Economic forum looks at the road ahead for region

Business and government leaders hoping to prepare Northwest Florida for the economy of the 21st century see the potential but also the obstacles ahead, especially with development resources that are often slim and a work force that still needs training.

The 2010 Northwest Florida Legislative Dialogue was convened Monday morning at the DoubleTree Hotel by economic development organization Florida’s Great Northwest and Our Region Tomorrow, a Tallahassee-based consortium of Big Bend leaders. They invited members of the area’s legislative delegation to hear the case for the region’s business growth and what it will take.

Bo Taff, economic development task force chair for Our Region Tomorrow and executive with Foley Timber & Land Co. in Taylor County, described the area as a participant in a knowledge-based economy, where talent, ideas and understanding can flourish. That does not mean, however, that knowledge becomes a commodity or a product, he said.

“Rather, a knowledge-based economy is born on the idea that advancements in knowledge become a tool to form solutions that meet the needs and demands of a global economy looking for answers,” Taff said.

Al Wenstrand, president of Florida’s Great Northwest, said another sector, aerospace and defense, will play a big role in the future economy, pushed by the research and development of systems and hardware at Eglin and Tyndall Air Force bases and the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Panama City.

Wenstrand said there are now 1,900 companies from Tallahassee to Pensacola that are working in aerospace and defense, or are providing support services of some type. Together, they have generated 70,000 jobs. “These are also the ones that kept growing during the Great Recession,” he added.

The challenge will be preparing the work force for jobs in science, engineering, information technology and related fields. State Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Niceville, told the gathering that the funding resources the state does have need to be redeployed so that more students can be readied for employment in the new economy.

Performance-based business incentives will take the place of grants and similar forms of funding, Gaetz said. The state’s budget cutting has officials looking “for opportunities to do things better and smarter and sooner.”

Richard Williams, executive director of the Chipola Regional Workforce Development Board, echoed that sentiment. He stressed that more resources should be devoted to supporting technical education programs.

“I am really sick and tired of having these conversations about what the DOE needs,” he said of the Department of Education’s curriculum requirements. “What about what the companies need?”

One of his community’s projects has been to get teachers out into the work place to visit local industries and have them become better acquainted with what the firms do and what skills they seek when recruiting.