This is what we get for an Economic Development Plan? Seriously? Even the Economic Development Commission didn’t think much of it and its complete lack of goals.
To me, all it is is a list of things we are already doing and lot of vague talk about public-private partnerships and communication and how staff needs more training. Oh, and there’s an attempt to take more TIF funding and CDBG funding for economic development. The final take away is that we are trying to create jobs to serve people who don’t live in Madison.
Seriously? Is that it? Am I missing something? I expected to see a vision of what Madison might look like in 5 – 10 years if we concentrate on economic development. How many more jobs might we have? How might those jobs be different than what we have now? What kind of jobs are we trying to recruit and how will we do it? And how much will it cost?
I really didn’t expect to read the plan and hear about how we should revise our TIF policies (currently happening), re-write our zoning code (currently happening), support THRIVE (already happening – but we don’t know what we are spending our money on), finish the one-stop shop (already happening), hire staff for the Economic Development Unit (already happening), support programs we are already supporting, etc.
Isn’t a plan supposed to be about what we are going to do, not what we are doing? Our staff could have made this list for us in one meeting. Hopefully the consultant will shed some more light on this tonight, because otherwise, its a huge disappointment.
