Page County EDA 2008 Strategic Plan Recap, Part 1

Early in the week I posted a summary of my review of the Page County EDA’s 2004 Strategic Plan – today, we’ll move on to summarize the review I did of the 2008 update. Keep in mind that all of this was done at the time the controversial land deal known as Project Clover was being put together. In checking the original posts, I had a couple of thoughts about tourism, sustainable agriculture and retaining existing businesses – I will summarize those here in the next few days before moving on to the 2009 update of the plan.  And by the way, although I have comment moderation turned on to protect the world from spam - your comments are important and appreciated - so take a moment to comment if you care to!


Back in the dark ages, when I went to business school at USC (note: that's Southern California, not the other 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 didn’t have any of those resources at hand to guide my review of the 2008 update; 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.

On looking back on this now, an immediate thought springs to mind – where does Fibrowatt fit in with these goals? It potentially would increase the number of jobs, but would sacrifice two or three of these others.

Continuing the review now, with a discussion of tourism in Page County.

Tourism is the economic driver that nobody questions in Page County – but its role in the County creates conflicts with other industries here from time to time, as we saw with the Fibrowatt case. I’ve heard estimates of the number of visitors at SNP as over a million, and a half million at Luray Caverns. The plan acknowledges this with the quote, “Just a few miles in any direction offers visitors a chance to enjoy the abundance of Page County’s natural resources and a range of recreational activities including camping, canoeing, cycling, fishing, golf, hiking, horseback riding, and photography.”

The plan summarizes the impact of tourism, noting expenditures of almost $51 million in 2007, employment of 654 people, and annual payroll of almost $11 million. An occupancy tax generates a budget that is used to promote tourism in the County, guided by the Chamber of Commerce’s Tourism Council. Mary and I have stopped by the Luray-Page visitors’ center and can vouch for how friendly and knowledgeable the staff is; these functions are now housed at the restored Luray train station, making visits to the County memorable.

A new feature of the 2008 plan is a summary for each initiative, presented in something of a scorecard format; at least it is easily adaptable to results reporting in the next update. For each major section of the plan, there is a table that outlines objectives, assigns the lead role, sets a priority for each objective, identifies support roles, and lists resources.

There are four objectives for Tourism. The only “Priority A” objective here is:

“The Director of the Economic Development Department will work with the Executive Director of the Chamber to develop reporting formats for the marketing and financial updates that will be submitted to the Board of Supervisors on a regular basis.”

As I mentioned in past posts, I see the opportunities with tourism as low-hanging fruit in the overall context of economic development for Page County. There’s no question about the natural resources available, you have a solid base of visitors to work from, and you can easily monitor the impacts of improvement objectives.

If less than $200K in promotional funds is all it takes to maintain tourism traffic at 1.5 million visitors, tourism revenues at $51 million, and creating payroll of 654 employees, does simply adding $20K create the opportunity to increase everything by 10%? If that investment won't improve the statistics by 10%, how much will the impact be? If it only creates 10 more jobs, that still seems worthwhile – especially when you compare it to the $7-million plus being considered for clover, or for the millions of dollars in subsidies that would have been offered to Fibrowatt in exchange for 25 jobs.

Seems like an easy place to start to me.

There are two more posts in this wrap up of the 2008 Economic Development Plan. The Agriculture sector is the one I will take a look at next, followed by retaining existing businesses.