Strategic Economic Development Plan - 2008 Update

Back in the dark ages, when I went to business school at USC, the emphasis was on entrepreneurship – and as a result, on how to write a business plan to attract investment and support. It’s been so long now that I don’t have any of those resources at hand to guide a review of the 2008 Page County Economic Development Plan; I vaguely recall that the progress through a plan, no matter how it was organized for presentation, was to read the idea first, skip to the resumes, look at how the plan proposed to execute, and then look at financials.

The Page County plan doesn’t include all of this material, but it does start with a vision statement, so at least we can take a look at that as the central idea of the plan. There are five elements of the vision, and I think it can be assumed that these would pass muster with most County residents:

• Better quality of life for the community – includes better wages, improved infrastructure and amenities, a healthy place to live, and improving employment prospects;
• Job retention and creation – seen as a “fundamental” goal;
• Retain the rural character of the community and natural resource protection – including mountains, groundwater, caves, and rivers, but also farms, woodlands and open spaces;
• Balance the growth between agriculture, tourism, and industry – elsewhere these are referred to as Page County’s three-legged stool of the economy; and
• Strengthen the collaboration between the County and towns – the recognition that cooperation is the only way to ensure successful growth. A rule of thumb is that while the towns have concentrated populations and thus require significant infrastructure, they represent only about 30 percent of the county population.
  

Three of these goals are linked in my mind – quality of life, job retention/creation, and the economic base of the County. So tomorrow’s post will look into those a bit more, taking the three economic elements one at a time.