Not just a new name. Tampa business group is broadening its focus, too.
A growing quest for talent has led to an expansion of the traditional emphasis on helping companies relocate here and arranging for incentives.

By Richard Danielson
Tampa Bay Times
Published: Nov 1, 2019

TAMPA - The Tampa Bay Economic Development Council has made a lot of headlines lately, first for changing its name.

Goodbye, Tampa Hillsborough Economic Development Corp. Hello, surprised and annoyed St. Petersburg officials they suspect that that a corporate recruitment agency with a regional-sounding name but a focus on Tampa will grab companies' attention at their expense.

Then last week Tampa City Council member Bill Carlson raised the stakes, calling for City Hallto stop giving the economic development council $538,000 a year. Carlson said the council didn't deliver new jobs.

Economic development council president and chief executive officer Craig Richard countered that Carlson wanted to go on the organization's trade missions overseas and is now retaliating because Richard told him it's up to Mayor Jane Castor to say who represents the city on such trips.

While this controversy plays out, the Tampa Bay Economic Development Council is moving ahead with a project six months in the making: to re-think what economic development means.

The council was spun off from the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce 10 years ago. Since then, it has used a standard economic development playbook: Recruit companies outside the state. Steer them toward available sites. Help them seek government development incentives.

Since then, it has used a standard economic development playbook: Recruit companies outside the state. Steer them toward available sites. Help them seek government development incentives.

But the landscape has changed, Richard said in an interview last week.

"Now it's about, ‘Do you have the talent to sustain them and help that company succeed in the future?' ” he said. "That's a whole new conversation that economic developers across the country are having with each other.”

So the council, which is nonprofit but receives support from local businesses, Hillsborough County and the cities of Tampa, Temple Terrace and Plant City, is broadening what it means by economic development.

It will still help companies that want to move or expand here, especially if they are in one of its strategic growth areas: cyber-security, financial technology, health technology, supply-chain management technology, and cancer research and treatment. In that last category, economic development officials say the presence of the H.

Over the past year, the council worked on 39 corporate relocations or expansions, resulting in more than 2,500 new jobs and investment in new facilities and capital of nearly $392 million.

In the coming year, it plans to take a larger role in two other areas: talent and place-making.

"Talent is the No. 1 priority for every audience we target,” new council chairwoman Marie Chinnici-Everitt, managing director and chief marketing officer of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), told the council's annual meeting last week.

"We've done well in creating jobs. We have about 50,000 open positions in the market. Now we need to recruit people.”