The future of Florida was the “hot topic” during the Alliance For Regional Stewardship (ARS) Fall Forum, held November 15-17, 2006, in Ft. Lauderdale. More than 120 participants from throughout the country, including Shelley Lauten, Dean Hybl and Karine Moreau from myregion.org, spent three days exchanging ideas and discussing issues that affect regions throughout the country.
ARS, a national network of regional leaders working across “traditional” boundaries to solve tough community problems, holds a conference twice a year in different cities across the nation. This marked the first visit to Florida for the Alliance. The topic for the Conference was “Building Strong Regions from the Top Down and the Bottom Up.”
To kickoff the forum, participants were escorted to the Everglades to see “first hand” the environmental challenges facing Florida’s key natural environments. A surprisingly friendly alligator, several native birds and saw grass were among the natural elements that greeted participants during an airboat tour of the Everglades.
The tour provided a perfect preview to the first session of the conference, which was spent discussing the past, present and future of Florida. Currently the fourth most populous state in the nation with 18.2 million residents, Florida is projected to move past New York (19.2 million residents) into third place nationally with more than 23 million people projected to reside in Florida by 2020.
To provide forum participants with a clear understanding of the challenges facing Florida, Glenda Hood, the former Mayor of Orlando and Florida Secretary of State, moderated a panel that included State Representative Mike Davis from Southwest Florida, Isabelle Owen Spence from Leadership Jacksonville and Shelley Lauten representing Central Florida’s myregion.org project. As was also done in a separate panel discussion focusing on Southeast Florida, they discussed the issues facing the various regions of Florida and provided insight into the different regional approaches being taken across the state.
After focusing specifically on Florida during the first portion of the conference, the remainder of the forum was designed to highlight regional “best practices” from throughout the United States. Parris Glendening, former Governor of Maryland and now President of the Smart Growth Leadership Institute, was among the keynote speakers. Other presenters during the conference included Robert Grow, Chair Emeritus of Envision Utah; Florida Secretary of Community Affairs Thaddeus Cohen; Frank Beal, Executive Director of Chicago’s Metropolis 2020; and Marc Draisen, the Executive Director of Boston’s Metropolitan Planning Commission.
Several members of the ARS Board of Directors served as National Faculty members for the myregion.org-sponsored Central Florida Regional Leadership Academy held earlier this year and the group reconvened for a special breakfast during the conference. At the breakfast, Shelley Lauten provided an update on myregion.org and the “How Shall We Grow?” initiative to Create a Shared Vision for Central Florida. The National Experts then used their own individual experiences to help the myregion.org staff craft strategy for the future of the “How Shall We Grow?”
