Recently, the Greater Baltimore Committee (GBC) released a new ten-year strategic plan calling for (in their words), a “sea change,” to boost economic opportunity in Baltimore city and five Maryland counties adjacent to Baltimore — Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Carroll, Harford, and Howard.
Founded in 1955, GBC is a not-for-profit organization with approximately 400 members.
Their membership includes large, mid-size, and small businesses, not-for-profit organizations, foundations, educational providers, and healthcare institutions in the Baltimore region.
All the geographic areas served by GBC are unique, but all recognize the value of mutually beneficial collaborative efforts on economic development matters.
In an ever-changing world, GBC ‘s new strategic plan acknowledged a pressing need for changes on a better definition of their traditional purposes and their traditional goals.
Accordingly, their new plan includes new purposes and new goals to guide private and public investment and regional collaborations designed to result in transformational positive change in the Baltimore region.
Specific GBC goals are included in three broad areas of economic development. They are:
Industry and innovation
Place and community
Talent and people
Ultimately, GBC’s vision is to position the Baltimore region’s residents, businesses, and quality of life amenities, as a globally recognizable and competitive brand.
The overall success of GBC’s new plan is based not only on new purposes and new goals. It also depends upon on a continuing commitment to collaboration from businesses, political leaders, developers, educators, workforce providers, nonprofits, entrepreneurs, current economic development organizations, and other key stakeholders in Baltimore City and the five surrounding counties.
Based on past measurable successes with GBC, they understand they do best by not competing against each other, but by working together to compete globally for current and emerging economic engines that provide good jobs, good wages, good benefits, and economic stability.
They also understand the needs of the leaders such economic engines. These leaders are much less interested in artificial human made geographic boundaries that delineate county and municipal borders and are much more interested in what a region can provide in terms of a long term, reliable, and positive business environment along with a supply of skilled workers.
No doubt any discussion of any changes leading to a new regional approach to economic development for the Mid Shore region may be unsettling to some. It is new and it is different.
With all due respect for those who may be unsettled with this commentary, I offer the following thoughts that futurist Leon Martel includes in the preface to his book “Mastering Change”:
“We live in a world of change, yet we act based on continuity. Change is unfamiliar: it disturbs us. We ignore it, we avoid it, and often, we try to resist it. Continuity, on the other hand, is familiar; it provides safety and security. I propose a new approach to the future and a new strategy for dealing with it. The new approach is to recognize that change is natural and to be expected and that continuity is unnatural and to be suspected. The new strategy enables us to identify those changes that will affect our businesses, our occupations, and our personal lives; it helps us determine their kind and see their dimensions, and it assists us in making use of them. If we make this strategy a conscious ongoing activity, change will become familiar, and we will welcome it, seeing in it not cause for alarm but reason for action. And as we come to understand and use change, we will be better prepared for the future, increasingly able to make tomorrow’s world the world we want.”
I suggest now is the time for the leaders in Talbot, Dorchester, and Caroline counties (at a minimum) to immediately engage in meaningful discussions on the feasibility and benefits of launching a Mid Shore version of a regional economic development organization comparable to the GBC.
The key words are comparable to the GBC, not identical to the GBC.
I am not suggesting Mid Shore leaders adopt GBC’s purposes and goals without modifications that work best for the Mid Shore now and going forward. I further suggest we already have an outstanding organization in place to serve as a new leader in regional economic development.
That organization is Chesapeake College.
The college has served the Mid Shore region with distinction since it was chartered as Maryland’s first regional community college in 1965 and opened in 1967.
Offering a wide range of adult learning opportunities, they have extensive experience in developing and conducting workforce training programs. The availability of these programs is a great selling point for economic development prospects.
I also suggest that in addition to a new regional economic development organizational model, the Mid Shore must have an open and transparent process for developing regional economic development goals based on citizen input to maintain and advance the Mid Shores’s position in Maryland as the “Land of Pleasant Living.”
David Reel is a public affairs and public relations consultant who lives in Easton.
William Keppen says
If one just looks at the ongoing debates over development in and around Easton, given the competing values and interests, it would be nice to have a big picture group to find and advance common interest. Good Luck!
Kim Cassady says
Fully agree! Go for it.
Pete Lesher says
Not only do Talbot, Caroline and Dorchester (along with Queen Anne and Kent) Counties – a unique 5-county collaboration – work together to support Chesapeake College, which contributes to a trained workforce in the region ranging from nursing to marine trades, but four of those counties (Talbot, Caroline, Kent, and Queen Anne) collaborate in heritage tourism development through the Stories of the Chesapeake Heritage Area.
But there is also significant and award-winning economic development coordination specifically among the three counties the author names – Talbot, Caroline and Dorchester – through the Mid-Shore Resource Council, which secured US Economic Development Agency funds to build a set of economic development tools that will assist our regional business retention efforts through any future economic crisis. Those tools have evolved into the Delmarva Index, managed by the Eastern Shore Regional GIS Cooperative at Salisbury University. This valuable web portal includes tax revenue dashboards, the findings of a semiannual business sentiment survey, and an industry-specific dashboard for tourism. You can learn more about the Delmarva Index at an upcoming lunchtime presentation, and more information can be found at this link: https://talbotworks.org/delmarvaindexjune18/
Another example of this economic development collaboration is the recent AI Conference hosted by the Upper Shore Workforce Investment Board in April: https://talbotworks.org/artificial-intelligence-conference-explores-advancements-and-challenges/
But perhaps the broadest evidence of the depth of economic development collaboration among our three counties is our joint Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy, which we update annually and can be found here: https://ceds.midshore.org/
A dive into the infrastructure, strategic planning, workforce development and other projects – whose listing here is key to obtaining Federal grant funding – shows the extent of regional economic development collaboration that Talbot, Caroline and Dorchester are now undertaking. We are committed to a strong regional and cross-jurisdictional approach to economic development.