If you weren't at the Chamber's economic development lunch yesterday, by now you've read the coverage in today's Orlando Sentinel. The consultant/speaker they brought in highlighted two things: First, the majority of jobs created in Osceola County in the last 5 years were lower-paying service-industry jobs, which dragged Osceola's average wage to among the lowest in Central Florida. No one should have been surprised there.Second, the consultant says that in order to attract high-wage employers, the county should consider buying and developing a 500-750 acre industrial/headquarters park. He suggests that publicly owned "job centers" are becoming more popular as private developers don't want to go through years of land-use approvals (sounds familiar, right?)
Well, according to the Sentinel, the "room was buzzing" about the industrial park, and Economic Development Director Maria Grulich was quoted as saying "I want it."
Kissimmee Commissioners: Your 192/Vine corridor consultant suggested much this same use on the airport side of Vine over a year ago. Interestingly, the only site within the city mentioned as possible for this park in the article was "the area around the Kissimmee Gateway Airport."
We hope that the conversation has already started, but if not, we need you to do this for us today. Start calling the county commissioners and the economic development department with this simple message: "City of Kissimmee here...we're in." Tell them to not even bother looking other places...we have developable land around the airport, utilities in place, a commercial strip that is badly in need of repurposing and redevelopment, and, by the way, it's anchored to the airport, which is already an economic development hot spot. Because we all know, that left to a passive search pattern, a greenfield development site out in the middle of the county somewhere will be selected, and if that happens, we're going to pretty much be out of ideas for things to do with Vine Street.
Say it again: "City of Kissimmee here...we're in."
5 comments:
Is it me or is the County's Economic Development Department over rated? Their Director dances around the Commissioners and distracts everyone with her hand movements all the while the County's average salary drops and we continue to be hospitality based/dependent. This office talks about their success in bringing higher paying jobs but most of the time its smoke and mirrors. Example...They make a presentation to the County Commissioners and the County Manager about a company that wants to move here which will bring jobs with an "Average" income of $50,000 per year and the crowd (Commissioners) goes wild. Now here's the catch. Of the 20 or 30 jobs 70% of these jobs only pay $20,000 while 30% pay over $70,000 bringing the "Average" to about $50,000. Hey! Wait a second. I think I've been tricked. No. They said "Average". Now this same company says that "Most" of these positions will be given to locals. Hmmm. I wonder which jobs will go to the locals? I guess not the higher paying jobs because those will be filled with transfers from other offices within their company. Here's the kicker...we give some pretty good tax breaks/packages to these groups in order to get them here. I know...even a blind squirrel will find a nut now and then (Lowes, which rumor has it just laid off over 200 employees)but it doesn't mean that nut will satisfy that squirrel's hunger/need forever.
Publicly owned job centers might be becoming more popular, but give me a break. Do you really want to see the government involved in competing with private business and owning an industrial park? Maybe the school board should buy some fast food franchises so the profits can be used to help the kids education. Come on.
It would be nice if we could believe that governemt could do this right, but they would kill it over time. Look at the Stevens Plantation debacle in St. Cloud. Government can barely do its own job. Putting government in the developement business is a bad idea and does not work.
A $200,000 fountain instead of fire fighters??? Good catch Wayne Who.
I think the problems that I have with this is that the governments have never been serious about working on building an economy here. They like to talk about it now, but only because some of the new candidates that have been running for office have identified this as a problems. Economic develpoment is a serious issue, and the elected people we have now have not and are not doing anything to fix the problem.
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