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: 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: Roberta Brandes Gratz
Via: The Atlantic Cities


Unproven theories abound as to how cities with a diminished population might “shrink” their footprint to ease the financial burden of maintaining an infrastructure created to serve a larger city. By moving the few remaining residents out of the most diminished neighborhoods and into under-utilized spaces in healthy areas, the theory goes, the now-smaller city saves money, strengthens neighborhoods worth saving and prepares for a better future.

‘Unproven’ is the operative word here. History makes plain that if you plan for shrinkage, a city will continue to shrink, not grow stronger.

American cities started losing population after World War II with the creation of suburbs. “Planned Shrinkage,” no different than today’s shrinkage strategies, was New York’s solution to a South Bronx that looked like Dresden after the war and other failing neighborhoods. Fire houses, police stations, schools closed, garbage ignored, streets unrepaired. But residents citywide fought back fiercely, refused to leave, took over vacant buildings, fixed them up on their own, stuck it out with minimum city services and with mottos like “improve don’t move” set about on a sweat equity path that was the catalyst for a slow, incremental citywide rebound. Developers followed the residents’ lead. That is why New York grew again, instead of shrank.

The same pattern of regeneration took hold in small doses slowly in Savannah, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, San Antonio and more. Now, similar pockets of re-growth can be found in Buffalo, Detroit, Syracuse, Muncie, South Bend and elsewhere.

Today, one community exemplifies both the consequences and costs of shrinkage and the regeneration path of incremental but veritable re-growth.

That singular place is the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. After Hurricane Katrina, skeptics assumed the worst. Officially, the city did not turn its back on the working-class neighborhood of the Lower Ninth, but few dollars and little energy have been expended there. Residents will tell you that there was not much in the way of city services to shrink.

A recent New York Times Magazine article, “Jungleland,” offered an exaggerated look at what’s happened since to the acres of vacant land in the once heavily populated working class neighborhood. The impression is one of an almost primeval forest taking over. The author ignored blocks of rebuilt houses and clusters of homes scattered among the overgrown lots. But he did highlight the inevitable consequences of the removal of city services: piles of broken up concrete and construction debris, discarded sofas, bags of garbage, toilets, a burnt car and lots of tires are randomly dumped, costs that are inevitable in even a semi-shrunk area. Considerable acreage is reverting to unkempt nature.

But the Lower Ninth Ward is also growing again slowly. Residents have defied expectations and expert predictions and are re-staking their claim. Emptiness still dominates the landscape once filled with homes but clusters of rebuilt houses and new construction are not hard to find. The sound of the hammer or buzzsaw is ubiquitous.

Officials too often assume shrinkage is inevitable. But do they ever inquire of the diehard hold-outs why they stay? The answers are clues to regeneration instead of assumptions of continued loss.

Last year, I asked Josephine Short Butler, 89, if she wasn’t a little nervous returning to such an empty neighborhood when her Lower Ninth home was rebuilt soon after Katrina in one of the bleakest corners of the area. She was one of the first back and the landscape then defined desolate. “Honey,” she said to me leaning forward in her chair, “when we moved here in 1948, this was farmland, the streets were paths of oyster shells and it was a 45-minute walk to church.”

Mrs. Butler came back. Her best friend and neighbor followed next door. And so did her two granddaughters who live around the block. Others followed. That corner of the neighborhood now has dozens of rebuilt homes in a few square blocks. Residents will tell you that they never received more than a minimum of city services. Yet, this 65 percent homeowner neighborhood paid plenty in taxes.

Let’s call people like Mrs. Butler “magnet residents.” Magnet residents exist in every city’s derelict neighborhoods. Often they are owners of mortgage-free homes that can’t be replicated elsewhere, or else something equally compelling is keeping them in place. Magnet residents are easier to find now in the Lower Ninth Ward than the reported wildlife, although residents will tell you they always had snakes and abandoned houses.

The Lower Ninth is growing back, much more than expected. When New York was shrinking in the 1970s, planners predicted it would shrink further; thus the need to “plan” for shrinkage.

All shrinking cities exhibited similar patterns: departure of resident population for the suburbs starting in the ‘50s and ‘60s and departure of factories and corporations either for overseas or, in the case of New Orleans, for Houston. They all lost much of their local economy. Neither New York nor New Orleans is a special case; only the particulars are different.

Top image: Josephine Short Butler’s house in the Lower Ninth Ward.

By: Eric Westervelt
Via: NPR

Waltraud Grubitzsch/DPA/Landov

Metal-working apprentices train in Leipzig, Germany, in 2010. Germany has Europe’s lowest youth unemployment rate, thanks in part to its ancient apprentice system, which trains about 1.5 million people each year.

For as long as he can remember, German teenager Robin Dittmar has been obsessed with airplanes. As a little boy, the sound of a plane overhead would send him into the backyard to peer into the sky. Toys had to have wings. Even today, Dittmar sees his car as a kind of ersatz Boeing.

“I’ve got the number 747 as the number plate of my car. I’m really in love with this airplane,” the 18-year-old says.

Less-than-perfect school grades dashed Dittmar’s dream of becoming a commercial pilot. But they were good enough to earn him a coveted apprenticeship slot with Lufthansa Technik, the technical arm of Europe’s largest airline, responsible for aircraft maintenance and repair across the globe.

One-third of the way through his three-and-a-half years of training at Lufthansa technical headquarters in Hamburg, Dittmar is honing the skills required to become an aircraft mechanic — and all-but-guaranteeing himself a job.

The protracted European debt crisis and austerity measures have made career prospects for many of the continent’s youth bleaker than ever. In Spain and Greece, nearly half of all those under age 25 are unemployed.

But as Dittmar’s experience illustrates, that’s not the case in Germany. In stark contrast, Germany’s youth employment is the highest in Europe, with only a 7.8 percent jobless rate. At the heart of that success is a learn-on-the-job apprenticeship system that has its roots in the Middle Ages but is thriving today in Germany’s modern, export-oriented economy.

On-The-Job Training

A brightly lit Lufthansa workshop in Hamburg is part of that apprenticeship system. Teenagers like Dittmar, many dressed in the company’s navy blue shirts and overalls, are busy learning the basics: drilling, filing, soldering and manipulating sheet metal.

Dittmar’s apprenticeship is part of Germany’s well-established and successful “dual system,” so-called because training is done both in-house at a company and partly at local vocational colleges.

About two-thirds of his time is spent on the job at Lufthansa — split between workshops and classrooms, and actually working on real aircraft and engines supervised by an experienced full-time mechanic, a “training buddy.”

“[The training buddies] are taking the apprentice with them in their work. They are integrating them in their work and they are making real training on the job,” says Hans-Peter Meinhold, Lufthansa’s head of vocational training. “So it’s a one-to-one situation.”

For an aviation buff like Dittmar, getting to work on real machines so soon is not only a sign that his employers see potential in him, but also fuels his passion for planes.

“I could work anyplace in the world. I like the system here,” the teenager says. “I know that I will be a good aircraft mechanic when I’m out of the apprenticeship, so that’s very cool to know.”

Eric Westervelt/NPR

Apprentices are trained at the Lufthansa Technik training center in Hamburg last month. About 60 percent of German high school students opt for vocational training over further academic education

Long-Term Benefits

About 60 percent of German high school graduates travel the same path as Dittmar, choosing vocational over academic education. Throughout his training, Lufthansa pays Dittmar the equivalent of $1,000 a month, one-third of the starting wage a qualified mechanic would get. That’s part of the system that some foreign visitors can’t comprehend, director Meinhold says.

“I tell them [the apprentices] don’t pay anything for it, they get paid by the companies. They get money for their training,” Meinhold says. “‘You are training them and you are paying them for that?’ They can’t understand this.”

Once qualified, these skilled aeronautical and engine mechanics feed into a fairly robust European aviation industry, either directly at Lufthansa or at one of its subsidiaries or competitors.

For many, the potential of being hired permanently is the key attraction. Germany’s industry still offers a majority of skilled workers the elusive “job for life,” a long-gone legend in many other Western countries.

Meinhold believes that despite the costs, the apprentice system is an investment vital to the ongoing success of Germany’s export-dependent economy by creating loyal, well-trained employees.

“It’s a quite expensive way we go,” he says. “The benefit we get from the system later, that’s a great benefit and makes everything economical.”

A Model For The Rest Of Europe?

Germany’s dual system trains 1.5 million people annually. Across the board, from bakers and car mechanics to carpenters and violin-makers, about 90 percent of apprentices successfully complete their training, German government figures show. The apprenticeships vary in length, between two and three-and-a-half years. The average training “allowance” is 680 euros a month (approximately $900), and about half of the apprentices stay on in the company that trained them.

British Prime Minister David Cameron recently called for his country to emulate parts of the German system by reinvigorating British apprenticeships with higher-level training.

“I think what we are going to see with the expansion of the higher level apprenticeships is many people going into them as they leave school, spending time doing that and then going on and doing a university degree linked to their apprenticeship skill,” Cameron said. “That is what has happened for years in Germany and it is going to be happening much more in Britain.”

But Rolf von Luede, an economic sociologist at the University of Hamburg, isn’t so sure the German system would translate well to other parts of Europe. He notes that German industry and its powerful trade unions have a unique relationship marked by what he calls “antagonistic cooperation,” a far cry, he says, from the more confrontational policies pursued by unions in Spain and Britain.

“One of the crucial aspects of the German dual system is that it is created by a cooperation of the employers and the trade unions,” von Luede says. “[It is] really a model that ensures that the qualifications that are needed within the industry are supported by this apprenticeship.”

Eric Westervelt/NPR

Apprentices are trained at the Lufthansa Technik training center in Hamburg last month. About 60 percent of German high school students opt for vocational training over further academic education

Not Enough Skilled Workers

Today Germany has a problem that Britain, Spain and other European countries can only dream of: It doesn’t have enough skilled workers to meet the demands of its economy. Almost one-third of German companies could not fill open jobs in 2011. And some 30,000 apprenticeship placements went unfilled — or about 2 percent.

According to von Luede, this deficit is the result of a dramatic demographic shift. Birth rates are falling across Europe, but the effect is pronounced in what was once East Germany: There are half as many high school graduates in the East as there were only five years ago. Von Luede believes the solution is for Germany to relax its immigration policies because Germany’s population is shrinking.

“Migration has to be orientated at people who are qualified or who may be qualified in the future by the educational system of Germany,” he says.

But while 30,000 apprenticeships went unfilled, 85,000 high school graduates failed to find a placement. The reason for this mismatch, a recent study by the German Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training found, is that the education system is failing to adequately prepare the children of recent immigrants for the job market.

Analyst von Leude agrees, adding that many school districts still divide children into blue- or white-collar career tracks while in elementary school.

To address the mismatch between jobs and the labor market, the German government just made it a little easier for skilled foreign workers outside the EU to come to Germany by lowering the income requirement — to about $60,000 from $88,000.

Under the rules change, non-EU workers who meet the new requirement will be able to stay in Germany permanently after a three-year period, if they are still employed. People with particularly good German language skills will be allowed to stay after a two-year period.

By: J. Katie McConnell
Via: CitiesSpeak.org

There’s been no shortage of interest and commentary about the importance of entrepreneurs and small business to the nation’s recovery. Almost daily, economists and policy wonks engage in a seemingly never-ending discussion on what the “right” businesses are to create jobs. And while these conversations have utility and value, they have not produced many actionable strategies for cities where entrepreneurs and small businesses actually exist. In response, NLC released Supporting Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses: A Tool Kit for Local Leaders.

Almost universally, city leaders understand the value of all shapes and sizes of entrepreneurs and small businesses. These businesses create jobs, employ local residents, and help define a community’s sense of place. What is often unclear, however, is how city leaders can foster an environment that encourages entrepreneurs and small businesses.

The tool kit profiles efforts in cities of all sizes to support entrepreneurship and small businesses. These efforts range from knowledge focused in Boston’s Innovation District, governance focused in Seattle, Wash., export focused in Wichita, Kan., or regulatory focused in Rockhill, S.C.

The tool kit’s core message is that cities need to look to the things they can actually control. This includes providing a supportive political leadership; channels of communication between business and government; and reasonable, transparent regulations with accessible interfaces.

Additionally, given the shaky track record of some government-led entrepreneurship efforts, as cities strive to provide more sophisticated services to spur entrepreneurship, partnerships with necessary expertise are essential along with sufficient levels of resources and realistic expectations and time-frames.

It is our hope that this new tool kit shines additional light on the role that local government plays in business development and helps city leaders create a more supportive environment for their local entrepreneurs and small businesses. To download Supporting Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses: A Tool Kit for Local Leaders, click here.