Residents concerned by the dedication of millions of dollars of public money to Columbus2025’s counterproductive and failing efforts may voice their opinions to their city council members.
Representatives of the “Columbus2025” initiative asked the City of Columbus for $3 million of public money at the council meeting held on October 11, 2022.
According to the seven-year-old organization’s presentation slides, the organization has been aimed at “creating a more competitive and prosperous region by 2025.” As the ten-year target rapidly approaches, the organization has failed for its entire existence as poverty and crime have continued to rise.
The $3 million in public funds are intended to “market” the city to the rest of the country as part of the organization’s grander $11 million budget from now until 2025. Columbus2025 was also largely responsible for the city’s failed “we do amazing” logo, further highlighting its track record of failure.
Betsy Covington, chair of Columbus2025, led a more than half-hour long presentation accompanied by Audrey Tillman, the organization’s immediate past chair.
The duo’s pitch highlighted the efforts of the organization over the last seven years. According to their website, Columbus2025 is “the Greater Columbus region’s public/private community strategic plan to increase prosperity, reduce poverty and enhance the quality of life of all citizens.”
Measurably speaking, the results of Columbus2025’s seven-year-long efforts have already observably failed.
According to the presentation’s own slides, the poverty rate in Columbus was 21% when the organization was founded in 2015. After seven years of implementing Columbus2025’s approach, the poverty rate currently rests at an increased 22% estimated for 2022; a measurable failure throughout the entirety of the organization’s efforts.
The name of the organization alone highlights its counterproductiveness, as the year “2025” is when the organization intended to meet its goals. Instead, the city is now poorer, deadlier, and smaller than when the organization began its multimillion-dollar efforts. Now, the organization wants $3 million of public money to continue its failing operations as the city continues to fall victim to urban decay at their incompetent behest.
The presentation also mentioned how the organization now conveniently plans to rename itself “Columbus2030,” moving the goalposts in denial of its objective failure. Covington stated the date within the name will continue to change over the years — shifting from 2025 to 2030 and then to 2035 — with her statement appearing to dissonantly ignore the backward direction their efforts have taken the city. The “moving goalposts” appear to create a never-ending perpetual cycle for the organization’s measurably-failed approach to continue indefinitely despite its failed results.
Despite the seven year failure of the organization’s efforts being readily-visible on their own presentation slides, Covington and Tillman then scapegoated the size of the city’s marketing budget as the reason for its failures, completely ignoring the city’s widely-mocked logo that their organization was ironically responsible for creating.
The presentation also completely ignored how the city’s rampant violent crime, homicide rate, homelessness, and poverty also contribute to the city’s perceived “branding” throughout the rest of the nation, choosing instead to argue that pumping more money into “marketing” will somehow help bring prosperity to the city. No mentions of the city’s current rates of crime and poverty were made by Covington, Tillman, nor the city council throughout the entirety of the presentation.
Tillman then warmed up her audience for the multimillion-dollar ask, appearing to state that more money will help alleviate the organization’s fundamentally flawed approach over the past seven years:
“If we’re going to be transformational, then we’ve gotta have more effort, more intensity, and more investment than we’ve ever seen before.”
The duo then made their request to the city for $3 million of public money to be allocated to their organization at a rate of $1 million per year for three years.
Both Covington’s and Tillman’s body language and heuristics presented obvious tells of nervousness and uncomfortability throughout their presentation and multimillion-dollar request.
Covington in particular appeared victim to the Hawthorne Effect; a phenomenon of behaving differently when a person knows they are being watched. Covington’s heuristics strongly suggested she was putting forth a significant effort to behave in an almost scripted manner to hide her true discomfort from the public. The conscious effort of her disingenuous acting was most visible through her breathing patterns and timely facial expressions.
When seated after her slideshow presentation, Covington focused heavily on maintaining her composure — though her slow, deep, diaphragmatic breathing conveyed a trained effort to conceal her true nerves. Covington’s occasional downward glances and tense facial expressions also coincided with key parts of Tillman’s $3 million ask, conveying her subconscious mind’s lack of congruent support for the funding request.
Tillman’s speaking volume also decreased while stating the $3 million figure, as her posture revealed a subconscious effort to make herself appear smaller and weaker.
From a trained professional standpoint, both Covington and Tillman consistently displayed subconscious behaviors that deviated from their baselines in ways that were inconsistent with their words.
While several council members arrived at a seemingly enthusiastic group-think conclusion without even bothering to consult any data surrounding the multimillion-dollar ask, Mayor Skip Henderson provided what appeared to be a somewhat sensible reply:
“The thing that is exciting about it is (that Columbus2025) began with a look at our flaws; it began with a look at the things that separate us from where we are to becoming the city we want to be — that we frankly deserve to be — as Georgia’s second-largest community … I consider it an investment, but I think — as you have to do with all investments — you have to be wise: considering where you pull the money from, and make sure you feel confident that you’ve got that ROI (return on investment) coming back.”
Given the seven-year track record of measurable failure from Columbus2025 in terms of the city’s increased poverty rate, increased crime rate, and slowly-decreasing population size, it is unclear if Mayor Henderson is willing to encourage further investment of the taxpayers’ money — or any public money — into Columbus2025’s failed methods of operation.
Mayor Henderson did, however, state that Columbus2025 is the “only vehicle that provides a very clear, ordered … plan to address a lot of the ills.”
Contrary to the mayor’s statement, the seven-year-rise in poverty experienced by the city tends to suggest that “clear, ordered plan” has been a bad one; regardless of how structured it may look on paper, the results have been counterproductive.
Now, the organization needs more money to perpetuate those measurably counterproductive results — and this time, they want $3 million of it from public coffers.
While Henderson’s comments appear at least partially wise through his questioning of the initiative’s return on investment, his comments simultaneously seem to fall victim to the “sunken cost fallacy”; the inability to stop investing in a bad plan so that one can avoid admitting the losses already incurred in its pursuit.
Instead of pumping millions more into perpetually marketing the bad soil of the city in hopes of attracting new trees — which will never be able to grow in it — perhaps the city should explore the statistical data of how a larger police force and hard-on-crime policies can help build a better soil first. With better-amended soil in place, fruit-bearing trees may have a better (and more cost-effective) chance of taking root here on their own from within the city itself — but without good soil, no tree nor fruit will ever grow, no matter how many millions one altruistically throws at it.
It appears sensible to say that Columbus needs to properly amend the soil in our own garden first before we can reasonably expect others to visit it. No amount of money can change that. Redirecting efforts can help get our city on the right track instead of cognitively ignoring the poor soil as it continues to further erode.
Good intentions are great — but competency, measurable results, and ROI matter far more when running a literal city; altruism alone doth not cut the proverbial cake. Perhaps it’s time we tried something else.
Have an aMaZiNg day.
You can watch the full presentation and the city council’s commentary in the video below. The presentation begins at the 4:12-mark:
Residents concerned by the dedication of millions of dollars of public money to Columbus2025’s counterproductive and failing efforts may voice their opinions to their city council members.
Facts are stubborn things — and we’ll keep publishing them, whether city officials like them or not.
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