LAIC: Earn Your Keep

Yesterday's (2006.07.26) Madison Daily Leader offers the headline "LAIC Wants More Money." Yes, our friends at the Lake Area Improvement Corporation think they need $30,000 more from the city to do more facilitating and strategizing and all the other tasks that marketers do. I think we'd get as much satisfaction and enjoyment from flushing 30,000 one-dollar bills down a toilet and watching them spin into oblivion.

However, knowing the LAIC will tell us that we must grow or die, and that the only way to grow is to market, I offer the following suggestion: Sure, the LAIC can have $30,000 more in next year's budget, but first, they have to prove that they have brought twice that much revenue into the city coffers in the last year. $30,000 from the city would be the product of $1.5 million in sales (taxed by the city at 2%). Of course, the LAIC shouldn't get every penny of increased revenue -- increased tax revenue is supposed to help us pave streets and fund the library, not simply keep churning out more banners and slogans for our town. 50% of any provable revenue increase is a more than reasonable commission. Thus, for every dollar more that LAIC wants in its budget, it should have to prove that its efforts (not luck, not good weather, not national economic trends, but LAIC's own marketing campaigns) have generated an additional $100 of economic activity in Madison. LAIC's $30,000 budget increase would only be justified if LAIC could show $3 million in increased local economic activity.

If the LAIC wants us to live by the mantra of marketing, the LAIC should also have to live by the rules of business and good government: you want more money, you show us results. Indexing LAIC's funding to its proven performance should have the same positive impact on productivity and efficiency that it does in the private enterprises LAIC is promoting.