The new chamber director

Better tardy and the right candidate than timely with the wrong candidate.

That surely is how the board of the Gulf County Chamber of County must look at the final selection of a new chamber executive director.

The timeline of having someone in place was optimistic and while it was a struggle to operate through most of the summer tourist season with a strictly volunteer staff, if indeed the Chamber has found someone who will help spur economic development in the county, then it has been worth the wait.

The Chamber should also be credited with partnering with the Gulf Coast Workforce Board on the search. That eliminated the local politics – that a county candidate was not among the finalist underscores the point – and also brought experts in such a search into the party.

Bringing the finalists to town, had them meet key civic and elected leaders, was also an appropriate step for a board appearing to perform all due diligence to put the right person in place.

The search, however, will be the easy portion of this program to consolidate chamber and economic development activities under one roof, which has been requested by the Board of County Commissioners.

For starters, as noted above, the new executive director will start completely from scratch within the office.

The initial organizational chart from Chamber president Bobby Pickels was for a director of chamber activities and a director for economic development activities operating under the executive director, but however the final look shakes out, the executive director will have to find candidates for everything from answering phones to coordinating economic development efforts.

The Chamber did the right thing in cleaning house and allowing the new executive director to select their team, but right now the bench is empty so that must be task one.

The new executive director will also have to pick up whatever pieces remained from previous economic development regimes.

Whether the previous executive director was living in Gulf County or not, whether the prior Economic Development Council had filed all the appropriate annual reporting documents on time or not, the EDC, with an all-volunteer board doing much of the lifting, did make inroads in bringing jobs to Gulf County.

While the mayor of Port St. Joe and the chairman of the county commission may have been instrumental in attracting the proposed renewable energy center to Port St. Joe, to argue that the EDC was not crucial in nurturing that project to the point of permitting for construction is fantasy.

The EDC should also be recognized for its constant communication with the Port of Port St. Joe, communication with The St. Joe Company on a renewable energy park, of which the Northwest Florida Renewable Energy Center is a key component.

Certainly it was not the fault of the EDC, which along with Taunton Truss made inroads on a jobs-creating house-building project in Haiti, that Haiti’s government and leadership structure was so tenuous that even two former presidents, Clinton and Bush 43, could not attract the kind of money needed to perform the massive rebuilding of that country.

And, on a fundamental level, the tale of the prior EDC and this effort toward consolidation represents maybe the largest hurdle for the new executive director.

Because at the heart of that tale is a question of patience and how much the community, the elected officials who at least for now are being asked to foot the bills – though a final budget has not been finalized, the county’s outlay to the Chamber figures to come close to or exceed that which was provided the prior EDC – will have patience to see meat on the bones.

History is not in the executive director’s favor.

The Board of County Commissioners has blown up the EDC and started over at least three times in the past decade. Each executive director shown the door had produced some job growth, none of it was deemed satisfactory.

In rough terms, the tenures of those prior directors was roughly three to four years, about the expiration time on patience among elected officials who control much of the purse strings. The prior EDC managed to realize less than three years of their pledged five years of funding before consolidation became the mantra of the commission.

The Port St. Joe city commission is questioning its spending to the Chamber and EDC has it prepares its budget.

And this kind of anxiousness over bang for taxpayer buck is certainly not exclusive to Gulf County. For example, several municipalities in Bay County are questioning their contributions to that county’s Economic Development Alliance because elected officials don’t see the results for the public’s dollars.

While the balancing act will be tricky, the new executive director has some cards to play.

The port is one of the great untapped resources of the region – and a perfect testimony to patience; despite nearly a decade of visioning and planning the port remains untapped – and the energy plant has the potential to opening a door to renewable energy businesses.

The public schools are, based on all measurements, outstanding; the Gulf/Franklin Center offers advanced education; tourism numbers in 2011 are strong and have bolstered business up and down the county; there is a small business foundation that is viable; and there is a sense of collaboration behind this consolidation.

But, even though almost any economic development will attest that job creation takes time, the honeymoon here will be short. And a community hungry for jobs will accept nothing else from the new executive director of the Chamber.