Allegheny Magazine

In his inaugural address on January 10, 2002, Enrique Bolaños, the third democratically elected president of Nicaragua, announced the dawn of a new era for his country. With a rise in foreign investment, which grew by a remarkable 43 percent in 2004, Bolaños said Nicaragua was well on its way to recovering from poverty, corruption, and the civil war that once plagued its people.

“Nowadays, private businessmen are investing in Nicaragua after twenty years of reticence and lack of confidence in the country,” he said. Bola�os was referring to entrepreneurs like Mike Cobb ’86 and Joel Nagel ’86, who joined forces in 2000 to develop Gran Pacifica, an up-and-coming resort community in Nicaragua’s Villa del Carmen County, forty-five minutes from the city of Managua.

Cobb and Nagel met on Nagel’s first day at Allegheny and have been best friends ever since. “We had an intellectual connection first that became a deep connection,” Cobb says. That same day, Nagel also met his future wife, Susan Entress ’86. Cobb and Nagel majored in political science at the College, joined the Theta Chi fraternity, and were roommates. “The friendship we formed at Allegheny gave us a lasting basis for working together years later as business partners,” Nagel says.

They parted ways after graduating, but neither could have anticipated how their paths would cross again. Nagel, a Fulbright Scholar sponsored by Allegheny, studied international law in Germany before opening his own law practice in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, where he lives with his wife and seven children. As past president of the Pittsburgh Rotary Club, Nagel made his first trip to Nicaragua on a trade mission in 1993.

Cobb, meanwhile, was successful in the computer business, joining Comtech’s sales team in Springfield, Virginia, where he worked for eleven years. He and Nagel stayed in touch, he says, and soon “decided that it was time to branch out and do something on our own.” Together, they owned and operated a hotel in Belize and a teak plantation in Panama.

Inspired by a tourism initiative launched by Nicaragua in 1998, Cobb and Nagel acquired 2,700 acres of land, including 3.5 miles of beachfront property on Nicaragua’s Pacific Coast, for only $1,000 an acre. Today, Cobb and Nagel are joined in their venture by about 120 investors, 25 percent of whom are from the Pittsburgh area, and are currently overseeing the rise of Gran Pacifica’s infrastructure.

Working closely with President Bolaños, Cobb and Nagel fashioned a law in Nicaragua to enable Tax Increment Financing (TIF), which funnels the future property tax value of a real estate project into a bond used for financing current expenses, like construction costs.

Cobb, the president of Gran Pacifica, and Nagel, the chief financial officer, expect the resort to develop over the next ten to fifteen years. Cobb even moved from West Virginia to Managua in 2002 with his wife, Carol, and their two daughters to supervise the project. “I’m fulfilling my calling in Nicaragua by helping others in significant ways,” he says.

Gran Pacifica has already created jobs for two hundred Nicaraguans with the recent groundbreaking of its first 18-hole golf course (of 45 holes), and Cobb and Nagel expect to provide as many as 2,000 jobs as the resort progresses. In light of the region’s 30 percent underemployment rate, Nagel says Gran Pacifica will make a significant impact on the economy.

He describes the resort as appealing to “snowbirds, baby boomers, and retirees looking for a very affordable and surprisingly upscale quality of life”-whether they choose to vacation at the proposed five-star Marriott hotel, purchase property and build a home under the resort’s two-year build requirement, or live in a neighborhood of Spanish Colonial style houses, condominiums, or casitas. The resort will also feature a town center of shops, restaurants, and other amenities.

Cobb and Nagel have already witnessed the fruits of their labor, selling over 100 lots-with prices ranging anywhere from $30,000 to $300,000. They have enlisted Urban Design Associates, the land planning firm responsible for Walt Disney’s Celebration community in Florida, to create a sense of unity while also sustaining Nicaragua’s unique history and culture.

At the end of the day, Cobb and Nagel agree that working together is one of the best parts of their lifelong investment. “We’re certainly friends first and friends last,” Nagel says. And their rapport as business partners, Cobb says, is undeniable. “Joel and I play off each other so well,” he says. “And we get to do what we love. It doesn’t get any better than that.”

—Abby Collier ’03

This article was featured in the Spring/Summer 2006 issue of Allegheny Magazine.

For Kim Phan, success has always come early. A mere three months after celebrating her thirtieth birthday, Phan was named executive director of the prestigious International Law Institute (ILI) in Washington, D.C., where the average age of directors is well over sixty.

Phan majored in political science with a concentration in nuclear war under the direction of Associate Professor of Political Science Howard Tamashiro. “I owe fifty percent of my education to him,” Phan says. “He is so brilliant, modest, and devoted to making sure that his students developed a sophisticated thinking process beyond what they thought they were capable of.”

During the summer of 1996, encouraged by Tamashiro, Phan joined a research team in Vietnam through World Learning’s School for International Training. “I discovered that one out of five children died from waterborne diseases in Vietnam,” she says-an especially poignant statistic for Phan, who was born in Saigon four days after the city’s fall signaled the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

Before long, Phan says she realized that heightened government awareness and funding for wastewater treatment plants could potentially save the lives of 100 Vietnamese children per day. Returning to her homeland at such an impressionable age ignited Phan’s interest in environmental issues throughout Asia and foreshadowed a high-profile career advising governments of developing countries all over the world.

At age twenty-six, Phan secured her dream job as the United States-Asia Environment Partnership Liaison to the Asian Development Bank. Working at the U.S. Embassy in Manila, Philippines, Phan says she “found opportunities for U.S. companies and Asian countries to work together to clean up the environment in Asia.” Soon, Phan adds, she made another important discovery.

“I realized that just because a government has the money to build a water treatment facility doesn’t mean people will have access to clean water, or that the facility will be built well,” she says. “The problem was not a lack of money for projects, but a lack of knowledge on how to implement those projects. Ultimately, governments made bad decisions.”

All roads seemed to point Phan to the ILI, a private, not-for-profit organization established in 1955 whose mission is to “foster prosperity through the rule of law.” Phan joined the ILI as Director of Business Development in 2004, a role she still maintains in addition to her executive directorship.

Today, the Institute consists of three major components: education, advising, and publishing. Known primarily as a training institute, ILI has trained more than 14,000 government officials and practitioners from over 185 countries. The Institute also advises both the public and private sectors in the handling of negotiations, problems, and work with respective governments to draft various laws; and it has published books on law and legal systems, most notably the annual Digest of United States Practice in International Law for the Department of State.

“Sometimes corruption is so ingrained in a society that its citizens don’t even know that it’s bad,” Phan says. “That’s why we select government officials who are sincere about their country’s well-being, and we teach them the difference between good practices and bad practices.”

Phan’s business travels have included a trip to Honduras, a visit to Mauritius, and a stop in Uzbekistan. The Institute’s most concentrated efforts, Phan says, have been in China, where its staff trained nearly 300 judges in the Chinese National Justices College to make their rulings comply with the standards of the World Trade Organization. The ILI also implemented the China Banking Regulations Reform project to make the Chinese bank more conducive to business and the private sector.

“We empower government officials and practitioners by giving them knowledge and tools to do their job better,” Phan says, “and hope that the political will in their respective countries will allow them to better perform their jobs.”

While success may always come early for Phan, it never comes easy. “My work day is literally around the clock,” she admits. “Very often, I have to do conference calls at 2 a.m. because that is the hour of business for the Philippines and Uzbekistan.”

But Phan is showing no signs of slowing down. She even decided to forgo a honeymoon with husband Mattias Wiklund after their November wedding in order to attend the ILI’s 50th Anniversary Gala in Washington one week later, on November 17.

“It’s rewarding to know that what we do has a significant impact that trickles down,” Phan says of her work at the ILI, “to know that when you help governments make the right decisions, their countries and people will benefit.”

—Abby Collier ’03

This article was featured in the Spring/Summer 2006 issue of Allegheny Magazine.

If you ask the average American, she would tell you that we are a nation divided. The evidence for this comes in our newspapers, on the evening news, and in innumerable talk shows where we are told we are the fifty-fifty nation, a country clearly split between red and blue states.

Mo Fiorina ’68 is trying to debunk this notion. His widely read book Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America makes the case that we are not nearly as divided as it often seems.

Though Fiorina is based at Stanford University, where he is professor of political science and a senior fellow with the Hoover Institution, he aims for an audience of rank-and-file Americans. His message is straightforward: the culture wars are a phenomenon found in the political circles of Washington and among political activists elsewhere in the country. But among ordinary Americans, the polarization doesn’t exist. “What we’re seeing on television is not at all reflective of the views of most of the people who are watching,” he says.

While there are issues on which Americans disagree-gay marriage would be one-these are not issues that are high on the list of important matters they want politicians to address. “People care about Iraq, terrorism, the economy, health care, and education,” Fiorina says. “They want to know if they will be able to afford health insurance. They want to know if this war is going to go on forever. Abortion, gay issues, gun control, and other ‘hot button’ issues are way down there [on their list of concerns]. If you look at most people’s views on gay marriage, they’re not that worried about it. One study during the last election had it fifteenth in importance out of sixteen issues the study asked about.”

But among the political classes, the divide does exist. “The political classes have always been more polarized than ordinary people,” Fiorina says. “This group includes political activists, party officials, major contributors, convention delegates, etc. But it’s only about ten percent or so of the country. These people have become more polarized than they were thirty years ago, but they constitute maybe ten to fifteen percent of the country.”

Several factors account for the increased polarization of this group, Fiorina says. A major one was the political realignment of the South, which weakened the conservative faction of the Democratic Party. The rise of the religious right and its alliance with the Republicans strengthened the socially conservative wing of the Republican Party. But as party elites grew more and more distinct and intense in their views, not many voters in the country followed their lead. “There’s a tendency to misperceive political differences,” says Fiorina. “When the book came out, I got a lot of e-mails from readers who said, ‘I thought I was alone in being a moderate.’ In fact, most Americans are moderate in their views. They’re tolerant. And they’re ambivalent about the issues. They don’t know what’s right. But in politics, it’s my way or the highway. The politicians don’t seek any middle ground.”

“We could cut a deal that would fix Social Security,” says Fiorina. “And in the past, we would have. But neither party wants to do that. They’d rather have the issue to run on.”

“If we elect a centrist president, I think we’d start to see some compromise on the issues,” he says. In this environment, a centrist would have a tough time winning either party’s nomination. But if a centrist did get the nomination, Fiorina says, “All other things being equal, the centrist would win.”

In the meantime, the country as a whole is paying a steep price for the unending feud between political factions. “The majority of people see a system that doesn’t address the issues they really care about,” says Fiorina. “That’s the consequence of this.”

—Doug McInnis

This article was featured in the Spring/Summer 2006 issue of Allegheny Magazine.