A
crowd of more than 60 community leaders from Brevard County gathered last week
to hear myregion.org President
Jacob Stuart provide an update of some of the latest regional findings to date.
Members of the Space Coast Tiger Bay Club listened attentively as he shared
data collected on the 13 areas of study, including tourism, economic development,
transportation and demographics.
A story published in Florida
Today, Brevard County’s premier newspaper, carried the headline “Regionalism
is Key to Economic Success.” A very positive review of the event by reporter
John McCarthy, it quotes University of Florida County Extension Director Jim
Fletcher rating the presentation as “excellent.” See the full article
below.
Project to identify local
strengths
Regionalism key to economic success
John McCarthy
Florida Today
COCOA BEACH -- Brevard County's economic, environmental and quality-of-life
concerns don't end at the county line.
That was the point Jacob Stuart drove home to the members of the Space Coast
Tiger Bay Club during a luncheon meeting in Cocoa Beach on Thursday.
Stuart is president of myregion.org,
a two- to three-year project designed to identify key priorities for the seven-county
Central Florida region, and plans necessary to tackle those priorities.
"It's about regional cooperation," Stuart said. "Regions are
now the hubsof economies."
Stuart, who also is president of the Orlando
Regional Chamber of Commerce, said the United States has gone through two
prior waves of "regionalism," once following the Civil War, the other
during the Great Depression.
Just as those two were driven by extraordinary events, so is this wave, he said.
This time it was the collapse of communism and the subsequent rise in global
trading that has spurred the movement. That has forced local industries to compete
in the worldwide marketplace. Individual cities or counties can't go it alone
in that marketplace, he said.
"The world today, giant global trading blocs . . . Are we going to compete
with China or Tampa?"
To emphasize his point, he displayed an overhead map of the Central Florida
region showing the county boundaries, which for the most part were drawn in
the 19th century. "How many people would redraw those lines the same way
today?" he asked. Not a single hand among the crowd of several dozen people
went up.
"Economies don't end at the county line," Stuart said after the luncheon.
Stuart says myregion.org is going
through a three-step process:
• Create an understanding of the region's needs and strengths.
• Evaluate challenges and opportunities for the region.
• Prepare the area's leaders to act upon those challenges and opportunities.
myregion.org has spent the past
year studying the region and polling residents about how they felt about their
communities, as well as about their hopes for the future.
Among the highlights of the findings:
• Eighty-three percent of Brevardians said they wouldn't live anywhere
else, a higher percentage than in the region's other counties. "That's
incredible," Jacobs said.
• Forty-six percent said Orlando was the economic engine of the region.
Driving that, of course, is tourism. "We are the single largest tourist
destination in the world," Stuart said.
• Local economies in the Central Florida are the strongest in the state.
"The powerhouse of Florida is right here in Central Florida.," Stuart
said. "Tampa Bay to Cocoa Beach, that's the action."
• The region's population is dominated by two age groups, children and
senior citizens. And both groups are growing. Both these groups typically are
very large consumers of public services, Jacobs pointed out.
• People in the region wanted leaders to work more closely on two areas
in particular, health care and jobs.
University of Florida County Extension Director Jim Fletcher said Stuart hit
the nail squarely on the head.
"I think it was excellent," he said of Stuart's presentation. "Definitely
regions are driving the economy. No doubt about it."
