States Turn to Regional Economic Development Strategies

"We cannot win the future with a government of the past," President Obama said last week, before promising a proposal to "merge, consolidate, and reorganize the federal government in a way that best serves the goal of a more competitive America."

He can learn something from Michigan’s Rick Snyder, the Republican governor who is retooling Michigan’s government, or significant parts of it, so that it is clearly in the service of the state’s metropolitan areas, its economic engines.

In his state of the state speech, Snyder pledged to make the state’s regions the drivers of state economic development policy, with state agencies in their service. "We have a number of very strong regional groups that are capable of taking the lead in the field." This is a very mild-mannered way to describe a significant inversion of state policy. States usually don’t even recognize their regions, seeing instead a fractured map of hyper-local jurisdictions, commissions, and boards. And they certainly don’t tell them, "You show us the way, because you know best."

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