Vicksburg-Warren County members, city government, business leaders and interested residents got an overview of the strategic plan county economic development officials believe will be the key to helping bring more business and industry to the area.

Pablo Diaz, chamber executive director and the county’s economic development director, said after the presentation the plan provides the outline to educate the county’s residents about themselves and prepare them to move forward with selling the Vicksburg/Warren County story outside the county’s boundaries.

“This time, we’re going to take our message to the world; we’re going to tell the world who we are, and we’re going to change those wrong perceptions that they have about Vicksburg,” he said. “It doesn’t mean we are perfect, but we’re going to tell them who we are.

“We’re going to tell our own community who we are and we’re going to ask their help in shaping that negativity from us, and we’ll be focusing on the positives we can build on, so we can lead this community more than you ever imagine. Our imagination will have no limit.”

Discussing the area’s strengths, Melissa Medley, a principal with VisionFirst, said the area has one strength that is often overlooked.

“This community has more public art than any other community in the state of Mississippi,” she said. “Just start with the other 1300 pieces in the (Vicksburg National) Military Park and the murals.”

Other strengths include the waterfront, the growth of the downtown area, leadership and the convention center. And a strong tourism market.

“You as a community should take your rightful place as the regional leader,” she said. While the strategic plan is geared toward Vicksburg, she said, “You are the regional leader, and it is incumbent on you that as you grow as a community and continue to improve, that you work with the communities around you so that they too may grow.” 

The plan is based on a slogan of “Vicksburg, more than you ever imagined; tech center, enterprising, cool, historic and art-filled.”

The plan developed by VisionFirst Advisors of Tallahassee, Florida, breaks the plan into three initiatives, each with goals to improve the area and make it more productive and attractive to outside business.

Inside the plan is an emphasis of not only building the area’s image, but an emphasis on encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship and technology centered around the redevelopment of the Vicksburg Hardware building project, which is seen as a technical and innovation center for the area.

The plan also includes recommendations to work toward retaining and encouraging expansion of existing business an industry, upgrading the area’s economic development product, addressing employers’ workforce needs and concerns, and reimagining the area to better take advantage of the area’s creative assets and resources.

The plan also encourages economic development leaders to include the community in the economic development process.

“This is something that every organization that touches the economic development process … anyone who has a piece of that process that they can look toward as doing their own job and performing in their own lane, they too can say ‘We see ourselves in this. We see where we fit into that.’ It’s when you as citizens should say, ‘That makes sense and I can see where I fit in that,’” Medley said.