Page County EDA 2008 Strategic Plan Recap, Part 3 - Business and Industry

This is the third and final recap post on my review of the 2008 update to the Page County EDA’s strategic plan. Today’s post reviews the plan’s “business retention and attraction” section – the material regarding business retention is by far the shorter of these two goals, so we’ll start there.  Later next week, I'll take a look at the 2009 update.

Even a cursory review of this plan update shows that in 2008 the EDA had already vectored itself onto a perceived need to expedite the purchase of “ready-to-go” sites – a concept eventually leading to the Project Clover land deal.

Now on to the review of the plan –

“In order to retain businesses in Page County, public education is needed to let firms know what resources (financial, information, expertise, etc.) are available to leverage their existing efforts and investments.” This quote is the sole reference to existing business in the 1.5 page executive summary of the plan. It is a distinctively noncommittal observation – “public education is needed” – no assignment of responsibility, no data, no performance metrics.

Further back in the plan, where the goal and objectives are listed, the four items listed for retaining existing businesses are basically a repeat of those found in the 2003 plan:

• Expand existing efforts to educate businesses…
• Continue to build relationships with existing businesses…
• Undertake a survey of local businesses…
• Identify companion businesses to those existing in the county…

The first three are given high priority, while this last is rated less important. All were to be done with current staff resources – Chamber of Commerce, EDA, or Board of Supervisors resources – and some with current funding. The middle two above – the relationships building goal and the survey – require program funds for implementation; which is the same status they had in the 2003 plan, if I recall correctly. One thing I would like to see is a status report, not just in this section but in all sections – going back to the old stratagem of “what gets measured gets managed.”

The plan includes a straightforward justification for these simple investments:

• “…existing businesses provide the greatest opportunities to provide new jobs and capital investment.”
• “…business retention is even more critical than business recruitment to the economic viability and growth of the County.”

These are strong statements – and their placement in the plan is significant, appearing as they do before the discussion of goals related to recruiting new businesses. There is a long history of businesses leaving the County or closing outright. And the data shows that more than 60 percent of Page County's workforce commutes to work places not located here. If I were an owner of an existing business in Page County, I’d be asking questions about this – and I’d want to know why, with this kind of wording around the goals, more hasn’t been done to support existing businesses.

It gets to the soapbox point: why all the fuss about a land deal that will cost a lot more money than the small outlay it would take to lay the ground work for future growth, based on what’s already here?

Seems to me, this is another case of low-hanging fruit, along with overlooking the tourist and agriculture sectors as possible investment targets, that was missed somehow by the Board of Supervisors and the EDA. I’d love to see a revisit of these items as part of the way forward for the County.