El Paso has never been able to get its political, business and community leaders to agree on a vision and course for the city, but that is the only way to keep the city from falling farther and farther behind the state and nation in education, jobs and income.

That is the central conclusion of a report, sponsored and paid for by the Paso del Norte Group, that was presented Friday to business and education sector leaders.

And what El Paso really needs but never has had, the report states, is a strategic plan for the city’s future developed and agreed on by local government officials, the business sector and leaders in education.

“For whatever reason, however, the community has not demonstrated a capacity to come together behind a common vision for its future,” the report states.

Ironically, no public officials or top administrators from the city or county governments were among the 50 or so on hand to hear the conclusions and recommendations of the two consultants behind the $100,000, year-long study and report.

Woody Hunt, a member of the PDNG’s executive committee and the co-chairman of the group’s Higher Education Attainment Committee that worked with the consultants, said the council members were invited.

He said Mayor John Cook was reportedly busy at a regional mayor’s meeting but wasn’t sure what kept other officeholders away.

Presenting the report were Dennis Jones, president of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, and Aims McGuiness, senior vice president of the Boulder, Colo., consulting firm.

They found the same problems and covered much of the same ground as consultants and analysts have in past years, from disunity and lagging educational achievement to the brain drain.

“The reality in El Paso is that the community has been losing ground vis-à-vis Texas and the rest of the country for decades,” the report states near the beginning. “Further, the education attainment levels of the adult population – and therefore the skill levels of the workforce – are not competitive with those in more affluent parts of the country.”

Texas, in turn, lags well behind the rest of the country, which has fallen to 10th in the world in educational attainment behind No. 1 Norway.

The consultants also found that El Paso is hampered in various ways by its isolation and noted that of those El Pasoans who do go to college, 19 out of 20 stay in town and attend UTEP, the community college or another local institution.

“Students are so dependent on supporting themselves that they tend to stay at home and work at the job they had in 10th grade,” McGuiness said.

The educational attainment of the United States, measured by the number of college bachelor degrees, is 81 percent of Norway’s and Texas Hispanics’ attainment is 30 percent in comparison, the study found.

Only Asians in Texas exceed Norway’s standards.

Meanwhile, Mexico and Juarez in particular are making significant strides in education and are, “on an upward trajectory.” Though the U.S. and Texas are significantly better educated, their trajectory is downward relative to other nations.

When it comes to income, El Paso also lags behind Texas, which lags behind the rest of the nation.

“If you live here, you give up a very large chunk of salary if you stay here,” McGuiness said.

And so it went, through various projections and statistics showing El Paso’s place in the world when it comes to education, earnings and opportunity.

The study looked at those people who do obtain significant skills through training and education, and found that many more of them are leaving El Paso than staying.

“All kinds of people are leaving that are the basis of an economy,” McGuiness said. “You wish they would stay.”

The educational, income and brain-drain issues facing El Pasoans are even more severe in Las Cruces and Dona Ana County, the consultants found.

That is why, they concluded, the problem solving must be done on a regional scale that takes in Las Cruces and Juarez.

And it needs to focus on bringing in or growing up well-paying jobs to keep people with education and skills from leaving in El Paso and the region.

Leaders and planners in El Paso have long talked about the need to work regionally, but the ties have not been established, the report states.

“In this same vein, there is little evidence that El Paso has positioned itself to take full advantage of its location adjacent to Juarez and as a gateway to much of Latin America,” it states.

The ultimate goal of the region must be to “create high-value jobs and a workforce that can handle the demands of those types of jobs.”

The report largely ignores El Paso Community College, the University of Phoenix and Texas Tech University, and focuses on UTEP’s position in the community and its potential.

“Perhaps most telling is the inability of the community to come together around a common view of the role that UTEP should play in the future development of El Paso and the Border Plex,” the report states.

For its part, the university “tends to be traditional in its educational mission and outlook and burdened with a bureaucratic process, which hampers accommodation, creativity and results.”

Recommendations

Rather than gearing up for another communitywide effort to focusing tightly on improving educational attainment, the consultants concluded that efforts should also aim at developing better jobs that would provide the incentive for El Pasoans to graduate from high school and college and then stay.

The consultants said El Paso needs to:

-- Seek a consensus around the directions and strategies for economic development in the community.

-- Create the mechanisms that support start-up/entrepreneurial companies.

-- Better use the region’s colleges and universities for economic development and as research and development partners with area employers.

To get there, the consultants had a long list of recommendations that include:

-- Establish an organizational means to develop and sustain a two-way agreement between the El Paso community and higher education to transform the economy and quality of life over the next decade. Although UTEP or another institution could become the “keeper of the vision,” the report recommends looking at the Paso del Norte Group because it “represents the best hope for initiating such an entity or evolving into this role.”

-- Develop strategies to attract new employers while supporting existing employers, especially those needing higher-skilled workers.

-- Concentrate on developing El Paso as a “premier location for globally mobile location” by offering amenities, good schools, access to international business and legal services, arts and culture, access to university-based professional development and post-graduate education.

-- Improve the communities’ abilities to help start-up ventures and young entrepreneurs.

The PDNG is an organization of regional business and community leaders. [may 15, 2006 npt background]

It commissioned the consulting firm that, two years ago, produced a controversial plan that City Council adopted for the revitalization of Downtown El Paso.

And Hunt Communities, headed by Woody Hunt, is the development company that recently stepped back from its agreement to buy nearly 5,000 acres of Public Service Board land for $131 million to develop a master-planned community in Northeast El Paso.

The company and the city are in negotiations over that purchase.

Several council members said they weren’t staying away from Friday’s meeting but just had other things to do.

Southwest Rep. Beto O’Rourke said, “How is one to know how important this meeting is compared to dozens of other meetings on education. I had no idea how much work had gone into the study.”

West Central Rep. Susie Byrd said she was personally invited by the executive director of the Paso del Norte Group but just didn’t make it.

And Eastridge/Mid-Valley Rep. Steve Ortega, who was with O’Rourke at a meeting with irrigation district officials about the so-called border fence, said he hopes the PDNG will follow up by presenting the report to City Council.

He acknowledged the community’s persistent divisions over important issues and said it would take a “charismatic, visionary, accommodating, communicating mystical individual” to pull El Pasoans together.

David Crowder can be reached at dcrowder@epmediagroup.com or 915 351-0605