Planning, presenting and pondering
I had been meaning to blog about the taskforce presentations last week, but just ran out of time. As is the case when it comes to many of my intentions with this blog.
Anyway, when the five presenters completed their group's recommendations, I needed to take a deep breath to digest it all. While many of the "action items" from one group overlapped or related to ones from other groups, the presenters still put a lot out there to consider. Ideas ranged from starting an economic development alliance with the city hiring a person to be the "go-to" for city development to having a downtown retail start-up fair to developing greater access to high-speed Internet.
One commenter on the story said the meeting appeared to deal "primarily in theoretical concepts," and my editor asked me if there was any discussion or opinions shared on the ideas. After deciding on objectives, the taskforces came up with action items and the resources needed to complete them. Thursday's meeting simply was presentation time--chair Tony Wyse said they weren't there to decide what ideas were good or bad. That's the next step the economic development and redevelopment authority will deal with in the coming months.
While many studies in other cities often get shelved and never implemented, one thing many speakers reiterated was to continue the momentum the city has going since its January summit. Some of the speakers explained how their group tried to come up with inexpensive action items and pointed out that the needed resources really are volunteer hours and a roll-up-your-sleeves attitude from the local business community. That's not to say many of the other ideas won't cost money.
Now that the ideas are out there, what would you most like to see come to fruition? What should be axed? If you were in charge of branding the city, as suggested, how would you fill in, "Home of the _ ?"
Apr 22, 2008 at 8:21 a.m.
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Hey Frank,
Thanks for your comment. Yes, you're right--the story was only on the meeting's presentations. We haved limited space for each story so we want to keep it on one focus, and for that I just wanted to get all the ideas out. But you make a good point, and I'll add that to my ever growing to-do list. Thanks!
-Gina Duwe
Reporter
Apr 21, 2008 at 10:20 p.m.
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I think the blog comment you are referring to was mine. Let me be clear. I was commenting on your article, and not the meeting. I was not in attendance, and could only go on your article, which did not include any information or data which would indicate the current economic condition of Evansville.
Evansville seems to be in some kind of debate on the heath of it's economy, or economic base, some say new businesses are opening, others say there are many empty storefronts, yet there hasn't been any publication of any data to support either side.
Clearly the article was only on the meeting and not on the subject.
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