This afternoon City Council will meet behind closed doors to discuss options for salvaging what I believe is the biggest economic development incentive package in our city’s history. The deal to keep the U.S. Olympic Committee in town is falling apart in a patchwork quilt of criminal investigations, lawsuits, construction liens, and schedule failures.

In my view, the city should have done everything possible and reasonable to keep the USOC here, SHORT of financial incentives. The incentives game is a race to the bottom, and here it has turned a good corporate citizen, the USOC, into something less.

While on one level it is hard to blame USOC for the shakedown, we all know this is not a model our world should aspire to. Clearly we cannot afford for everyone to play this game, so the game should not be played. It’s a little like dealing with terrorists or paying kidnappers. If you never pay a ransom, the kidnapping will stop. I expect it won’t be too long before federal law prohibits economic development incentives. All communities lose in that system.

Morally and ethically this was also a questionable deal. Council’s plan to borrow the money to fund this without a vote of the citizens was a breach of trust between Council and citizens. And our City Council should be avoiding getting into business deals with those who provide the lion’s share of funding to their election campaigns.

We got in way over our heads here. There is a valuable lesson to be learned from this. Our city government should play a VERY limited role in economic development. And what role it does play, should be an informed role, not just following the lead of developers and the developer-dominated EDC. We cannot afford amateur-hour economic development.

One of the reasons I don’t favor city investments in traditional (antiquated) economic development methods is that they drive physical expansion and population growth. Our city’s future sustainability depends on our embracing an economic model that doesn’t require perpetual expansion. Read more about this modern, enlightened form of economic development here.