Tag Archives: kansas city

Trying to Attract the Tourists

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Unique tourism campaigns are nothing new. Governing magazine recently highlighted several:

As the saying goes, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. That’s exactly what South Dakota did with a new tourism approach a few years ago.

After hearing from focus groups across the country that the Dakotas were nothing more than a “barren wasteland,” the state tourism agency came up with a unique campaign angle: At least we’re not Mars, an actual barren wasteland.

The voiceover in a TV ad says: “Mars. The air: not breathable. The surface: cold and barren. … South Dakota. Progressive. Productive. And abundant in oxygen. Why die on Mars when you can live in South Dakota?”

Their efforts may have paid off: The state has had a record number of tourists in the past two years. 

Instagram on the Road

Last year, Minnesota decided to tackle the perception that the state is just a cold, snowy place by bringing its attractions to you. Really.

Explore Minnesota Tourism, the state’s tourism committee, created traveling photo booths featuring two of the state’s main attractions: the First Avenue music club, which was featured in the 1984 Prince movie Purple Rain, and scenes of the Minnesota outdoors.

The state set up the booths in cities across the country, ranging from Denver to Chicago to Kansas City, and modeled them after Instagram to encourage people to share their photos on social media.

The Prince booth came complete with a fog machine, purple lighting and a drum kit, while the other booth featured a canoe and a machine that generated morning mist and bird calls.

Come Get an Operation

San Diego doesn’t need to do much to convince people to visit: It has legendary beaches, a world-famous zoo and plenty of sunshine. Even so, the city is now betting it can convince tourists to get that elective surgery they’ve always wanted in between getting a tan or frolicking on the beach.

In 2017, city leaders launched DestinationCare San Diego, a public-private partnership to get more tourists to think of San Diego as a place to get medical care — and recover afterwards. The city hopes to compete with world-renowned medical destinations like the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota or the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.

The city does have a strong medical sector. It’s home to the University of California health systems and Rady Children’s Hospital, which is ranked one of the best children’s hospitals in the country.

Businesses Disapprove of Incentive “Border War” in KC

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When an Illinois company, for example, moves to Indiana because of high tax rates or other business climate concerns, most consider that a good thing. When Missouri and Kansas battle over Kansas City area organizations, some businesses view it as wasteful spending on tax incentives. Governing reports:

Seventeen prominent business leaders, including top officials with Hallmark and Sprint Nextel, recently wrote a letter to the governors of Kansas and Missouri, asking them to put an end to the “economic border war.”

“Because of our unique bi-state community, too often these incentives are being used to shuffle existing business back and forth across the state line with no net economic benefit or new jobs to the community as a whole,” the business leaders wrote.

The fact that the business community has come out against this practice hasn’t moved politicians to stop devoting scarce tax dollars to it. Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback denies that his state is “poaching” companies and is unapologetic about seeking new employers wherever they may be found, including just over the border in Missouri.

Sly James, the new mayor of Kansas City, Mo., says it’s time his city makes a move. His predecessor, Mark Funkhouser, was opposed to using tax incentives to lure businesses. (Funkhouser is a Governing contributor.) That opposition, James argues, handed Kansas an advantage. “The days of sitting back and watching it happen are over,” James told reporters at an economic development event. “Mutually assured destruction only works if both sides are armed.”

But some residents agree that their region should be presenting a united front. When a company’s interested in relocating, says Jeff Kaczmarek, the president of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, there’s a “well worked out protocol” for banding together. If a company is moving in from Seattle or Denver, there’s no squabbling about which jurisdiction is going to try to lure it. “Everybody agrees that the best approach is a regional approach,” Kaczmarek says.

It’s only when a company is already established in the area that the bidding wars take place, it seems. “Money that goes to bribing some company to move 10 miles across some obsolete political border is money wasted,” says Richard C. Longworth, author of a book about heartland economics in the global era.

It may happen everywhere, but the practice of throwing tax dollars at companies has become so prevalent around Kansas City that it has, in fact, generated some new business. Realtors are benefiting by helping companies find short-term leases, which have become fashionable because businesses know they may be moving in the near future to take advantage of new incentives.

California Still Not Learning Hard Lessons on Education

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Oh, California. You gave us good wine, the Grateful Dead, and Reggie Miller. We should probably be a little kinder to you than we are. But you don’t make it easy. The Heartland Institute asserts the Golden State just isn’t getting it when it comes to education, throwing money at a failing system instead of letting the system work for the kids. Here’s an excerpt: 

Frustrated by some tough budget years, California public school officials want a court to declare the state’s Byzantine school finance system unconstitutional. The stated goal of the lawsuit is to circumvent lawmakers (and reality) by asking a judge to force billions of dollars in unaffordable education spending increases.

But the system isn’t "unconstitutional" so much as unworkable. The way to achieve an equitable and affordable public school system in the Golden State isn’t more funding to prop up a bloated bureaucracy. The answer is to fund all children equally by letting the funding follow the child. The answer is choice.

This is hardly a radical idea. Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania, for example, offer tax credits to corporations and individuals who finance scholarships for children from low-income families. Even Sweden lets families choose the school they want, public or private, backed by a tax-subsidized scholarship…

The education establishment views the case as a bureaucracy preservation problem, which evades the real problem – the failure of that bureaucracy to educate California’s children. Students only enter the equation as a pretext for propping up the salaries and benefits of public employees.

The fact is, court-ordered school spending has never translated to academic success. A federal court judge ruled in 1985 that school officials in Kansas City, Mo., had to double local property taxes to fund $2 billion aimed at improving performance in low-income and mostly minority schools. In the blizzard of spending that followed over the next two decades, students got state-of-the-art science facilities, Olympic-size swimming pools, small classes – and no measurable improvement in academic outcomes.

Voters’ efforts to boost school funding haven’t translated to success either. Proposition 98, which Californians passed in 1988, locked California into a budget-busting mandate directing at least 40 percent of the state budget toward elementary and secondary education. Since its passage, California has seen negligible gains in academic outcomes and lagged well behind mediocre national trends.

What the California case needs is a second group of plaintiffs to intervene and argue the only workable way to secure the fundamental right to an education in a truly equitable fashion is to fund every child equally. The court certainly could declare the entire system unconstitutional – and then insist that funding follow the child to any school that meets California’s content standards.

Lasting reform requires shifting from the stifling chaos of the current "bureaucracy-based" system to the spontaneous order that will unfold as we fund the child. That’s the only system that comports with the spirit and the letter of the "equal protection" clause in any constitution.