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The folks against the current health care bill that was passed and signed into law by President Obama this week say that it is to expensive and will ultimately cost America jobs and forement future problems we have yet to identify. Those for the bill say it is important to give all humans  an opportunity for good health care, and while there is a cost, the benefit is even greater.

For entrepreneurs the jury is out. Some say the health care bill will give them an opportunity for affordable health care that they couldn’t otherwise get. Some analysts also say that the  health-care bill provides an opportunity for people who would otherwise be locked to their jobs due to the need for insurance to go out on their own and develop new entrepreneurial enterprises. Others say that the penalty for not offering health care to employees is too great and obtrusive.

A good article about these and many other questions about the health care bill is by Megan McCardle, the business and economics editor of the Atlantic Magazine. The article,  Will Health Insurance Spur Entrepreneurship? is a good read and sets out to ask some of the net affect questions about the current health bill.

I think that it is difficult to figure out all the things that will happen with this bill. Those who feel strongly about this legislation one way or the other feel certain they know how this bill will impact their business. But I believe our behavior will change in ways we haven’t even determined yet. The smart bet is that there will be some opportunities for  entrepreneurs to take advantage of this bill and the new demand for services related to this legislation. The best way to take advantage of this new era is to determine what service providers, insurance pools, insurance companies and communities will need in this new era of national health care. Then start a business to meet those needs.

In graduate school I trained to be a City Manager. It was the one real job that I could think of that combined good government practices and my love for things political. It also gave my father some assurance that I would land a job. The one thing I liked about my graduate public administration degree was that there was a history behind the profession I was choosing. There was almost 100 years of practice and discipline behind me that told me that this was a real profession with real ethics, common practice, and a consistent and disciplined way of doing things. At the end of graduate school and my internship in the Village of Deerfield, a north shore Chicago suburb,  I learned what it took to be a good city manager, and went on to build my career.

Well, it didn’t take along for another City Manager to burst my bubble, and show me just how some “professionals” aren’t always so professional. I left the profession for a couple years in despair and frustrated then went back to it with a more open view and separated by time from my previous bad experience. Quickly I  was recruited into the economic development field and between my first foray in to the field in 1993 and today I have been involved in some type of economic, community or private development for 17 years.

Today, as an economic development professional I have never been more involved in the future of my profession as I am today. Nationally, I serve on our professional organization’s public policy advisory committee. I have also been involved on a committee that helps direct future economic development research. Statewide, I serve on the board of our state economic development organization and will be chair of this group starting in July. I say this not to impress  you but merely to show I interact with a lot of people in my profession.

Jeff Finkle, Executive Director of the International Economic Development Council (IEDC) gave a  presentation called “The  Future of the Profession”  some months ago at a leadership conference in Houston, Texas. His presentation centered on a poll conducted about the IEDC about the future of the profession. Here are some of the impressions I came away with:

1. There is more pressure than ever from elected officials to see performance from EDO’s. They are under pressure to show how every public dollar is being spent, so in turn they are putting more pressure on local EDO’s for results.

2. Funding is down. Due to the recession, tax receipts are down and some communities are cutting back dramatically. Others are even doing away with entire departments devoted to economic development (which is a mistake that will take a community years to recover from).

3. New strategies are being employed with a concentration on more local business retention, entrepreneurship  and cleantech jobs (green, sustainability).

These are just some of the things that were in his report. The bottom line is that as economic development professionals we have to become more disciplined than ever. I’ve often said that economic development is the “undiciplined dicipline”.  The people engaged in Economic development as a profession did not have a chance to go to graduate school and get a degree in Economic Development. There are very few programs that address the discipline of the economic developer.

No one has developed that one curriculum that anoints you in the profession. We come from all walks of life, experiences, environments, and education. Until one is in the profession for a while, there is not an advanced educational “course” that allows one to hone their skills and have a context that is common to all (IEDC’s Certified Economic Developer designation).

There will always be some type of economic development profession, but it changes often. What is the discipline needed to be a professional economic developer? I think my training in Public Administration has been key to my success. Perhaps schools of Public Administration should develop a concentration in economic development practice. My alma mater has various concentrations including one in non-profit administration, but that isn’t quite the same.

Working in the private sector has also been important to me. Learning how a profit is made and watching small business owners struggle to make payroll and stretch out payments has been invaluable. I think the future of the profession is good, but I believe we need a better foundation for new people coming into the profession. We need to be more on the cutting edge in best practices and we need to move quicker to drop old practices that are unsustainable to the professional and the communities they live in (attraction, incentives, etc.)

Next week I will spend some time talking about that part of economic development that many are suddenly recognizing as the saviors to their programs, but one some have recognized for years as the keystone to successful communities: business retention and small business development.

The following are excerpts  from an article written by Jeff Finkle, Executive Director of the International Economic Development Council (IEDC) regarding looming funding cuts for economic Development Organizations (EDO) back in 2009. I include it today because the EDC in Bloomington-Normal is facing cuts from one of our local units of government. Mr. Finkle says it better than anyone can:

You Can’t Cut Your Way to Prosperity: Why in Tight Budget Times, Funding for Economic Development Is More Important Than Ever

Everywhere you look, local and state government budgets are on the chopping block. Property tax revenues are hit by the weak housing market, payroll taxes are cut by rising layoffs, and sales tax receipts decline with lowered consumer spending. Add to that higher fuel transportation and health care costs, and governments are buckling under the stress.¹

As budgets go under the knife, many economic development organizations will find themselves vulnerable, if they haven’t already. Yet it’s now, more than ever, when investment in economic development is critical to maintaining a community’s short-term and long-term health.

The key message to your community’s leadership is: You can’t cut your way to prosperity. Here is why:

• The time to invest is at the bottom of the cycle. If you don’t stay invested, you lock in your losses and miss out on the rebound. Warren Buffett makes this case in a recently published column in the New York Times: “Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful….bad news is an investor’s best friend.” This applies to economic development in multiple ways. Now is the time to help that strong company increase its market share, to help laid-off workers hatch business ideas they’ve incubated for years, to ensure you’re creating the supply of workers and buildings that will put you in the strongest possible position for recovery. As Buffett notes, “If you wait for the robins, spring will be over.”

• Investing now is an opportunity to differentiate your community, as others cut back on marketing and promotion.

As budgets inevitably are cut, EDOs that stay in the game have less competition and more opportunities, for business attraction or building international trade relationships, for example. While business won’t go on as usual, there still will be companies looking to move and expand – and your EDO is more likely to stand out as one of fewer in marketplace.

• In tough economic times, your work is more important than ever. Cutting economic development programs is akin to killing the goose of golden-egg fame. Who else is going to secure jobs and investment in your community? The blows brought by the economic downturn would hit your region even harder if it weren’t for existing economic development programs and the work done to date.

Indeed, there are logical arguments for investing in nearly every area of economic development right now:

o Business retention and expansion. You need to gauge the health of your businesses, give a boost to the weak ones and save those jobs. Conversely, you may have other businesses that have hoarded cash and are ready to expand or buy other companies – you need to know which they are and get in front of them.

o Marketing and business attraction. As mentioned above, if you can preserve your budget for these programs while others’ are slashed, your community and EDO are more likely to stand out in a less-crowded field. Showing up is half the job.

o Workforce development. During economic downturns, many workers go back to school. In light of current economic times, do you know what the demand industries of the future will be? You should be playing a role to nurture the workforce that will be ready for these jobs – creating internships, career programs in high schools, community college courses/certificates, etc.

o Entrepreneurship programs. If your community is experiencing major downsizing, this is a good time to get laid-off workers into entrepreneurship programs. That strategy paid off in Kalamazoo, Mich., after Pfizer was bought, and in Newton, Iowa, after Maytag, to name just a couple of communities that were determined not to let their talent languish.

o Small business programs. You may not be able to do much to help major, multi-national corporations that are subject to global trends – but you can help your small businesses, with revolving loan funds, incubator support, marketing, connections, economic gardening, and more.

The Bloomington-Normal EDC is faced with budget cuts form local government. We are communicating and working very hard to make sure they understand our position and making the points above. If you are reading this in Bloomington Illinois contact your City Council members and help them understand.

If you are reading this in your own community, check and see to make sure the local government is not selling your EDO short. It is important, right now to make sure you are able to provide services, help local businesses, and build for the future.

The health-care bill passed the house last night and pending some parliamentary procedure as of yet unforeseen it will probably pass the Senate and become the law of the land. I am not writing today to talk about the merits of the plan, but to consider real reform that addresses the real issues of health-care in America. The debate over the last year was less about “government takeover of health-care” which to me would mean that all doctors and health-care providers would be employed by the federal government and more about who is going to pay for health-care and who is going to get health-care.

But the real question should center around “how we deliver health-care”. According to the only speech I heard about health-care this year, and delivered by the president of the largest health-care system in Houston, in the United States, we have a system that provides “curative” healthcare. We don’t have a proactive system. We get, sick and then we go to the doctor to get cured. We have diabetes, cancer, troubles with obesity, we go and get prescribed, drugged, chemo’d and banded. We usually don’t think about how we got there.

Today’s TED video is from TEDMED and provides an alternative view of how technology can provide us with some answers as to how we deliver health-care. Why do we have great companies with great technology providing awesome solutions to our problems in our world, and we are always slow to employ them? Watch the video and ask yourself, what have we been debating about over the past many months?

Many people ask me how can we go to Washington DC and ask the feds for money in a time when the federal deficit is higher than it’s ever been, and earmarks are pork and wasteful. I understand what they are thinking and how they feel. I too, have always had some trepidation in taking this trip each year. But when I fully think about it, it becomes clear and I am once again excited about moving forward with this effort. You see, One Voice isn’t about wasteful pending, and it isn’t about pork. It is about many other things. This is why I still believe in One Voice:

1. It is our first amendment right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”. In the context of the Constitution and One Voice, what does this mean? I think it means that as citizens we have every right to go to Washington DC and ask our elected leaders for the things we believe are important. This ranges from the implementation of programs designed to defend our borders and punish those who might hurt our citizens, to health-care to immigration, to small business to unfair taxes. But it also means that we have the right, and I would even argue “duty” to ask for some of the dollars we send to the federal government back. We want to bring these dollars back to our own community to spend on projects that make us a quality place, and place where business and families can prosper. Therefore our grievance is, “We want some of our money back”

2. Our request for funding for an appropriation is not for dollars that are “above the budget”. All we ask is that our community be given the opportunity to show how these projects will be beneficial to us. Should a career bureaucrat following the rules in the federal register decide when and how our community is going to benefit due to some program that has arcane rules and national goals that don’t even come close to our needs? I say no. We send our congressional delegation to Washington DC to do our good work and represent us. The best thing they can do from time to time is make sure that we have an opportuntiy to share in our national wealth.

3. Our requests are well thought out and can withstand the  front page of any newspaper or media scrutiny. We have no “bridge to nowhere” (by the way, which if you looked at it was actually a decent project, its problem was the fast moving media frenzy that occurred after someone had the audacity to criticize it and subsequently become the poster child for waste and pork), we have good projects, and good outcomes. Our requests make it easy to for our congressional delegation to support.

Those are three strong reasons why asking our congressman or women for funding for good projects is right, fair and our duty. I love coming to Washington DC and spending time on Capitol Hill trying to convince my elected leaders to find a way to fund our projects. There are so many groups, delegations and people milling about, waiting to meet with their elected officials to tell them their needs. Autism research, green energy alternatives, composting, small business outreach programs, and a whole host of other ideas are brought to their attention every day. This what makes us America. I can’t imagine any other place on earth where we get to do this.