In the pre-council work session on Tuesday, the Fort Worth City Council received a progress report on the Economic Development Strategic Plan.
Director of Economic Development Robert Sturns opened the presentation before turning it over to John Karras of TIP Strategies, the company based out of Austin leading the plan. TIP stands for Theory Into Practice. The city is paying TIP Strategies $350,000 to help develop the Strategic Economic Development Plan.
“We’ve been very pleased with the process is going so far,” Sturns informed the Council.
The plan’s project goals include:
*Emerging as one of America’s most livable cities.
*Competing regionally, nationally and internationally.
*Building on the city’s economic base.
*Establishing new business opportunities and clusters.
*Workforce development.
*Attracting talent (quality of place).
*Major infrastructure projects (Trinity River Vision, TEX Rail, High Speed Rail).
*Attracting new investment.
*Entrepreneurial ecosystem.
*Supporting women and minority-owned businesses.
*Formal strategy, with metrics and tools.
The schedule included a kickoff meeting in February, followed by discovery through May, application through July, implementation May through August, and a final presentation in August.
In engaging citizen stakeholders, the plan includes:
*Education and outreach – Raising awareness.
*Input – Identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
*Refinement – Refining issues, exploring opportunities and increasing stakeholders’ buy-in.
*Action – Dedicating resources and engaging other leaders.
Karras’ presentation showed that Fort Worth leads Metro growth throughout the United States with 143,435 new citizens in 2015-16. Also, from 2000-15 the population has increased 56 percent, also tops in the nation.
As for vacant, developable land, Fort Worth’s 70,661 acres is first in North Texas.
In summary, the report included what will count as success for Fort Worth: International status, catalyst projects and winning the talent war.
“While Fort Worth has experienced some outstanding growth over the last decade, we still see troubling signs as we look to the future,” Sturns said in an earlier interview on the plan. “Our commercial tax base lags behind residential and our wage growth has been somewhat stagnant. Our goal is to align our strategies to more effectively deal with some of these issues.”