<body><div><figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=2fINkm_1H25IZTz00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=2fINkm_1H25IZTz00" width="1200" height="629" ><figcaption>At center, Marc Dunkelman was the keynote speaker at the fifth annual Place Summit on Thursday (Nov. 12). At left, Graham Cobb, a former chamber executive, was the moderator.</figcaption></figure>Author Marc Dunkelman discussed the difficulty of completing projects even with support, the laws implemented after bad projects were completed, the importance of public input and the need for decision-makers.Dunkelman, a fellow in public policy at the Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy at Brown University, was the keynote speaker Thursday (Nov. 12) at the fifth annual Place Summit in Fayetteville. Graham Cobb, an Arkansas native and a former chamber leader, was the moderator. Cobb recently joined Kansas City, Mo.-based commercial contractor Centric as its market executive for Northwest Arkansas and is leading Centric’s expansion into the region.Cobb and Dunkelman spoke as part of the three-day summit hosted by Urban Land Institute Northwest Arkansas. About 250 people registered to attend the event, with workshops, tours and breakout sessions on construction, design, infrastructure and real estate development.Dunkelman wrote “Why Nothing Works” based on his experience working in government and think tanks. He said there were obvious things that needed to get done, but they were impossible to do. The problem wasn’t a lack of leadership in many cases, said Dunkelman, pointing to the number of summit attendees “who want to get things done and see the potential and understand that…what we do today is going to have massive effects on our children, grandchildren and beyond.”However, sometimes good ideas are “put off track for some reason,” even if they have a lot of support, he said. In the 1950s and ‘60s, projects were completed much faster, he said. Some were good, and some were bad. He wanted to know what had changed.“The story of this book is that something profound happened in America in the late 1960s and early 1970s,” he said. “Not only did we become sort of aware of how bad it could be when powerful people made bad decisions, but we created a whole infrastructure to make it so that when you want to do something big, there are so many permits, approvals, efforts, competing interests, most of who actually have good intentions.”Before writing “Why Nothing Works,” he had read “The Power Broker,” a book about Robert Moses, the most powerful bureaucrat in New York City from the 1930s to the ‘60s. One chapter described a 1-mile stretch of expressway Moses built across the South Bronx as part of the South Bronx Expressway. Moses wanted to connect New Jersey and Long Island. He didn’t take anyone’s input into account, and the project impacted thousands of homes.Dunkelman was reading this as his train from Washington, D.C., arrived at New York Penn Station. It’s “New York’s front door,” he said. “More people go through Penn Station every day than LaGuardia, Newark and Kennedy combined.” Penn Station was beautiful but needed renovation. It was taken down in the 1960s to make room for Madison Square Garden and was never renovated. He wanted to know why Moses could get projects done, but Penn Station couldn’t be renovated even when people supported the work.Dunkelman said he was told Northwest Arkansas comprises 31 cities and that everyone has a different view of what should happen next.“And that’s what happened with Penn Station,” he said.Multiple organizations and the city, state and federal governments had differing views on what should happen. “And in the absence of a process designed to metabolize those differences, it was impossible to actually get anything done. That’s a story from New York, but it’s a story from everywhere.”Another book he talked about regarded connecting wind farms in the Oklahoma Panhandle to the Tennessee Valley Authority. The project would require transmission lines to run from Oklahoma, across Arkansas and into Tennessee. The project was not completed amid mixed support.“The question is, in places where people don’t exactly agree on the vision, how do we come to some sort of swift, fair…way forward?” he said.There’s a fantasy that if people are brought together to “talk it out… they will emerge with some sort of plan that they can all agree on,” he said. “That’s just not how it works.” He said some projects won’t happen, but “that can’t mean that in all circumstances…we can’t do big things that are going to have…negative effects on some small portion of the population.” Changes will be needed to be prosperous. “So the question in American life today is how do we create a system where we can make tough decisions in a swift, certain and fair way?”The problem goes back to the founding of the United States, when states had veto power over what the federal government did, he said. The U.S. Constitution corrected this about 10 years later. In the 1960s, Floyd Dominy built many dams in the West that damaged the environment, “but no one could stop him,” Dunkelman said. “We reacted to that by creating a series of process changes to make it harder. So those two extremes, one in which everyone has a veto and one in which one person is sort of domineering… These are the two extremes that we have.“In the book, I tried to argue that there are two well-intentioned but conflicting impulses in American life that reflect all of this,” he said. One is that central power is required. No one person is going to build all city infrastructure for everyone. “You have to put it in the hands of someone who’s going to choose where the sewer lines are going to go, where the parks are going to be, where the buses are going to run.”Alexander Hamilton wanted the Constitution. He wanted the central ability to make change. Thomas Jefferson was afraid of this. The author of the Declaration of Independence didn’t want central power. He wanted to put power in the hands of ordinary people, Dunkelman said.“And we have vacillated between these two views for the whole of our history.”He said that over the years, Hamilton-type people “had done some amazing things and also done some terrible things. They allowed the big agriculture companies to throw DDT on our crops… They’ve done the interstate highways, which were pretty terrific between cities.” But the highways also went through cities and impacted them. “So we created, both nationally and regionally and in cities themselves, all sorts of checks: the National Environmental Policy Act, which created the EIS’s that you all have to do when you’re trying to build something, an environmental impact study that can take years and years; National Historic Preservation (Act), designed to protect homes but can really explode there on a project; mitigation measures, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act.”They’re all meant to protect the environment, but “at the same time, we need to have some ability even when there is a cost, an environmental cost, a trade-off to be had, to figure out how to do that.”People want to figure out how to get things done, he said, but doing so involves trade-offs. Nationwide, people are having similar conversations at events like this summit.“There are things that we’re going to have to give up in order to make things better on the whole,” he said. “And we need processes that allow us to get that done.”The system needs to include an opportunity for people who might be affected by the proposed project to provide input, Dunkelman said. But there needs to be an end, and someone needs to decide.“The decision should be quick, certain and fair,” he said. “And I think we should be extending that sort of ethos to the way we make decisions about a much wider variety of issues, housing, transit, transportation, infrastructure, energy transmission, you name it… It’s the endless delay and the endless uncertainty that, I think, in many cases, holds things up.”</div></body>

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Author Marc Dunkelman discussed the difficulty of completing projects even with support, the laws implemented after bad projects were completed, the importance of public input and the need for decision-makers. Dunkelman, a fellow in public policy at the Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy at Brown University, was the...

Dunkelman talks about challenges in getting projects done

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Author Marc Dunkelman discussed the difficulty of completing projects even with support, the laws implemented after bad projects were completed, the import

Dunkelman talks about challenges in getting projects done

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