Day 1: Welcome; Megaregions & the case for a national infrastructure policy
Houston Tomorrow President David Crossley opened the conference, and Dan Bellow, Chairman of the Greater Houston Partnership, welcomed the participants to Houston. Former Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby discussed the economic benefits provided by Tier One universities. Petra Todorovich, Director of America 2050, provided an introduction to the concept of megaregions and discussed their relationship to a national infrastructure policy.
Video will be posted soon.
Dan Bellow on the State of Houston’s Economy (.ppt, 2.7 MB)
Bellow noted that Houston is growing at a rate of 100,000 people per year, and while the city has lost 80,000 jobs in the last year, it is still faring better than the rest of the country. He said that the cost of living is lower in the Texas Triangle than in the US as a whole, which attracts many new people, and that traffic and jobs at the Port of Houston will rise dramatically once the Panama Canal widening is complete. He also noted that in its September issue, Forbes Magazine declared Houston as one of the “top 10 world capitals of the future.”
Bill Hobby on the Importance of Tier One Universities in the state of Texas (.pdf, 4 KB)
Lt. Gov. Hobby said that Tier One universities are crucial for attracting venture capital and research funding. “In the past four years,” he said, “Austin [home of the University of Texas, a Tier One school] has attracted more venture capital investment than Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio combined.” Currently, Texas only has three Tier One schools: UT-Austin, Texas A&M in College Station, and Rice University, a small private university in Houston. He stated that Texas loses about $3.7 billion every year in research funding because of its limited Tier One facilities. For instance, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio are among the largest cities in the nation without public Tier One universities. The University of Houston, Texas Tech (Lubbock), and the University of North Texas (Denton, north of DFW) are the closest to achieving Tier One status, he said.
Petra Todorovich on Megaregions and the Case for National Infrastructure Policy (.ppt, 5.9 MB)
Todorovich introduced the concept of “megaregions,” which house 70 percent of this country’s population and economic activity. “Megaregions,” she said, “are networks of metropolitan areas connected by overlapping commuting patterns, linked economies, business travel, as well as large environmental resources, like the watersheds where we get our drinking water, and airsheds, as well as shared history and culture. … Overseas, our competitors in Asia and Europe are making investments at the megaregion scale, such as the Pearl River Delta in China, which is about the size of the Northeast megaregion – about 50 million people – and which is spending today the equivalent of 50 billion US dollars on a high-speed rail system that they will complete in the next five years.”
If megaregions can organize effectively, Todorovich said, they can be effective partners with the federal government to implement a national infrastructure plan, which would include passenger and goods movement, energy transmission and smart grids, and water infrastructure and resources management. America 2050 has been hosting a number of megaregions conferences around the country to promote this goal.
“The notion of a national plan may seem like something we don’t do in the United States,” she said. However, she said it is one of the oldest American traditions, from the Gallatin Plan in 1808 to the Inland Waterways Commission plans in 1908, the National Resources Planning Board during the Great Depression, and the creation of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s. All of these efforts were championed by their respective presidents to provide better connectivity and resource management.
She said that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which included $120 billion for infrastructure, was a step in the right direction. “We think that America needs a vision for transportation in this country that is as ambitious as the Interstate Highway System, but this time around it probably should not be just about roads,” she said.
Video will be posted soon.