We first took notice of Bob Fountain at a Comstock's event five or more years ago. He was talking on the subject of the housing boom and how long it would last in Sacramento. He predicted as long as Sacramento retained its positive price differential advantage over the Bay Area. We often quoted him to others who were concerned about the market. And he turned out to be absolutely right.

Bob Fountain, by the way, is Dr. Robert Fountain, Director of the Applied Research Center, College of Continuing Education at CSUS. In April, he completed a study, Keeping California's Edge, which examines the relationship between higher educated employees and the California economy. Recently he was interviewed by Bob Schmidt for the Sacramento Business Journal and said some more pretty profound things.

Regarding Sacramento:

"It still hasn't made the transition to the big regional center that it should be."

"For years SACTO and the Metro Chamber have sent teams to different cities to see how other cities do things. We used to come back with the conclusion that some of these cities, no bigger than we were, seem to have more sophistication and capability in their public sectors than we do. They had smarter people working in the mayor's office than we do. The new city manager Ray Kerridge...is head and shoulders above anyone we've had in that office. We need 50 more of him."

"If we were able to take everything on the downtown table away and bring back to the table a regional vision which encompasses 3 million people, going on 4, by the year 2050, we would produce an entirely different vision of what downtown would look like....We tend to do "little think" in small increments and that's a bad way to get into the future."

"What's happening with the Kings is illustrative. We just don't have anyone in the public sector with the skills to put together the kind of deal necessary. The city botched it twice before and maybe now again."

No surprise he is a big supporter of propositions Q and R.

And his thoughts on California in general:

"The state of California has been coasting, entrepreneurially. It's been cashing in on the assets it had because of Pat Brown, but we've run those assets into the ground. What have we done lately? Very little. But if we had the right vision, we could make giant steps."

"This is a state which hasn't invested much in anything, except prisons, in the past decade."

On his concern that we are not training enough people to be a part of an economy that will depend on a workforce more highly skilled in technology:

"..recent immigrants and their first generation of children are not going into software development. Half of them are not graduating from high school. So, to the question of what jobs are being generated for them, the answer is none. That is scary--the crisis du jour.

This is a smart guy who has been studying this region since he came here 30 years ago. We need to start listening.

Gillian Parrillo
The Sacramento Executive