Business, government leaders craft 10-year strategic plan for Palm Beach County

by Stacey Singer

BOCA RATON — The economic downturn has forced businesses to take a hard look at what they do and how they do it to increase efficiency and reduce costs.

“Right or wrong, the feeling is government really hasn’t done a lot of that,” said Bill Perry, managing partner with the Gunster law firm who also serves on the board of the Florida Chamber of Commerce Foundation.

On Wednesday, the North Palm Beach attorney led a group of about 150 business and government leaders assembled in Boca Raton in crafting a 10-year strategic plan for Palm Beach County, one designed to inform a statewide strategic plan that the Florida chamber hopes to use to set government’s agenda for the next decade.

It has been 19 years since Florida voters approved a state constitutional amendment requiring Florida to have a long-range planning document to guide the budget and legislative process. Yet today, no such document exists.

On that note, the Florida Chamber of Commerce Foundation, backed by grants from FPL, Gunster and Wayne Huizenga, has been developing its own strategic plan for Florida, organized around a concept it calls Six Pillars, for the six key issues it believes will support a strong state economy.

It’s intended to be a road map to promote growth, jobs and a higher standard of living, said Dale Brill, the foundation’s president. The chamber’s Six Pillars plan is slated to be released to Gov. Rick Scott at a statewide Future of Florida Forum in Orlando Sept. 19-21, Brill said. Palm Beach County’s work will be highlighted because it is the biggest urban area to launch the planning.

“The Great Recession has been a great awakening,” he said. “We cannot wait for government to do this.”

All year, the Economic Council of Palm Beach County has been conducting meetings with leaders from cities, county government, special taxing districts and the business and nonprofit communities to create its local strategic plan.

Teams met Wednesday to discuss goals including educating the workforce, creating a more business-friendly regulatory environment, enhancing transportation and infrastructure and improving quality of life through better health care access, better neighborhoods and increased civic pride.

Improving health care access for all county residents, including those who are uninsured, was one key need identified, as was increasing the proportion of high school graduates who choose careers in math, science and technology.

On the government end, there was talk of improving the pipeline of people serving in government, getting more people to vote in city elections and increasing both transparency and efficiency.

Several participants, many of them city employees, agreed it was the state’s broad open records and open meetings laws that were to blame for poor participation and government inefficiency. They added to their goals a reassessment of government in the sunshine. Also in the goals: A look at public sector pay and pensions.

Isabel Cosio Carballo, public affairs director for the South Florida Regional Planning Council, said a similar regionwide strategic planning effort has been launched this year by a coalition of regional planning leaders from Indian River, St. Lucie, Martin, Palm Beach, Broward Miami-Dade and Monroe counties. The group, calling itself the Southeast Florida Regional Partnership, applied for and won a $4.25 million Sustainable Communities regional planning grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

That group is preparing to hold a series of publicly advertised meetings around the region to likewise craft a regional strategic plan for counties and cities focused on many of the same Six Pillars goals, including promoting economic competitiveness, coordinated policies and better transportation and housing choices. It also incorporates a plan to build resilience to climate change, including more severe storms and rising sea levels. Cosio Carballo praised the Economic Council’s Six Pillars strategic planning effort and said it will be incorporated into what the Southeast Florida Regional Partnership does.

“You have to understand what your opportunities and challenges are before you can address them,” Cosio Carballo said . “It

really gave me a lot of hope. It is a discussion about where we are, where we want to go, what our priorities are.”