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Tuesday, February 9, 2010
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Planning for Marshall County’s future
Published October 4, 2008
GUNTERSVILLE — More than 170 “movers and shakers” attended Vision Marshall’s first strategic planning meeting Thursday at Lake Guntersville State Park.
Their mission: Brainstorming for the future of Marshall County.
Leaders from the business, education, government and private sectors joined the roundtable discussions aimed at creating a more economically viable county.
Vision Marshall is a strategic planning initiative organized by the Marshall County Economic Development Council.
Thursday’s event was sponsored by Marshall Medical Centers, Snead State Community College and Regions Bank.
Jeff Thredgold, an economic futurist and author who’s appeared on CNN numerous times, was the keynote speaker. His presentation was followed by a strategic planning session facilitated by Phil Scharre, manager of community development for the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Thredgold said brainstorming is a good idea.
“In terms of economic development, just getting together and talking about it is part of a solution,” he said. “To the extent you can sit down and say, ‘These are what we think our strengths are, these are our challenges. This is the good news, this is the bad news,’ and then formulate a plan as to what kind of companies you want to try to entice. But you also have to look at what kind of planning you can do in terms of helping existing companies stay and grow.
“The sexy part of economic development is attracting some company from around the world. Many times there’s an enormous investment to do that. But if you can do something behind the scenes in terms of tax policy or workforce initiatives that provide companies a reason to stay and expand, that is equally important. And that doesn’t get as much attention as bringing in new jobs.”
Thredgold praised the proactive stance of Vision Marshall, adding the initiative needs help to thrive.
“The key to success is providing support both in terms of emotional support and financial support,” he said. “Sometimes these things need some contributions to get the word out and get the right contacts made. The first part is sitting down and talking about economic development and trying to have some control over where you go versus letting the market impact you.”
EDC President Matt Arnold was once awed by the participation in Vision Marshall, which kicked off with a similar crowd in July.
“Just looking at the list and the crowd today, there’s a lot of folks here that didn’t make the July meeting,” said Arnold. “I had a lot of folks to call me and say they couldn’t make this meeting but they want to be involved.
“I think if it were a perfect day where everybody could come, we’d probably have 400 people here. We’ve just had that many people that said they want to be involved in this. I think the momentum is only building.”
The participants at Thursday’s meeting explored three questions during the session: What are the county’s strengths and assets, what are its obstacles and deficiencies, and what should be done in the next five years to achieve the vision of creating a more economically viable community in which to live, work and raise children?
Albertville Regional Airport manager Jerry Cofield and Albertville City Councilman Kerry NeSmith attended the session.
“I think anytime you get 175 of the leading people in the community together at one time, you need to take advantage of that,” Cofield said. “I think it was wonderful to bust them out into groups and pick their brains and formulate some kind of action plan that will take this community where it needs to go in the future.
“And these are the kind of people that can do that. These are the movers and shakers in the community.”
NeSmith agreed.
“I think if we don’t have a vision then it’s just going to be everybody for themselves,” said NeSmith.
“We need to pull together and use our resources better to make it a better place for all of us. I think it has some worthwhile objectives.”
Arnold said the next step is organizing the information from the session.
“First step is we collate all these ideas,” he said. “We will take those ideas and categorize them and get that back out to the group and anyone else that’s interested. There will be subsequent meetings and focus groups.
“Say we have a particular group that is interested in workforce development issues. We’ll have a meeting and they can really hammer some of those ideas like infrastructure issues.
“What this will do — and I hate to use the word culminate — but this will culminate in a strategic plan and then go into an implementation phase. We’ll bring this group together again, maybe once a year, maybe twice a year. We’ll ask, ‘What have we done in this area? What is our leadership doing in that area? Was this objective we settled on even feasible? Should we move on to something else?’
“What the Economic Development Council intends for this to be is a continual process year after year. We don’t want to just write a strategic plan, sit it on a shelf and say, ‘Gosh, we did a great job with that strategic plan.’ We have to take that plan and continually update it and implement it and push the objectives that come out of that plan to our elected leadership.”
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