As published in the March 1, 2006 Toledo Business Journal
Tony Reams
Toledo Metropolitan Area Council of Governments
Toledo Business Journal recently met with Tony Reams, president, Toledo Metropolitan Area Council of Governments. He shared the following thoughts.
TBJ: TMACOG recently held its 75th Biannual General Assembly titled Prepare, Preserve, Partner, and Prosper. Can you discuss how your organization works with regional entities to meet these goals?
TR: We work on issues that all of our members bring forth, primarily related to transportation and environmental issues in the region. For example, there are major stormwater issues in the City of Toledo and throughout the region, and all of the communities have to deal with them. TMACOG formed a stormwater coalition where we work together to comply as a region.
TBJ: What priorities do you see for TMACOG members in the area of regional transportation?
TR: We’re working on a long-range plan that will determine where we spend about $5 billion between 2007 and 2035. Many of us addressing this issue probably won’t be around in 2035, and we want to make sure that what we leave is something that will allow future generations in the region to prosper.
We recognize as an organization that you can’t pave the whole state. When we focus on transportation, we focus on the movement of goods and people. That means using what we have the best we can, and improving technologies and not just adding lanes to highways.
For the long-range plan, which we are calling “On the Move,” last year we began establishing where community leaders as well as average citizens believe that development or change might occur in the foreseeable future. We brought people together, so we could see where growth has occurred and where there were concentrations of population and jobs. We’re doing this so we can stay ahead of the curve when it comes to what we are going to do to develop our transportation resources.
This plan is going to be our focus because it lays out the blueprint for where we think the region is going to grow. By law, we’re responsible for transportation issues for Lucas and Wood counties and the southern three townships of Monroe County, Michigan. What happens there, because it’s the urban core of the region, impacts our other members.
The plan will be complete next year. It isn’t our plan to implement as far as the growth is concerned; it’s our plan to say: “This is where we’re told the growth is going to be. This is where the people who make the investments say that it’s going to be, and we need to be prepared to accommodate that growth in an orderly fashion.”
TBJ: What other transportation initiatives are in place?
TR: We also do a transportation improvement program, which is a four-year plan that basically runs between $200 and $300 million per year as to the amount of money that’s spent in our three-county area on major transportation projects and programs that are controlled by the members of TMACOG. They come together and decide the timing and sequence.
You have so much money to spend; you can’t go beyond that. We work efficiently and sometimes are ahead of where we budgeted so we borrow money from other metropolitan planning organizations, or MPOs, to keep regional projects moving. The other 15 or so MPOs all have the same issues that we have and the same budget constraints. When you get the funding, you have to spend it or it’s forfeit back to the State of Ohio that has a backlog of projects to use it for. Because most of our members have learned to deal with this so well over the last seven or eight years, we actually borrow money from our counterparts around the state.
We’re building projects that are ready to go sooner than they would have otherwise, knowing that we’ll have to repay that at some point in the future; we’ll have to hold back projects to let them do theirs. It’s a win-win for the MPOs because if we borrow money from them, we pay it back. If they don’t use it and it’s forfeit to ODOT, it never comes back. They might have very valid projects, but for environmental or other reasons, they can’t get those projects on track fast enough to spend the money, and then they’re stuck.
TBJ: Can you explain the environmental issues that TMACOG addresses?
TR: For environmental issues, our primary focus is water quality, but we also have air quality issues that we have to deal with. We’re in non-attainment for ozone as of last year. It’s a significant economic development and regional quality of life issue. TMACOG is working with the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on strategies to regain compliance by 2010; the EPA submits the complete plan. We think in terms of transportation because it’s a leading issue there, but we bring everybody to the table to deal with that issue because it isn’t just transportation. It’s movement of goods – that’s business, that’s commerce.
TBJ: What are the environmental priorities?
TR: Obviously, the Maumee Watershed. We’re right here at the crux of the largest bodies of fresh water in the world. There are several Great Lakes initiatives that we’ve been working on. Kurt Erichsen, our vice president of environmental planning, has been working with an international effort to identify what it’s going to take to restore the Great Lakes. It’s about a $20 billion number. We’ve been working very steadily as an organization with our counterparts around the nation and with US EPA, but we run into a problem because $20 billion is a big number.
We need to protect, improve, and promote the Great Lakes. Part of that is we need to clean up our own act in the watershed. We have to make sure that we’re not discharging substances into the watershed that are going to harm that great resource. We try to come together to deal with that. We have sub-groups of TMACOG – Portage Watershed Council, Maumee RAP (Remedial Action Plan) – that work very hard at dealing with those water issues.
One of the things transportation and the environment hold in common is that they don’t respect political boundaries. Our membership is getting to be very good at remembering that state borders aren’t that critical, either. There are a lot of issues where we have to ignore borders, because, for example, the Maumee River isn’t just in Lucas County; we can’t find the solution just in Lucas County.
TBJ: Please comment on businesses and the environment. What plans do you have in this area?
TR: We do what’s called a 208 plan, named after section 208 of the Clean Water Act, which is primarily concerned with sewers and sewerage. Jurisdictions are always building new sewers to serve new housing and industry, meaning that the 208 must be regularly updated to reflect changes and look for potential conflicts.
We also work on the regulatory policies to meet the national standard for water quality. The Stormwater Standards Manual is a document being prepared jointly by jurisdictions in the metro area to meet EPA stormwater management requirements.
We also have a public awareness program called Give Water a Hand. It tells businesses how to protect water quality as they go about their regular business. We looked at the residential impact previously and this year we’re looking at the business impact.
TBJ: Please explain one of your organization’s key challenges.
TR: Bringing jurisdictions together to work on common issues. For example, we’re working on a Swan Creek pilot project. The Swan Creek watershed has 23 jurisdictions that we have to bring together, and they need to come to some sort of consensus as to what the plan will be. This pilot project encourages jurisdictions to determine priority development and priority conservation areas as part of their land use planning. But the plus side is, in coming together, it makes them eligible for incentives, including lower loan rates and some special considerations for grants. One of the things the funders at the federal and state level look to more and more now is who your partners are.
TBJ: With steep increases in energy costs, can you discuss opportunities available to local governments for use of alternative fuels and renewable energy resources such as wind and solar?
TR: We can’t afford to continue the same types of fuel uses that we have now. We have very significant freight programs that deal with truck as well as rail traffic. As part of that, we have helped bring together some of the aspects of alternative fuel uses and pilot projects, such as TARTA running biodiesel fuel vehicles as part of a study to determine how effective that can be.
We are always looking at the alternatives that are there. It isn’t one of the focuses or charges for TMACOG, but only because our members haven’t asked. One of the neat things about TMACOG is that you can bring it all to the table. We have two core programs: transportation and environment. Whenever our people come together and say they have an issue, we think that issue needs to be addressed regionally. When someone brings an issue to the table, TMACOG finds appropriate experts in the private sector who can come in and show what can be done. We ask our members what they need to make their project or program work.
For energy, we’ve exposed our members to some new ideas. If they say they want to explore a part of it, then we’ll bring people together. We facilitate meetings where they decide how they’re going to do it.
We also do the free Share A Ride program. We have a database of commuters and we work to match them up for carpooling. Because of high gasoline prices, we’ve made and are scheduled to make presentations to a number of area employers we hadn’t met with previously.
TBJ: Can you address the issue of regional economic development and share your thoughts and insights?
TR: Economic development seems to be a buzzword for short-term action, like opening plants or malls. We don’t tend to look at it that way. We look at how we can make the region attractive for folks who want to invest, and that investment brings the jobs. If you really look at economic development, as much as we hear our members are competing with each other for jobs – and in a sense they are for the tax base – but as a region we’re competing for jobs, too. Economic development is all local. Economic sustenance, to maintain economic activity, is regional. You can’t attract someone to Toledo or Maumee or Perrysburg and keep them without a strong region. If the region isn’t strong, then the local economic development may look good this year, but how long is it going to be around? We firmly believe that we need to bring folks together to do that. Our members believe that.
Because we are focused on transportation and environment, we need to be concerned primarily with the movement of goods and the ability to develop or build here, because of air and water quality issues. To the extent that we can maintain a high standard of air and water quality, we are an attractive place to locate or maintain a business.
We work closely with the Regional Growth Partnership, the University of Toledo, the Port Authority, and all of the leadership in the realm of economic development.
TBJ: Are there any other issues that you would like to address?
TR: I think we do a pretty good job of listening – that’s key for us. One of the complaints that I hear about other regional agencies is that you end up getting staff members that have agendas that they want to drive. Our agenda at TMACOG is to make our members’ jurisdictions the best that they can; to help them do that. It means working with them inclusively, not exclusively. I think they all appreciate that.