There’s much more to be said about hydrofracking, the topic of my Citiwire column last week which generated quite a bit of comment.

Consider, for example, the pipelines.

Hydrofracking involves injecting clean water, sand and an undisclosed combination of chemicals into the shale to free the gas from vast lateral reserves that are then brought to the surface. Each well site — known as as a pad — contains multiple wells on three to four acres of compacted gravel. The sites are spaced maybe 40 acres apart and connected by pipelines crisscrossing the land.

In recent years, local fights occurred in many farm areas when windmills started to fill the landscape, kill birds and emit noise heard at great distances. People worried about the impact on the land of the pipeline grid required to distribute the generated energy. In the case of gas, the grid connection is a more complex piping system, indeed one so vast that it is difficult at this point to fully comprehend how many pipelines and multiple compressors will be required as wells proliferate, or how many farms, wetlands, woodlands and mountain tops they will cross. Gas makes windmills look benign in the impact on the land.

“To connect to the larger, interstate pipelines” companies are moving forward “on what is expected to be thousands of miles of smaller pipelines,” Marc Levy of the Associated Press wrote in August. And that doesn’t include a possible network of water pipelines called for to avoid the current endless truck trips required to deliver water.

Pipelines require wide cleared swaths through forests, mountain tops, farm fields and wetlands. The sediment runoff into streams and rivers understandably concerns environmentalists, noting that rising riverbeds from increased sediment accumulation increases flood opportunities. After Hurricane Irene, northeastern Pennsylvania, where I visited, was heavily flooded.

Levy also reported that the EPA raised environmental concerns about a new interstate pipeline project, the MARC-I, which is proposed by a Kansas City company to be constructed in northern Pennsylvania’s rural Endless Mountains region. The EPA noted that the line, which would travel into New York, would pose the threat of pollution to 111 sensitive streams and water bodies and split 39 miles of undeveloped forest and farm land in an area that supports a robust ecosystem, high quality of life and recreation. Nevertheless, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission found “no significant impact” and approved the project, thus giving the company the power of eminent domain to confiscate private property for the pipeline.

Gas needs to be compressed at multiple points along a route to flow through a pipeline. Compressor stations are required at close intervals. Compressors clean the gas of impurities before it is piped into peoples’ homes down the line. The noise from these compressors can be deafening.

Mountain and hilltops seem to be the preferred sites for drill pads and holding areas. They are out of sight, for one thing, and avoid the run-off into creeks and streams that has been a problem. No one sees them until the burning off of the methane (mostly at night), although some companies claim to be recapturing the methane that should be required. If methane were to be recaptured, a separate pipeline would be needed — or yet more truck trips would be required.

Once windmills are created, that’s it. They are there, complete. The popular belief is that once the well is functioning, all the rigs and other equipment goes away. But gas wells often need refracking as the volume of captured gas diminishes from a well. Then of course, the drill rigs return with all that comes with them.

Roberta Brandes Gratz is an urban critic and author of the newly published The Battle For Gotham: New York In the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs,2010, Nation Books.

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In 1969, Walter Cronkite, in one of his nightly newscasts, called Chattanooga “the dirtiest city in America.” The pollution was so thick that drivers needed headlights to see through the fog, men took two white shirts to work for morning and afternoon, and respiratory deaths were 20 percent higher than national average. Today, Chattanooga is one of the cleanest cities; its success on a number of fronts has raised concern of being too successful.

The city is indeed blessed with the spectacular Tennessee River snaking through it, a setting surrounded by small mountains and woodlands filled with recreational attractions. The 1970 Clean Air Act forced the issue of pollution and by 1972 clean air standards were met. In the meantime, the city was working on big plans for change.

“We were the smart ones,” Mayor Ron Littlefield, a professional planner, told a meeting with the Citistates Group last week. “The city produced a detailed plan, colorful documents and maps, gathered lots of figures and then delivered them to the people. We figured they would recognize our genius and run with it.”

Well, it didn’t happen that way. The plans fell flat, met unanticipated resistance and went nowhere. With a complete reversal of strategy, Littlefield explains, “We discovered that if we brought all the factions to the table first and engaged them in drawing up the plans, they were more likely to support the implementation. It doesn’t stop criticism but it does build the support you need to get things done.”

With the help of the Partners for Livable Communities, in 1983, a cross-section of civic leaders toured European and American cities, returning home with a new set of regeneration ideas. Then, in 1984, with funding from the local Lyndhurst Foundation, the citizen-based Chattanooga Venture process was established to initiate a community-wide visioning process from which a series of goals and projects would emerge. It took 52 meetings in 26 weeks attended by 3,000 people — but a plan did emerge.

A longstanding aquarium idea grew from a “little sideshow on the river” into a huge, privately funded $45 million defining project and was quite controversial. “The fish tank on the river,” the critics called it. Prevailing views identify the aquarium as the catalyst for dozens of good things adding up to downtown renewal.

The process revealed ideas planners hadn’t thought of and could be done quickly. There was a strong call for a Family Violence and Rape Crisis Center, a “real surprise,” Littlefield reports. “Quality of life is about more than the pretty things. We didn’t know we had a battered women problem.”

Another surprise was a strong push to save the lavish 1921 Tivoli Theater, once known as “the jewel of the South” and centrally located on Broad Street, downtown’s spine. It closed in 1961. The city purchased it, slapped on a coat of paint and reopened it in 1963. But the visioning process revealed a strong desire for a full restoration of its elaborate interior notable murals and golden cherub glory. After a $7.5 million restoration, the Tivoli reopened in 1988 and like in many of its counterparts in American downtowns again serves as a centerpiece.

Many distinctive revitalizing projects followed. A free electric bus running the full length of Broad Street carries a million passengers a year. This turned into a veritable economic development project: a new company was formed in Chattanooga, Advanced Vehicle System (AVC), to manufacture the buses and is now one of three such companies in the country.

The 100-year Walnut Street Bridge over the Tennessee River, scheduled for demolition, was restored as a pedestrian and biking passage, connecting downtown to the North Shore neighborhood so effectively that the North Shore experienced an organic rebirth. A waterfront highway was replaced with Riverpark, replete with a variety of recreational uses.

The appealing projects are many — an impressive Hunter Museum of American art and an adjacent arts district, scattered loft conversions, a restored inner city school serving as a very successful school for arts and sciences, and more. But most interesting perhaps is that Chattanooga is still very much an industrial city with many large manufacturing companies, most recently joined by Volkswagen. This “family wages” industrial base, Littlefield notes, remains the heart of the city’s economy.

As good as it all sounds, Chattanooga’s downtown is missing the connective granular city that so many American cities lost during the height of bulldozer urban renewal. An overabundance of parking lots and garages, curb cut drive-in eateries and unfortunate replacement buildings interrupt the flow of what could be a positive pedestrian experience. Residential conversions are scattered — and so far, scarce. One million square feet of empty office space remains a challenge. The small local businesses that give a place character lack visibility. Shop windows offer nothing to stop and look at. The vibrancy of a bustling urban place remains to evolve.
Still, it’s hard to believe the Chattanoogians’ “can do” spirit won’t in time uncover new ideas to make the city center — and, with luck, the entire Chattanooga region — a place of distinction.

Roberta Brandes Gratz is an urban critic and author of the newly published The Battle For Gotham: New York In the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs,2010, Nation Books.

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The words are harsh: Clean-air regulations are under “demagogic assaults.” House Republicans are dangerously “advocating abandonment of toxic regulations” that have demonstrably protected Americans’ health. They’re “ignoring climate change.” In fact, “for some of the most prominent leaders of the Republican party, science has left the building.”

The speaker, William K. Reilly, has gilt-edged Republican credentials. He was a senior staff member of President Richard Nixon’s White House’s Council on Environmental Quality. For four years, he served as President George H.W. Bush’s administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Indeed, Reilly credits the first President Bush’s “monumental contribution to the environment” for his support of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. And when critics assault EPA regulations as “job killers,” Reilly argues EPA rules have had dramatic public health benefits even while the U.S. economy has grown by 200 percent since Nixon signed the original Clean Air Act in 1970.

What I’ve always found fascinating about Bill Reilly, whom I’ve known since the ’70s, is not just the political candor he brings to big issues. Nor just his array of top public service posts including heading the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, directing the Global Water Challenge, and co-chairing the recent National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling.

What I’ve found striking is his equal interest in creating better places — communities, neighborhoods, in which we live. It’s a connection the mainstream environmental community ignored for many of its early years, focused overwhelmingly on issues such as saving the wilderness.

But not Reilly. He was an urbanist before it ever became fashionable — indeed starting in his college days, he explained in a recent lecture at Washington’s the National Building Museum on receiving the prestigious the Vincent Scully Prize for “exemplary” leadership in urban design.

He’d learned from distinguished conservationists, said Reilly, that it’s possible to breathe life and beauty even into the dullest landscape or cityscapes. And from Holly Whyte, author of “The Organization Man,” that density is the secret, not the bane of urban life — that “pedestrians choose the most heavily crowded and trafficked intersections to stop, chat, exchange reciprocal gestures.”

James Rouse, famed developer of festival marketplaces, took Reilly for a tour of his first big hit, Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace. As they passed the low-revenue fruit, vegetable and flower market that had taken up the entire ground floor of the building, Rouse remarked that big developers were mocking him for ignoring “the bottom line.” But Rouse explained what critics missed: “the market is the magnet, it’s what draws the crowds.”

William K. Reilly

As president of the Conservation Fund, then merged with the World Wildlife Fund, Reilly focused in the ’70s both on protection of “exquisite, unspoiled, wild and beautiful places” around the world and creating friendlier, more inviting and inclusive neighborhoods in U.S. cities.

He also chaired the board of Robert McNulty’s Partners for Livable Communities, creating such programs as The Economics of Amenity to convince cities and corporations, even at a time of serious urban flight, that there were greenbacks — and civic gold — in investing in such “frills” as people-oriented parks and plazas, theaters and museums, historic preservation, waterfront revival and sports events.

Check America’s rejuvenated cities, 2012, and it’s clear that work was prophetic. And so is Reilly’s warning of the devastation that today’s steadily advancing climate change may visit on our communities if Congress and the country continue their “sleepwalk” and denial on the issue. He cites cataclysmic multi-billion dollar impacts that may result from rising sea levels, soaring summertime temperatures, insect infestations and the washing away of thousands of miles of critical levees.

“Climate change,” says Reilly, “is to America what the German buildup in the 1930s was to the British — the threat that grows more menacing even as we determinedly pretend it is not there.”

Though while Congress sleeps, Reilly says, industry and cities are starting some of the essential responses. He cites Chicago’s comprehensive Climate Action Plan as an example.

Recalling the City Beautiful movement which flourished in the 1890s and early 1900s, Reilly argues we need a new movement — “the City Sustainable” — for communities that are green, smart and fair. The top priority: to “armor our cities” against climate change’s worst impacts by such practical steps as reduced water use, greater energy efficiency, better insulation, green roofs, reflective pavements, and more tree cover. Along with “a more congenial environment for pedestrians, bicyclists, for public transportation.”

It’s all possible; it’s already being tried in cities, Reilly insists. And, he adds, “It’s very much place-based, in the best sense,” and might help “save us from the ideological gridlock in Washington.”

Will Washington — and especially its combative Republicans — listen? Not very soon, I’d guess. And that’s the quandary, as the climate clock keeps ticking.

Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.

Is natural gas the clean energy source it has been successfully marketed to be? My judgment? No. It may burn more cleanly than other fossil fuels. But the process to create the wells and then to transport the gas — even before and after the actual hydrofracking process — is so destructive of the natural and built environment that it is a wonder anyone can call it clean.

Just visit  Pennsylvania, relatively new to the gas exploration industry that really started ramping up operations two years ago. In this one state, 3,000 wells have been drilled. Thousands more are planned. And already, enormous change has occurred.

Pennsylvania is not the only state to experience intense gas exploration. But it is a popular target because of its location on top of the Marcellus Shale rock formation that also fans out under New York, West Virginia and Ohio. A map of existing and proposed drill sites makes Pennsylvania look like the victim of chicken pox. Add to that the requisite pipelines either in construction or yet to be and it is difficult to imagine any community large or small escaping the impact.

A recent visit to Bradford and Susquehanna Counties in northeastern Pennsylvania, currently a prime drilling target, revealed very troubling impacts that have received little attention so far. On scenic farm roads that never before bordered anything but farms — not even a gas station — industrial sites are sprouting left and right, representing the different segments of the gas production process — compressors, storage tanks, staging sites, maintenance operations and more.

Consider for example the situation in and near the towns of Wyalusing and Montrose. Both are small, historic towns, not quite fitting the description of ‘sleepy’ but, then again, not home to intense activity either. The library in Montrose is packed daily with gas company researchers poring over land deeds. The small hotel in Wyalusing is mostly filled with gas workers or deal makers. The coffee shop conversation on this short, storybook Main Street is filled with complaints about endless midnight truck traffic and news of residents trying to sell or move.

The road between these towns is a bucolic, windy, two-lane farm road. About midway is a staging area for trucks each carrying 50,000 lbs of sand. I observed roughly 30 trucks waiting to deliver to a nearby drill site under construction. The truckers report that each load had been trucked 80 miles from Wellesville, N.Y. One driver noted, that this typical site — a drill pad with six well holes — takes 480 million pounds of sand! At 50,000 pounds per truck driven 80 miles one-way — you do the math. Then calculate diesel fuel burned, exhaust released, road wear caused for that 80 mile trip for one pad of six wells. How could this be defined as clean energy? That doesn’t even begin to touch the controversy of the impact on global warming of the leaked methane during the drilling process.

The enormous consumption of fresh water for both site creation and the drilling process is alarming environmentalists. Construction of a single gas well requires upward of one million gallons of water. That is for just a single gas well. In that same well, the fracking procedure requires upward of five million gallons of water.

The Susquehanna River Basin Commission overseas the industry’s water usage, limiting consumption according to availability and suspending withdrawals when necessary. Some 40 withdrawals were suspended last summer due to low water levels, Andrew Maykuth reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer. “The SRBC,” he reported, estimates “that the industry will need about 30 million gallons a day.” That is a demand equivalent to that of a nuclear reactor.

At this point, no one can honestly say how many wells will cover Pennsylvania or New York. When asked what the impacts are on the area, one local resident laughed. “It is still new for us,” he said. “We’re still learning.”

Roberta Brandes Gratz is an urban critic and author of the newly published The Battle For Gotham: New York In the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs,2010, Nation Books.

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“You’ll be woken in the morning by a convicted murderer.”

It was some years ago (1982), and the governor of Mississippi — William F. Winter — was talking. He’d graciously invited me to spend the night at the Governor’s Mansion. As he predicted, the next morning I was indeed politely awakened by a convict serving as a trustie at the mansion.

So earlier this month, when outgoing Gov. Haley Barbour stirred up a hornet’s nest with his pardon or clemency for over 200 offenders, I wondered if mansion trusties were among the bunch. And indeed, five — including four convicted murderers — were included. I checked with my friend former Gov. Winter (now 88), and he confirmed it was long-standing Mississippi custom — not just to assign several well-behaved and stabilized criminals from the state penitentiary to the mansion, but to suspend their sentences at the end of each governor’s term.

Barbour said he’d had so much confidence in the mansion trusties that he’d let his grandchildren play with them. Winter told me there’d even been one occasion, when other staff was off duty and he was obliged to be out of town, that he’d felt free to leave his wife, feeling ill, to the care of a single murderer trustie.

The Mississippi custom raises an intriguing question: What ever happened to the idea of rehabilitation in American justice as a whole? Historically, notes Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project, it was common for governors to issue a significant number of pardons and commutations — typically just before Christmas, in a spirit of mercy and forgiveness.

But since the 1970s and the “get tough on crime” crusade, we’ve focused almost exclusively on punishment and retribution. We’ve increasingly spurned the idea of possible parole or pardon as an incentive for prisoners’ self-improvement — notwithstanding convincing research showing that even perpetrators of the most serious crimes often mature and become a radically reduced threat to public safety.

In fact, there’s been a virtual explosion of sentences for life imprisonment without parole — up to roughly 140,000 nationally, a doubling as a percentage of all prisoners since 1992. Most of the sentences are for murder, but many also for burglary, robbery, carjacking and the like.

Included are offenders we have reason to fear and want to keep off the streets for several years. But forever? Do we really want to leave all of them with zero hope of ever going free, so that there’s no incentive for reform and good behavior?

Then there’s the cost issue. Increasingly, with life sentences, we’re seeing 50- and 60-year old convicts behind bars. Statistically, they pose scant threat to public safety. But as they age and their health deteriorates, the cost to the public of holding them runs as high as three times that of incarcerating younger convicts.

Is gritting our teeth and being vengeful worth $75,000 a year to hold a mature man who’s already spent many years behind bars? Couldn’t we toss away mandatory sentences and trust parole boards to make sensible case-by-case judgments?

And to speed our rethinking, couldn’t our state governors — and the president — show some initiative through their power of pardon and commutations?

President Obama — surprisingly — is failing miserably on this score. He’s issued just 22 pardons and one commutation, barely exercising his important executive power to correct injustices and excessive sentences. African-Americans, heavily overrepresented in prisons (in comparison to crimes they actually commit), have special reason to be disappointed.

In 2010, for example, Congress reduced penalties for crack cocaine possession (most frequent among blacks) to 18 times the comparative penalty for powder cocaine (more popular among whites). Before, the crack penalty had been 100 times higher. But the change wasn’t made retroactive.

“With a stroke of the pen,” Mauer notes, the president could reduce existing crack sentences to conform to the new standards. Such a move, he said, would represent “justice and fairness” and could even include checks to exclude any convict corrections officials identify as “a terror in prison.”

Governors, Mauer suggests, could also respond to growing public belief that our “war” on drugs is excessive by reducing sentences by some set percentages — from five to three years, for example. Released earlier, prisoners can more easily rebuild their ties to their family and community. The reduced sentences can also deliver substantial economies for hard-pressed state budgets.

The good news is that the politics of reduced sentencing has become less partisan. Some conservative politicians are joining reformers on the left to question our massive incarceration numbers and look for ways to let up on harsh and long sentences while saving public funds.

In that sense, Gov. Barbour has done the nation a favor by reminding us that the broad powers of our elected officials can be used not just to punish wrongdoers, but to help redeem those ready for a new life.

Editor’s Note: In a guest column for the Washington Post, Barbour Jan. 19 elaborated on his decision to pardon or grant revocable, indefinite suspensions to five inmates who worked at the governor’s mansion. Excerpts from that column:

“Historically, most of the inmates sent to the mansion, known in Mississippi as trusties, have been murderers, convicted of crimes of passion. Experts agree that these inmates are the least likely to commit another crime and the most likely to serve out their sentences well. My experience has been that this view is correct. About a third of the inmates sent to the mansion were returned to prison because of rules violations or infractions, but most worked there successfully during my terms. All but one of these mansion trusties had been convicted of murder.”

“The criteria the Corrections Department uses to select the prisoners who work at the mansion narrows the pool to those convicted of terrible crimes, almost always crimes of passion.”

“These crimes must be punished, but these offenders are not hard-core, cold-blooded criminals. In fact, to work at the mansion, an inmate must be classified as minimum-security by the Department of Corrections.”

“I always intended to follow the tradition of gubernatorial clemency for the mansion inmates. When I did so at the end of my first term, I was criticized for pardoning murderers. I never made any secret of the fact that I would again pardon those who successfully completed work during my second term.”

“The mansion inmates I fully released are not threats to society. They have paid the price for their crimes, having served an average of 20 years’ imprisonment.”

“In Mississippi, the constitutional power of pardon is based on our Christian belief in repentance, forgiveness and redemption — a second chance for those who are rehabilitated and who redeem themselves. Other great religions have similar tenets; so does the U.S. Constitution.”

“Mississippi spends about $350 million a year on our corrections system, much of it aimed at rehabilitating those who went wrong. Regrettably there are bad actors who will never be rehabilitated, but many who go to prison can be helped. Our state recidivism rate is just above 30 percent, far below the national average.”

“For some who are rehabilitated and redeem themselves, the governor is the only person who can give them a second chance. I am very comfortable giving such people that opportunity.”

Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.

For reprints of Neal Peirce’s column, please contact Washington Post Permissions, c/o PARS International Corp., WPPermissions@parsintl.com, fax 212-221-9195. For newspaper syndication sales, Washington Post Writers Group, 202-334-5375, wpwgsales@washpost.com.

Americans are now beginning to realize that their world is not the same, that fundamental change is underway. Incomes have dropped for ten years; the unemployment rate, while slightly lower right now, is persistently high. Looking to the future, Americans know there will no quick return to normalcy. Support for bipartisan leadership is actually a cry for a new direction that will provide long term real changes and not more incremental quick fixes and policy spins that do not work.

Why this change in fortunes and what can we do about it? We are caught in the wave of a fundamental transition greater than any period in recent memory, a transition that will redefine how we think and act going forward. The promise of a “flat world” of cheaper products so we can consume more and find interesting places that we can visit has resulted in a migration of jobs from the US to abroad and, according to the World Bank, the largest movement of peoples (country to city) in recorded history.

The world is not as flat as we envisioned. Instead the gateways to this global world, the places where international airports, ports, finance, marketing and distribution centers converge, are the attractors of growth. New logistic supply megaregions, involving multiple states and portions of large states such as Texas and California, have been identified by the public policy group, America 2050. More disturbing, America 2050 noted, the rest of the country is losing population and economic growth to the rapidly growing states and regions, creating huge inequities in the U.S. Abroad, particularly in the developing world, these mega-global gateway regions are logistic production centers. People outside these global megaregions are falling behind.

The information revolution is now coupled with the logistic revolution, with its massive container ships, double–stacked trains and barcoded distribution driven distribution centers, to redefine how the world market works. A semi-truck sized container costs $600 to transport from China to Los Angeles, making our competitors equivalent to our neighbor. Interestingly, moving the same or equivalent amount of goods from Los Angeles to Houston costs $1,400 due to the inefficiencies, primarily in the urban regions, of our land system. The trade policies of the world’s countries and these new logistical innovations are creating a new competitive reality that we never envisioned. The international sector growth from 8 percent to almost 40 percent in the last 20 years means that the U.S.A. is no longer an island where we can do what we want without implications.

The total cost — of doing business, public and private lifecycle costs over time — counts significantly. When we take public and private actions, they will affect our international competitive position. Competitors like China do not make a distinction between public and private expenditures; they make investments that are needed to run their society so they can produce and export with an eye to export more. Collective choice goods, such as transportation systems and education, are all part of the costs that go into producing and selling and they all contribute to growth in the economy.

Unfortunately, U.S. decision-making does not look at cost this way. What is more important, we do not consider long-term costs. If we do not have up-to-date logistics systems in place to move our goods in these logistics megaregions, and if we do not have higher speed rail in place to move workers (particularly skilled workers) over the longer distances involved, we disadvantage ourselves. Meanwhile our competitors have or are developing this infrastructure.

Another cost is how we put ourselves together to deal with these collective choice issues. Infrastructure, energy, education, environment, health require all sectors to work together differently and will require fiscal resources that our debt-laden governments at all levels cannot provide if they are looking seriously at lifecycle costs. If we do not address these issues, which are the foundations for competitiveness, we fall further behind.

Bringing people and sectors together happens when collective interests are furthered by working together and the results of this cooperation can be realized. This has happened historically in this country at the grassroots level in communities. Because of the complexity that has evolved through globalization, this form of collaboration will need to evolve beyond the community to the region and even to the megaregion. Critics will say that it won’t happen. But we are now beginning to see that leaders are developing strategies to bring the sectors together to address their collective choice issues.

In the Northeast Megaregion from Boston to Washington, DC, the Regional Plan Association, a business led organization, is mobilizing support for the development of a high speed rail system in the Northeast Corridor to move skilled labor from one metro region to another and to facilitate business transactions in the megaregion. The strategy captures labor and business mobility and land use benefits to finance the system. Federal financial instruments and state cooperation will accelerate the evolution of the system, but the leadership is coming from within.

In the Southern California Megaregion, governmental leadership from the Southern California Association of Governments developed a new logistics corridor to move goods from the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach through the region, removing blockages and lawsuits that were threatening the development of the ports. The key to the strategy was the business and public agreement on a container fee that was based on the benefits the project developed and was implemented by a new institution–the Alameda Corridor Authority. A federal loan accelerated the development of the project but the leadership came from within.

In the Northwest megaregion, the recession of the 90′s led the political leadership to capitalize on the region’s major locational advantage of being a global trading center to form the Greater Seattle Trade Alliance as an alliance of business, government and educational interests. The alliance developed strategies that led to the development of the FAST Corridor (Freight Action Strategy for Seattle-Tacoma) which will facilitate the movement of containers out of the ports. Additionally the Alliance created a public and private marketing strategy for the region that accelerates its growth. Again federal assistance is important to the regional strategy but the leadership is local.

Examples abound throughout the country of new regional educational, health, environmental and infrastructure partnerships to address these collective choice issues, aiming to find new lower cost solutions and develop new resources. Leaders throughout the country understand that we need to roll up our sleeves and, with new rules of the game for our organizations, work differently to address the issues we face in a way that deals realistically with our cost and our competitiveness issue.

Mark Pisano served for many years as Executive of the Southern California Association of Governments, with headquarters in Los Angeles. He is currently a Distinguished Fellow at the Bedrosian Center for Governance at the University of Southern California.

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WASHINGTON — Newspapers, the airwaves and the blogosphere are already delivering 24-7 news and speculation focused on the 2012 presidential campaign.

But in the end, will we get the president the most Americans favor?

Don’t count on it. The hoary electoral college system lets states cast their electoral votes any way their legislatures determine. A minor electoral switch in one state can reverse the entire national election. There’s always a temptation to meddle.

Take Pennsylvania. For five elections running, Democratic candidates have triumphed there in “winner take all” style, capturing all of the state’s 20 electoral votes. Great for Democrats.

But the 2010 election gave Republicans control in Harrisburg. Gov. Tom Corbett endorsed a bill to split Pennsylvania’s electoral votes by congressional district. The motive was transparent: to cut — roughly in half — the number of Pennsylvania electoral votes that President Obama could hope to win in the Keystone State.

That effort now seems shelved, but it reflects a bipartisan habit: When we can pull it off, we try to rejigger the election system to favor our side. A Supreme Court majority even did it in its infamous Bush v. Gore decision in 2000, stopping a recount that might have awarded the presidency to Al Gore (who actually led by more than 500,000 popular votes nationwide).

The Big Cure would seem obvious: institute a direct vote of the people, and scrap the electoral college, a jerry-rigged, last-minute concoction of the 1787 Constitutional Convention.

For 68 years — since 1944, when the Gallup Poll first posed the question — overwhelming majorities of Americans have favored direct popular election of the president. But getting a constitutional amendment approved is so cumbersome that all attention has now turned to an ingenious, alternative approach.

It’s called the National Popular Vote initiative and its method is ingenious: Use a compact among the states to deliver all their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes of citizens nationwide. The compact will go into effect when — but only when — states with votes constituting a majority of the electoral college (270 of the total of 538) formally approve it. The legality is clear: the Constitution gives state legislatures total power over casting electoral votes, plus the right to make interstate compacts.

So far the compact proposal has been approved by nine states which hold, cumulatively, 49 percent of the required 270 electoral votes. Included are Maryland, Washington, Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Vermont, the District of Columbia — and California, in a big-time win for the movement this year.

There’s been a distinct Democratic cast to the group of states approving. Many Republican operatives, recalling the 2000 election, apparently feel the system somehow favors the Democrats. Plus, a significant number of GOP state legislators have been heavily wooed by the ultra-conservative, corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). It opposes the National Popular Vote, charging the measure would “render minority groups voiceless and empower densely populated and ideologically homogenous regions as well as radical fringe groups.”

It’s a somewhat preposterous argument when one considers how “voiceless” many minority groups — from progressives in the Deep South to conservatives in the Northeast — may feel today. They know they’re so outnumbered in their states their votes will rarely if ever make a difference in choice of a president. And if everyone votes equally, how could direct popular vote for president really benefit “radical fringe groups?”

In fact, several states have reported significant Republican support for the National Popular Vote. Republicans voted 21-11 in favor, for example, when the New York Senate last June approved the proposed interstate compact. Republican supporters of a direct presidential vote have included, over the years, such stalwarts as Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, and Fred Thompson of Tennessee.

The reality is that a Republican could win the popular vote and lose the presidency just as easily as a Democrat. Each close election perpetuates a kind of insane electoral roulette which the National Popular Vote (
www.nationalpopularvote.com) would resolve.

Plus, a direct vote would end the Flyover Phenomenon. Candidates see little point in visiting, or paying much attention to the two-thirds of states rated “safe” for one party or the other (for example Republican Texas, Democratic California). Following Labor Day in 2008, more than 98 percent of presidential campaign spending, plus all the candidates’ campaign visits, went to just 15 battlefield states (among them Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, Florida, Colorado, Michigan, Virginia and North Carolina) that represent barely a third of the U.S. population.

This means that special interest causes, like ethanol in Iowa or Cuban-Americans in Florida, get inordinate attention. And we virtually invite voter apathy, non-participation, in most of our states.

The favoritism would disappear in the first presidential election under the National Popular Vote. Its proposition is simple: Each American’s vote ought to be inviolate — and have equal impact.

Neal Peirce’s e-mail is npeirce@citistates.com.

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