Pelosi's SPUR earmarkBy Tim Redmond
Nancy Pelosi has stuck a $231,000 earmark in the federal budget to help the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association build a new Urban Center in San Francisco. The move stirred up some controversy on the floor of the House today, when Rep. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican who likes to criticize earmarks, asked whether federal money ought to be going to a private nonprofit think tank.
It's a relatively tiny amount of money -- the who-really-gives-a-shit level -- and some good progressive people love the idea of a SPUR Urban Center -- a downtown building that could be a community center of sorts for city planning issues. I'm not sure I hate it myself.
"We want to become much more public and democratic," Jim Chappell, SPUR's president, told me when I called him just now about the earmark. Pelosi's money, he said, "is a statement of confidence in our cities and our program by a federal government that has declared war on cities."
But SPUR has over the years been way on the wrong side of a lot of important planning issues, and is still dominated by developers and their architects, and ... I don't know. It struck me a worth noting.
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Comments (1)
Some of us have been talking about forming a progressive SPUR to support progressive research into all aspects of urban public policy at least since Gonzalez 2003. There are apparently some progressive land use geeks who are considering trying to "take over" SPUR.
Once progs "took over" SPUR, and I'm not sure how that would happen as the Board of Directors self perpetuates and is laden with corporate mucky mucks, the corporate funding base would evaporate rapidly.
The Board tolerates (what they view as) "socialists" on staff as a progressive fig leaf for the real work of corporate welfare that happens in the endorsements committee where Jim Lazarus more than likely calls the shots and rustles up cash for electioneering.
SPUR talks the good talk, but once the first dollar needs to be raised from business taxes to be spent on any progressive policies, they get cold feet, decry municipal and union waste, and move on to less expensive projects.
Interesting how a think thank that carries water for downtown is seeking out corporate welfare for its office space, but corporate welfare knows no bounds, socializing risk and expense and privatizing profit.
There are some good folks at SPUR, but they are on a leash. We can argue about how long that leash is, and what kind of relative autonomy staff might enjoy, but a leash is still a leash nonetheless.
Unleash the policy geeks!
-marc
Posted by marc | June 28, 2007 02:22 PM