Fourth Annual Planning Challenges of the 21st Century - "Putting Florida to Work - the Planner's Role"

I am a long time member of the Palm Beach County Planning Congress.  We are predominantly a group of professional urban planners practicing in the private and public sectors within Palm Beach County.  Anyone can join, however, if they share an interest in planning and zoning issues that affect our region.  The annual membership fee in only $40 and I would highly recommend joining if you have the desire.  Regular readers might remember the post regarding the trip to the FPL hybrid solar plant and Barley Barber Swamp tout last month - this was one of the Planning Congress' monthly events.

Yesterday, in the City of Boca Raton's state-of-art training facility at 6500 Congress Avenue auditorium, the Planning Congress held their fourth annual seminar on planning challenges of the 21st Century.  This year the focus was on Economic Development and ways the planning profession can promote job creation and investment in the south Florida region.

Our first speaker was Dr. Ned Murray who is the Associate Director of the Metropolitan Center at Florida International University.  Dr. Murray addressed the second annual seminar of the series and we were glad to welcome him back.  He spoke on "Creative Economic Development in Florida."  He noted that planners do not often hold positions as economic directors in municipal and county governments.   He found that odd since planners are in many ways trained to be economic development professionals given our "generalist" tradition and our usual immersion in statistics and the monitoring of broader societal and economic trends.  Planners understand the relationship between function and form on a larger scale.

He centered his discussion around the Miami-Dade FEC corridor study and its role in what become known as mid-town Miami.  At the beginning of the study, it consisted of a 54 acre railroad yard for the FEC railway.  He looked at economic growth during the period of time between the study (2002) and the current year.  It showed the trajectory of our economy and evidence of the bottoming out of the regional economy which started in 2006 and is only just now showing signs of improvement.  He then compared this with the poverty rate over the same period and found that it was relatively unchanged.  This showed that the underlying causes of poverty are really independent of economic growth cycles and that the downturn itself did not contribute greatly to increased poverty.

He noted that 90 percent of businesses in Palm Beach County have less than 25 employees and 65 percent have less than 5 employees.  He said that the focus for economic development activities should be targeted to these firms and not as much in landing the one big employer that everyone is going after.  Economic development is not high-rise condominiums or a new Starbucks - in south Florida it needs to be about industrial development to help diversify our predominant lower wage, service economy.

We need to ask the following questions when making decisions about what sort of industries and firms communities wish to attract.  What is the occupational mix?  Who are the direct beneficiaries?  What resources does your community already have that would be attractive to who you are targeting?  How are your efforts going to legislated, promoted and sustained?

In order to do this, you need information that planners already have at the ready.  You need a knowledge of the region's economic history.  You also must have a sense of where your particular jurisdiction stands in relationship to your "competition" and who exactly that competition is.  You really need to thoroughly examine existing geographic concentrations of major employers.

There are certain industrial policy considerations that you need to look at.  He said that 75% of the remaining industrially zoned land in Palm Beach County is within 1 mile east and west of I-95. If we are going to be attracting new industry, this is it's likely location (Park of Commerce).  Much of this will be redevelopment so that the emphasis has to be in improving the area's access and infrastructure to accommodate this new investment and employment base.  Much of the effort needs to be targeted towards municipal service delivery and the adequateness of public infrastructure.  He emphasized the importance of workforce development programs and the need to bring in local community colleges to assist in the effort.

He continued to emphasize throughout his talk that retention is more important for economic development than expansion and attraction of new industries.  Small Business Development centers need to be staffed with trained business professionals.  While Miami-Dade targeted the film making industry and has had some success building on an existing industry, he said that county and city film commissions are largely irrelevant.  He said that many communities have had success in establishing a Business Development Office where people can go and access an Ombudsman to help them through the regulatory process (something that I have repeatedly suggested here.)  Communities can also help in establishing guilds for training of workers that need skills for a particular trade needed for your targeted industries.  He recommended creating a "Mayor's Invention Award" to celebrate and draw attention to unique entrepreneurial accomplishments in your jurisdiction.

If the session had a keynote speaker, it had to be Lois Frankel, former Mayor of West Palm Beach.  She built her talk around the Knight Foundation Soul of the Community study.  She said that the top attributes for community attractiveness, based upon the results of the study, were social offerings, openness and acceptance of a diverse community, aesthetics, green space and access to higher education.  She pointed to the new West Palm Beach library and how it has become a real community draw.  She said in its first year of operation, the library checked out over 1 million individual items.  She said that it really has become a social center. (By the way, for the first time, I visited the West Palm Beach City Hall this week delivering an application that I put together.  I used to work for West Palm Beach in their planning department and I could have only dreamed to work in a facility like that.  To me, it had more in common with a Saks Fifth Avenue than your typical government building.)

She reviewed the major accomplishments of her Mayoral predecessors starting with the late Pat Pepper who led the charge to make sure the Kravis Center ended up where it did, Nancy Graham's role in the development of City Place and Joel Daves focus on the city's park system.  She said that each Mayor addressed the pressing issues of their time.

Her pressing issue was addressing the waterfront and the Clematis Street area as it was quickly becoming the poor step-child to City Place when she first came to office.  She said that nightclubs back then had overpowered the environment there and it really became an issue of public safety.  She remembers then West Palm Beach Chief of Police Ric Bradshaw called her up at midnight on a weekend and asked her to meet him on Clematis Street.  She got there and all she saw was a sea of people milling about on the sidewalk, in the streets, everywhere.  As she walked through the crowd, she was accompanied by two officers in front and two in back as protection.  She knew that the city had to get a handle on this situation not only for public safety but in order to return Clematis Street to a space for retail outlets and restaurants that would serve mostly food.

The City Commission then initiated policies that banned anyone in a bar that was under 21.  She said that before, young women under 21 would be let in and be given a wristband which identified them as someone that couldn't drink - "wink, wink."  It turns out that young men of the same age would be waiting and milling about outside and meet up with the young women that had been inside the establishments.  The city then implemented a nighttime curfew - after 11 - for anyone under 18.  She said that those two actions did a lot to change the character of the street.

She talked about moving the library and opening up the waterfront from Clematis and how that condition - a downtown shopping street with access to water - is an unusual and unique condition not found many other places.  She said that these was done to create a place that people would want to be and help meet some of the community strengths identified in the Knight Foundation study.  She reminded everyone that we live in a competitive world and you always have to have that in mind when directing which way a community will grow and develop.  She also stressed the importance to be an attractive place for the 20-40 year old age group.  She bragged about the Digital Domain facility on the drawing board for what used to be the "tent site.  I guess they helped in the film Titanic - Frankel got a couple of laughs when she asked, "What was that movie where the boat sank?"

She was asked if she felt that it was necessary to be a strong Mayor in a Strong Mayor form of government in order to do what she did.  Surprisingly, she said, "No, you don't need to be a strong Mayor in order to move a city forward."  She also reminded us that she had to work with the City Commission in order to really accomplish anything.

I got the opportunity to ask her a question about how she was able to overcome opposition to get things done.  She recited a short history of the City Center project, which I won't go into here, but her summary response was most revealing.  She said, "In order to lead, you can't spend all of your time putting out fires.  Fires are always going to be there and many times they go out on their own accord."

I'll continue with a second installment later.