Coming Together

Maybe it’s just the natural nesting instinct as the economy falters and hardwoods across the state turn brilliant gold on the eve of winter, but we’re noticing many fresh examples of regional cooperation across Michigan this fall…

IN JACKSON…Imagine a small business that reduces employee health care costs by 20 percent — not through benefits cuts, but by working to make your employees healthier. That’s what Great Lakes Industry, a transmission and auto parts maker in Flint managed to do. The company president gathered employees one day, cleaned out a storage area, installed gym equipment, and watched as the shipping manager soon lost 45 pounds simply by using the treadmill. The company’s health care costs dropped from $9,200 to $7,400 in one year. (Here in Fresh Thoughts, we previously lamented the eye-popping $15,000 annual cost for each state employee’s family health insurance — a rate that, as of 2006, was 23 percent above the national average, but I digress.) In Jackson, Great Lakes is one of numerous small businesses that have joined together in a city-wide wellness campaign. As the New York Times recently described it, the group “is trying to address employees’ health as a crucial part of corporate strategy rather than as simply a cost-management problem.”

IN TRAVERSE CITY… “We are doing something extraordinary,” writes Hans Voss, executive director of the Michigan Land Use Institute. “It’s a 50-year growth plan. It’s called the Grand Vision and it is happening because people (thousands of them) from all walks of life are coming together to frame a powerful consensus vision for what we want this place to be. It’s a true model for other regions across the state. Read more about Grand Vision here and here.

IN METRO DETROIT AND GRAND RAPIDS… In its recent “East Meets West” report, Crain’s Detroit Business found several common approaches among business advocacy groups on both sides of the state. Workforce talent, tax reform, and prison reform lead the list of reforms on which east and west side business leaders nod in agreement.

IN CHICAGO… An upcoming conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago will discuss how the unified economic fortunes of the Midwest are closely tied to the Great Lakes. Here’s a sense of the Chicago Fed’s thinking on Midwestern cooperation…

“The Midwest is failing the challenge of globalization, largely because it’s so balkanized, with each state trying to compete in the global economy. Midwestern states are simply too small, too incompetent, too obsessed with the wreckage of the industrial economy, to deal with the problems of the future, like education. It’s time for other players — cities, businesses, especially universities — to come together in a concerted regional approach that would leverage the Midwest’s strengths, not undermine them,” said Richard C. Longworth, senior fellow, Chicago Council on Global Affairs and author of the new book, Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism.

Can regionalism boost the prospects of the Midwest? When is cooperation and when is competition the right approach in gaining regional advantage? How do you get people to “think regionally?” These questions were at the center of a two-day program that brought together a group of 100 business, academic and policy leaders in Minneapolis on June 26-27. The program was cosponsored by the Committee for Institutional Cooperation (which represents the Big 10 universities as well as the University of Chicago), the University of Minnesota and the Minneapolis Fed and was designed as a companion to two previous conferences in 2005 and 2006 held here at the Chicago Fed. The program had a specific mission—to discuss the role of human capital in the economic development of the region and to investigate whether greater regional cooperation might hold the key to a more vibrant future for the Midwest.