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Reinventing Economic Development: Less Action, More Talk

If someone tells you that I am all talk and no action now, they would be right.  After 30 years, personally on the hook for planning and executing job creation strategies, my job now is to talk about it.

One would think that talking about economic development would be lot easier, much less pressure and less productive than actually doing it. This would be a fair conclusion, in a field with the worst talk to action ratio, where talking is the primary excuse for inaction. But, I’m actually finding this talking gig to be much more difficult, and higher pressure than running a program ever was.

Designing and managing a program with the staff, budget and cohort corporate alliance of architects, builders, financiers, lawyers and training institutions was definitely demanding, high pressure work, but I usually had 7 to 12 years to change the economic trajectory of a place, by adding value daily, building capacity, generating leads, persuading prospects and closing deals.

Now, I have 20 minutes to say something that compels the audience to change their community’s economic trajectory – something they wouldn’t otherwise do. It is a lot more pressure and much harder, given that less and less of what I have learned over the last 30 years about economic development actually applies in today’s environment. So many of the fundamentals of economic development have changed, that it begs a new paradigm. A paradigm in which many of the strategies and insights we developed to grow local economies in the past won’t apply in the future.

Sage advice from decades of experience is not as valuable as it might have been ten years ago.  Copying other communities won’t work right now, so there is great value in talking to people who can give you contrasting insights, to help your community talk through what it might do now.

In many places, talking may be more important than action right now. Human beings are unique, in that we are capable of contemplating and designing our future. We do it by iteration – by thinking ahead, assessing our choices and expressing our ambitions. It is by talking that we improve our understanding, innovation, collaboration, and develop a consensus.

If you think about it, language is the architecture of our thinking. If we don’t have the vocabulary and sentence structure to say something – we can’t think it. Furthermore, if we if we lack a common theoretical construct for something complex, like how the community economy works, we will find it difficult to frame and manage deliberations to a productive end.

To some, talking about talking or talking about theory may seem to postpone the actual action. With so many underlying fundamentals of the game in flux, productive talk will be difficult if we don’t reassert a common intellectual construct, and recalibrate the nomenclature.

Talk is crucial, if a community is to understand its predicament and the dimensions of the new paradigm, and to act strategically to manage their economic future.

So this talking gig might look like easier, lower pressure and less impactful than actually doing it was – but for now at least, it feels like the reverse.

So, keep talking.

Thank you for visiting MarkLautman.com. 

This position has been filled.

LIVEXCHANGE 2013: Mark Lautman to Present Seminar at Business Facilities LiveXchange.

LIVEXCHANGE 2013: Mark Lautman to Present Seminar at Business Facilities LiveXchange

Mark Lautman, Founding Director of the Community Economics Lab

Mark Lautman, CEcD, CRE, Founding Director of the Community Economics Lab, will join the all-star list of guest speakers featured at the upcoming Business Facilities LiveXchange event. The ninth annual event will take place May 19-21, 2013 at the Westin Stonebriar in Dallas, Texas. Lautman will present a seminar on Demographics and Site Selection.

With three decades of experience as a professional economic developer, Lautman has designed and managed four economic development programs having procured more than 80 corporate locations, accounting for more than 15,000 new jobs, six million square feet of industrial space, and $11 billion in new investment. His consulting business, Lautman Economic Architecture, LLC, works with community leaders to transform community economies and elevate the professional practice of economic and workforce development. Mark has written a monthly column for the New Mexico Business Weekly, and is the author of a book, “When the Boomers Bail: A Community Economics Survival Guide.”

The Community Economics Lab is a private not-for-profit think tank that innovates new approaches to economic development to work in a labor and capital constrained economy.

To learn more about LiveXchange, or to apply to attend, please visit http://www.bflivexchange.com/.

 

Analysis paints grim jobs picture for Sandoval County

By Rosalie Rayburn / Journal Staff Writer on Mon, Mar 11, 2013

RIO RANCHO — Sandoval County urgently needs to find ways to create employment to stave off the expected effects of the shrinking federal job market.That’s the grim picture economic development specialist Mark Lautman painted for county commissioners at a recent workshop on the topic.

» Analysis paints grim jobs picture for Sandoval County | ABQ Journal.

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Based on a recent analysis, Sandoval County will have to generate more than 700 “economic-based” jobs each year through 2022 to bring its economy back to the level it was in 2007. 

Gary Gerew

Assistant Editor-Albuquerque Business First

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Sandoval County needs to find ways to create employment to stave off the expected effects of the shrinking federal job market, an economic development specialist has told county commissioners.

Mark Lautman delivered that message at a recent workshop on the topic, according to the Albuquerque Journal.

Lautman has been involved with numerous economic development projects, including Mesa del Sol in Albuquerque and the Santa Teresa industrial park in southern New Mexico.

He estimates the state lost about 50,000 jobs from 2008 through 2011 and will likely lose thousands more if the federal government follows through on expected spending cuts, according to the Journal.

Based on a recent analysis, Lautman estimates Sandoval County will have to generate more than 700 “economic-based” jobs each year through 2022 to bring its economy back to the level it was in 2007 before the recession, the Journal reported. Economic-based jobs create products or services that bring out-of-state revenue into New Mexico.

After the workshop, commissioners agreed to create a task force to draw up a strategy to promote economic development. They will discuss the topic again at their regular meeting this month, the Journal reported.

via Sandoval County told to start looking for work – Albuquerque Business First.

Roswell is Changing Say City Leaders – Roswell, GA Patch.

• The Neighborhood Files

Roswell is Changing Say City Leaders

The first Roswell NEXT Town Hall on Thursday evening went over some of the ways the city is changing and will improve over the next several decades.

• By Christine Foster
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• March 1, 2013

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Roswell has and will continue to change in the coming years, said a panel of city leaders during the first Roswell NEXT Town Hall meeting. The challenge is now influencing a change that builds community.

It was a full house at the Historic Roswell Cottage for the meeting, Thursday evening, Feb. 28, which was open to Roswell NEXT members, as well as the public. An engaged audience listened to local experts including developer Dave Schmit, Roswell Councilwoman Nancy Diamond, Roswell’s Director of Transporation Steve Acenbrak and urban planner Lew Oliver speak on where Roswell is coming from – a traditional bedroom community which has avoided mixed zoning uses in the past – to where it’s headed in terms of demographics, potential redevelopment and community connectivity.

Because metro Atlanta is still growing there are opportunities for Roswell to adapt into something that will better suit a new generation seeking a different kind of lifestyle than Roswell was originally built for, Schmit told the crowd. Though he and the rest of the panel believes Roswell will predominately remain residential – 71 percent of the city is occupied by homes currently – reshaping the city’s sense of community is entirely viable.

Redevelopment is happening in selected areas. And more will be fueled by the 1,627 new jobs that have come in over the past six months and are currently being filled thanks to the efforts of theRoswell Business Alliance, said Diamond. She said the city needed to figure out the best plan for incentivizing redevelopment which will replace an aging stock of retail and office space, as well as improve the community surrounding certain blighted areas.

Similarly, Oliver – who, along with local architect Alex Paulson, assists the city’s Downtown Development Authority - proposed ideas for redeveloping the commercial area near the Masonic Lodge on Alpharetta Street. He also showed a potential design for a new European style boulevard in front of Roswell City Hall and another that would extend Oak Street to the west in a way that elaborates upon the history of the area.

Additionally, Acenbrak offered up renderings for new transportation connectivity opportunities within the city, including the proposed Big Creek Parkway extending over Ga. 400, an early off ramp at Holcomb Bridge Road and a new multi-use trail along Highway 120, from Willeo Road up to Mimosa Boulevard. He also explained how a future “Roswell Loop” could create multi-use paths throughout the entire city, as well as connect Roswell with other metro area multi-use paths, like the Big Creek Greenway and the Silver Comet trail.

Diamond suggested residents who are interested in the establishment of community read Mark Lautman’s “When the Boomers Bail: A Community Economic Survival Guide.”

Check the Roswell NEXT website for future events or how to get involved.

Expert: Tough task to lure quality jobs.

Remember the days when Northeast factories and businesses laid off their union wage workers to move to the South where salaries were lower? Those days are gone, economic development expert Mark Lautman told a Covington workforce summit Tuesday. To coax big employers into Newton County, towns will need better amenities and a talented, educated workforce.

County is poor and getting poorer
“Branding Covington as the place that pays workers less than everywhere else is not a good way to attract talented, skilled workers to come here,” said Lautman, a New Mexico economic development consultant, whose bio claims he landed 15,000 jobs and $11 billion in investments for clients. “You need those workers for your tax base. You are poor and getting poorer. You cannot count on a national economic recovery saving Covington’s future. It won’t happen.”

Employers at the summit were equally blunt. When chamber of commerce President Hunter Hall called for a 15-minute break from the tough talk, he joked with the audience, “We may need to use the buddy system to get you all back. I hope I don’t have to put anyone on a suicide watch after this.”

They laughed. And they came back.

Newton County jobs sit vacant
Most seemed to agree with Lautman’s assessment that the global economy has changed so much over the past 20-odd years, it will never fully bounce back from its 2007 near-death freefall. Solutions must be found at the city, county or state level because Washington is too politically polarized to move forward.

Newton County employers said they had vacant jobs that could not be filled because county residents lacked the right skills and education.

Michelin plant manager Terry Redmile said his company spent a substantial sum relocating workers to the Covington workplace even after contacting the community college.

“It seems a shame that we’re spending all that money we could have spent in Covington,” said Redmile, who needed electricians and skilled maintenance workers.

One manager was inundated with hard-working, eager applicants who were unskilled laborers. Unfortunately, she needed skilled laborers. And the applicants did not have the money for classes to get the necessary certification.

Many attendees believe even college educated workers can face the same fate in the new economy that prizes engineering and science majors.

“If you didn’t have good high science, math or computer science teachers in high school, forget an engineering or chemist’s job,” ProLogistix manager Deidre Dorsey said. “You can’t learn that type of work on the job. You’re lost.”

Follow the money, not bliss
Lautman suggested the county and city work with local employers to create a scouting system to spot middle school students who were talented in math, science and technology. A mentor from the company could help the student choose courses that would educate him or her or a job in the Covington firm. A company might even pay some of the student’s college costs in exchange for a promise to work a year for the company.

“We have baseball and football scouts for talented athletes,” Lautman observed. “We should set up a similar process for science, engineering and technology.”

He urged educators, employers and parents to avoid misleading young people by telling them to do what they loved and earning a living would come naturally.

“We have a great anthropology program at New Mexico’s university that turns out 100 anthropologists per year,” he said. “Know how many anthropology jobs New Mexico has each year? Two.”

Converting the unskilled into the mainstream workforce will take substantial state, local or corporate investment, he conceded. He described a successful New Mexico program that enlisted three corporate mentors for a worker trying to gain the skills needed for a job with the corporation.

He praised Covington’s 2050 plan because it can help residents focus on how to prepare the next few generations for the future.

Rules of attracting talent
Lautman told the audience Newton County has “a really bad commute problem; 75 percent of your residents commute out of the county to work.”

Those Newton County workers may be spending lunch, coffee and gas money in another county as a result.
“You need more than an industrial park and utility scale to attract creative, innovative companies whose workers will build your tax base,” Lautman said, urging Covington to “hire an economic demographer who can help you with talent attraction. Of course that can be scary. Who wants to spend $60,000 to find out you suck at something. It may be depressing. But it has to be done.”

No, it doesn’t, not in Newton County or Covington.

“We’re not hiring an economic demographer because we just don’t have that kind of money,” Hall later told The News. “But we have already targeted industries that are a good match for our existing workforce.”

Among the industries targeted are advanced manufacturing, food processing and call centers.

So much TV and movie filming is done in Newton County, some attendees suggested during a breakout session whether Covington could convince film producers to hire locals as editors, CGI and special effects artists as well as crew members, like the industry does in popular filming locale Wilmington, N.C. But Wilmington has an infrastructure of huge studio spaces and editing bays as well as a workforce with the needed technical skills.

Hall said he was working on a plan to develop a similar core workforce in Covington, but it was not ready yet for public discussion.

What amenities would make Covington appealing to a creative, well-paid workforce—and the company that employs them?

“We’re in our infancy stage as far as talent attraction is concerned,” Covington-Newton County economic development director Shannon Davis told the audience. She invited Lautman to speak at the summit after reading his book, When Boomers Bail: A Community Economics Survival Guide.

Redmile said most potential hires with children ask about the local schools first. But managers at the summit said young workers in particular wanted to know about music, concerts, the visual arts scene and cultural amenities, too.

“Where you live is twice as important to your happiness as who you marry,” Lautman quipped, as he urged local government officials to play matchmaker for Covington. Then he closed with some final goals for attendees who emotionally or financially invested in Newton County—keep baby boomers physically healthy, make sure youth have employable skills and offer the unskilled but eager to learn a helping hand into the workforce.

ABQJournal Sports » Uphill trek For community spirit.

By Glen Rosales / For the Journal on Feb. 7, 2013

Stretches of biking, snowshoeing, running and cross-country climbing make up what’s known as the Quad

When a little-known nuclear reactor near Harrisburg, Pa., burst into national consciousness in 1981, the fallout from the accident at Three Mile Island was a complete disintegration of the uranium industry. And that ripped the economic heart out of Grants.

This year will be the 30th anniversary of the Mt. Taylor Quadrathlon, started as a way to help Grants recover from economic devastation, as well as a community morale-boost.

The Quad, as it is known, starts with a 13-mile bike ride from Town Hall at an elevation of 6,500 feet, followed by a 5-mile run on a dirt road, then a 2-mile, 1,200-foot cross-country climb and finally a 1-mile, 600-foot snowshoe slog to the top of an 11,301-foot peak before reversing it all back to town.

	If you go  What: Mt. Taylor Quadrathlon Where: Grants When: Feb. 16, 8 a.m. Who: Solo, pairs and 4-person teams How much: $60 per person for teams and pairs; $80 for solo competitors before Friday; $100 thereafter. Registration closes Feb. 14

At the Quad’s inception, Mark Lautman, a former swimmer for the University of New Mexico, knew that in addition to a long-term plan to turn Grants around, the town needed a quick fix that could inject some needed economic relief and some positive community spirit.

“About 70 percent of the economic base of Cibola County went up in smoke,” Lautman said. “About 8,000 people lost their jobs and these were high-paying jobs.”

As he was moving from Denver to Grants, “I’m thinking, we have to figure out some way to make an immediate contribution to the economy.”

Lautman had become a triathlete, but he knew it would take something special to attract people to Grants, so he arranged to meet UNM ski coach George Brooks, who arranged a meeting with Nordic coach Klaus Weber, who went on to coach the Lobos men’s soccer team and is now coaching soccer and tennis at Bosque School.

And the germination of the idea began in earnest.

“I thought we should do something to tie the community of Grants to Mt. Taylor,” Weber said.

“We talked about whether we could hold a Nordic ski event there now or whether we could make it a winter triathlon,” Lautman said. “There’s no place to swim in the winter so we thought we’d add skiing.”

Weber immediately got behind the idea.

“I found the concept pretty exciting,” said Weber, who plans to compete this year for about the 20th time.

After Lautman got settled in Grants, Weber paid him a visit and the two “spent a week hiking all over Mt. Taylor,” Lautman said. “We figured and realized that to get to the top of the mountain would be too steep for skies. So we put snowshoeing in. Klaus was the guy that basically engineered the course.”

Once that was determined, the route nearly laid itself out, Weber said.

The length of the bike ride “is just about perfect,” he said. “It’s slightly uphill so you don’t have crowding. The second leg is definitely ideal for running. The cross-country ski is tough, especially the hill right before the end, and the last 400 yards to the top in the snowshoe is tough.”

Turning around and doing it all again in reverse “is much easier on the way down,” Weber said. “But that can be pretty challenging too.”

That first year, there were about 50 entrants, but the number quickly grew as the local community quickly adopted the event and the athletic community gravitated to its unique nature. “Nobody got killed, we didn’t lose anybody and it was a remarkable event,” Lautman said of that first year.

Now, the event that is more than just about endurance, is a fixture on the calendar of extreme athletes.

Directions 2013 sentiment: ‘Modest progress’ in economic growth development efforts in Reno-Sparks (see video from event) | Reno Gazette-Journal | rgj.com.

Mike Kazmierski: CEO of EDAWN speaks at Directions 2013.

Written by

Bill O’Driscoll

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• Business
• Economy
• Grand Sierra
• Economic Development Authority
• Western Nevada

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Economist Mark Lautman speaks at Directions 2013 at the Grand Sierra Resort and Casino on Thursday. Lautman was the keynote speaker at the annual economic summit. / Andy Barron/RGJ

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Photo by Andy Barron — 130107 Economist Mark Lautman speaks at the Directions 2013 at the Grand Sierra Resort on Feb. 7, 2013. lautman was the keynote speaker at the annual economic summit. / RGJ

QUOTABLES

Heard at Directions 2013:

“We will launch a new marketing campaign on the beauty and diversity of Nevada, from Lake Tahoe to Las Vegas to Elko. We’re letting the world know Nevada is a world-class destination no matter what part of Nevada you’re in.” — Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval
“ ‘Solopreneurs.’ Once you start looking around, they’re everywhere. Make Reno a way better place to work for yourself than anywhere else.” — Mark Lautman, consultant, Lautman Economic Architecture LLC, Albuquerque, N.M.
“We will never get schools to where they need to be unless Nevada business plays a larger role. Not more taxes, but something more. We need the chambers to participate in the contact sport called politics.” — James Guthrie,
Nevada superintendent of public instruction
“Rally around education. It’s been too long. If we can build a solid foundation, a lot of our future will be easier.” — Shaun Carey, Sparks city manager

On RGJ.com/directions

Find this story online to see video and other coverage from Directions 2013, as well as our preview articles leading up to the event.

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Photo by Andy Barron — 130107 Economist Mark Lautman speaks at the Directions 2013 at the Grand Sierra Resort on Feb. 7, 2013. lautman was the keynote speaker at the annual economic summit. / RGJ

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Photo by Andy Barron — 130107 Economist Mark Lautman speaks at the Directions 2013 at the Grand Sierra Resort on Feb. 7, 2013. lautman was the keynote speaker at the annual economic summit. / RGJ

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Photo by Andy Barron — 130107 Economist Mark Lautman speaks at the Directions 2013 at the Grand Sierra Resort on Feb. 7, 2013. lautman was the keynote speaker at the annual economic summit. / RGJ

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Photo by Andy Barron — 130107 Attendees of the Directions 2013 listen at economist Mark Lautman speaks at the Directions 2013 at the Grand Sierra Resort on Feb. 7, 2013. lautman was the keynote speaker at the annual economic summit. / RGJ

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Photo by Andy Barron — 130107 Attendees of the Directions 2013 listen at economist Mark Lautman speaks at the Directions 2013 at the Grand Sierra Resort on Feb. 7, 2013. lautman was the keynote speaker at the annual economic summit. / RGJ