Valley leaders push for regional clout

Mesa Mayor Scott Smith said Valley leaders should think more regionally as they attempt to deal with transportation and other local problems. In fact, he said just thinking Valleywide is no longer sufficient. Valley and state leaders should look to alliances with cities in other Rocky Mountain states and present a united front to the federal government in seeking aid for common urban problems, he said.

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"We can't do it alone," Smith said Friday at a forum on regional cooperation sponsored by Arizona State University and the Brookings Institution. "We have to realize we must come together with Las Vegas and Denver and Albuquerque and Salt Lake as a sort of sole face in the Intermountain region. While we are vastly different and have our individual interests, we have very similar problems."

He added that other more powerful states and regions have more clout with the federal government, and "unless we join with our fellow states in the Intermountain region, we will be dead on arrival."

The forum at the ASU downtown Phoenix campus was an outgrowth of a Brookings study that said Mountain West "megapolitan" areas such as Phoenix, Las Vegas and Denver should forge alliances to more effectively lobby the Obama administration and the new Congress to deal with transportation, environmental and other urban issues.

It was attended by about 150 political, academic and policy-making officials.

The regional mantra was widely voiced by the participants.

"Arizona has done a pretty good job on its own, but we need to work as a region to help us get to where we need to go," Gov. Janet Napolitano said.

She said the Mountain West needs to work together to get its share of public works money that is likely to be included in a federal economic- stimulus package next year. She said regional cooperation might also help Arizona acquire more federal laboratory and research spending.

Grady Gammage Jr., senior research fellow at the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at ASU, said Arizonans should abandon the notion that federal aid is bad - a sentiment he said is still widely felt. He said federal highway and water projects made Arizona what it is today, and "we need to use the power of the federal government to help us make it a better place."

In an effort to increase regional leverage, Gammage said ASU is in early talks with the University of Nevada at Las Vegas to create a megapolitan consortium that could influence federal policy.

Robert Lang, senior fellow at the Brookings' Metropolitan Policy Program, pointed to major infrastructure projects that Arizona needs to build with regional and federal help. He said Phoenix and Las Vegas are the two biggest cities in the U.S. not linked by freeway, and he said that only two lanes of freeway in each direction between Phoenix and Tucson is "pathetic - non-developed nation status."

Also, he said a high-speed rail line between Phoenix and Los Angeles would be competitive with air service and would reduce congestion at Sky Harbor Airport. Air policy should focus on longer distances, including direct links to Asia, Lang said.