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Economic Developers – Keep Your Eye on the Prize

Is your community’s economic development progress stalled? Make sure that you’ve aligned with these three items:

1. Communities cannot reasonably hope to achieve economic development success without first establishing and championing a vision that defines what that community strives to become.

2. Focus on primary jobs. Primary job growth fuels community wealth building. Retail sales represent economic activity, not economic development. Primary job growth drives economic development and generates disposable income that sustains economic activity.

3. Economic development must be a regional activity. Corporate locational decisions are made based on an evaluation of a laborshed–that geographic area where a company can find, attract and retain the workforce that will assure their success. Almost certainly, that laborshed will cross several jurisdictional lines–which become meaningless to a company. Nothing will undermine economic development efforts faster than parochialism among a region’s jurisdictions.

Larry Burkhardt, CEcD, FM

Economic development practitioner and consultant | Speaker| Writer| Strategic Planner| Baseball Fan| Guitar Player

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