Looking five years ahead EDC develops road map to St. Clair County’s future success

For some, talk of five-year plans conjures visions of a small gaggle of decision makers in a back room, setting a course for the masses.

But when St. Clair County’s Economic Development Council crafted the county’s growth blueprint for the next half decade, EDC Executive Director Don Smith made one thing plain: This is a countywide team effort. The council listened to hundreds of voices, folks from the incorporated areas to the farmlands, the lakefronts to the riverfront, corporations, small business owners and every entity in between.

“The EDC’s success is the result of the partnerships we create throughout the county,” Smith says. “That’s really the secret to our success. It’s not what the EDC does. It’s what we’re able to do by working with others.”

The recently approved new five-year plan was crafted after a series of public meetings across the county and input from hundreds of citizens.

“From that, we were able to create a vision of what we need to focus on achieving in the next five years,” Smith says, “The plan helps us to stay focused and to dedicate resources to make sure we achieve our goals.”

The wide-ranging plan focuses on six key areas – infrastructure development, marketing and communication, recruitment and retention, community development, leadership and tourism.

Some key areas include job creation, growing agritourism, including farm-to-table initiatives, and assisting municipalities in tapping into a deep pool of available state and federal grants through EDC’s Grant Resource Center.

“We had a lot of input from our smaller municipalities about the difficulty in knowing what grants are out there and being able to obtain those grants,” Smith says. “When you talk about a municipality that has a budget of $1 million, and they can get a grant for $200,000 for infrastructure or something else, that’s a major impact for them.”

The plan also envisions an industrial park to create more wealth along the county’s section of the burgeoning Interstate 59 corridor. Development along the vital transportation artery is a key component in the goal of creating 1,200 jobs over the life of the blueprint.

“That’s going to be a major priority for us over the next five years – to create more jobs along (I-