Second summit plots course to CEDS

Andrew McKeever

GNAT-TV News Project

MANCHESTER — Regional marketing to promote the Bennington County and southern Vermont tier, and economic development to bring more jobs and revenue were the focus of a follow up meeting to last September’s “summit meeting” held at the Equinox Resort.

The meeting, held, Nov. 30 at the Park House on Manchester’s Dana Thompson Recreation Park, was intended to “roll up the sleeves” and explore how organizations like the Bennington Area Chamber of Commerce, the Shires Regional Marketing Organization and the Bennington County Regional Commission, could work together along with several other groups with an interest in attracting more visitors, investment and perhaps, eventually, permanent residents.

A desire to see that sort of cooperation is present, said Jonah Spivak, the chairman of the Shires RMO’s board of directors, at the start of the meeting.

“That’s the best way to think about economic development, and not just regionally, but super-regionally,” he said. “That means getting our house in order in the Shires and then coming together perhaps with Windham County to form a larger southern Vermont economic zone.”

The first step was bringing in the regional commission as well as the Bennington County Industrial Corporation, a formerly independent entity which earlier this year integrated into the regional commission, he added.

Matt Harrington, the executive director of the Bennington Area Chamber of Commerce, said areas like Bennington county and southern Vermont in general should be viewed by members of the millennial generation — of which he was one as well, he noted — as great places from which to work and launch careers, Instead of gravitating towards major metropolitan and urban centers, millennials might find more rewards and opportunities in “fringe’ areas, like southern Vermont, he said.

“If you really want to do some change and do some good in the world, go to those fringe areas where they need your innovation and need your mind the most,” he said. You also get easier access to powerful and influential figures to help advance those innovative ideas, he added.

Jonathan Cooper, a community and economic development specialist with the regional commission discussed the groundwork for developing a CEDS, or Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy. A CEDS is designed to bring together public and private sectors and formulate a roadmap to strengthen a regional economy. A successful and approved CEDS plan can unleash federal dollars in support of those efforts, and requires a clearly articulated analysis of regions’s strengths and weaknesses that spells out a direction and a plan for getting there.

“The CEDS process is a process of self-discovery and a process of transformation,” Cooper told the audience at the Park House. “That takes a lot of work.”

Building public support for the initiative was also critical, and another “summit” meeting was tentatively in the works for May, 2017.

Windham County, it was pointed out, already has a CEDS plan in place and up and running. A plan that merged both counties would pack a larger wallop and help get the region moving beyond some of the issues highlighted in the Southern Vermont Economic Zone report released last year, which noted demographic challenges and a recovery from the economic downturn that began in 2008 that has been more sluggish than elsewhere in the state.

Wayne Granquist, a retired businessman from Weston who served as the chairman of the economic zone report, said that the 2-county region had some advantages to work with.

“We already have a diverse economy … we’re in a plateau, not in a place where we’re sinking rapidly,” he said. “The benefit, it seems to me, is to start to integrate the many well-intentioned organizations that are doing some version  of economic development or marketing to coordinate that into something that has scale.”

On the regional marketing side, discussion centered around getting a tourist information brochure up an running, both in print and online.

Following the meeting, the organizers of the meeting spoke of the “next steps” needed to keep momentum going, an effort that has taken on more urgency as the dust has been settling from the collapse of the Manchester and the Mountains Regional Chamber of Commerce last spring. That event led to the Shires taking on some of the tourist promotion work formally handled by the chamber. The Shires RMO has been fielding calls placed to the  chamber’s former telephone number, as well as maintaining its website. Two interim brochure kiosks have been set up along Main Street in Manchester to help provide information.

The day’s meeting was primarily a jumping off point for gearing up to develop the CEDS and identifying other people who needed to be involved in the process, said Bill Colvin, the assistant director of the BCRC.

“We expect many of those people will be involved in that process going forward — others will come to the table,” he said. “We expect to meet on a monthly basis going forward to support the steering committee and begin the discussion with the Windham region about partnering for southern Vermont.”