Interview: Craig Richard

Craig Richard President & CEO Tampa Bay Economic Development Council

What were the reasons behind the Tampa Bay EDC’s rebranding?

We have been holding strategic planning sessions to develop our next three-year strategic plan. Part of that included discussions about how we market ourselves as a region and as an organization. We found there was confusion about our name outside of the market. For example, when we worked with people from Nashville or companies in Boston, they had no idea what TampaHillsborough meant. There are several local marketing agencies, such as Visit Tampa Bay, Film Tampa Bay, the Tampa Bay Sports Commission and so forth, promoting the area nationally and we were the only ones without Tampa Bay in our name. Our mandate is to attract new businesses and to help local businesses grow and expand. Business development is still what we do first and foremost. But we have developed two additional priorities as strategic areas: talent attraction and placemaking.

What do investors want you to do regarding talent attraction and retention?

If you take immigration out of the equation, we will actually have stagnant population growth. Fortunately, 27,000 people relocated to Hillsborough County last year. Without that immigration we wouldn’t be experiencing growth. Our Investors say that one of the most important things that we can do is to help attract the type of talent that we need.

How do you work to help and promote small businesses in the area?

Our Business Retention and Expansion program focuses on our existing small and medium-sized businesses and ošering resources that assist them in going to that next level. We identify and visit more than 200 small and medium-sized businesses every year to spread the word about the resources available to them to grow and expand, such as training and opportunities in international markets through trade missions.

The population of the region was 3,142,663 in 2018.

( ) series of lavish hotels he built along the rail line to coax visitors into the region. The shipping industry also entered a boom that ran from the 1880s into the 1890s, and today Tampa’s port is the seventh-largest in the entire country. Vicente Martinez Ybor’s cigar factory, established in 1886 in the area that still bears his name, the Ybor City district of the city of Tampa, was also instrumental in the economic development of the region. In 1914, the world’s first scheduled commercial airline service was also launched in Tampa Bay in the form of Percival Ellicott Fansler’s St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line. Between 1923 and 1926, the mass production (and mass commercialization) of the automobile brought a new wave of settlers into the region.

Today, the Tampa Bay region consists of three cities: Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, and by some definitions covers the counties of Hillsborough, Pinellas, Hernando, Pasco, Citrus, Manatee, Sarasota, and Polk. The population of the region was 3,142,663 in 2018, making the region one of the Top 25 most populous metropolitan areas in the United States.

Demographic shifts The demographic makeup of the state’s population has been changing over the last few years. For

example, as of 2017, 12.7% of the Tampa Bay population consisted of foreign-born residents (393,000 people), an uptick on the year before when that figure was 12.5% (378,000 people). The most common countries of origin for foreign-born residents of Tampa Bay are Cuba (1,028,508 people), Haiti (339,246 people), and Colombia (285,400 people).

Another important demographic shift taking place among Tampa Bay residents is the steadily increasing median age of people living in the area. In 2018, the median age of all people in the region was 42.3, compared to an even 42 in 2017. It is of note that Tampa Bay residents born outside the country tend to be older than native-born residents; the median age of the former was 47 in 2018, whereas the median age of the latter was 41.

One factor contributing to the aging of Tampa Bay’s population is a trend that is being referred to as “baby chasing.” Baby chasers are baby boomers who move near their millennial children upon retirement to be close to their grandchildren. This is no rare occurrence – research shows that as high as 25% of baby boomers retire near their children and grandchildren, even if it means moving to another state. Florida has always been a destination for retirees, and it seems that baby chasers are keeping to tradition, with three Florida regions among the Top 20 destinations for members of this demographic (Tampa Bay is No.14). What makes Tampa Bay so attractive to baby chasers? Simply put, it’s the fact that the region is such a desirable place to live for the parents of the babies they’re chasing: millennials. Tampa is among the Top 5 baby chaser destinations in terms of high-income job growth over the past five years, but remains affordable, while still offering cultural and recreational amenities like Ybor City and award-winning beaches. These factors are motivating families to move to Tampa, and in 2016 and 2017 Tampa ranked third out of cities in Florida in terms of the number of families that moved into its borders, with families defined as households with members under 18 years of age.

Economic performance 2019 was a watershed year for economic growth in Tampa Bay, with multiple cities in the region scoring high in a WalletHub ranking of the top cities in the country in terms of economic growth. The WalletHub study broke cities down into large (population greater than 300,000), midsize (population of 100,000- 300,000) and small (population fewer than 100,000) and ranked their economic growth according to 17 metrics, including population growth, job growth,

building-permit activity, growth in businesses and other economic factors. The city of Tampa finished 67th among all U.S. cities, 10th on the list of large American cities, ninth among Florida cities, and first in Tampa Bay. Tampa’s high score for economic growth is helped by its impressive creation of 21,700 jobs between 2018 and 2019 – the third most in Florida. Other Tampa Bay region cities that made the list include: Clearwater (168th on the midsize list), Lakeland (85th on the midsize list), and St. Petersburg (83rd on the midsize list).

On the employment front, the Tampa Bay Region posted big job creation numbers in 2019, with DeSantis announcing in July 2019 that the region had added 29,100 new private-sector jobs since the same time in 2018, or the second-highest number of jobs created among all Florida metro areas. During the same period, the metro area’s unemployment rate dropped 0.3%, to 3.5% (0.1% higher than the state average). The unemployment rate dropped even further over the rest of 2019, to end the year at 3.0% in December. The fastest-growing industries in Tampa Bay were professional and business services (7,200 new jobs), education and health services (5,700 new jobs), and construction (5,000 new jobs). Although second in job creation, Tampa Bay ranks first in job demand with 58,559 openings, and first in demand for high-skill, high-wage STEM occupations, with 19,381 openings in June 2019. The figures suggest a shift in employment needs from the government to the private sector, according to Ron Christaldi, president and CEO of Shumaker Advisors Florida, LLC. “There is a great deal of need in the private sector right now. We are no longer an area that is driven by government

Tampa Bay is the 13th-largest media market in the United States.

employment. The government’s doing a great job and we have great political leaders, but the growth and prosperity of industry in this region has continued to be exponential and the needs have continued to grow. Those needs are both business-to-business and business-to-government. For instance, places like MacDill Air Force Base are extraordinary economic drivers in the community. They serve an extremely important and critical function from a military perspective but they also create a lot of jobs. There are a lot of spin-off businesses in the defense industry that are located here because of MacDill.”

The region’s total GDP is also on an upward trend. The latest figures through 2018 show annual GDP at just over $158 billion, continuing over two decades worth of acceleration. With that growth come concerns in terms of sustainability, in particular the impact on the environment. Johnnie James, president and CEO of Lykes Bros. Inc. told Invest: that companies need to do their part, which sometimes entails compromise. “We consider ourselves stewards of the environment. We own large tracts of land and we have a lot of natural resources on the land from species of animals to natural wetlands. We have always done our best to try and protect these. One of the things that is being proposed and is really big in the news, are the three new roadways. The legislature passed them in 2019 and they are now under study. The one that is targeted for Southwest Florida and would run from Naples to Lakeland has the potential to come through our ranch. As a result, we are trying to be proactive and come up with a way to support these roadways while also being environmentally sustainable. The roadways are needed because of the growth of the state, but at the same time we don’t want to ruin our environment. There needs to be a balanced approach. Solving the issue of a more environmentally-conscious business community is not easy. It is going to take a lot of creative minds and a commitment to sacrifice old habits and try some new things.”

Dealing with infrastructure issues across the region is another element in that process. Governments are going directly to the people to address the challenge, such as the referendum that instilled the Penny for Pinellas tax. Revenue from the tax is helping communities like the city of Largo to correct the issues they face. “We have a lot of gaps in sidewalk connection and some residential roadways that need repaving, so we are investing a significant portion of Penny for Pinellas, which is the 1% sales tax, in these infrastructure improvements. We are also looking at a lot more investment in protection against stormwater. We do not have many areas that have significant stormwater challenges when it rains heavily, like in some other areas of the county, but we still want to continue to make sure that we improve our stormwater system,” said Woody Brown, the mayor of Largo.

Global factors As a member of the global economy, it is inevitable that global economic factors will impact Tampa Bay. For example, experts have been warning of a potential recession for some time now, and the U.S. economy is showing clear signs of slowing, slipping from 3.1% growth at the beginning of 2019 to end the year at 2.1%. The economy received a further jolt in the first quarter of 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic that emerged from