Mark
Bitz isn’t the kind of man you’d expect to lead a
revolution.
The
turkey farmer from OnondagaCounty is so
soft-spoken it can be difficult to hear him at times, and he frequently stops
for real pauses between sentences. But the calm demeanor with which he carries
himself at public speaking engagements belies a depth of intensity and an unwavering
focus on his mission to re-democratize New York State. In addition to his
speeches around the state, Bitz has penned a slim
book that lays out a dozen initiatives to reform state government.
The
sixth generation to own and operate Plainville Farms, Bitz
began working for his father at the age of 8. He studied at Purdue and Cornell,
where he earned a master’s degree in economics and completed the coursework for
a PhD. He forsook academia before he could do his dissertation, though,
returning to the farm to help run it through tough business times. That
academic background may explain why he’s comfortable moving from Euripides to
Thomas Friedman in the space of a few sentences, or why his book’s epigraph is
a Shakespeare quote. Bitz is the walking personification
of an old American ideal that died out long ago: the farmer-scholar.
But
Bitz traces his most formative period not to Cornell
but to trips to Latin America, Cold War Europe, and the Soviet Union during his
undergraduate years, followed by a year-long stint teaching English in Poland. The year was
1981, and the hitherto unthinkable was happening: the Poles were restless and
agitating for reform. The attitude he’d observed in other Soviet satellite
states seemed one of hopelessness when it came to reform. But the Solidarity
movement in Poland challenged
that and, eventually, succeeded in exposing the Soviet system’s vulnerability.
Bitz’s travels “were
actually good preparation for what I’m doing with the state of New York right now,
because I know there’s good and bad ways to govern, and there’s policies that
lead to prosperity and there’s policies that lead to decline,” he says. “I saw
living examples of them in different parts of the world.”
He
borrows from that experience to talk about New Yorkers’ frustration with their
state government. At a talk to business leaders in Rochester last week,
sponsored by the Rochester Business Alliance as part of its Unshackle Upstate
initiative, he went as far as to suggest that Russia of today is a
more democratic place than New York. (That may or
may not be hyperbole; the criterion Bitz appeared to
be using is the state’s inordinately high reelection rate for incumbents: about
98 percent.)
In
an interview after his talk, Bitz discussed his
concerns about state government. The following is an edited transcript of that
conversation.
City: With
your background in Eastern
Europe and at
Cornell, you’ve been noticing these problems with state government all along.
But there must’ve been a point at which you said, “OK, this is the tipping
point.”
Mark Bitz: Yeah. Actually, somebody approached us to buy our business,
and that was the tipping point. I had to ask the question: Are we better off
selling it or trying to have it intact for the seventh generation? We’re largely
a manufacturer, and New York was one of
the two worst states in the country to do manufacturing. And when you aren’t in
a place where your costs are low, people who are have more resources to take
better care of the customers than you do. We were growing and doing OK, but I
felt in a lower-cost area we’d be doing a lot better and we’d be a lot stronger
company.
So
I’m asking myself: Do I really want to pass this on to my kids and set them up
for possible failure in a state that makes it so hard to compete? Or do I want
to sell the business? Finally I decided that before I sold the business, I
would try to affect the policies in the state and make it a better place to do
business.
You’ve got 12
different initiatives in the book. If you distilled those down to one important
message, what would that be?
We
need to call Albany on the
redistricting game they’ve been playing and vote for Senate Democrats and
Assembly Republicans. If we do not change our voting patterns, we’re going to
continue to get what they’ve been giving us, which will continue to cause the
state to decline. The bottom line is change. The status quo is unacceptable.
What would be
the best possible outcome of your campaign?
Well,
how the state prospers is subject to a lot of debate, but the democratic
process is not subject to any debate. And the thing I would like to see more
than anything is for the New YorkState government to
truly function as a democracy.
People
don’t realize that the genius of democracy is not in the ideal that we’re all
representing. The genius is, just as every cell in our body gives feedback to
the brain, every person in a state is giving feedback to the government. And
when governments get feedback from everybody, they make much better decisions.
When that process is short-circuited or eliminated, and you’ve got two or three
people basically deciding everything, the system does not function at the level
that it could if it was getting feedback from all its members.
Have you seen
any changes that make you optimistic that we’re moving in the right direction?
Yes,
I do think people are getting it. The upstate papers and the New York Post are
shining light on the systemic problems New York has. This was
not done in the past. A recent poll showed that 72 percent of the population
felt the state was not doing well, not going in the right direction. So people
are sensing a need for change, and the press is illuminating the need for
change. Those are very good developments.
You
specifically didn’t include the New York Times, and you said earlier that
you’ve been disappointed with it. What would you like to see the Times do with
its coverage of this?
I’d
like to see them spend more time examining the functioning of the government in
New YorkState and showing
the public how it doesn’t function democratically and that it needs to. And
then I would also like to see them spend more time on stories that show how
much higher the cost of doing business in New York State is and why it is
higher. And that the causes for the high costs have to be addressed, or
standards of living will steadily decline relative to other states.
You laid out a
strategy during your talk about how business organizations like the RBA can
touch base with their counterparts in New York City, some of the good-government groups.
In
New York City, there are
numerous good-government groups, particularly Common Cause, the BrennanCenter at New YorkUniversity, and several
others, and they’re all concerned about democratic process. And the business
community, which usually comes more from the right, should unite with these
groups, which come more from the left, and be as concerned about process as
they are. Because right now the public-sector unions and the attorneys own the
process. And anything that improves the process and makes it more democratic
will diminish their influence.
This article appears in May 31 – Jun 6, 2006.
