Inside Tucson Business: Time to heal old wounds and push

Time to heal old wounds and push

Published on Friday, March 30, 2007

forward with five gears of success

You’ve got to hand it to the people who developed “Securing Our Future Now: An Economic Blueprint for the Tucson Region” n they went right for our sore spots and picked the scabs.

While that may be indelicate, this is a plan that can move this region forward economically, but the first step is to eliminate turf wars and capitalize on the best we have to offer.

At first blush, the tendency might be to dismiss the blueprint from Tucson Regional Economic Opportunities Inc. (TREO) as more of the same blah, blah, blah we’ve heard before. If so, you’re not reading or listening to what it says. Worse, it means you’re not likely to be part of the solution. Drill down into the report n an executive summary is inside this edition of Inside Tucson Business n and read the “power of five” goals and, more importantly, the strategies for achieving each of them.

It may be unfortunate the graphic to illustrate the power of five shows five intermingled gears, with the one labeled “high-skilled/high-wage jobs” at the top. That conveys it might be more important than the others. Indeed, it may be the loftiest of the goals, but it’s also the one we’ve heard most often before.

But this time, TREO’s economic blueprint uses quantifiable measures focusing on industry clusters that can get the region to that goal. We already have some of the clusters in place. We have a major resource in the McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Arizona, ranked No. 1 by Entrepreneur magazine and The Princeton Review. Tapping such resources within bio-industry, environmental technology, information technology, transportation and logistics, business and financial services, and research and development and this region should be incubating, growing and retaining the kinds of jobs that in today’s world pay at least $16 an hour.

From now on, the Tucson region can no longer be satisfied with simply landing new jobs; they have to be the right new jobs.

Apropos to the gear graphic, it’s those other four goals that will lay the foundation for achieving economic success decades into the future: making education first, having an urban renaissance, developing livable communities and collaboration among our public and private leaders.

We’ll admit, as we’ve said previously, the one about an urban renaissance is a train that’s already left the station without anyone on it. Good luck on getting that one back.

On the others, though, there are some real opportunities.

The perception is that K-12 public education in our region is weak. Blame that on the bloated bureaucracy and inability to satisfactorily meet student achievement goals in Tucson Unified School District, the state’s second largest district. On the other hand, Catalina Foothills School District No. 16 has the state’s highest student achievement test scores and is the only district in the state to have all of its schools, from kindergarten through high school, labeled “excelling” by government standards since the labels were developed four years ago. We have a model for success.

Building livable communities means building infrastructure and addressing crime, both of which are a challenge.

Leadership collaboration could be the real challenge as to how far this blueprint will go. The first step might be trying find true leaders. As was noted in our report on the blueprint’s unveiling the audience applauded when it was suggested government needs to cut red tape. Further, the report’s research notes the average tax levies are higher than the markets we’re competing with in the Southwest.

Finally, what will make this report different from all of the others is that TREO is promising us an annual report card measuring such things as job and wage growth in target industries, employer satisfaction with the workforce, median household income, reductions in timelines for government permits and achievements in educational attainment.

There probably isn’t a person in the Tucson region who doesn’t have an opinion on what we’ve done wrong in the past. Thanks to TREO we have a common starting point for what those are and a road map for healing those old wounds and giving us directions for our future economic health.

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