It won’t be long before we find out who’s going to be on the board of the new Coast-wide economic development agency, and I’m torn between sending congratulations or condolences.
The board, and the organization it’s going to oversee, will try to build our local economy amid ominous signs of a coming downturn.
The agency will also face high expectations, and it’s going to be very, very hard for it to show those expectations are being met.
Measuring the success of economic development efforts is a bit like measuring the length of a snake; the damn thing keeps moving and curling in on itself.
The Economic Developers Association of Canada (EDAC) put the problem pretty clearly in 2011: “Performance measurement is one area where the economic development profession is weak, undoubtedly due to the difficulty of establishing direct ‘cause-and-effect’ linkages between the work of an economic developer and the jobs created by private sector employers.”
Here’s the thing, though. That’s probably the indicator the public will use.
The economic development agency will be funded with tax dollars collected by local governments, or filtered through Ottawa and Victoria.
So, it’s up to us as the shareholders to tell this board of directors what we expect as a return on our investment: Is it simply more jobs? Does it matter if those jobs are high-paying, full-time work with good benefits?
Is it helping the Sunshine Coast maintain the status quo if the national economy starts slipping?
Or, is it a complete transformation of the Sunshine Coast economy? An economy where three of the four biggest employers are in the public sector (Vancouver Coastal Health, School District No. 46, and local governments) and nearly 30 per cent of households get their income from pensions or retirement savings and government transfers.
Those of us who cover local politics will, of course, be expected to hold the economic development agency to account.
I’ll be using the best tools I’ve got.
Reporters are trained observers. We go everywhere with our eyes open, and our ears filtering the true signals from the noise.
We notice whether most of the cars on our streets are newer models.
We hear from people struggling to make ends meet on low wages, or part-time work, or unable to find jobs at all.
We can feel uncertainty in the community in our guts. We can also feel optimism when it’s there.
Those are pretty subjective indicators, but they tell me more than most spreadsheets.
