles and hiring recruiter William Hudson to make it happen. Through no fault of its own, in the summer of 1992, GTEC got embroiled in a political mess. Five council members (Molly McKassan, Mike Haggarty, Steve Leal, Bruce Wheeler, and Janet Marcus) forced the resignations of City Manager Tom Wilson and Fire Chief Richard Moreno over leaking fuel tank problems at the Thomas Price Service Center at 4004 S. Park. The terminations infuriated Mayor Miller and council member Roger Sedlmayr, bifurcating the council into two hostile camps, the five who demanded the resignations and the two who did not. A group called the Tucson Business Coalition (TBC) hated the five. Some of them helped an organized recall against three of them (McKassan, Haggarty, and Leal), and when that effort failed, they fired up a recall effort against the remaining two (Wheeler and Marcus). In response to the fuel tank ruckus and the forced termination of the city manager, the mayor formed a task force to investigate the five. We had the two plus TBC plus the task force feuding with the five. GTEC's by laws called for the mayor to appoint members to its board of directors. The September 8 city council meeting occurred a few weeks before the GTEC board meeting where the Mayor was expected to nominate three new members. At the council meeting the five passed a resolution requiring council approval of every appointment the mayor made to a board, committee, or commission. Furious, the mayor replied that he would nominate his choices at GTEC's board meeting anyway. When the council asked for their names, he refused to tell them. Tempers flared. The council knew the three were gas station owner Jesse Lugo, restaurateur Frank Davis, and Pima Community College executive Reggie Demick. Lugo and Davis were key TBC leaders, and Lugo was also on the task force going after the five. On the advice of City Attorney Fred Dean, the five got City Attorney Richard Rollman to obtain a temporary restraining order from Superior Court Judge Lawrence Fleischman preventing Miller from making appointments to GTEC's board. Before GTEC's board meeting, Dean sent a notice to chairman Larry Hecker advising that the mayor could not make appointments to its board. At the GTEC board meeting, eleven of fourteen new appointments were made, with the mayor's three excluded. The eleven included Larry Aldrich, President of TNI Partners. Andy Flores, the CEO of GTEC, tendered his resignation a couple months of months later. He announced that he would try to find another position in Tucson, but not one that involved economic development. Two weeks later, Neil Spritz resigned from GTEC and soon after that the organization laid off two employees. Some time later Mayor Miller subtly suggested in public that Flores had help resigning, "Flores wasn't doing a good job so we made a change." By March 1993 GTEC had found its new president, Robert L. Gonzales, president of the Brownsville Economic Development Council in Texas. Gonzales said, "The first rule in marketing is to know your product, and I don't know Tucson." Mitchell's March 21 Star article notes that when Gonzales joined Brownsville in 1991, he had stepped into the hot seat, apparently good at handling tough situations. Welcome to Tucson, Mr. Gonzales. It's great here in March. With Gonzales not yet unpacked and still to start, senior vice-president Tom Wilson resigned. With Gonzales less than a week on the job, Pima County Supervisor Ed Moore started complaining about GTEC's performance. A couple weeks later Moore proposed cutting county funding for GTEC in half, and a few days later GTEC vice president William Hudson submitted his resignation. Supervisor Moore did not cut GTEC's funding in half. He just shaved $20,000 from the $400,000, but the county implemented stiff performance measures for GTEC many considered to be unattainable. Gonzales had barely started, and people were shooting at him. Did they mention July? Vice-president Barbara Dawson resigned the summer of 1993. Then the private contributions started to falter. At what point Gonzales recognized he had walked into a hornet's nest will perhaps remain known only to Gonzales. I must give him credit. He rode his bull for seven years. I only lasted four. I will now climb altitude to more executive level information regarding the 1990s. Bill Clinton became president and to his credit or not the economy started to heat up. In fact, during his presidency one of the longest economic expansions ever experienced in the country occurred. Many factors contributed, among them information technology. Information technology became an important component of human history at this time and warrants some attention. D. Brief Remarks on Information Technology (Skip this to Next Chapter)
Xerox Park and IBM, chained by their own paradigms, did not see what others started to see. IBM thought hardware, not software, and Xerox thought big, not small. Jobs and Gates both understood small. Sun Microsystems understood SmallTalk. By 1990, the ubiquitous personal computer had become a must for the office and a nice-to-have for the well-to-do at home, and the IBM PC running Windows dwarfed Apple. At this time, only the geeks knew about the Internet, which consisted primarily of Telnet, Gopher, military applications, and other features excluding the masses. Computer science had well developed the OSI Model and packet networking technology. The astute saw the approaching explosion when email hit the college campuses in the early nineties. Using OSI the SMTP protocol was built, and email became as easy as typing a letter. Email on college campuses blossomed exponentially. By 1993, every student had an account. After a slight delay, email penetrated the corporate world with equal velocity. As this occurred James Gosling of Sun Microsystems thought deeply about object oriented programming, seeing another level that could allow code to run on any operating system. The brilliant insight involved creating a virtual machine for each operating system that could interpret and run platform independent code. While James thought about Java, Tim Berners Lee thought about the cumbersome SGML (Structured Generalized Mark-up Language) to format documents. Surely an easier language could be developed to render content in a desired format. While James and Tim worked, people at a place called Adobe converged to produce a program called Photoshop that made it possible to manipulate digital images with pixel precision and produce eye popping graphics in manageable file sizes. As if by magic, the digital image, HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language), Java's ability to download and run client side programs called applets, came together with another new protocol, HTTP, and a subset of the Internet was born. They called it the World Wide Web. NASDAQ became a nuclear reaction waiting to happen. Readers interested in a more rigorous history are invited to consider Computer Hope's Chronology. Returning to Tucson, from 1993 to 2000, Robert Gonzales ran GTEC with a degree of effectiveness hampered by: 1) tax issues (they tried to
address) The results flowed from the physics of the situation. Tucson's low wage and affordable housing environment attracted businesses that had lots of low paying positions: call centers. Throughout the 90s, Tucson turned into a teleservices mecca, doubling from 8,000 call center workers in 1990 to over 16,000 workers in 2000. The call centers started arriving in earnest in 1994. They are still coming. When a call center moves to Tucson and adds a quarter to the going rate, it receives thousands of resumes from qualified, experienced employees. I do not exaggerate. In August 2000 Robert Gonzales resigned. I salute him for lasting as long as he did. As the top man with the biggest office reporting to the governing board, he lasted longer than his predecessor, his successor, or your humble blogger. GTEC inherited a schizophrenia I would later learn well. Get the job done, but only do part of it or do it this particular way. The untenable situation involves taking direction from the clueless and managing irrational politics rooted in ignorance. I often think of GTEC as SAIAT times two. Double the budget, the staff, and the politics. The community expressed frustration with GTEC, and Mayor Walkup, Supervisor Sharon Bronson, and University of Arizona President Peter Likins chose to meet and craft a new strategy.
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