The city of Temple, Texas, is strategically located along the Interstate 35 corridor between Austin and the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. In addition, it is adjacent to Fort Hood, one of the largest active duty armored posts in the US. In 2011 the Killeen-Temple-Fort Hood MSA was ranked among top five best-performing metro areas in the nation, according to the Milken Institute, which ranks metropolitan areas by how well they are creating and sustaining jobs and economic growth.

The Temple EDC wished to position the city to continue this trend through a better targeted business recruitment program. With this in mind, TIP was hired to define the top five industry categories best suited for Temple, taking into account the community’s and region’s existing assets. Additionally TIP was to provide extensive research on each target, as well as a marketing and implementation plan.

The selection of target sectors is traditionally bound to an assessment of only a few determinant factors, such as access to an available workforce, industrial sites, and incentives. Our target industry recommendations are not based solely on these issues, but also on conversations with the area’s business leaders to better understand potential opportunities and challenges that might not be readily identifiable through secondary data sources alone.

Laborshed Analysis: Employees by Zip Code
Source: TIP Strategies

To define the study area for the target industry analysis, we established the actual laborshed of the City of Temple by collecting employee zip code information from the city’s major employers. We obtained data from 11 employers on 17,958 employees or 10% of the Temple Metropolitan Statistical Area’s (MSA) non-military workforce. Employers represented various sectors including healthcare, distribution, back office, education, and manufacturing.

Using tools such as a laborshed analysis, economic base analysis, location quotients, and a shift-share analysis, a quantitative analysis was conducted to identify potential target industry sectors. The list was then filtered further using specific criteria, including location, growth, size, image, and infrastructure. The resulting list includes both existing industry clusters and aspirational targets. Each industry sector was profiled and specific niches are noted. These niches show the greatest potential for growth, pay higher than average earnings, and are sufficiently large to warrant an investment of TEDC’s resources for business recruitment. In addition, they play to Temple’s strengths and fit with Temple’s site availability.

The TEDC adopted the plan in early 2012. With the tools provided by TIP, the TEDC has augmented its marketing program, enhanced its industry research, and re-focused its business recruitment efforts.

By Bill Thompson
Via: Ocala.com

For the Chamber of Commerce and Economic Development Corp., it’s time to get down to business.

Local business leaders say Ocala-Marion County’s main business promoters have essentially completed the merger they embarked on in August, when the respective boards of both organizations voted to combine forces.

As billed back then, the new agency promises to be leaner, more focused and more driven by the private sector, said some involved in the process who visited the Star-Banner on Wednesday.

The new agency will be called the Ocala-Marion County Chamber and Economic Partnership.

The name reflects the new organization’s mission: to draw together and utilize the best traits and expertise of the chamber and the EDC, proponents said.

The idea of a merger was conceived last year as the recession lingered and as unemployment locally persistently hovered above 12 percent.

It also evolved after the County Commission, reacting to what it perceived as ineffective action by the recruiters, had launched its own aggressive plan to create jobs.

Doug Cone, chairman of the EDC board, said Wednesday the community, especially its business sector and promoters, had grown “complacent” with the steady growth in the late 1990s and early part of the last decade.

That attitude, he added, seemed to carry over after the onset of the recession, which revealed how dependent the local economy had been on one narrow segment: building new homes.

Cone said the EDC, for example, had been “moderately effective” in spurring new business growth in recent years.

Yet he maintained that President and CEO Pete Tesch and his staff became bogged down in the “politicking” of trying to satisfy the County Commission and Ocala City Council — whose combined $290,000 annual subsidy comprised a large part of the agency’s budget.

Meanwhile, recruitment of new businesses suffered, existing ones were leaving town and the EDC’s investors were drying up, Cone said.

Cory Pool, chairman of the merger task force’s governance committee, noted, “During the recession, the delivery systems we had in place were not able to meet the challenge.”

Chris Yancey, a member of the merger task force’s finance and funding committee, put it more bluntly: “The business community realizes how important this (merger) is, because we let the ball drop in the last 10 years.”

Correcting that now falls to the Chamber and Economic Partnership, or CEP.

Advocates of the merger hired a Texas-based consultant, Tip Strategies, with knowledge of similar efforts in other parts of the country to help develop the plan for combining the chamber and the EDC.

In their report, the consultants related how vulnerable Marion County had been to the housing market crisis, and recommended a merger of the chamber and the EDC as the best way to climb out of it.

“Without this realignment, there is a distinct danger that a recovery cannot take place,” the consultants wrote.

“Individually, stakeholders cannot act on their own without undercutting the partnership,” the report said. The new agency “must be the central and driving entity for everyone concerned with growth and vitality.”

Kevin McDonald, chairman-elect of the EDC board, observed that the chamber and the EDC had, in the past, different missions.

The chamber, geared toward small businesses, excelled at communicating to its 1,700 members and advocating for their needs, while the EDC specialized in catering to big business.

The CEP will build on both skills.

“The chamber and the EDC have always worked well together, but they had different roles. We’ve got to get rid of some silos and have a unified voice. That’s what’s going to result from this,” McDonald said. “We’re going to take what’s good and make it better.”

The new organization will be headquartered at the chamber’s current offices near Ocala City Hall.

Pool explained that the EDC will be dissolved and that the group will be brought under the Chamber of Commerce.

The EDC was incorporated in its present form in 1995, but conceptually, as a recruiter of businesses for Marion County, the organization dates to 1958.

Putting things under the chamber’s umbrella was done because the state law mandates the organization and identities of local chambers of commerce in Florida, Pool said.

“It doesn’t mean anybody’s done anything right or wrong,” he said of the merger. “But people want change.”

The CEP is expected to be rolled out to the respective boards of the chamber and the EDC at a joint meeting scheduled for May 23.

Some details remain to be worked out. One is selecting a new leader.

The current leaders of the chamber and EDC — Jaye Baillie and Tesch, respectively — will remain in place as co-CEOs until July 1. That’s when a new director is expected to be brought on board.

McDonald said he is heading up a national search for a “world-class” person to take the helm.

Both Baillie and Tesch may apply for the post.

The fate of the rest of the staff for both groups is still being decided.

Another task to be completed is ironing out the structure and make up of a new board of directors. Cone did say the City Council and the County Commission will have a seat and the city and the county will each have a staff member in the CEP’s site.

The task force also must decide what to do with the EDC’s offices at the College of Central Florida.

“We’ve got one chance to get this right. We believe the we are building a sustainable organization, something that will be enduring,” said Cone. “The private sector has got to take the lead on economic development. The government cannot do it.”

By: Chris Amico, Danny DeBelius, Terrence Henry and Matt Stiles
Via: NPR

In 2011, Texas endured the worst single-year drought in its history. Now the state has to make some hard choices about how to prepare for future droughts and water shortages as its population and water demand grows. Learn about the drought’s progression and its impact on the state, explore the pros and cons of the policy decisions that need to be made and share your stories.


A DROUGHT OF HISTORIC PROPORTIONS

The current drought began in October 2010. Though the situation has improved recently, the drought is far from over — and the conditions that caused it aren’t going away anytime soon.

Texas is a place susceptible to extreme weather, and the last year was no exception. Thousands of square miles were burned in wildfires, billions were lost in agriculture, and its impact could still linger in years to come.

The interactive map to the right shows how extreme drought conditions enveloped Texas, beginning in the early summer of 2010. The chart below shows how much of the state was under drought conditions over time. The slide show includes a timeline of how the drought affected Texans. Share your story.



FAR-REACHING EFFECTS

The drought’s impact has been severe, costing the state billions of dollars. These maps show where wildfires monitored by the Texas Forest Service spread last year, destroying homes and charring thousands of square miles.



 

POLICY RESPONSES

Various plans for dealing with future droughts and growing demand for water in Texas exist, but most comprehensive — and accepted — is the state Water Plan. It offers a frank assessment of the current landscape, saying Texas “does not and will not have enough water to meet the needs of its people, its businesses, and its agricultural enterprises.” It predicts that “if a drought affected the entire state like it did in the 1950s,” Texas could lose around $116 billion, over a million jobs, and the growing state’s population could actually shrink by 1.4 million people.

The water plan also offers a range of solutions for dealing with the problem, focusing mainly on conservation and efficiency, but also on building new reservoirs, tapping additional sources of water underground and treating effluent water. The biggest question, however is where the money will come from to pay for it. It has a price tag of $52 billion, or roughly $2,000 per Texan, through 2060. The state’s entire biennial budget for fiscal years 2012-2013 is just over $170 billion. Read more here.

via The Atlantic and NPR

Today, at least 90% of the country has a stove, electricity, car, fridge, clothes washer, air-conditioning, color TV, microwave, and cell phone. Take a moment to savor this graph from Visual Economics, which shows the adoption rate of new technologies across the century:

One way to parse it is to ignore everything at the top and trace your eye along the 10% line:

– In 1900, <10% of families owned a stove, or had access to electricity or phones

– In 1915, <10% of families owned a car

– In 1930, <10% of families owned a refrigerator or clothes washer

– In 1945, <10% of families owned a clothes dryer or air-conditioning

– In 1960, <10% of families owned a dishwasher or color TV

– In 1975, <10% of families owned a microwave

– In 1990, <10% of families had a cell phone or access to the Internet

In his final of 3 posts, Derek Thompson of The Atlantic notes: “In 1900, less than 10% of families owned a stove, or had access to electricity or phones, and the Model-T was still a full decade away.” His first installment of this series followed shifting family budgets between 1900 and 2003. The second explained why food seems so much cheaper at the dawn of the 21st century. The third is different because it goes beyond numbers, to include issues of quality of life and the question of progress: “It’s not just that life expectancy at birth has grown from 49 years in 1900 to 78 today, but also the quality of our lives has been improved by law (e.g.: new safety and anti-discrimination laws), by culture (e.g.: women’s ascent in college and the workplace) and by technology.” (Believe it or not, the boom box was the fastest-adopted gadget of the last 50 years.)

Another piece from NPR traces the Birth of Silicon Valley. Now a well-known hotbed of innovation stretching along the peninsula southwest of San Francisco Bay, the story that emerges from this timeline is the transformative power of venture capital, as well as the onward march of technology. Click on the image below to explore the timeline.

By: Catherine Rampell
Via: The New York Times

Last month I wrote about how state budget cuts were forcing public universities to raise tuition and cut programs. Some of the subjects most valuable for job and economic growth — like engineering, computer science and health sciences — have been most vulnerable, because they also happen to be among the most expensive to teach.

One new and especially high-profile example is the University of Florida, which this month announced a plan that would gut its Computer and Information Science and Engineering Department.

Last week, Gov. Rick Scott of Florida signed a law cutting higher education funds in the state by $300 million, according to local papers. This follows cuts totaling $767 million over the previous five years, according to the Center for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University.

The University of Florida, the state’s flagship school, has been hit particularly hard. In an opinion article in The Gainesville Sun, a former university administrator said this year would bring “$38 million in budget cuts, creating an accumulated reduction in state funding to U.F. of 30 percent, or $240 million, since 2006.”

The university has responded to these cuts with tuition increases, although the Legislature has set ceilings on tuition that keep schools from fully offsetting the cutback in state support. This is true in many other states, too.

So the university, like others across the country, is making some draconian spending cuts.

These include eliminating all graduate and research activity in its computer science department. Some of the department’s faculty will be scattered to other departments, and some will have their jobs converted to full-time teaching/advising positions with a much higher teaching burden. The school plans to cut the department’s entire teaching-assistant budget.

Needless to say, many of the faculty members are expected to leave, and their innovation, ideas and research will go with them.

For context, Governor Scott made some controversial statements last October about favoring higher education that generates more job growth and economic activity because education is fundamentally a kind of investment in your work force.

“If I’m going to take money from a citizen to put into education, then I’m going to take that money to create jobs,” he told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune. “So I want that money to go to degrees where people can get jobs in this state.”

“Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don’t think so.”

By: Mark Wilson
Via: Co.DESIGN

USING ALGORITHMS, A TEAM OF STUDENTS ANALYZED THE CLUSTERS OF PLACES THAT LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE FLOCK TO.

Every city is filled with different neighborhoods, but often, you won’t find these places on any map. They’re word-of-mouth zoning distinctions known only to locals. The boundaries are vague and arbitrary, based as much upon the way people eat and dress as real estate prices and income per capita.

Yet if these areas are distinctive to city culture, is there a way that we could measure them and analyze them–map them–scientifically?


A team of students (Justin Cranshaw, Raz Schwartz) and professors (Jason I. Hong and Norman Sadeh) from Carnegie Mellon’s Mobile Commerce Lab has done just that. Their research project is called Livehoods, which analyzed 18 million Foursquare check-ins to spot algorithmic relationships between the spots people frequent. “Livehoods looks at the geographic distance between venues, but also a form of ‘social distance’ that measures the degree of overlap in the people that check-in to them,” the team tells Co.Design. “For example, if the algorithm notices that the people that visit a local bar are the same people that visit a nearby restaurant, these two places will be more likely to be grouped together.”
As more and more people and places are analyzed, Livehoods clusters this data into what becomes a collection [of] distinctive neighborhoods–places filled with people who enjoy going to the same restaurants, coffee shops, and music venues. And as calculating as the approach could seem, Livehoods’ scientific basis makes it extremely valuable as a social artifact: It defines local culture without the inherent judgement that comes along with human stereotyping.


With this scientific methodology in mind, the Livehoods team cross-checked their own findings of Pittsburgh with 27 resident interviews. What they found–the full results [of] which will be shared in a paper presented this June–was “compelling evidence” neighborhoods, as Livehood algorithms had defined them, had “real social meaning to people in the city.” In other words, the digital map lined up with many residents’ own mental maps.

All of this said, Livehoods aren’t a perfect snapshot of humanity just yet. The datasets mined for the project are limited by the perspective of Foursquare users. A lot of us don’t use Foursquare (with a strong skew toward older adults, most likely). “Our technique, however, is agnostic to the specific source of the data,” the team explains, “so as we get better, less biased sources of data, we should be able to produce more accurate views of the city.”

The young researchers also fear that we may take their boundaries a bit too literally. As much as Livehoods works to clarify invisible distinctions, the team, paradoxically, points out that these distinctions are more subtle than we might expect.

“In reality, neighborhoods tend to blend into one another,” they write. In which case, may I suggest a simple UI tweak? Maybe Livehoods should be rendered in gradients.