Just over two years ago I wrote my first column for Coast Reporter, “Great expectations for new agency” (Jan. 22, 2016).
I’d been following the conception and gestation of a new Coast-wide economic development organization and we were just a couple of months from its due date.
“I’m torn between sending congratulations or condolences,” I wrote.
That was because I knew the Sunshine Coast Regional Economic Development Organization (SCREDO) would, as I put it, “face high expectations, and it’s going to be very, very hard for it to show those expectations are being met.”
The words of the Economic Developers Association of Canada I quoted are still valid. “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.”
We didn’t know much about what SCREDO would look like or how it would go about its business in January of 2016.
It’s been a slow reveal.
The board has been in place since March 2016, but SCREDO’s first program manager only starts work March 1 of this year.
I spent a lot of time this week going over the agency’s year-end progress report and the 2018-19 annual plan (click here to read story).
SCREDO board member Celia Robben told me, “This is not your dad’s economic development organization.”
So, in fairness, I guess we ought to avoid judging it that way.
The SCREDO plans outline how they’re measuring the success of individual programs.
I said two years ago that most of us would likely go with our subjective sense of which direction the local economy is headed.
“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.”
Sechelt Mayor Bruce Milne told me during a Coast TV taping last month the local economy is healthy. “We’re in the midst of, probably, the strongest economy the Sunshine Coast has ever seen,” he said. “Unemployment rates are almost zip, anyone who wants to work is working, development is off the table in terms of how much development is going on.”
It’s too early to credit much, if any, of that to the work of SCREDO.
Broadcast journalists looking for an easy sign-off often fall back on the “remains to be seen” tag. It goes something like this: “Whether the dike holds remains to be seen – Hans Christian Andersen, Holland.”
So, two years after writing about how difficult it would be to tell if we’re getting value for money from a taxpayer-funded economic development agency, I have to take the easy way out.
Whether SCREDO meets expectations remains to be seen.
