Recent studies project more than one million new residents to the Vancouver-Portland metro area by 2025. A groundswell of regionalism is bringing together CEOs, planners and economists to capitalize on the influx of talent and the continued upward economic trends. Identity Clark County Executive Director Ginger Metcalf said this new thinking should involve a shift from her organization’s first 13 years of gaining the tools to facilitate growth, to a practice of developing programs to support it.
"The region is going to expand by a million people and we are not ready," she said. "We need to be ready. We need to be working with all the jurisdictions within the region to create a 50- or 100-year plan to coordinate the efforts of industrial development and educational facilities."
To make the plan go, said Metcalf, the area needs to shed some of its small town mindset.
"There is some small-town mentality," she said. "It’s taking us a while for our brains to catch up with how we are growing. We’d like to keep some of our small-town ideas, but that’s not in the crystal ball for us. The best attack is to anticipate that growth."
To this end, Metcalf advocates embracing a new mode of thought.
"It is time to look at a more mature model," she said. "We need a model that has experienced many successes as we prepare for the growth that this region is going to experience over the next 25 years."
Metcalf feels the Chicago-based CEOs for Cities, an organization not unlike ICC, but with a much larger scope, is the model to which to aspire.
"CEOs for Cities has pieces that could be applied to our community," Metcalf said. "We can take their example on how business leaders work with government as well as the partnerships that make significant difference in quality of life issues and how we build community."
Metcalf might get something close to her model in the brand-new Four County Economic Development Corporation, a group of business leaders with the mission of attracting companies not just to the Vancouver-Portland metro area, but to the collective region of Clark, Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas counties – and, in fact, the whole Cascade region – in an effort to become competitive on a global scale.
"We are minnows in the global market and we need to combine our forces," said Four County Economic Development Corporation Interim Executive Director Andy MacRitchie. "And the people involved in starting this effort understand that nothing sells like a conversation between two CEOs when it comes to attracting business to the region."
Metcalf has begun a conversation with Portland-based Economist Joseph Cortright, who in September, produced a study for CEOs for Cities, called CityVitals. The study outlines the four essential areas of a successful metropolitan area: talent, innovation, connection (to the world market) and distinctiveness of community. Cortright said these elements combine to cultivate ideas, which he asserts is the one thing that allows an area to flourish.
"The real question is, what kind of ideas do we have here," he said. "If you look at our metropolitan area, we’re pretty remote. But if we can attract the right talent, we can create an economy of ideas."
Cortright said this may be attainable, as more and more young, educated people move to the region.
"We are fortunate here to have a huge ‘brain gain,’" he said, citing a 50 percent increase in college-educated people aged 25 to 35 over the past decade.
Metcalf said she would like to see more incubators to help young talent blossom, but both she and Cortright acknowledge that such a change in thinking is not always immediately welcome.
"I had an older executive ask me at a presentation about attracting young people with new ideas, (he said) ‘why should I care if a bunch of latte-swilling slackers move here or not?’" said Cortright. "I immediately thought of what IBM executives must have thought of the young upstarts in Silicon Valley."
