Long-range thinking

If politics and the economy are getting your goat a little more than usual these days, you’re not alone. The election of President Barack Obama and Democratic majorities in both the U.S. House and Senate certainly transformed the power balance in the country in a direction I favor. But when it comes to making plans for the future, to doing any long-range thinking, that’s about all that’s changed.

It’s become almost impossible now to make sense of the swirl of economic opinion, for instance, about matters utterly vital to us all. Commentators and analysts change their minds weekly. The news cycle that thrives on novelty and sensationalism hypes every itch and fidget in the market with such drama that most of us can’t tell a tick from a catastrophe.

Does anyone really understand what’s happened to the financial markets — beyond greed, criminal cunning, government collusion in corruption, the delusional self-entitlement of the rich, and bookkeeping black magic that would make a numbers runner blush?

The gladiatorial freak show of gross-out hate radio that purveys slander dolled up as insight has stunk up American politics so badly, and is so fundamentally disgusting, that most of us have turned away to preserve the contents of our stomachs.

So how does one makes sense of all this? Stumbling along like everyone else, I’m leaning toward trying to create a new set of standards to help me judge the credibility of opinions, pronouncements and decisions.

I’ve only come up with one, so far, and it’s an old timer. It’s that’s based on a belief that long-range planning is both safer and more innovative and responsive to current events than short-term reactions and profiteering.

Take the Tax Increment Development District (TIDD) situation at the New Mexico Legislature this year. TIDDS are, of course, government subsidies in the form of tax breaks. And such things in the past have always been given to businesses that represent the status quo, as defined and favored by those in power.

This year the definition shifted. Sun-Cal, the west-side developer charged with trying to promote more sprawl in Albuquerque, lost its bid for a TIDD, and may have to chuck its project and withdraw to California.

Sprawl, which was once defined as the inevitable and eternal status quo, is now being viewed as a short-term bad risk in this climate of drought, burst housing bubbles, deep recession, and sure-to-be-soon rising fuel prices. Legislators apparently didn’t think Sun-Cal could come up with the jobs it had promised before and during in its frenzied advertising blitz to secure the TIDD.

But the Legislature granted TIDDs to major infill projects in uptown, the new center of the city — one for Winrock’s renovation and expansion and one for Hunt Uptown LLC, a proven job provider in the area. Infill is, by its nature, an effort at long-term thinking, at least in a city in which sprawl as king is a probably a thing of the past as far as investors with any brains are concerned.

Long-range thinking did win out in prominent other ways at the Legislature this year. Both the House and the Senate voted unanimously to strip cities of the power to condemn water beyond their boundaries. In essence, the Legislature is forcing cities to rethink their futures, now that the ultimate bailout of outright water theft is no longer available to them. And a new law extends the state engineer’s power to regulate water in deep aquifers below 2,500 feet, effectively giving him oversight of drilling for brackish water to be desalinated for urban use.

This is a major step in long-range sanity, and one that had to buck the oil and gas industry that opposed it. The old limits were put in place so the state engineer had no say over drilling for oil through deep aquifers, fresh or briny.

The Legislature also saw into the future and created tax credits for companies that create electricity using solar power, and it increased tax credits for people who solarize their homes.

While lawmakers were farsighted in coming up with subsidies for vocational training for so called “green job” workers in alternative energy and the building trades, they were myopic failures when it had to do with worker’s compensation for ranchers and farmers, which they rejected. The next two to three years will see something of an economic renaissance in local food production, and potentially ramped up employment and higher production levels in agriculture and livestock businesses. It’s dangerous and unfair for rural workers in a growing industry to be without adequate worker’s insurance.

But really the most farsighted action had to do with an attempt to limit the state Oil Conservation Division’s ability to regulate oil and gas drilling and the inevitable spillage into clean aquifers. The attempt to hogtie the agency failed, to the long-range health benefit of us all.

Perhaps the most optimistic message of this year’s legislative session in New Mexico is that, despite the insanity and decadence that is putrefying the national political scene, the people’s basic work is being carried out here, and probably across the country in state legislatures who often make their counterparts in Washington seem like raving lunatics who couldn’t tell a long-range plan from a straight stretch of highway across a desert to a new subdivision.