Erie County PA 1895

Erie County PA 1895

If you were to look at a movie of my life 10 years ago, you would have seen me scrambling to make provisions for Christmas broadcasts and coverage of First Night-Erie and the Y2K date change as part of my management job at WCTL. At home I had two active elementary school-aged boys and a pregnant wife getting ready to deliver our Millennial Baby.

Let your lens widen out to the Erie community at large and you would have seen an optimistic community, ready to head into the new century tackling our challenges and accepting responsibility to make change. Soon after New Year’s, the region through the Economic Development Corp. of Erie County engaged Brian Bosworth to do a comprehensive 12-month study and propose a developmental strategy for the future.

The much-referred-to Bosworth Report was released on October 16, 2001 and it gave a frank assessment of where our region stood and where it needed to go. Plenty of Erie stakeholders were involved in providing input into his findings, delineated by a 13 point Executive Summary.

In the introduction to the 79-page document, are these two telling paragraphs:

As we hope this report makes clear, a new strategy and an aggressive commitment to economic development in Erie must be a very high priority for the entire region.  The consultant team believes that, over the next ten years, the region is headed for serious economic problems.  Unless the leaders and residents of Erie take dramatic steps to counter current trends, we believe the regional economy will continue to shrink relative to the rest of the nation, income and opportunity will erode, and people – especially young adults – will begin to leave the region at an accelerating pace.

In some places where we have worked over the past several years, we have come essentially to the conclusion that the people of that region need mostly to keep doing what they have been doing, perhaps with a few adjustments, and the economy will continue to do well.  This is not the situation in Erie.  You cannot keep doing what you have been doing.

To say that this was a wake-up call for community officials is an understatement. In fact, I think that the report had a significant bearing on the election of Rick Schenker to County Executive that November over incumbent Judy Lynch. People wanted change and the young Schenker along with the then new Erie City Mayor Rick Flippi created expectancy for forward momentum for our region.

The two Ricks got majorly behind Bosworth’s first Major Recommendation:

We recommend the immediate establishment of a high-level, civic coordinating council to integrate the activities of the region’s principal business-based civic institutions. Its goal will be implementing the recommendations of this report and other major economic development initiatives that might emerge.

This recommendation led to the formation of the Civic Coordinating Committee, filled with leaders from government, economic development, education, and the like. At the beginning, there was a strong willingness, if not buy-in, to participate in the various task forces. But after a couple years of slow movement, the addition of a paid Executive Director, and the change of administrations for both city and county, the “C-Cubed” basically petered out. Instead of a high-priority, protected communications and strategy vessel, C3 because just another economic development council, which we didn’t need.

Activity, however, continues. Much of the job creation tasks have been taken up by the Erie Regional Chamber and Growth Partnership. Some of the intergovernmental communication, along with smart purchasing happens in the Erie Council of Governments. The good thing is that the Bosworth report is rarely out of mind for those who discuss our region’s future. What we want to look at in the next couple weeks is how much of this community agenda has been or is being accomplished.

Stay tuned.