Staying the Regional Course

More committed than ever to work collaboratively with leaders from the Atlantic Ocean to Tampa Bay.

By Jacob V. Stuart, President, Central Florida Partnership

With age and tenure comes a certain amount of knowledge and experience. Recently, I must be “showing my age,” as I’ve been asked to share, in a number of regional and national publications, what I know and believe best for the future of our region.

Certainly, breaking down barriers to collaboration and cooperation has been at the forefront of our work at the Central Florida Partnership. And, I believe, we are making significant progress in advancing our regional vision and the strategic regional priorities that will lead to our collective success.

It was an honor to be recognized in the winter edition of Chamber Executive magazine as an Innovator for more than a decade of work in making regional stewardship a reality in Central Florida. Today, the idea of using public-private partnerships and collaborative regional strategies to solve big problems is taken for granted.

“It is now likely that when a chamber in any region in the country wants to look into serious regional cooperation, they know they must look at the Orlando story,” comments Mick Fleming, president of the American Chamber of Commerce Executives. “When Jake says, ‘I think we might try ...’ everyone in the room listens.”

Now, I don’t know if that’s true, but I have learned that for regionalism to work, it is important leaders across all sectors, at the very least, need to be “in the room.”

In a recent issue of The Journal of the James Madison Institute, I was asked to advance a message about High Speed Rail for Florida, which would have provided the potential for the state to become a leader of modern and efficient regional transportation. Until it was rejected by Florida’s new Governor, service between Tampa and Orlando would have been the first segment of the state’s 320-mile Tampa-Orlando-Miami High Speed Rail corridor, enhancing economic growth in Florida’s Super Region.

Much like the trillion-dollar, 60-year investment in our 47,000-mile national interstate system, the state of Florida was recognized by the federal government as an ideal site for investment in the strategic “Vision for High Speed Rail in America” program. When combined with SunRail — 61 miles of commuter rail service from Volusia County to Osceola County — Central Florida would achieve its quest to provide an integrated multimodal transportation network, unique in the world, including roads, rail, water, air and space.

At the time, I wrote that High Speed Rail for Florida would be a defining moment for our region and our state, much the same as when Henry Flagler first visited Florida in 1883 and recognized its potential to attract out-of-state visitors. He returned to St. Augustine in 1885 to begin construction on the 540-room Hotel Ponce de Leon. Realizing, even then, the need for a sound transportation system to support his hotel ventures, Flagler purchased the Jacksonville, St. Augustine and Halifax River Railway. The Florida East Coast Railway would eventually connect the state all the way to Key West in 1912. But the dream of leaders across Florida and our nation for High Speed Rail built on Henry Flagler’s legacy was not to be … at least not in my lifetime.

Most recently, a guest column on regionalism, focused on megatrends in Florida, was requested for the March issue of the Journal of the Florida Engineering Society, which also includes a piece by our colleague, Trey Carlson, master planner for the Kennedy Space Center. His post is an especially important one, given the closure of the Space Shuttle program later this year. On the subject of regionalism, I said, “We’ve always known intuitively that working regionally is a good idea. It’s a documented principle that regional economies are, in fact, the drivers of national prosperity. The top 100 largest U.S. metro regions generate 75 percent of the nation’s GDP. The U.S. economy’s performance is driven largely by that of its major metropolitan economies.”

Since publishing the results of Connecting for Global Competitiveness: Florida's Super Region, a study commissioned by the Tampa Bay Partnership and the Central Florida Partnership to demonstrate the potential advantages of coast-to-coast connectivity and develop a “super regional strategy” for transportation and land use, economic and workforce development, environmental sustainability, and quality-of-life issues, new 2009 data from the U. S. Conference of Mayors shows that the Central Florida Region has the 18th largest gross metropolitan product in the United States and the Tampa Bay Region is ranked at 20th. Combined, the 13-county “super region” has the 10th-largest economy in the United States, with the potential to be a major global economic competitor. Many forecasts, in fact, suggest that by the year 2050 Tampa Bay and Central Florida will become a single economic region and Florida’s dominant economic driver. With a combined population of 7.2 million, the Super Region is the seventh most populous in the country, according to the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida.

With historic world-renowned icons throughout our region like the NASA-Kennedy Space Center, Daytona International Speedway, the seaports at Tampa and Cape Canaveral, visitor attractions, and professional sports franchises in Tampa Bay and Central Florida bringing visitors, conventioneers and new residents to our area, I am more committed than ever to work collaboratively with leaders from the Atlantic Ocean to Tampa Bay to advance strategic regional priorities that will benefit Florida’s Super Region and our state.

Tags: central florida partnership, economy, infrastructure, Tampa, transportation