Change Won’T Bring Results That Effort Will

A friend uses his cat’s water dish as a barometer for change.

If the water has frozen solid, my friend knows it is time to fire up the big furnace he uses for his work and begin the hard work of creating works of blown glass art.

If the water still ripples in the bowl, he knows the weather is still too warm for working in front of a hot furnace.

The change is inevitable. My friend doesn’t need a rocket scientist to tell him that. A cat’s water dish will do.

We don’t all have a cat.

We all, however, must deal with change. One day the cat’s dish will freeze.

Political opportunists, owners of losing football teams and anyone who is looking to cover up some shortfall in creativity or hard work knows this. So, with 100 percent certainty of success, they will call for change as if it were a solemn and risky pronouncement.

Bogus.

Public declarations about change mean absolutely nothing. An example of such nothingness is the gloomy TV ads being run by some grumpy business people in Spokane, ads suggesting that a change in leadership at City Hall is all that is needed to address the changing Spokane economic and political climate.

This is a media trick as old and as hollow as a piece of cheap chocolate at Christmas.

But calling for change will sucker some people who would like to believe calling for a change is the same as responding to difficult, often intractable problems.

Does Spokane have too many low-income households? Absolutely. Does the city need more high-tech jobs to build the tax base? Without question.

Would the election of a new city council add a single dollar to a low-income household? No.

Would new leadership at City Hall add a single year of education to a local work force that is short of engineers and technicians needed for high-tech companies? No.

City Councilwoman Roberta Greene was right on the mark a few days ago to challenge the recent TV ads and their supporters. Change to what? she asked.

She knows that the current Spokane City Council has had to make hard choices, not just sit in the peanut gallery and shout insults. And the City Council has done a decent job. They got rid of an ineffective police chief, held up on the Lincoln Street bridge and backed the restoration efforts of downtown.

Be wary of those who call for change but dodge the details. Calling for change is simple.

Making changes is difficult, and often much of what we desire to change is out of our control or will bring on unintended consequences.

Here is another example of the confusion between calling for change and doing the hard work that inevitable change requires.

Recently, much has been made in Spokane of a Forbes magazine article that rated Spokane poorly as a place to do high-tech business.

Let’s assume, for a moment, that Spokane is a tough place for high tech. No magic wand for creating better-paying high-tech jobs will be brought to this problem by new leaders and new politicians at City Hall.

High-tech jobs come with high-tech companies that have something to sell and that want to sell it from this part of the country.

Does Spokane have a high-tech work force? Does the city have any particular advantage over the hundreds of other cities that are trying to woo high tech, and have more high-tech businesses already located there?

Have you noticed that three of the fastest growing high-tech states are California, Texas and Florida, where computer workers can wear shorts in January?

Has anybody heard the phrase Aryan Nations and remembered that about half the high-tech work force coming out of college these days is nonwhite?

The point here is that TV ads calling for change at City Hall don’t begin to get at the underlying issues involved in bringing high-tech jobs to Spokane.

In politics, football or the building of a high-tech economy, the seeds of change must be planted long before the harvest.

In Spokane, thankfully, some important seeds are in the ground.

The region’s public schools are being rebuilt and re-energized with tougher statewide standards. The schools will, in fact, soon begin producing better students and become a draw for outside businesses.

The air and water are cleaner, thanks to field burning changes and the recognition by local government that money needs to be spent on waste water treatment. This will help retain the high quality of life, as will the continued adoption of growth management guidelines.

The downtown Terrabyte Triangle of fiber optic cables is a neat idea and one being promoted by traditional downtown businesses working under the Downtown Spokane Partnership.

Bernard Daines, a brilliant high-tech innovator, this week signed a preliminary agreement to build a high-tech business park on land to be purchased from the Inland Empire Paper Company, a subsidiary of the company that publishes this newspaper.

That’s not enough.

More hard work, more inclusive community discussions and more cooperation and partnerships between business and government will be needed if Spokane hopes to tap into the changing global economy built around knowledge workers and no geographic boundaries.

The key point to remember is that change, or looking into the cat’s water dish and watching for a freeze, isn’t what matters.

It’s what you do once you understand that change is inevitable that makes all the difference.