In competitions of all kinds, it’s good to know who your team leader is and where to find them.
A football team wouldn’t have two quarterbacks line up under a lineman of their choosing, would it? You wouldn’t run a restaurant with only the executive chef and no workers, right?
So, why, as participants in the City of Vicksburg’s planning forum back in October seem to be asking, would we want three separate entities talking to the chiefs of industry who might want to locate a business here?
It’s been a full kitchen of chefs, a full huddle of quarterbacks that’s been in plain sight for years, but it took a secret vote of people seated right next to each other and Vicksburg Mayor George Flaggs Jr. to bring to light.
About 100 people of varying job titles and stations in life invited by the city to take part in a planning forum voted electronically in October on various topics such as tourism, economic development and quality of life in Vicksburg.
Results were kept under wraps until this month, when the Central Mississippi Planning and Development District crafted a report based on the results. Data is to be rolled into a comprehensive plan for the city, the details of which is set for a public hearing in January.
Rated “fair or poor” in the survey is the way three entities in town whose mission involves economic development to some degree work independently of one another. In layman’s terms, it’s a case of one hand not knowing what the other is doing.
The Warren County Port Commission, Vicksburg-Warren Chamber of Commerce and the Economic Development Foundation have been composed of different sets of people who got there different sets of ways. And they cover different turfs, no matter how they slice the issue.
The port board oversees county-owned land at the port and at Ceres industrial park. Its appointed membership is a 2-2-1 arrangement between the city, county and governor’s office. The chamber has done the most good in the retail sector, showing new arrivals the ropes.
The EDF’s identity has been attached to that of the port board; its mission and membership a word soup of mystery and generalities, according to the port board’s website.
The chamber, as per reports of the forum, was represented at the forum. Whether either of the other two had membership in the room is unclear. Much clearer is Flaggs’ take on the results of the voting, which favored consolidating the three under one director.
“I looked at it this weekend, and one of the things I came away with is how fragmented our economic development is here in this community, when you look at the port, you look at the Board of Supervisors, you look at the city,” he said Monday during a working meeting.
Directorships of the port commission and chamber have filled glaring vacancies at Ceres. That includes TanTec, which promises to start tanning leather at Flowers in 2015. Still, the answer to the city’s overriding question on the subject was clear enough.
That question, apparently, was, ‘How do you really feel?’ Secret vote or not, the answer is out and we can’t agree more with it or the mayor’s summation.