It’s tough to underestimate the peril to impartial American justice that’s been highlighted in a new report on the big-time campaign money flowing into elections for justices on state supreme courts.

Total spending on the campaigns doubled in the past decade, from $83 million in the 1990s to $207 million in 2000-2009, according the report from three nonpartisan groups — the Justice at Stake Campaign, the Brennan Center for Justice and the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

Equally alarming, those pushing the spending — corporations on one side, trial lawyers on the other — are using shell organizations such as the American Justice Partnership and the Alabama Civil Justice Reform Committee to keep their involvement hidden.

Increasingly, the special interest groups are using questionnaires to pressure judges into signaling, during campaigns, how they’ll make courtroom decisions. And there’s been a surge of nasty and costly television ads, mimicking the ugliness that pollutes so much television political advertising today.

The situation has become so serious that recently retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, in a preface to the new report, counsels Americans to remember the imperative of a “fair impartial and independent” judicial system. “Partisan infighting and hardball politics,” she notes, could well “erode the essential function of our judicial system as a safe place where every citizen stands equal before the law.”

Political operative Karl Rove was an early player in pushing big-time money into judicial races, the new report indicates, noting that he acted as the “mastermind” of a political turnaround in the late 1980s and early 1990s of the Texas Supreme Court, from a Democratic body with cozy relationships with trial lawyers to an all-Republican panel that took a hard line on injury and product liability cases.

Between 2000 and 2008, business and conservative groups funding and organizing state supreme court races succeeded in shifting the makeup of previously of trial lawyer- and union-friendly supreme courts in Illinois, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio, Wisconsin and West Virginia.

Key players in the effort have been top leaders of such firms as Home Depot, insurance giant AIG, Chrysler and big tobacco, plus such leading business groups as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers. One political supporter, the report notes, has been Bob Perry, the real estate magnate who financed the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth Campaign in the 2004 presidential election.

Trial lawyers and unions have responded by funneling money into state-level interest groups and Democratic party organizations, “gradually clawing back a little of their lost turf,” the new report indicates.

But the Supreme Court’s recent decision in “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission,” overruling longstanding bans on election spending from corporate and union treasuries, will loosen restraints on judicial elections and likely benefit the corporate world with its superior and immense financial resources.

We face a “perilous time for fair courts,” says Bert Brandenburg of the Justice at Stake Campaign, as special interests work to dismantle spending limits, eliminate merit selection of judges, and strive to keep campaign spending secret by assaulting disclosure laws.

The “good news,” as it were, is that the very worst abuses have been concentrated in a handful of states, especially Alabama, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Texas, Michigan and Mississippi. Polling shows strong public support for such reforms as public financing of judicial races and obliging judges to recuse themselves in cases where they have any personal stake. Judicial election reform efforts have picked up recently in North Carolina, New Mexico and West Virginia, with Wisconsin enacting public financing of state supreme court elections.

Lurking behind all this is the thorny question: Why (as 22 states do) elect judges at all? Why not nonpartisan panels or other forms of merit selection? How many of us, as voters, have any idea of the real qualifications of judges?

For that matter, what are we ordinary citizens doing electing — as we do in many states — auditors, coroners, surveyors, sheriffs, insurance commissioners, school superintendents, controllers, probate judges, tax assessors, orphans’ court judges, recorders of deeds and wills?

What were our ancestors ever thinking of when they made those posts elective? Faced by yard-long ballots for these miscellaneous posts, we mark ballots blindly or not at all.

It’s essential in our democracy to have popular elections for president, Congress, governors, mayors, city and county councils. One can even argue it’s a good idea to elect state attorneys general or secretaries of state (both good “step-up” jobs to governor).

But government functions best with a limited number of clearly accountable, top officials. And each of us wants to know that if we, or groups or causes we believe in, are in trouble with the law, that the justice meted will be objective, fair, and free of taint of monied influence. Popular election of judges undermines that most fundamental right.

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

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America’s public libraries, fast turning themselves into “one-stop shops” for digital job searches, appear to be staging one of their great historic transformations.

Responding to a rush of recession-time visitors, 88 percent of our libraries now offer access to job databases. And at least two-thirds of library staffs are helping applicants complete online job applications, according to a national survey by the American Library Association and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

As for access to free wireless services, 82 percent of libraries now provide it — up from just 37 percent four years ago. In two-thirds of cases, the libraries are the only source of free Internet service in their communities.

What’s amazing is that many libraries are able to maintain the bulk of their services and adapt to growing needs during a recession, even in the face of snowballing funding cuts by their local governments. More than 55 percent of urban libraries are reporting budget cuts, and a quarter have felt obliged to cut hours or close branches. Fifteen percent of libraries reduced their hours of operation in 2009 — three times the number reported in 2008. And 50 percent report they have insufficient staff to met their patrons’ job-seeking needs.

But they’re not taking it quietly. In Indianapolis, neighborhoods around the branches facing possible closure became very active, holding read-ins, marches and letter-writing campaigns. In Camden, N.J., one of America’s poorest cities, a fierce public outcry has followed the threat to close the entire library system.

And when Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa proposed 37 percent cuts to his city’s library budgets, advocates argued it would be the first time in the system’s 138-year history that libraries would be open just five days a week. And they came up with a strong productivity argument. In 1978, when there were 61 L.A. libraries (there are now 72), 1,459 staff librarians served 6 million visitors. Under Villaraigosa’s budget, they noted, there’d only be 848 staff slots — to serve 18 million visitors.

The silver lining for communities, note library sources, is that threats of actual branch closures create such a strong pushback that most communities compromise with cuts that go no further than constriction in staff or branches.

The reality, says Audra Caplan, director of the Harford County (Md.) Public Library and president of the Public Library Association, is that the role of public libraries has changed dramatically in the last 10 to 15 years. And computers and job-search assistance, while highly significant, aren’t the whole story.

“We’ve turned ourselves into community centers,” notes Caplan. “We have meeting rooms that get booked by community agencies, chess clubs, any not-for-profit. We bring in authors, we sponsor civic engagement-type programs. And we’re attracting a larger share of the population — even teens, or parents with toddlers.”

So what about serious research? “It’s still healthy,” Caplan insists. She acknowledges Google and Wikipedia are popular on the available computers. But libraries also subscribe to specialized and sometimes costly subscription databases — business, legal, health and other — and electronically extend the access to even their smallest branches. As for books (remember them!), libraries’ per capita circulation has increased roughly 20 percent over the last decade.

And in a sense the libraries are as varied as America. Many provide specialized services, including translation and English instruction, to America’s large populations of new immigrants. Some let patrons check out not just books but fishing poles, backpacks and garden tools.

And central libraries, notes Robert McNulty of Partners for Livable Communities, can be “the great good place in the city” — as a literacy, Internet and special film center, or as a place for lectures, for local performing arts and exhibitions. Or as a coffee house. Or as an information center for visiting tourists, or a safe place for kids.

Andrew Carnegie’s original idea in founding his string of free public libraries, McNulty notes, was that they’d be gathering places for young people — that once drawn there, they’d learn to read. So Carnegie built a boxing gymnasium into one of his Pittsburgh libraries, a swimming pool into another.

But right now, it’s computer access that leads the library parade. “Beginning computer skills are especially important for dislocated workers,” says Brian Clark of the Nashville (Tenn.) Career Advancement Center. “Having computer skills” he suggests, “won’t necessarily get a person a job. But it means the door won’t be slammed in their face” — in other words, before they can even state their case.

Opening doors? It’s true that funds saved or restored to libraries may mean deeper, sometimes very painful cuts in other parts of city and county budgets.

But what’s more American than open doors? Seen that way, libraries have been enablers of generations of Americans’ dreams. And with a little luck, they’ll help pull us out of our current economic morass too.

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

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The rest of the world is starting to notice the United States’ incarceration follies.

Case in point: “Why America locks up so many people,” the cover story of the British-based Economist magazine, showing the face of a forlorn Statue of Liberty behind bars.

The grim statistics noted: some 2.3 million people, more than the population of 15 of our states, are now incarcerated — one in 100 Americans. That’s quadruple our 1970 imprisonment rate. For hard-to-defend reasons, and at staggering fiscal cost, we incarcerate people at a rate five times Great Britain’s, nine times Germany’s, 12 times Japan’s.

Congress is on the brink of our first national reassessment in many decades. Sen. James Webb of Virginia is proposing a National Criminal Justice Commission instructed to take an 18-month, stem-to-stern look at the system, its shortcomings and alternatives. The bill recently passed the House without opposition; now the question is whether the Senate (where the measure has a 38 cosponsors) can avoid a procedural objection by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and bring it to a vote.

The Economist notes that along with truly dangerous serial rapists and murderers, as well as Bernie Madoff-like white collar criminals we want to punish severely, the United States incarcerates astounding numbers of low-level blue and white collar offenders.

Among them are street-level drug dealers (generally quickly replaced), people accused of such violations as embezzling, driving without an operator’s license or transgressing environmental laws. In addition to voluminous state laws, there are some 4,000 federally-defined offenses backed up by thousands more regulations — many virtually impossible for any layman to comprehend.

The Economist tells the story of George Norris, a 65-year old Texan who imported orchids. He was suddenly accosted in his home by armed police in flak jackets, frisked, held incommunicado for four hours as officers ransacked his home, and eventually charged with smuggling flowers into America, a violation of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

Norris, who believed himself innocent though he admitted some of his Latin American flower suppliers might have been sloppy in their paperwork, had never made more than $20,000 a year in his importing business. But he was thrown into prison with suspected murderers and drug dealers, accused of being the “kingpin” of an international smuggling ring, ultimately sentenced to 17 months — and then, despite his condition with Parkinson’s disease, put in solitary confinement for 71 days for bringing prescription sleeping pills with him to prison.

The tough question raised by the Norris case and others likes it: are some prosecutors going overboard, using their extraordinary powers beyond clear justice requirements? Under threat from prosecutors, it’s claimed, even defendants who are convinced they’re innocent may enter guilty pleas to shorten their potential sentences. Example: a prosecutor might threaten a middle-aged man that he’ll receive such a long sentence he’ll likely will die in a cell unless he gives evidence against his boss.

And then there’s the incarceration youth-aging syndrome. Americans seem anxious to get their youthful violent offenders behind bars, and it’s happening (with especially huge numbers among minorities). But in reality, there are few muggers over 30.

Why long sentences when classic penology says swift and certain punishment is what works? We already have over 200,000 prisoners over 50, often in failing health (with vast medical costs). Yet if released, they’re unlikely to offend again. When imprisonment costs vary from Mississippi’s $18,000 a year to roughly $50,000 in California, when schools and critical social services are being cut to the bone, do long sentences into middle- and late-age serve the public interest?

Webb acknowledges that when he started discussions on today’s criminal system, “we heard a lot of unease, particularly from law enforcement’s side.” But he then met with over 100 organizations, explaining the need and balance of his commission proposal — to include every relevant issue from arrest, prosecution, incarceration and prison administration to prisoner reentry. Now, he claims, the idea of his proposed commission has been “scrubbed through the entire philosophical spectrum with great support,” ranging from the NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union to leading national police officers’ groups.

There’s emerging evidence, developed by such organizations as the Pew Center for the States and the Vera Institute of Justice, that we’ve reached a point of diminishing if any public safety returns from cascading levels of imprisonment. Some states — even toughly conservative South Carolina and Mississippi — have begun to reform their practices, reduce incarceration, without impairing public safety. A typical measure: make non-violent drug offenders eligible for parole or probation instead of incarceration.

Reform’s potential net effect? Saving billions of public dollars, for sure. But also fewer deeply disrupted families, fewer deeply embittered ex-cons, and fewer communities impacted by high percentages of their youth imprisoned. And fewer, as the Economist puts it, decades-long sentences “watching hairs go white, and lifetimes ebb away.”

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.

BRIDGEWATER, N.H. — With a classic glacial lake, steep mountainsides and grand vistas, the area around my family’s summer home draws visitors and would-be new residents like a magnet. The visioning statements that surrounding towns have adopted place high value on land stewardship and retaining a rural lifestyle.

But what do the towns’ actual zoning statutes actually call for? Overwhelmingly, they focus on suburban-style one- and two-acre lots, highly popular in recent years. And 68 percent of the the watershed is technically buildable.

So what’s to be done? A new Watershed Master Plan by the Newfound Lake Region Association, backed up by scientific analysis and polling of residents by nearby Plymouth State University, is designed to open a clear public dialogue and help towns resolve the tough development choices they face.

The Newfound area’s growth dilemma isn’t mentioned in “Putting Smart Growth to Work in Local Communities” — a report released last week by the International City/County Management Association under an agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

But it’s typical of the challenge so many rural American communities feel today: How to keep a rural quality of life, preserve our landscapes, sustain our small towns and cities, even while positioning ourselves for better jobs and family futures?

Rural America varies greatly, with towns and farms, mining communities, prairies, forests, rangelands covering thousands of square miles nationwide. But it’s also the outer suburban edge communities, plus second home and retirement concentrations, not to mention “gateway” communities near our coastlines and national parks.

But from all sorts of rural communities, states Matthew Dalbey, a chief author of the new report, questions have rolled in — “We’re different from big cities and suburbs; how can we put ‘smart growth’ to work to stay rural, to preserve our quality of life, but still develop?”

First, the report advises, support your legacy — the rural landscape you have today — by keeping working lands (farms, forests, mines) viable and by conserving natural lands.

Second, help existing communities by preserving and investing in such historic mainstays as small town Main Streets.

Third, create “great new places” — neighborhoods and communities so attractive that young people won’t want to leave.

The sad truth is that much rural development steers straight away from those directions. Instead of conserving working lands, it lets many be chopped up for exurban sprawl housing. Rather than undergirding Main Streets, towns and counties have welcomed — under pressure from national chains and tax-hungry local officials — collections of WalMarts and auto parks, hamburger and fried chicken joints, usually spread along sign-glutted roadways through once-placid farm and forest land.

Concurrently, the decades-long decline of small family farms and rise of corporate farms has cost jobs and threatened the very existence of many small towns. Yet as the stores and services once focused on Main Streets spread out across the landscape, the costs for roads and utilities escalate, town treasuries get pinched, and resources for long-term planning run thin.

So what’s the “smart growth” alternative? Focus first, the new report urges, on a community’s “heart” — a vibrant, walkable Main Street and compact, “neighborly” residential neighborhoods around it. Encourage local businesses and rebuild on underutilized close-in lots. And if there’s pressure for residential development outside of town, try to cluster it rather than allow large lot single family subdivisions.

How about the familiar argument — “It’s my property and I can do with it as I please”? Even on land that seemingly has no controls, Dalbey notes, there’s influence — public investment, state tax laws, or county-level rules on subdivisions. The report suggests a raft of balancing tools, including “right to farm” policies, conservation easements, purchase of development rights, and valuing land for taxation at its current use (for farming or forestry, for example) rather than its purported “highest market value.”

The key to make all this happen seems to be found in shared community vision exercises that present clear alternative future growth paths for citizens and elected officials to debate and choose.

But how to popularize a land conserving rural future? The new answer is food. In 1970, there were 340 farmers’ markets in the U.S.; by 2006, there were over 4,300. “Buy local” campaigns help market locally grown products and reinforce the message of rural land conservation. Now “agritourism” is flourishing, with visitors drawn to stay in farm bed-and-breakfasts and lend a hand in the farm work. Agritourism revenues have risen above $550 million nationwide, the Agriculture Department reports.

Back at Newfound Lake, there’s growing community pride in Walker’s Farm, our prime supplier of a raft of seasonal vegetables and fruits and flowers. Walker’s business is booming. But just as important, the farm, set in a stunningly picturesque New England valley, reminds us, native and visitor, of our roots — and hopes.

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.

Can rising exports help us save our economic skin? Are smarter metropolitan-region strategies a part of any necessary game plan?

This is the case the Brookings Institution is making, and it makes some sense. We’re into a season of dire budget squeezes — federal, state and local. There’s a rising chorus of deep worry about fast-rising public debt.

But simply focusing on government cutbacks and shrinkage misses two critical points:

First, there’s no substitute for new wealth that eventually yields the taxes that pays off debts, even massive ones. Second, just stimulating our domestic consumer economy isn’t going to do the trick. The time has come to be looking early and hard beyond our own borders in today’s global economy, focusing on every opportunity for expanded export markets.

And here’s where the Brookings economists see a first wave of exciting new opportunities. Middle class consumption is literally exploding in Brazil, India and China. Last year those countries accounted for 8.4 percent of all middle class consumption in the world; by 2020, Brookings estimates, the figure could well reach 26 percent.

So how does the United States exploit those export opportunities and the millions of new American jobs they might generate?

Already, U.S. exports support 11.8 million jobs nationally — 8.3 percent of the nation’s employment. But these jobs aren’t scattered randomly across the landscape. They’re focused in our metropolitan areas. In fact, the top 100 metros account for 62.3 percent of the manufactured goods we export, and 75 percent of exported services.

And little wonder. Metro areas are naturally our hubs of commerce and innovation — for clear reasons. With their universities, laboratories and venture capital resources, with the ideas and skills of experts in varieties of fields, they generate creative interaction — the seedbed of innovation that leads to new jobs, and most often, higher wages.

Among our top examples: pharmaceutic companies in Northern New Jersey that pay on average $105,213 a year, computer manufacturing in Silicon Valley ($114,053), airplane manufacturing in Seattle ($81,004) and film production in Los Angeles ($94,952). And the rewards spread down the income chain: workers with limited education and skills also tend to earn better in export-oriented firms, Brookings reports in its new study: Export Nation: How U.S. Metros Lead National Export Growth and Boost Competitiveness.

Even before the recession, it’s noted, export sales were growing about four times as rapidly as the overall U.S. economy. Four metros — Houston, New Orleans, Portland (Ore.) and Wichita (Kan.) — actually doubled their exports between 2003 and 2008. “These trends prove U.S. manufacturers can compete globally,” says Jonathan Rothwell, one of the Brookings report authors.

So what’s to hold us back?

The federal government does need to move forward more aggressively on stalled international trade agreements and issues such as the exchange rate of the dollar — keys to fulfilling President Obama’s call to double exports in the next five years.

But Washington can advance the game by connecting, especially through the Commerce Department, the country’s global trade vision to the metros which actually generate our export possibilities.

And for that to work, suggests Brookings’ Bruce Katz, the metros themselves “must make exporting a signature element of their economic planning.”

A leader on that account has been the Seattle region, home to such mega-exporters as Boeing and Microsoft. The Trade Development Alliance of Greater Seattle works on close ties with federal decision-makers and for years has launched major trade and urban study missions to cities around the world.

“Every U.S. metro now needs a strong global strategy, with the federal government helping us to pull jointly, not separately,” says William Stafford, the Trade Alliance’s president.

And while “newer” areas of America’s South and West often seem more trade-oriented, the country’s struggling “Frostbelt” areas can be and are serious export trade winners. Measuring exports as part of a region’s total economy, the top 12 regions include Youngstown and Toledo in Ohio, Indianapolis (Ind). Grand Rapids (Mich.) and Baltimore.

And there may be more, spreading benefits to come. Suniva, an Atlanta-based maker of high-efficiency solar cells, was formed by Ajeet Rohatgi, an Indian-born scientist, at the Georgia Tech. It’s received nearly $1 billion in orders from Indian and European solar module makers.

But now, with a prospective $141 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Energy Department, Suniva is poised to build a 500-worker plant near Saginaw, Mich., one of America’s hardest-hit recession areas. The company is claiming the plant will literally quadruple its exports over the next five years. Talk about new American wealth creation where it can matter the most!

Bottom line: the time seems ripe to connect smarter, aggressive national trade policies with the economic imperatives of metropolitan America. Or as Brookings’ Emilia Istrate puts it: “smart, game-changing policies” that “connect the macro to the metro.”

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 the film industry snookering America’s taxpayers?

We’re accustomed to state governments putting up big capital for footloose auto factories, biotech firms, even airplane assembly plants.

But what are we to make of tax credits and other state-financed breaks to such big-time production companies as Disney, Time Warner and Sony and their film-making subcontractors? With most state budgets now mired in deep red ink, does this make any sense?

Louisiana, which had been attracting some filmmaking for decades, decided in 2002 to ramp up modest incentives in a really serious way, passing a bundle of subsidies for film production in the state.

The strategy paid off quickly, attracting such production firms as Disney and such stars as Dustin Hoffman.

Louisiana’s move did more. It triggered, as researcher William Luther reported for the Tax Foundation, “an explosion of movie production credits nationwide” as dozens of states tried by one way or another to outbid Louisiana. By 2009, 44 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico were into the game.

Michigan, reeling under cataclysmic job losses and massive budget shortfalls, has played hard to trump the field, laying out $125 million in 2008, $223 million in 2009. Its investment, pushed hard by Gov. Jennifer Granholm, has snagged such big-time films as Gran Torino (starring Clint Eastwood) and Up In the Air (starring George Clooney). Eastwood has predicted Michigan “will be the new film capital of the world.”

The hope — pushed by television commercials featuring Granholm and actor Jeff Daniels — is that the rich and famous will flock to Michigan, and that filmmaking will become a magic elixir for the state’s economy and image. One wonders if such towns as Lansing and Detroit have that potential. The Tax Foundation’s wry conclusion: “The probability of such a transformation actually occurring is extremely small, but the dreams of Tinsel Town can die hard for citizens and statesmen.”

The incentives, as they’ve developed in copy-cat fashion across the country, typically start with exempting filmmaking production purchases from sales taxes, or lodging taxes for crew members in hotels. They continue with such freebies as no-free locations and waiving police traffic control costs as film sites. South Carolina even offers 20 percent cash rebates for wages paid local actors and stunt performers.

Next come actual state grants to filmmakers for significant shares of their local expenditures. And then the biggest and potentially most serious — tax credits that remove a portion of the companies’ income taxes due the state.

Twenty-eight states now offer the tax credits, many so generous, the Tax Foundation reports, that their value often exceeds the movie company’s tax liability in a state. But they’re structured to be transferable. Brokers are able (for a 25 to 30 percent cut) to sell them to companies who have nothing to do with movies or entertainment. The firms can then apply the credits like coupons on their tax returns.

So is the state really gaining much? State Rep. Steve D’Amico calculated Massachusetts was spending $89,000 a job through the tax credits. Citing the competition from other states, D’Amico told Governing Magazine: “These jobs will only persist as long as we continue to offer the credit. We’re renting them. But once you start handing out money, it’s really hard to step away.”

Various estimates show overall return to states embarrassingly low — 19 cents on the dollar in South Carolina, 16 cents in Massachusetts, 8 cents in Connecticut, 28 cents in Rhode Island.

The criticisms — and actual scandals in handling the subsidies in Iowa and Louisiana — have at least tapped the brakes of the subsidy train, reports Phil Mattera of “Good Jobs First.” Iowa and Kansas have suspended their programs while Wisconsin and Connecticut have cut back sharply.

But Louisiana — notwithstanding the revelation its film commissioner had accepted bribes from a film producer — actually boosted its tax credit and made it permanent. Alabama, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Utah have recently upped their subsidies. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger favors tax credits to lure back film production that’s crept away from Hollywood.

Politicians prize, predictably, photo-ops with glamorous movie or TV stars. But do film subsidies — except in established centers like Los Angeles — actually spur meaningful economic growth? Do they improve productivity, train significant new workforces, develop new technologies — especially when a non-ending chain of public subsidies is required to keep them in state or in town?

The raw bottom line is this: Subsidy-induced film activity may have glitz and surface appeal. But nationally, it’s a washout — film production lured from one place to another is classic “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” At the end of the day the country’s no less prosperous. The net economic impact is simply to enrich the filmmakers at the expense of state taxpayers. Even a Cecil B. DeMille would blush.

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.

Does it always take adversity to get an American region to “get its act together” in planning future growth?

The Puget Sound area anchored by Seattle suggests “no.” Geology and modern economics have blessed the region in astounding ways. There’s the natural legacy of glistening snow-capped mountain peaks and lush Douglas fir beside sparking watersides. Economically, the region’s had such world-renowned economic treasures as Boeing, Microsoft and Amazon.com, excellent ports and vibrant international trade.

Yet there’s been a dark underside to the region’s exuberant growth — to 4.7 million people — over the last decades. I vividly recall a 1989 helicopter ride marked by spectacular views of Mount Rainier, a rainbow at Snoqualmie Falls and picturesque villages. But I could also see bulldozed “progress” — a plethora of scarred hilltops, deep cuts into the magnificent evergreen tapestry.

Over the past 30 years, more than 2 million acres of Cascade-range forest and farm land has given way to sprawling development. In 1990 the state of Washington did pass a growth management act that restrained some helter-skelter expansion. But development has fragmented open spaces, including wildlife habitat and corridors. With rapid expansion of the urban footprint, added paving has intensified flooding and erosion. There’s concern that climate change will bring warmer winters with less snow pack, leading to summertime drought, water shortages and increased forest fire danger.

Responding to the dangers, a “Cascade Agenda” was launched in 2005 — a 100-year conservation and preservation plan for 1.3 million acres of the Puget Sound region’s most prized waters, mountains and communities. Some 225,000 private acres have already been conserved under the plan, which is rooted in an imaginative transfer of development rights.

But there’s concern that 700,000 acres of working farmland is being converted to 10- and even 80-acre residential lots, translating to some 18,000 housing units over time. So there’s a new community discussion with city managers, focused on where new development should be channeled, says Gene Duvernot, Cascade Land Conservancy president. The draft legislation would give the Puget Sound Regional Council authority to apportion the 18,000 housing units across the cities, granting them tax increment authority so that new development goes “up” in the existing towns rather than “spread” across the landscape.

But the process isn’t “anti-development,” Duvernoy insists, because developers, in the process, can still have a “product” — just producing it in towns and cities rather than in the form of outward sprawl. “Great communities, great landscape, a sustainable environment — they can only work in tandem,” he insists. “Built right, attractive, affordable city neighborhoods will be our best hope.”

Regional leaders are now using the language of “ecodistricts” –chains of communities that feature not just low-impact development techniques and a range of housing types and costs but also frequent public transit, high efficiency district energy systems, and community space. The initiatives are all part of a package it’s hoped will show distinctive region-wide collaboration and innovation, qualifying the area for support under the federal government’s new Sustainable Communities grant program.

It seems the Cascade Land Conservancy’s agenda is never complete. A top example– restoring neglected parks to their former glory. Seattle and four neighboring communities have joined a “Green Cities” program for massive, city-wide park and open space restoration. Some 10,000 volunteers are involved. “It may be decades before we are all done. But it’s a far better investment in a city’s quality of life to restore a weed-choked park than purchase new land,” notes Duvernoy.

And now, to match the Cascade Agenda, the Conservancy has organized an Olympic Agenda to cover Puget Sound’s western neighbor — the entire Olympic Peninsula, which offers some of North America’s most dramatic scenery, ranging from glacier-rich Mount Olympus to thick canopies of rain forest. Yet the collapse of the timber industry has hit hard, while farming and fishing aren’t providing the jobs they once did. Unemployment is high.

Meanwhile, the peninsula is under economic pressure to fragment and convert private lands for private real estate development, raising dangers for both its rough-and-ready rural character and its pristine shorelines and estuaries. Proposed remedies have emerged in county-by-county dialogues that the Conservancy has organized. They range from rounding up capital to replace worn-out bridges and water systems to “green” infrastructure in the form of community-based forests and well-maintained trails to undergird both community life and tourism.

The extension of regional dialogue from the Everett-Seattle/Bellevue-Tacoma axis to the neighboring Olympic Peninsula, from urban to rural, from income-rich to economically struggling territory, isn’t totally unique in the U.S. But it’s rare, and it represents the kind of imaginative citistate-wide approaches that the times demand. Hard to quantify in the short-term, the benefits of thinking, planning, strategizing together, jointly exploring innovations and promising steps for the future, could in time be dramatic. More American regions should be emulating the model.

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.

Close to 40 years after Richard Nixon sparked America’s “war on drugs,” California voters this November get to vote on the war’s biggest challenge ever.

It’s a ballot initiative making it legal for any Californian 21 or older to grow or use marijuana. If passed, there will be no more requirement to prove medical need (today’s law in California and 12 other states). Cannabis would be subject to taxes, potentially yielding billions of dollars in state, county and city levies.

California will be voting in the wake of Gallup polling that shows nationwide support for legalizing marijuana up to 44 percent, an eight-point jump since 2005. Support is higher in California: recent polls show the legalization initiative leading by margins of 56 to 42 percent and 49 percent to 41 percent.

But that doesn’t assure passage: historically, a modest poll lead for an initiative can melt away, especially as opponents wage fierce negative campaigns close to election day. Stiff opposition to the marijuana measure is likely from California’s “prison-industrial-complex” including police chiefs, prosecutors and prison guards.

Still, the California stage is set by the state’s early approval of medical marijuana and the Obama administration’s key decision last year to reverse earlier policy to shut down marijuana dispensaries even when countenanced under states’ laws.

Voters will likely debate social impacts of legalization versus potential state and local tax gains. But waiting in the wings is a deep moral issue: how marijuana prohibition laws were written in part to subjugate minority populations.

Last week the California State Conference of the NAACP issued an “unconditional endorsement” of the legalization initiative. Alice Huffman, the group’s president, attacked the current marijuana laws as a de facto way to criminalize young black men.

She cited a Drug Policy Alliance report showing that while total marijuana arrests in California spiraled from 20,000 in 1990 to 60,000 in 2008, arrests for “youth of color” rose four times faster. Federal surveys have consistently shown that young whites are more likely to use marijuana than young blacks. But in every one of California’s largest 25 urban counties, arrests of African-Americans for possessing marijuana exceed those for whites. In Los Angeles County, blacks are 10 percent of the population but account for 30 percent of marijuana arrests.

“It is time for them to stop using my community to fill the prisons,” Huffman said.

And it’s not just a California phenomenon. New York City’s marijuana arrests are also racially skewed, reports Harry G. Levine, Queens College sociologist. Arrests for small amounts of marijuana in New York City have skyrocketed to unprecedented heights, he reports, with blacks (20 percent of the city’s population) constituting 52 percent of arrests, and Latinos (27 percent of the population) 31 percent of arrests.

For the cops, this is good business, notes Levine: “Narcotics and patrol police, their supervisors and top commanders” benefit from arrests that “are comparatively safe, allow officers and their supervisors to accrue overtime pay, and produce arrest numbers that show productivity.”

But for youth — nearly all handcuffed, put into the back of a police car or van, taken to a local station to be photographed and fingerprinted, and most often held one or more nights in jail — it’s a traumatic experience. Often they can escape longer incarceration by pleading guilty — but then have a felony conviction likely to haunt them for life.

Yet New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, asked in his first campaign if he’d ever used marijuana, replied: “You bet I did. And I enjoyed it.” One in three Americans, and two recent presidents, have also tried the weed.

Small wonder. Marijuana has been used by humans for some 10,000 years. President Nixon’s hand-picked commission on marijuana found its “health impacts are minimal” and “the ‘gateway’ drug theory has no basis.” Yet Nixon, as part of his cultural war on black militants, hippies and campus revolutionaries, made marijuana a chief target.

He wasn’t the first. As Mexican workers brought marijuana across the border in the early 20th century, local prosecutors and editors publicly decried the “loco weed.” One critic associated marijuana (called “marihuana” at the time) — not only with Mexicans but “Negroes, prostitutes, pimps, and a criminal class of whites.” States began outlawing the drug, one Texas senator asserting “All Mexicans are crazy, and this stuff is what makes them crazy.”

In the ’30s Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, spearheaded the campaign to make marijuana possession a federal crime because (in his words) of “its effect on the degenerate races” — not only Hispanics but blacks whom he suggested were deluded by “reefer” to “think they’re as good as white men.”

Ironically, current polling shows Hispanics the only California ethnic voter group leaning against the fall initiative. A refresher on the odious history of marijuana prohibition ought to be enough to shift that.

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.

Profoundly immoral — and fiscal folly, to boot.

That’s how the United States’ continuing “war on drugs” and its horrendous impact on our neighbor Mexico deserves to be seen.

Why?

First, it’s our appetite for official forbidden drugs — marijuana, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine — that’s driving the chaos on our southern border and deep into Mexico. President Felipe Calderon expected — but has clearly failed — to crack the vicious drug rings through police and military power. But he’s dead right on one score:

“The origin of our violence problem begins with the fact that Mexico is located next to the country that has the highest levels of drug consumption in the world. It is as if our neighbor were the biggest drug addict in the world.”

The conclusion is simple: if the United States were to decriminalize drugs, end the criminal prohibition on growing or selling them, prices would plummet.

This means that the massive profits the Mexican druglords reap — their “take” on an estimated $15 billion a year cross-border trade — would literally evaporate.

That, in turn, would put an end to most of the barbaric drug-driven crimes — shootings, kidnappings, beheadings — and that are currently being committed by the Mexican gangs as they struggle with each other, and with sometimes-complicit police, for bigger slices of the market.

Annual drug-related killings in Mexico total 22,000 since 2007, according to a leaked Mexican government report. At the scale of deaths reported since January, the total could top 13,000 just this year. Late in June the remains of 64 people, some decapitated, were discovered in a 50-story former mining pit near the tourist town of Taxco. From the wounds, it appeared many were alive when they were thrown down the shaft.

So how are we supposedly moral, righteous Americans reacting? Mostly with indifference, as if it’s “someone else’s” problem. Even the supposedly progressive Obama administration, while saying it wants a shift from interdiction to prevention and treatment of drug abuse, won’t make the connection between our drug prohibition laws and the mass killings in Mexico. Rather, it’s funneling more cash to the Mexican police and armed forces, money to support a bloody, unwinnable war.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, interviewed by the Associated Press on a trip to Mexico City, was asked why the U.S. pursues its clearly-failed, decades-long war on drugs. Her reply:

“This is worth fighting for because drug addiction is about fighting for somebody’s life, a young child’s life, a teenager’s life, their ability to be a successful and productive adult.”

But does U.S. drug prohibition accomplish that, when our teenagers report it’s easier to get a marijuana joint (because it’s unlicensed) than a six-pack of beer (its sale to minors government-enforced)?

Let’s assume drugs were decriminalized in the United States. And let’s acknowledge some added addiction occurred (even though the predicted rise in use is not reported in countries such as Portugal, the Netherlands and Switzerland, where decriminalization has been introduced).

Even if more Americans would have to battle with addictions, we need to ask: Are American lives so precious, so superior, that Mexicans can or should be obliged to suffer tens of thousands of deaths because we’re too timid to lift our legal prohibition on drugs? Is this kind of behavior, belief in our moral immunity, what our chest-thumping Fourth of July celebrations are all about?

And then there’s the fiscal folly point. For Mexicans, the continued drug horrors darken any prospects for an economically successful nation — one that’s an effective trade partner with the United States, and able to provide strong incomes for its families so that fewer feel compelled to immigrate north across the border.

And for the the U.S. economy there are big stakes too. We could save tens of billions of dollars — at a time when the federal and practically all state and local budgets have moved into deep deficit territory — by moving rapidly to terminate our war on drugs.

There’s strong parallel to the Great Depression time of the early 1930s. Repeal of the Prohibition Act, which outlawed liquor from 1920 to 1933, not only quashed the Al Capone-style crime rings but created tens of thousands of new legal jobs.

A parallel move today would also stop the epidemic of drug arrests that have driven our prison populations — and costs to taxpayers — to world-record levels.

A 2008 survey by Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron found legalizing drugs would save $44 billion yearly in government prohibition enforcement for arrests, prosecutions and incarcerations. State and local governments could enjoy $30 billion of the savings. And government taxes on drugs, by Miron’s estimates, would yield taxes of $33 billion — even if the rates were set no higher than current alcohol and tobacco levies.

Morals and fiscal common sense both dictate that we end our drug prohibition. And not some decades from now, but quickly.

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.

BALTIMORE — Forced “displacement,” “removal,” “resettlement” of peoples. Can it be made less painful?

The Annie E. Casey Foundation is working on a cure in the East Baltimore neighborhood beside the already huge and growing Johns Hopkins Medical Center, Maryland’s largest single employer.

There’s no doubt that forcing the breakup of neighborhoods is a global problem, whether triggered by civil wars, floods, fires, or just to clear prime city real estate for Olympic and World Cup-like events.

Yet for humans, displacement from their known settings may be exceedingly painful — a process Jane Jacobs highlighted in her 1961 book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Research psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove more recently underscored the point in her book, “Root Shock,” likening the psychological impact of forced removal from a familiar neighborhood to a plant being jerked from its native soil.

But holding neighborhoods static isn’t practical — they’re always in some flux, and spaces often do need to be found to accommodate job-creating industries, university expansions or creation of new parks.

The question is: Can we Americans be more sensitive than we were after World War II, when we countenanced “urban renewal” practices that forced inner-city residents — mostly black — to abandon their poor but socially cohesive neighborhoods? The prime public excuse back then was to “eradicate blight.”

But the uses of the lost neighborhood land often told a different tale: flashy public projects, real estate opportunities for private developers, and clearance for massive freeways plowing through low-income and minority areas.

Notwithstanding the redevelopment around Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, much of its inner city was a poster child for deindustrialization (loss of port, shipmaking, steelworking jobs). It experienced race riots in the 1960s, massive middle class exodus, waves of drugs, crime, property “flippers” and slumlords.

The Casey Foundation was initially skeptical when Baltimore’s then-Mayor (now Maryland Gov.) Martin O’Malley asked it to help out with a $1-billion-plus plan to acquire and demolish hundreds of homes in the Middle East neighborhood immediately north of the Johns Hopkins campus, with the goal of creating an 88-acre community for life sciences research facilities, retail development and market-rate housing.

But Casey reasoned that with its mission of supporting children and poor families, it might prevent great harm by participating. It agreed if — but only if — the city and Johns Hopkins would make a primary objective of improving lives for the neighborhood’s families. They did, East Baltimore Development Inc. (EBDI) was then formed.

The challenge was formidable: this was Baltimore’s second poorest neighborhood, suffering serious physical decay, housing abandonment and high crime rates. Yet with 35 percent homeownership, it had a resident core with commitment to place.

Consulting with residents about relocation, EBDI first encountered strong anger. But in well over 300 community meetings the tenor changed, especially as relocation counselors and family advocates were assigned to work for months with each of the 630 families to be moved, before, during, and up to three years after relocation.

Plus, millions of Casey dollars were invested in the neighborhood, including a new public community school with charter-like autonomy and funding, encouraging development of a community grocery store, new parks and open space, job training and some 1,000 new job placements, child care, credit counseling and health care.

The EBDI partners also responded to residents’ legitimate fears of a environmental health nightmare from the lead, asbestos and rat droppings that would be released in the atmosphere by a wrecking ball. A new safety protocol was developed — and embraced by Baltimore for regular future use.

Net result: Notwithstanding the more than 630 families moved, there’s not been a single law suit, and post-relocation surveys of residents moved show 8.5 satisfaction on a 1 (worst) to 10 (best) scale.

And a solid mixed-income neighborhood — ranging from low to higher income, literally the first of post-World War II Baltimore — is taking shape, complemented by a life sciences buildings, graduate student housing, a new state public health lab, a prospective commuter rail station, and more.

So it’s small wonder that Casey has announced it is now championing nationally its approach of “Responsible Redevelopment” — to build reconstructed neighborhoods based on robust resident engagement and technical assistance to help neighborhood leaders negotiate effectively with developers and city officials.

A key element of the new approach: “responsible relocation,” so that when residents are obliged to move out, they receive help finding quality replacement housing, legal and social services, job assistance, and “the right to return” to their revitalized community through purchase or rental of new or rehabbed affordable housing.

Is this Baltimore-born approach unique? Yes, suggests author Roberta Brandes Gratz, a staunch defender of city neighborhoods and an expert on Jane Jacobs and her legacy: “There’s never before been an honest relocation effort where there was actual one-on-one dealings with the people being displaced. This sounds like a real breaking of the mold.”

Editor’s Note: Roberta Brandes Gratz, quoted in the column, is a Citistates Group Associate and author of the newly-published book, The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs (Nation Books).

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.