You’ve heard this story before: a bunch of middle-aged local government nerds in suits from dozens of Northeast Ohio counties and cities and transportation agencies all get together and create an organization for collaboration.  Give it a terrible name like the Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium.  NEOSCC.  Bingo. 

That’s the group that released its first report called Conditions and Trends last month showing northeast Ohio is still not growing in population but is growing outward, sprawling apart in a very expensive way. 

No one listened 20 years ago. But now a new generation is coming along and it seems ready.  At  gathering, they sat at tables and explored findings, shared ideas  and brainstormed solutions to follow up on previous meetings.

An old hand at what makes cities thrive is former Cleveland city planner Hunter Morrison. He’s the director of this newest consortium.  He has the background to see how things have changed – how cities became more attractive when they cleaned up. And how Cleveland was energized when the sports teams moved downtown and the theaters were restored.

 “Now, 25 years later, a generation later, you have a waiting list for apartment buildings.  And that is attracting businesses from outside the region to a vibrant downtown because that’s attracting the workforce that wants to work in the higher tech, higher skilled industries.”

Morrison says his generation dreamed of the suburbs of Ozzie & Harriet. The Gen-x and Millennials dream of the city living  of Seinfeld and Sex In The City. 

“People want to be together. They want to come together in place.  You see that on a Friday or Saturday night in downtown Youngstown that ten years ago would have been impossible to imagine.  You see that at Playhouse Square and East 4^th street today that 10 or 20 years ago would have been impossible.”

The Sustainable Communities Consortium is asking those young people to get involved. But it’s not automatic. The president of the Summit County Historical Society, Joe Abraham, wants his generation to look to the future.

Abraham “People from a younger generation the X and Y’ers are so caught up in ‘what’s in it for me’ that they forget to look at the bigger picture.  That’s what’s sad and that’s why I hoping this group is going to show that people aren’t just caught up in themselves and they do want to see a better region”

Former Akron City Councilman Phil Montgomery agrees,  saying people his age need to do more than work toward a sustainable career – they need to work toward a sustainable community.

“One of the bigger problems is people aren’t willing to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty to actually figure out what the solution is.” 

The group at last night’s so-called “Vibrant NEO” gathering was tossing out ideas – like local governments collaborating to save money.  For Abraham that’s not just an exercise to shrink government but to find a better place to use resources.

“If there are ways that we can make ourselves more efficient it’s a great opportunities for arts for culture I think it’s a great opportunity to find ways to collaborate.”  

Arts and culture – Abraham pointed to Akron’s Lock 3 entertainment park as one successful example.   And Jennifer Eckhoff of the Summit County United Way thought even non-governmental agencies can collaborate

“We need to move the to the programs that best serve a need so there might be three different agencies that are working on a particular issue but if they work together and share resources we get a lot more done with a lot fewer resources.”

Even in a throwaway society, Hunter Morrison says it’s about government spending less by wasting less.

“What are the tradeoffs between building a new road and maintaining an old road; building a new neighborhood and restoring an old neighborhood; building on the infrastructure you’ve already paid for versus building new and having to maintain that as well? … We haven’t grown.  We haven’t experienced the growth of one to two million people 40 years ago.”

While some local city officials were arguing that decades ago, few suburban and very few state politicians were interested.

Morrison says that’s changing, with even the Ohio Department of Transportation pulling back on new construction.